Down the street a car stopped with a screech of brakes, spun in a ragged U-turn that took it a few feet over the curb, and sped off in the opposite direction. Somewhere a woman screamed. Ruger ran halfway across the lawn behind him, stopped, crouched, fired. His shot wasn’t even close.
Ruger was up again, running in a crouch, zigzagging toward the side of the house behind him. Dave followed him with the gun, his elbows braced on the windowsill, holding the .38 with both hands now. Ruger stopped, and as he started to spin once more around he was no longer a moving target. Dave gave the trigger a gentle squeeze.
He had not really believed the shot would be on target. But the bullet tore into Ruger’s arm above the elbow and sent his gun flying. The impact of the shot spun Ruger halfway around and knocked him to the ground. He moved awkwardly there, using his good arm to push himself to his feet. The bad arm hung like deadweight.
He got up and turned toward Dave, then away from him. His arm was leaking blood. He had lost his bearings and looked this way and that like a nearsighted man searching for his eyeglasses.
Dave aimed again and fired again, and the bullet took Ruger in the small of the back. He shrieked like a girl and went down flat on his face and didn’t move.
Now the whole house was awake. Dave yanked the door open, tore out of the room. A woman across the hallway was looking at him from her door. He glanced at her and she drew back in terror, slamming the door shut after her. He raced down the stairs. At the second floor, a burly man in his undershirt stepped into his path. Dave hit him across the face with the barrel of the gun, shoved him and sent him flying.
On the ground floor, a woman was shouting. There was nobody in sight. The front door was wide open. He ran through it, down the steps, along the path to the street. Across the street Ruger lay bleeding. Dave ran over to him. Ruger lay on his face, his body twitching spasmodically, a low moan issuing from his lips. Dave knelt momentarily and put the muzzle of the gun to the back of Lee Ruger’s head. He barely heard the roar of the gun as his last bullet tore into Ruger’s brain.
The neighborhood screamed with excitement. Doors slammed, windows opened. A police siren sounded in the distance. He was running now, not thinking, just running at top speed. His heart pounded violently and there was a constant roaring in his ears, like wind in a tunnel. He turned at the corner and kept running. Jill was up ahead, staring openmouthed at him. He ran to her.
“Dave, I didn’t know. Are you all right? Are you all right?”
He couldn’t answer her. He turned her around and grabbed her arm and they ran.
CHAPTER 17
IN THE CAB he moved the gun from one pocket to the other. He could smell powder burns on his hands and it seemed to him that the whole back seat of the taxi reeked of the smell, that the driver couldn’t help noticing it. He sat stiffly in his seat, trying not to look over his shoulder for policemen. They had caught the cab on Linden Boulevard, and they were already approaching the Manhattan Bridge, so they seemed to be in the clear, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that carloads of police were hot on their trail.
They crossed over into Manhattan. He waited for guilt to claim him, waited to be moved once again by a feeling of having crossed a great moral boundary. But this did not happen. He felt that he had been a very lucky bungler. He had very nearly gotten Jill killed, and had watched a prospective one-sided ambush turn into a gun battle. Good shooting and good position had won the battle, and pure blind luck had let them get out uncaught from the mess he had created. He was ashamed of the bungling and grateful for the luck. But the confused guilt that had come over him after he had killed the bodyguard in Lublin’s house—this did not come now. He wondered why.
They got out of the cab at Forty-second Street and ducked into a cafeteria. He went to the counter to get coffee and stood in line just long enough to decide that he didn’t want coffee. He left the line and took Jill around the corner. There was a bar there, and it was open already. They sat at a table. He had a straight shot of bar rye with a beer chaser. She didn’t want anything.
They lit cigarettes, and she said, “I’m so stupid, I almost ruined everything. I thought I was being so good at all this. And then like an idiot—”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I kept waiting and waiting and you didn’t come. I didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t stand it.”
“It’s all right now.”
“I know.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I’m okay. It was the waiting. I thought I was very brave. When I went to Lublin’s—”
“You were a little too brave then.”
“But it was easy. I was doing something, I could see what was going on. This time all I could do was stand around and find things to worry about. I had to see what was going on. I picked a hell of a time, didn’t I?”
“It was a bad arrangement. Forget it”
“I m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. We’re out of it”
“Are you sure he’s—”
“Yes, he’s dead.” The coup de grace, the bullet in the back of the skull. Yes, Lee was dead.
“Did anyone see you?”
“Half the world saw me.”
“Will they find us?”
“I don’t think so.” He sipped beer. “They’ll know what we look like, but they won’t know where to look for us, or who to look for. The big worry was that we might have been picked up on the spot. They would have had us then, and cold. A dozen different people could have identified me. But I think we’re out of it now.”
“What now?”
“Now we check out of the Royalton,” he said. “I was going to call them and tell them to hold our room. But that’s silly. If we’re not going to stay there, we might as well clear out altogether. And there are things there that we need.”
