I wondered if anybody would hear me if I screamed. The sound would have to go through two doors and down a hall. Being a record company, everything was pretty sound-proof. Suppose I screamed, what could Superman do? Would he kill me right then and there? What would happen if somebody came? If I went on screaming Superman would probably bash me on the head. There was a window open, though. I wondered if anybody down on the street would hear me if I screamed. Maybe if there were some windows open on the floor below somebody might hear me. I wondered if I could get to the open window.
“Boy Next Door,” Superman said softly, “I want to know what the police know.” He gave another push on the spear, and I wriggled.
“Superman, it’s the honest truth, I swear. I never called the police. I was going to, but I never did, and then when the cocaine was gone I decided not to. The police wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
He stared at me for a minute. “Boy Next Door, you almost convince me. But not quite. How the hell did the police happen to bust that guy so quick after you got the package with his address on it?”
The sweat was pouring down my face. “It must have been a coincidence. I swear I didn’t tell anybody anything.”
He went on staring at me. I knew he wouldn’t want to kill me until he found out what the police knew. The thing was if I could only get the spear away from him.
“It’s a hell of a funny coincidence,” he said.
If I could suddenly swivel sideways somehow, I figured I could grab the crutch spear gun and push it to one side. If I jerked probably it would go off, and then I could grab the spear before Superman got it. “It’s the truth,” I said.
He didn’t know whether to believe me or not. He leaned back his chair, and pulled the spear gun back so that it was a foot away from my chest. He held it sort of loosely, and went on staring at me. He wasn’t in a hurry about anything. He was taking his time. “You know, I almost believe you. The one part I can’t figure out is how you could have found out about the coke.” He was almost talking to himself. “The only way that it makes any sense is if somebody around here got suspicious and went to the cops. But why bring you into it, Boy Next Door? What did they need to involve a kid for? It doesn’t make sense.”
„I swear, Superman, it was just a coincidence.” He stared at me, and then he sort of rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling. I took a deep breath. Then I leaped out of the chair. His free hand shot back to the spear gun. I grabbed the end and pushed it away from me. At the same moment he pulled the trigger. There was a kind of whooshing noise. I felt my side burn. Then there was a kind of heavy smacking sound as the spear slammed into the door and stuck, quivering rapidly back and forth. “Damn you,” Superman shouted. He began to heave himself up out of his chair. I turned, raced for the door, and grabbed onto the spear. It was pretty stuck. I gave it a good jerk. The point squeaked in the wood. I jerked it again and it came loose. Then I swung around. Superman was hobbling across the floor on his crutches. The spear gun one was about six inches shorter than the other one, and it made it hard for him to move along. He was heading right for me. I let him get up to about five feet from me, then I skipped off to one side and raced back across the room. As long as I could keep away from him I was okay, but if he managed to get the spear back, I was in trouble. He turned and stood staring at me. Then he began to move forward again, this time going slowly, a step at a time, and watching me like a cat watching a bird, his big egg-eyes fastened on me like clamps. He was going to try to close in on me slowly, and corner me somewhere. I figured he’d probably try to hit me with one of his crutches if he could. With arms as strong as his, he’d be able to hurt me pretty bad if he hit me. I stood there, watching. Slowly he closed in. I felt a little breeze behind me, blowing in through the window. It reminded me that it was open. I turned and shouted out, “Help, he’s trying to kill me.” Little car noises floated up from below—faint horn honkings and the sound of a bus starting up from the curb. The sun was gone and it was night, but down in the cavern between the buildings there was a kind of sea of light, which got fainter as it came up. It was a long way down. I turned toward Superman. He was closing in, about ten feet away. I was still holding the spear in my hands. I stuck it out in front of me toward him. He started to grab for it, and quickly I realized that was a mistake and I jerked it back. With those strong arms he could easily pull it out of my hands once he got hold of the end. And the minute he had the spear back I was done for. I pressed back against the window. He hitched forward on his crutches. Now he was only five feet away. There was no place for me to go, except out the window. I turned to face it. What I wanted to do was fling the spear out the window, but I didn’t dare, because it would probably kill somebody down on the street below. At that height it would be going like a rocket by the time it hit the ground.
