and we’ll have a real party on me, honey, how’s that?”
“You won’t do it for forty bucks?”
Her busy hands took themselves off him and she said in a voice that was suddenly dry and cool: “Act your age, buster. Three-fifty for the hotel, one-fifty for miscellanies, two bucks for the cab, I get what’s left and I miss the rush hour here. You want to be a businessman, stick to your own business. Don’t try to run mine. Are you going to buy some tickets or aren’t you? This is liberty night and we’ll be getting the radar trainees from Great Lakes any minute, so make up your mind.”
“You goddamned tramp,” he said softly. “You remind me of my wife.”
Her painted mouth made a surprised scarlet O in the gloom.
“Let me out,” he said. She slid from the booth and primly straightened her dress. He ignored her, stalking from the Palm Room unsteadily. A couple of the other women headed his way but he outdistanced them.
“M’ hat and coat,” he said to the big man, who was standing by the door.
“The check, mister,” the big man said patiently. He found it and the man got his hat and coat. “That’ll be one dollar, mister,” the big man said, not handing them over. Boyce scooped out his change pocket and found four quarters. He got his coat and the big man said: “Come again, mister. Any time. You want to see a real strip show tonight? Private house? Nice mulatto girls? I can give you a card—”
Boyce raced down the creaking stairs and stood in the street breathing big lungfuls of the icy air. Four very young sailors in pea jackets were coming down the street, looking dubiously at house numbers. One of them said: “Hey, heah’s the place. Is it aneh good, misteh?”
“’s okay,” Boyce mumbled, swaying a little, and they exchanged grins.
“Take it easy, pappy,” they told him and went charging up the stairs.
“Suckers,” he said viciously, half-aloud, and went on down the street to a glow that promised to be a street of shops where he might pick up a taxi for home. “Suckers.” All of us. You can’t buy what you want and if your luck’s bad you can’t marry it either. Her and her goddam headaches. That semi-whore and her goddam tickets. Always something. He knew he couldn’t run away from it, but he wished desperately that it was already 9:05 tomorrow morning and that the streamliner was sliding out of Union Station with him aboard. You couldn’t run away from it, but you could try.
CHAPTER II
BYSTANDERS
I
The wolf was gaunt and shabby; he slunk cringing through the snow, quailing at every blast of wind. He was starving. His ribs showed plainly and his belly drew up tight; he looked grotesquely like the caricature of a greyhound on the buses. He had eaten last a week ago, a sheep cut out from a Colorado rancher’s flock and pulled down running. He had gorged on the sheep and awakened from the heavy sleep to find the bones picked by buzzards. The snow had started about then.
He stopped as a familiar, frightening smell permeated the air. It was the complex smell of man and his works. Oil. Gasoline. Cloth. Fire. Whenever that smell had filled the air before it had been followed by loud, inexplicable noises, rushing things moving faster than he could, stones that did not stay in place as stones should but hurtled through the air and thumped him in the ribs or on the nose. As a cub he had learned about that complex smell; it meant trouble and he had stayed away from it.
But he was starving, and part of the complex smell was meat.
With his hackles up and his heart pounding, he inched toward it through the snow. The smell came from a bundle on the ground, and the bundle did not move. His lips drew back as a strain of polecat and another of mink wafted his way. But the bundle did not move, and it smelled also of meat. His caution was consumed by the raging pain in his belly. He leaped on the bundle and tore at it, worrying away strange layers of pelt and cloth. It did not move; it was frozen. He knew what to do with frozen game. He went for the belly with his long, pointed eyeteeth and opened it up. The exposed organs steamed a little in the icy air.
The wolf crouched down and looked about, growling his ownership. There was nobody to dispute it so he began to gnaw at the liver.
He would live through the winter after all.
II
The three men in the hotel room jumped to their feet as the door slammed open.
“Police,” a tall man in the doorway announced. Uniformed patrolmen moved around him and began to search the room, picking up papers, briefcases, opening drawers and closets.
The oldest of the three men, bald, wearing a richly conservative brown suit, said: “I suppose you have a warrant.”
“Two of them. Search and arrest. Put on your coats and let’s go.”
The man in the brown suit took a heavy overcoat from a closet and began to wind a muffler around his neck. He asked almost casually: “What’s the charge?”
“Conspiracy to violate gambling laws. Let’s go.”
“May I phone a lawyer?”
“From the station house. Come on.”
One of the uniformed men, a sergeant, was carefully removing something bulky from the rear of a high closet shelf. It was a tape recorder, and its reels were still turning. The man in the brown suit raised his eyebrows. He and another of the room’s original occupants looked at the third man. He told the third man sadly: “You think you can get away with such goings-on? I’m surprised at you.”
The police lieutenant, admitting nothing, nevertheless gave the third man a chin-up glance. Everybody in the room, however, knew that the third man’s death warrant had just been signed.
It would be executed some day by means of a speeding truck or a bomb wired to his car’s ignition, or a shotgun blast through a window or fists and feet and newspaper-wrapped lead pipe in a deserted place where nobody would hear his screams except his murderers.
It would happen just as soon as they were ready for it to happen, not a minute sooner or later. He would have to use the time that remained to him as efficiently as possible and try not to worry too much.
III
“Phonies,” said the cynical bellboy.
“Honeymooners,” the romantic chambermaid said firmly.
They were discussing the couple who had checked in last night at the Desert Rest Motel, Nevada.
“‘Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,’” the bellboy sneered.
“Look in a phone book, wise guy. Look in any phone book, I dare you. You think there ain’t any John Smiths in the whole world?”
“A shack job,” said the bellboy. “And she’s taking him for plenty. I seen them quiet ones before.”
“I,” said the chambermaid, “seen the way they look at each other…” She smiled mistily and blinked.
But as a matter of fact they were both right.
IV