“What?”
“Our clothes and all. And the rest of the bullets.”
“I forgot that.”
“For Krause,” he said.
There was no problem at the Royalton. They went to their room and packed, and he called the desk and told them to make out the bill and to get the car ready. He packed everything and took the suitcases downstairs himself. The hotel took his check. The doorman brought the Ford around, and Dave gave him a dollar and loaded the suitcases into the back seat. They got into the car. He drove around until he found a Kinney garage on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth and left the car there. They carried the suitcases back to the Moorehead and walked upstairs to their room there instead of waiting for the ancient elevator.
Around four in the afternoon he went around the corner and came back with a deck of cards, a six-pack of ginger-ale and a bottle of V.O. They played a few hands of gin rummy and drank their drinks out of water tumblers. There was no ice. At six he found a delicatessen and brought back sandwiches. They ate in the room and drank more of the ginger ale, plain this time. He brought back a paper, but they couldn’t find anything about Ruger.
“You never did get those Scranton papers,” she said.
“So we’re out a dollar.”
Later he felt like talking about the shooting. He told her how he had sat at the window watching Ruger with the cigar, how he had pointed the gun at him, how he had felt.
“I don’t think I could have shot him just like that,” he said.
“But you did.”
“Because all hell broke loose. There was no time to debate the morality of it, not with the bastard shooting at us.”
“You would have killed him anyway.”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Not even uneasy.”
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“I feel relieved,” she said.
“Relieved?”
“That we’re both alive. And that he’s not, too. We came here to do something, and we’ve done part of it, and we’re still safe and all right, and I feel relieved about that.”
In the morning she asked what they were going to do now, about Dago Krause.
“Lie low for a little while,” he said.
“Here at the hotel?”
“It’s as good a place as any. If we let things cool down, we’ll be in a better position. There’s the cops to think about, for one thing. With Ruger’s murder so fresh, they’ll be on their toes. If they have a little time to relax they’ll just let it ride in the books as another gang killing. They won’t break their necks looking for us or keeping a watch on Krause. You remember the amount of attention they paid to Corelli’s death. Everybody was delighted to find an excuse not to try finding Corelli’s murderers. It’ll be the same here. They’ll decide Ruger was killed by a professional, and they’ll bury the whole thing in the files.
“The same thing with Krause, in another way. He’ll be on guard right now. He won’t tell the police anything. He’ll be sure we’re coming for him, and he’ll walk around with eyes in the back of his head. In three days he’ll manage to convince himself that one killing was enough to satisfy us or that we panicked once Ruger was dead and beat it out of the city. Let him relax.”
“How will we find him?”
“We’ll find him.”
“He won’t be in the phone book. I mean, there must be a million Krauses, even if he has a phone, and we don’t know his first name. Just a nickname. Why do you suppose they call him Dago? Krause isn’t an Italian name, is it?”
“No. We’ll find him.”
“How?”
“We’ll find him. One way or another, well find him.”
They spent the morning in the hotel room. At noon he went to the drugstore and picked up a stack of magazines, plus the morning papers. All the papers had the story, but not even the tabloids gave it a very big play. It wasn’t good copy. There had been a gun battle of sorts, which was on the plus side, but no innocent bystanders had been killed, and since no one had spotted Jill there was no sex angle to work on. The prevailing theory seemed to be that Ruger had been killed by a professional killer, a common enough ending for a criminal. The eyewitness reports contradicted one another incredibly, and the composite description of the killer made him about thirty-five, shorter and heavier than Dave. The whole pattern of the killing itself was confused in the papers. One witness insisted that Ruger had been ambushed by two men, one firing from the rooming house and the other gunning him down from behind a parked car. The woman at Ruger’s place told reporters that the killer had showed her false credentials and had posed as a federal officer.
They read all the articles together, and he laughed and folded up the papers and carried them down the hall and stuffed them in a large wastebasket. “I thought so,” he told Jill. “They would have had to pick us up on the spot in order to get us. Now they’re a million miles away.”
They went out for lunch and sat a long time with coffee and cigarettes. They walked up to Forty-second Street. There were a pair of science-fiction movies playing at the Victory, and the daytime rates were less than a dollar. It seemed like too much of a bargain to pass up. They walked in somewhere around the middle of a British import about a lost colony on Alpha Centauri and sat in the balcony. The theater was fairly crowded. They watched the end of that picture, a newsreel, three cartoons, a slew of coming attractions, and the other movie, one in which the fate of the world is menaced by giant lemmings, beasts that rushed pell-mell to the sea and devoured all the human beings in their path. Then there were more trailers, and they saw the Alpha Centauri movie up to the point where they had come in.
There was a comfortable feeling of security in the theater, a feeling of being in a crowd but not of it, of being surrounded by other persons while remaining comfortably anonymous. At first they were tense and on guard, but this stopped, and they got quickly lost in the action on the screen.
