A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She came to a halt again, like something that has run down, and just stood there numbed, gazing down at the sidewalk before her.

In a little while footsteps passed her, but she didn’t raise her eyes. They slackened, then they stopped.

“Hello, sister,” a man’s voice said with a soft slur.

“Hello, mister,” she answered dully, and kept on looking down at the ground, waiting for him to come alongside her.

Nothing moved but the laced strings, like yarn, toiling above the two cigarettes left pointing together tip-to-tip, like a smouldering kiss, from opposite rims of the little clay dish. Nothing moved but a carbonated bead, hindmost of the long procession, straggling upward in the residue in one of the glasses, to find the surface and its own extinction.

Then she put the arrested comb back, into the hand-bag where she’d found it. Then she took the lipstick out, made just two strokes, once to, once fro. Then she put the lipstick back.

Her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there. Finding nothing.

She just glanced at me for a moment in quizzical inquiry. Unreproachful, accepting the fact, but merely wondering about it with her eyes.

I answered her in kind. Shook my head slightly.

“Not that way, any more,” I said quietly. “You see, I’m starting to fall in love with you, myself.”

It Only Takes a Minute To Die

Why he wanted to kill him need not be brought within the compass of this story. It would drag it too far back — through too many long, brooding, rancorous, and sick-minded years for it to be cohesive. And a story must have a concise starting point, otherwise it becomes just a formless loose-leafed casebook. All that need be said is that he wanted to kill him, he did kill him, and he botched it — and now let the story begin.

Names are not too important — they are only labels used to differentiate people. It is the action stemming from given characteristics within a given situation that counts more as identification, that brings forward the individual personality. And since one played the part of the killer, and one the part of the dead, let them be known as Killare and Dade. That will characterize them beyond all doubt. The killer and the dead.

As he stood there waiting for the bus he’d missed that night, Killare wasn’t even thinking of this man he’d dedicated himself to kill. It was one of the few times, night or day, that he wasn’t. A skin-teasing, mosquitolike rain was needling him, and it felt more like icy pollen than rainwater. His collar was turned up, his hat brim down, he was chilled and getting more chilled by the minute. His shoes were starting to squirt instead of scrape when he scuffed them.

The bus must have broken down along the way, and had to be taken off the run and towed back to the garage. Which meant there would only be one more coming along after that — the buslines closed down for the night at 1:00 a.m. and didn’t start rolling again until 5:00 in the morning and the last bus wouldn’t get to his stop until about 1:15 or even later.

He turned and looked around despairingly for some kind of shelter to tide him over during the wait he foresaw coming up. He was standing out in front of a corner residential hotel. He el noticed it when he first halted at the bus stop, but hadn’t given it a second thought since.

Now as he looked again he caught sight of a small, neat neon sign with the word Bar on it posted above a separate doorway to one side of the main entrance. Also he noticed that the doorway was flanked by a number of lighted windows that looked out on the very stretch of sidewalk he was standing on.

He decided to do his waiting in there, and warm up while he was about it — that is, if he could find some place to sit that would let him keep an eye on the bus-stop zone outside. He walked over and went inside. It was a happy little place, warm and restfully lighted and sprightly — not raucous, but with the sound of soft-spoken voices. And his luck was working — the end seat at the bar, the one nearest the windows, was vacant. Probably because all the rest were taken up by couples, and this happened to be an odd seat, one left over.

He sat down on it, ordered a short but stiff bourbon, and as he slowly started to glow back to welcome warmth again, he kept his head turned, watching the sidewalk outside the window, which the rain kept covering with a patina of little disappearing pinpricks all the time, no two of which ever landed in the same spot twice. They looked like a swarm of drowning bees.