So what do you do? Somehow you make him break. Somehow you crack that stony, satanic arrogance. Now. Right now. Because morning will be too late. Let’s see. It’s nearly two. Human resistance is at its lowest ebb at two in the morning. The time for ghosts and fear of hell.
In the darkness, he stood up and dressed. His shoulder holster, nesting its .38, went under his coat. Moving swiftly, without noise, he went down to Constance’s door and knocked softly. Waiting a few seconds, he knocked again. The door swung inward away from his knuckles.
Constance was still fully dressed. He hadn’t even removed the perfectly tailored coat of his dark suit. He stood there without speaking, his pale eyes still and wary, the planes of his thin face stonelike in the dim light.
Jeff made a half-gesture toward the room. “I’d like to come in.”
Constance moved back, and Jeff moved in. The door clicked shut. Constance came back past him and turned.
“Yes?”
Jeff grinned. “I want in, Constance.”
“You are in, my friend.”
Jeff kept the grin. It was work, but he kept it. “I don’t mean in the room, Constance. I mean in the act.” He waited, tension drawing to a throbbing point of pain in his chest. “About halfway in fifty grand, let’s say.”
There was no change in the face. The voice became a little softer, slightly more clipped. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No?” Jeff shifted weight, lifted his shoulders. “Don’t be a fool, man. You think old Reed Roman’s lost his marbles? If you do, you’re making a mistake. He saw the possibilities in this thing from the start. Naming yourself as contact, for instance. A little obvious, really, to a sharp old bird like Roman. He had me on your tail before you’d been gone an hour. Fifty grand might seem like a lot of money to a private detective, he said. He seemed to think it might be a temptation. His only mistake was, he forgot I’m a private detective too. Fifty grand looks just as big to me as to the next one. Even twenty-five looks big. That’s all I’m asking. Just an even split. In return, I put you solid. I verify the contact.”
Constance’s lips moved stiffly. “You’re mad.”
“No.” Jeff shook his head. “Why don’t you give up, man? You’ll split or bum, and it’s as simple as that.”
He couldn’t tell if it was working. Constance just stood there, hardly touched. His lips twitched spastically, betraying inner tension, that was all.
“Conceding what you say is true, what makes you think I’d carry fifty grand around like car fare?”
“In case of emergency, maybe. In case, for some reason, you couldn’t anticipate, you had to produce it. Like now, I mean.”
“You guessed wrong, friend. I didn’t anticipate having to produce it.”
“You picked it up at the old man’s at six-thirty. You had to make it to the bus station in an hour. That didn’t leave you much time.”
“Time enough. It’s waiting for me in a tight spot.”
So it was true. Constance was the man, carrying the whole deal through in lonely arrogance. The sharp pain of tension behind the hard bone of Jeff’s chest was almost unbearable. In his head there was a thin, wild singing.
“It can wait for me just as well. Half of it, I mean. I’m in no hurry.”
The lonely, proud, ambitious man. Maybe it was because the years had been too long, the cold veneer of his reserve wearing too thin for the persistent erosion of frustration. Maybe, after all the waiting and the final exhilaration of the big dream consummating, the sudden threat of disaster was the final impetus to hysteria. However it was, it was certain, now, in the end when he most needed to do what was exactly right, that he did the worst possible thing. Jeff had no warning. There was no gradual disintegration of the cold veneer. There was only a swift white flame of madness in pale eyes and a gun leaping as if by magnetic attraction from under the dark blue coat.
Jeff spun away with the sound of thunder in his ears, and something hammered at his right shoulder, slamming him against the wall. He thrust himself sideways in a reflex motion as he fell, rolling into cover behind a heavy chair. A slug thumped into upholstery, beating out a thin cloud of dust.
Using his left hand, Jeff reached his .38 and got it out. He was not ambidextrous, and the shot he returned around the edge of the chair was wild. He heard the shattering of glass and thought for a moment his lead had gone through a window. Then he heard the sound of feet on the iron fire-escape, and he knew that it was Constance that had gone through.
Jeff pulled himself up behind the chair, his shoulder a mass of fire, and lurched across the room. Glass fragments grated under his feet. He was remotely aware that the rain had diminished, falling now in a soft cloud that seemed, against the street lights below, hardly more than a mist. The fire-escape went down against the brick wall to the ground, reversing the direction of its angle with each floor. Below, leaping three steps at a time, Cleo Constance had almost completed the descent.
Jeff wasted no shot. Stretching flat across the platform outside the window, he braced his inadequate left hand against iron, taking aim on the spot where Constance must leave the fire-escape. When the big figure came across the sight, he fired once, the gun leaping in his hand. The sound bounced off old brick and came crashing back around him.
Far below, Cleo Constance stopped and stood rigidly, a grotesque parody of a man being shot, like a kid playing cops and robbers. Then he pitched sprawling on the wet pavement, his arm flung wide for something that wasn’t there.
He had to get up, had to get up, had to get up. It seemed to him that he lay on the wet pavement in the gray soft rain for long, precious minutes, repeating the injunction. Actually, he had hardly fallen before he was clawing at asphalt, scrambling to his knees, to his feet, lurching ahead. Another shot ricocheted with an angry whine off the pavement ahead of him, and he kept moving.
At the comer, around the edge of the building, he hesitated, looking around wildly. Across the street, idling in front of an all-night short-order joint, a Buick Roadmaster waited with the yellow glare of its eyes projecting through the wet darkness. A break. A great, good break.
Holding his left elbow tucked into his guts and his smashed left shoulder pulled forward, he lurched across to the Buick and got in. With a desperate, instinctive concern for small matters that had assumed overwhelming importance, he noticed that the needle of the gas gauge showed almost a full tank on the face of its lighted dial. The big motor roared under his heavy foot, the car leaping ahead.
The sodden night went past him. That was the way it seemed. He sitting idle in the big immobile car while the night went past. The needle of the speedometer wavered at eighty, but surely the speedometer lied. He was sitting still while everything went past him. Everything, everything, all the wide world.
The wound hurt. It was alive and insatiable, tearing at him with hooked talons. It seemed lower than he’d thought at first. Farther in, too. Not really in the shoulder at all, but in the chest. His shirt was warm and sticky against his body. Blood, his bright, bright blood, seeping away in a cursed car that wouldn’t move while the whole wide world rushed by.
The Buick hit the edge of the highway and leaped into the air, coming down with a tremendous jolt and a long sickening skid on the muddy shoulder. The impact drove him forward, the lower arc of the wheel ramming into his guts to send a great sheet of fire searing upward across his vision. He jerked his head up, fighting for breath and sight, heaving at the wheel. The car came back onto the highway rocking, two wheels elevated in a terrible moment of suspension. Then the wheels dropped, and the big Buick hurled itself forward.