He picked up the evening papers on the way back to the hotel. In the room, he checked through them while Jill went down the hall to wash out underwear and stockings in the bathroom sink. He didn’t expect to find anything much in the papers, just checked them out methodically as a matter of form. For the most part, the material on the shooting was just a rehash of the stories in the morning papers, with a little extra material on Ruger’s background and criminal record and some hints at the police investigation of the murder.
But a final paragraph in one article said:
Philip “Dago” Krause, described by police as a longtime friend and associate of the murdered man, was among those brought in for questioning. Krause, who lives at 2792 23rd Avenue in Astoria, has a record of arrests dating back to 1948. He was released after close interrogation....
He took the paper down the hall to Jill and showed it to her. “Look at that,” he said, excited. “I told you we’d find him. The damned fools drew us a map.”
That night they had dinner at a good steak house on West Thirty-sixth Street. They went back to the hotel and drank more V.O. The ginger ale was gone. He drank his straight, and she mixed hers with tap water. They played gin rummy part of the time and spent the rest of the time sitting around reading magazines. She washed out some socks for him and hung them on the curtain rod over the window to dry. She muttered something about playing housewife on her honeymoon, and he smiled thoughtfully. It was the first time in days that either of them had mentioned the word “honeymoon.”
The next day was Saturday. There was nothing new on Ruger’s killing in any of the papers. Most of them had dropped it. One of the tabloids had a brief and pointless follow-up piece, but that was about all there was. They stayed close to the hotel.
By Sunday she was getting impatient, anxious to get it over and done with. “It’s better to wait,” he said. “Another couple of days. It won’t be long now.” They spent the afternoon at another Forty-second Street movie house and had dinner at the Blue Ribbon, on Forty-fourth Street. They had drinks before dinner and steins of Wurzburger with their meal and brandy with the coffee, and they were feeling the drinks by the time they left the place. He wanted to go back to the Moorehead, but she suggested stopping at a jazz place down the street and he went along with it. They sat at a circular bar and listened to a man play piano, until she lowered her head suddenly and fastened her fingers around his wrist
She said, “Don’t look up. Not now.”
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s a man across the bar, he was one of the ones at Lublin’s that night. I don’t remember his name but I met him there. The one with the red tie. Don’t look straight at him, but see if he’s looking at us.”
He saw the man she meant, watched him out of the corner of his eye. The man hadn’t seemed to notice them yet.
“He may not recognize me,” she said softly. “I looked different then, and I think he was drunk that night, anyway. Is he looking this way?”
“No.”
“We’d better get out of here. Let me go first.” She slipped off her stool. He left change on the bar and followed her out the door. Outside, she stood leaning against the side of the building and breathing heavily. He took her arm and led her down the street. A cab stopped for them. They got in and rode back to the hotel without saying a word.
In the room she said, “It’s dangerous. The more time we spend in this city—”
“I know.” He lit a cigarette. “Tomorrow.”
“Is that too soon?”
“No. I was going to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, but you’re right, we can’t stick around here too long. It was only a matter of time before we bumped into somebody. It was lucky he didn’t spot us.”
“Yes.”
“And lucky you recognized him.”
He sta
yed with her until after midnight. Then he left the hotel and walked downtown for a dozen blocks. On a dark side street he found a two-year-old Chevy with New Jersey license plates. The plates were in frames fastened by bolts. He used a quarter to loosen the bolts, took both plates, and carried them back to the hotel inside his shirt.
They packed up everything except the gun and the box of shells. He loaded the revolver with five bullets and carried the remaining shells outside to another dark street. There were about fifteen shells left in the box. He dropped them one by one into a sewer and chucked the empty carton into a mailbox.
At seven the next morning, he left the hotel again and walked to the Kinney garage. The place was just opening. He got his car, paid the attendant three and a half dollars, and parked the car on the street a few doors down from the hotel. He went upstairs for the luggage. Jill came down with him. She had the gun in her purse. They walked down to where the car was parked and loaded their bags into the trunk and locked it. He drove the car and she sat close beside him. He took the West Side Drive uptown to Ninety-fifth Street, then drove around the side streets between Broadway and West End Avenue until he found what he was looking for, an alleyway alongside a warehouse. He drove through the alley to the back of the warehouse and switched license plates, bolting the New Jersey plates loosely to the car and putting his own plates in the trunk of the Ford. He backed out of the alley and drove up to 125th Street and swung east to the Triborough Bridge.
They crossed the bridge. The heavy traffic was coming across the bridge into Manhattan, rush-hour commuters coming into the city. He drove through Astoria, and she checked the route in the pocket atlas and told him which turns to take. They made only one wrong turn; it took them three blocks out of their way, but they found their mistake and got back where they belonged. He found Krause’s block and then Krause’s building and drove around looking for a parking place.
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