Hal showed me his teeth, two rows of hard yellow pencil erasers. He backhanded me. Blood crawled down my chin from a half-mashed upper lip. I fought the tears but some rolled out anyway.
“Cry, you little chickenshit.” Hal spat on the floor. “Now hand me the .32. I’ve got some slugs that’ll work in it okay.” He laughed down low in his throat. The laugh sounded like a foot stepping in mud. “You’ll see how good that .32 works with live bullets.”
In neon letters the word formed in my tiny brain: frame.
“The neighbors, Hal,” I heard myself saying. “What about the neighbors?”
Suzie, who’d stopped screaming sometime ago, said, “Do you seen any neighbors around to help us? He shot that gun off over and over again and do you see anybody?” Her voice sound flat, a mixture of shock and reconciled doom.
Hal said, “This place was done over, not long ago. Remodeled. Used to be an apartment house, then sat for years vacant. But they made it back into an apartment house, ain’t it swell? Only nobody moves in till next week.”
“This is a well-planned mess. You going to tell me about it or anything?”
“What’s to tell?”
“Look, Hal, you’re going to kill me in a while. Don’t I have a right to know why? Humor Suzie and me, chum. Just a simple explanation.”
He shook his head. “I don’t give a damn why you die or what you know. And I ain’t going to stand around beating my gums so you can die happy. Not that you’d understand any of it, anyway. Got it? Now hand me the .32 like a good boy and go over to the wall and stand with your hands behind your head. You, too, honey. Now move!”
We didn’t move an inch.
“Look, chickenshit, hand me that .32 or I’ll make things tough on you.”
“You don’t hear so good, Hal. I said go fuck yourself.”
“Hand it over!”
I swallowed hard, grabbed in as much air as I could, and heaved the .32 at his head. It caught him, and he pitched backward, the automatic firing into the ceiling. Bits of plaster and wood rained on me as I leapt at him. I had an idea of getting the automatic away from him, but mainly just wanted to kill him any way I could. Tried for his groin, couldn’t get there, went after the throat, both hands, got there, dug in deep, tore at it, saw my hands go white, my nails red. Hand, his hand, came up at me with a gun in it, I batted it away with my elbow, lost grip on his throat. Got a good knee in his groin, finally, he screamed, high, but slammed in my nose with the gun barrel, didn’t break it but blood gushed out, kept gushing. Automatic’s single eye stared me in the face, in the eye, left eye, death staring at me. Gun went off, as I jerked my head to one side, sparks in my eye, burning, as gun went off to left of me. Punched my fist into his face, broke a knuckle, sent in a knee to his kidneys that drew him into a screaming ball. I grabbed up toward his arm, he had gotten to his feet now, grabbed his wrist and twisted it around.
The automatic went off and caught him square in the face.
I looked up and saw his face. What had been his face.
Watched as he dropped.
Suzie had started in screaming, only not so distant this time.
I went over to try and comfort her, but couldn’t make it. Ran to the bathroom and puked. Puked till I puked blood.
Then wept.
I fell to the floor and buried my head in my hands and wept and coughed a racking cough and lay there in the puke and blood and tears and wished I’d let Hal kill me.
A few minutes passed and I began to snap out of it.
I struggled to my feet, bracing myself on the bowl of the head, and went over to the sink and washed up as well as I could. My upper lip throbbed and hurt and looked like yesterday’s meat. I ached where I’d caught one in the kidneys and my nose was too sore to even think about. My knuckle was puffy-looking and numb, and my stomach felt weak from puking. And there was a taste in my mouth, an awful clinging terrible taste, a mouthful of pus and cotton.
But all in all I wasn’t so bad off for what I’d been through. When I went back into the room I found Suzie staring at Hal’s body. She’d covered his face with a pillowcase.
She said, “Somehow he doesn’t seem... quite so very dead that way... you know?”
I didn’t say anything. There’s only one kind of dead, and that’s dead, but I didn’t say anything. I just picked up my .32 and went over to Hal’s body to get the live ammunition for it. It was in his left inside sportscoat pocket. The pillowcase slipped and I had to see some of what was left of his face while I searched out the box of slugs, but my stomach seemed to hold on pretty well. Not that there was anything much left for it to retch up.
“Suzie,” I said. Softly. Very.
“Yes?”
“You’ll have to tell me about it. Everything.”
“I know. They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”
“Sooner or later.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Try and make it later.”
“How?”
“Well, they’ll be all over the neighborhood before long. Unless we stumble on a cruising cop first, we’re had. I doubt we make it out of this section of the city alive, not at this hour, with them after us. The streets’ll be deserted and we’ll be like the proverbial...”
“The proverbial sitting ducks,” she said. And smiled.
And smiled, for God’s sake.
So did I.
“How about a public phone, there’s surely one around here someplace, Smitty,”
“No go, kid. Bars are long since closed, and as for a booth, we can’t stand around in one spot that long. If we could find one. No, we’ll have to find some place to hide till the streets get busy. Toward mid-morning, when the people are thick on the street, we can blend into the crowd and then maybe get away because it’d attract too much attention if they shot at us in broad daylight.”
“What will we do, Smitty, what can we do?”
I latched onto her hand. I pulled her in close and looked her right in her pretty Karen face and said, “You are on my side, aren’t you, kid? I killed a man tonight and if you’re not on my side I’m liable to do other things.”
Her thin arms wrapped around me and she held herself close to me, warm to me, soft to me, saying, “I’m on your side, Smitty. On your side all the way.”
I put my hands on her waist and held her away from me. “Then come on. Let’s get the hell out. In the john, out the window.”
“Huh?”
“Fire escape, kid, follow me.”
“All the way, Smitty.”
The scape got stuck toward the bottom and I had to jump half a story. Suzie eased down into my arms and I set her down and we stood and brushed ourselves off, looking all about us. No sign of anyone. I kept the .32 tight in my shaking hand, moving it in front of me back and forth in a steady swinging arc, a pendulum extending from my shoulder.
“You... scared, Smitty?”
“Shitless.”
She laughed. “So am I. Boy, so am I.”
I smiled at her. Going to get killed any minute and she’s laughing. Well, what the hell, and why not? Hadn’t I smiled back?
I turned and looked down the alley. A block down, a solid block down uninterrupted by streets, two tight walls of building on each side, the alley stopped in a dead end. The dead end was the back of an old factory of some kind: faded lettering read “Christie Brothers Manufacturing Company.” I could see steps presumably leading down to a back entrance.
“Come on, Suzie,” I whispered.
And we ran, footsteps echoing.
The door had an old-fashioned key-hole lock, and all it took was a good swift kick to pop it open and in we went.
It was a dusty dump, but it was home.
There were a couple dozen old wooden crates of various sizes scattered about the room. Which wasn’t very big, as rooms go: long and narrow and naked, a boxcar of a room. The floor held a good inch of dust and the cobwebs hung from the low ceiling like old lace curtains.