The door was locked.
Putting his hands on the wall behind him, he lifted a foot and delivered a mighty kick. The reaction only hurt his jaw. Horne whirled to enter Betty’s bedroom.
After a while the dog strolled in from the kitchen to see the cause of the racket. Each of the drawers from the dressing table and a chest of drawers had been pulled out and dumped upside down. The contents littered the floor. Horne was pawing among the debris. The dog sniffed at the piles of belongings once or twice and dropped onto the tiny throw rug to watch the man.
After twenty minutes the man gave it up.
Dismissing the remaining rooms as unworthy of search, he exited by the kitchen door and ran across the yard to the garage. He flicked a light switch just inside the wide doors. The garage contained the usual paraphernalia to service an automobile. There was also a woman’s bicycle.
Dubiously, Horne eyed it, and swung around again to gauge the distance to where that red haze hung above the horizon. A few minutes’ tense silence brought not a single sound from the highway; there wasn’t so much as a hint of a pair of headlights traversing the rolling hills in the distance.
Horne wheeled the bicycle out of the garage.
Winken, Blinken and Nod trotted along beside him as far as the gate opening onto the highway, where he sat down. Horne rode onto the paved road and turned towards the town. The dog watched him out of sight. When all sight and smell and sound of the man had vanished into the night, the dog returned to the house. Pulling open the screen door with his teeth, he entered the kitchen and walked through all the rooms. Finally he jumped onto the studio couch and settled down to sleep.
Charles Horne dropped to his hands and knees in the blackness of the alley and crawled the entire distance between the two streets. When he reached the opposite end of the alley he climbed gingerly to his feet and swore under his breath at the bits of cinders and glass sticking in the palms of his hand. The knee of one trouser leg was ripped open and he felt warm blood on his kneecap.
He had counted up to three hundred and nine while traversing the alley and guessed that was just short of five minutes. All of the blocks in the neighborhood seemed about the same size.
He peered carefully from the mouth of the alley and scanned the street.
Standing there in the concealing darkness he tried to pick out the shapes or movements of the men who should be watching Deebie Bridges’ animal hospital, but nothing rewarded him. The hospital was on the other side of the street from where he stood, and a half a block to his left. There were no lights showing and no one on the street.
Cautiously pushing his head around the corner of the building where he was standing, he looked down the street towards the center of town. The street lights revealed no traffic, afoot or automotive. But then, he reflected, that was natural for Boone after midnight.
Several windows in the City Hall, three blocks down that street, were brilliantly lighted. Horne pulled his head in and looked in the opposite direction, away from town. Some nine blocks that way, he knew, was the telephone exchange. It was at the very edge of the residential district and out of sight from where he stood.
Horne grinned in the night. The animal hospital was situated on a crow-line between the City Hall and the telephone exchange. And telephone companies, like crows, realized the economic advantages of laying their wires along the shortest, most direct routes possible.
Horne prowled back along the alley he had just traveled, looking for a likely door. He found it, slightly ajar in its frame, the old-fashioned bar lock loosely holding it shut. He pried the lock open with the deposit box key the redheaded girl had given him.
Easing in, he located the stairway to the basement by the damp odor and slipped down the stairs. In the basement he struck a match and held it aloft. The far wall. Telephone and electric wires came down from the building overhead and dropped through an insulated slot set in the foundation wall. Below the slot was a small iron door opening into the service tunnel. The iron door was secured by a padlock. Horne’s fizzling match died out, leaving him in darkness.
Betty’s gift key would never open that lock.
Horne closed his eyes and searched his memory for what had been revealed in the brief flare of the match. Nothing, he felt sure, that would do him any good. On an impulse, he struck another match and examined the basement room in detail. It contained only broken office furniture and nameless junk. Horne quietly ascended the stairs and left the building.
Again in the alley he walked noiselessly along the building walls until he reached the mouth, to take up a position where he had stood before. There was no noticeable change in the scene.
Betty had an underground entrance into that hospital somewhere. She couldn’t and wouldn’t just walk up to the front or back door and push it open. Especially not these last few days — or nights. Horne eyed the alley mouth across the street, opposite him. It was very near the hospital. On a sudden decision, he whirled about and strode down the alley, back the way he had first come.
A five-block circuitous route brought him into that other alley from the rear. He found himself on the hospital side of the street, facing the position he had just quitted.
He searched again along the opposite side of the dark street, looking for the men that should be there. The row of second-story windows caught his eye. There was no movement behind them and they were as black as the night itself, but there would be the logical place for them to watch. A man in any of those windows commanded the front of the hospital. A man in the windows above him, across the ten or twelve feet of alleyway, would command a side view of the hospital and possibly most of the rear. But the man above him could not see him unless the man put his head out of the window and looked down. And even then the darkness would probably protect him.
But — let him step out of the alley mouth into the street, or let him slip into the fenced-in yard about the hospital, and he was an instant target. From the hospital as well as the second-story windows.
Horne looked down at himself clad only in torn trousers and slippers, and decided that he was pretty easy to identify or describe. Then he edged out of the mouth of the alley onto the sidewalk. Keeping close to the buildings, he sidled towards the animal hospital.
Upstairs, across the street, a yawning patrolman took one look and scooped up a telephone. By the light of a tiny penlight he dialed a number.
“City Hall,” the answering voice said.
“Gimme Wiedenbeck, quick! This is Eisner.”
After a couple of connecting clicks the sergeant came on the wire.
“Sergeant, this is Eisner. There’s a guy out here without any shirt on. He’s limping.”
“Without any — hey! That’s our man, that’s Horne. Hold him!”
“Okay, okay, he’s across the street. He’s — wait a minute, sergeant.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The guy’s breaking into the dog hospital, sergeant. He’s trying to get a window open.”
“Swell! Now listen — hey, don’t hang up!”
“I didn’t, sergeant, but it sounded like you did.”
“Bad connection, I guess. Now listen, wait until the dope gets inside before you move. Then grab your pardner and cover the front and back door. Nobody comes out — and if you have to shoot, aim for the legs. I’ll be there as soon as I can get a warrant out for Horne. That’s excuse enough to get in there.” He banged down the phone.
The patrolman watched Horne disappear through a window.
He smelled dogs. From his position on the floor Horne put out a hand, encountered a table leg or similar prop, and ran his hand up it. Close-woven chicken wire came beneath his searching fingers. He stuck a single finger through a hole in the wire and a small tongue licked it.