“We heard you the first time,” Gino cut him off.
He hoped Dora had a good plan. They were going to have to get out of town fast — and do something about Mike first. In another twenty-four hours, he’d do something to queer the game for all of them. The guy simply didn’t have the stability to stay with it.
Dora slipped in at ten minutes of twelve. She looked at Mike, lying asleep on the cot, still holding the bottle. She looked at Arne, at the portable radio, at Gino. Then she said, “What in hell’s been happening around here? The block is full of cops.”
Gino was on his feet without knowing how he got there. So was Arne. Arne said, “I knew it. I can smell ’em.”
“Where are they?” Gino asked the girl.
She said, “Still a dozen doors away. They’re making a house-to-house. I think they’re getting warm. How come?”
“Your friend Mike,” Gino said bitterly. He told her about the lighter.
Dora was silent a moment. Then she said, “We got to get out of here quick. If they find us with that loot...”
“Right,” said Gino, “but what about him?” He nodded at Mike.
All at once, Mike was sitting up. “Yeah,” he said thickly, “what about me? If you think you’re going to take a powder now and leave me holding all the sacks you’re out of your mind, all of you. So maybe I made a mistake. I did my share on this sting.”
“Any ideas, Dora?” Gino asked softly.
“Maybe,” she said.
Mike advanced on Gino. He said, “You think you’re such a Goddamn Napoleon, trying to boss the show. You couldn’t boss a chicken-yard, you little punk. You don’t have the guts to pull anything now. I’ll cut you down to your shoe tops. I’ll—”
He stopped talking suddenly. His eyes rolled upward and he crumpled to the floor. Dora was standing beside him, holding the portable. One of its corners was crumpled in.
Gino said, “Nice work, Dora. But we got to make sure he won’t come to and talk.”
Arne advanced ominously into the beam of the lantern. He stood between Gino and the fallen Mike and said, “None of that. Mike’s my pal.”
“He’s your death-warrant if you leave him here,” said Gino.
“Knife,” said Dora, snapping her fingers at Gino. In the shadows, Gino could not see her face. All he could see was her small white hand, outstretched, waiting. He threw her the knife.
Before Arne could turn, she had it open and into him, right through the kidney, up to the hilt. He made a sodden, gasping sound. She pulled it free with a wrench, jammed it into his back, higher up. There was a shrill scrape as it glanced off a rib, then it was through. Arne fell forward across his pal.
Gino picked up the portable and hit Mike hard in the temple, twice. The second time, he felt the bone crumple. He wiped off the grip and stood erect, warily. But Dora was just finished wiping the blade of the knife. She snapped it shut and handed it to him. “Come on,” she said.
The money was in three packets of ten $1,000 bills each, two more of ten $100 bills. They divided it swiftly, gravely, wordlessly. Gino put his half in his pockets, Dora stuffed hers in her handbag. They left the lantern and radio on behind them. Let the cops figure it out — they’d have a ball with it. Gino locked the door carefully behind them.
A cop looked them over at the end of the block. He said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
Dora blasted his head off. She said, “If you must know, officer, we’re on our way to New York to start a new Jelke Ring. We got big plans. Maybe you’d like to come along with us — protection, you know. You’d run up a lot better score than you can here, bothering a girl whose boy-friend is walking her home.”
The cop shook his head and said, “Kids!” and let them through.
When they were safely past him, Gino said, “I’m handing it to you, Dora. You’re going all the way — you and me. Was this the plan you worked out for us?”
“Not exactly,” she said, “but it seems to have done the trick. Let’s get the hell out of town.”
“How?” said Gino. “They got a lot of cops out — not looking for us, maybe, but if they nail us with this loot...”
“How do you think?” said Dora. “We walk. We walk to that motel on the main highway. We tell them we got ditched by our pals. We take a room. Tomorrow, we make some contacts there and get a lift with a family. Leave it to me. By tomorrow night, we’ll be a thousand miles away.”
“I’m sold,” said Gino and he meant it. By the street lamps, he could see that her complexion was almost clear. Put her in decent clothes, put him in decent clothes, and they’d be a good-looking couple. They’d be welcome anywhere. They walked on past the factories and the houses got further apart. Gino said, “It’s a fine night for singing.”
“You can say that again,” said Dora. “Those two so-and-so’s were driving me bats. We start clean, you and me?”
“We start clean,” said Gino. Right then he was as close to being in love as he had ever been in his life. This was a girl in a couple of million, a girl who could kill when she had to, yet who could make respectable folk trust her. Some baby-sitter — some baby!
They swung hands in the moonlight, like a couple of kids at the beach. They could hear the locusts chirruping and zinging in the stretches of grass alongside the road. They couldn’t hear the big yellow Cadillac creeping a hundred yards behind them with only its parking lights for guidance. They weren’t even aware it was following them, had been following them all the way, until it drew alongside them and a voice said, “These your pigeons, Ozzie?”
Ozzie replied, “That’s them.” And, to Gino and Dora, “Come on in, kids. You look like you could use a lift.”
Gino felt like something on a slow motion film. Time seemed to have braked down to a creep. He seemed, to himself, to take minutes to recognize the three sport-jacket sharpies from the booth at the Alcove. He wanted to break and run, run until the world was behind him like a bad dream — but the snout of the submachine-gun pointed at him from the rear seat held him as fixed as if he were an insect held to a piece of card by a pin.
He tasted copper at the base of his tongue — he tasted paralyzing fear. Yet, as he followed Dora wordlessly into the car, he didn’t even know why he was afraid. He only knew he was.
They searched him, coldly, impersonally, as they searched Dora, with regard neither for modesty nor her quickly checked gasp of outrage. Ozzie was polite about it. He said, “Sorry, girlie, but we got to be sure.”
They took the money away from them, took Gino’s knife and Dora’s handbag, then sat them side by side in the rear seat, where the man with the submachine-gun covered them. As they got the car under way, still moving out of town, Ozzie leaned over the back of the front seat and shook his head at them paternally.
He said, “You gave us a bad time, kids. You really had us scared there for a few minutes. We lost you right after you cleared the block and didn’t pick you up again until a couple of miles back.”
“Stop twisting the knife,” said Gino. “Take the dough, Ozzie, and let us go. Why get on our backs just because we made a big score?”
Ozzie chuckled and said to his companions, “Score? Get that — they don’t even know the score.” Then, to Gino and like a teacher to a very stupid pupil, “Kid, it’s all a matter of who you score on. I guess it didn’t enter your fat little heads there had to be a reason for Fellowes having that kind of dough in his house.”