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.”
They went to sleep early. They had both gotten a little drunk. She didn’t get sick, just sleepy. They got undressed and into bed, and the liquor made sleep come easily. And there was no attempt at lovemaking to complicate things, not this time. He held her and kissed her and they were close, and then he rolled aside and they slept.
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.”