I turned back. Superman was closer. He raised up one crutch, sort of balancing himself on the other, and started to swing it around. I jumped up on the window sill. Then I swung out the window and around the edge so I was standing on the ledge, with my face pressed up against the side of the Camelot Building, with the spear still in my hand. The only thing I had to hold onto was the edge of the window. I looked down. I could see the street straight down below me, just past my shoes—all those yellow taxies and buses and cars going up and down the streets in that hazy light. I began to feel dizzy and trembly, and I stopped looking down.
Superman was standing by the window, looking up at me and grinning. “Where are you going to now, Boy Next Door? It couldn’t have worked out better, could it? All I do is reach out the window, give your leg a pull, and down you go. I’ll tell the newspapers that it was a tragic accident—so talented a boy to die by accidentally falling out a window.” He reached for my leg. I kicked at his hand and he pulled it back. Then he reached again. I kicked, but he caught it and held it. I tried to jerk loose, but I couldn’t kick around too much without losing my balance. He started to twist my foot around. I could feel my whole body being forced to turn away from the window and out toward the street.
And then suddenly he stopped and turned away from the window. “Who is it?” he shouted. “Go away, I’m busy.” There was a kind of heavy bumping noise, and then another, and then a splintering crash of wood. “What the hell is this?” Superman shouted. I slipped in from the window, and sat on the window sill, my legs dangling into the room. There was another splintering crash, and the door broke and swung inward, and all of a sudden the room was full of cops, swarming all over the place. Behind them was Woody, and behind him was Barbara Feinberg. I slipped off the window sill, my legs and arms trembling so much I could hardly stand up, and then Woody and Barbara were sort of holding me up. About two minutes later the cops had got handcuffs on Superman and were leading him out of the room; and then Barbara was giving me a can of soda she’d got from the machine in the hall, and the cops were asking me a million questions, most of which I didn’t know the answers to. And then finally we went downstairs to the bottom floor, and there was the television news crew with their cameras, and the story all came out.
When I hadn’t come home Barbara had got worried. She’d found Woody’s phone number in my address book and called him, and of course he said that we’d all got back from the shooting in Pawling hours before. That worried her even more, and so she spilled it all to Woody about the cocaine. And suddenly Woody remembered that Superman had asked me to see him; and that was when everything began to add up, and he and Barbara came up to Camelot looking for me.
“The crazy thing is,” Barbara said, “we came up here practically an hour ago. The door was locked and we figured whatever had happened, Superman had left. We started to leave, and then I saw your teddy bear key chain lying on the floor in the reception room. That was when we figured you were in there, and we called the cops.”
So I told my story on television, not trying to make myself out a hero or anything, but as usual they got it wrong, and it came out in the news that I’d discovered Super
man was dealing in coke, and I tracked him down in his lair. I was trying to explain that I didn’t track Superman down, when Woody Woodward burst in and said, “This is no ordinary kid, he’s one of the country’s most talented young vocal stars, he’s hot as a jet of live steam.”
“He’s what?” one of the reporters asked.
“He’s just signed a Camelot recording contract. He’s moving like a fire engine.”
And that’s the way it came out on the television and in the newspapers—”Young Singer Outwits Dope Mobster.” I felt sort of guilty about everybody thinking I had out-smarted Superman, but I’ll admit it, not guilty enough to say anything about it. When the kids asked me about it later, I just said, “Oh well, it sort of happened.”
Finally they let us go, and Woody and Barbara and I rode down to our apartment in a taxi cab. It was about midnight. “Oh boy, George,” Woody said.
“Why was it my fault, Woody?”
“Whosever fault,” he said, “The Boy Next Door is down the drain.” Frankly, I was just as glad. “Woody, how come it was my fault that Superman tried to kill me?”
“I don’t know, George. It just seems that every time something gets hot, you get into one of these crazy things.”
“Well, it wasn’t my fault.”
He sighed. “I guess not.” He was quiet for a minute. We were passing through Times Square and I looked out the window at the lights and the people hustling and bustling around. Then Woody said, “Well, let’s look on the bright side. Maybe the publicity will help. Maybe I can think of something.”
“What’s worrying me is, what am I going to tell Pop?”
“Tell Pop? Doesn’t he know about this?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
He put his head in his hands and began laughing. “Oh George, what are we ever going to do about you?”
I didn’t think it was very funny though; and as we went on downtown in the cab, I began to work on my story. I figured it had better be a good one...
THE END
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