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

He needed the next day to get the gun. He’d decided long ago it should be a gun, and only a gun. A gun was tidy, swift, and usually successful. Knives were messy, and impact weapons like crowbars and wrenches and bludgeons — they got matted with gore and hair; and besides, they could be warded off by a sudden twist or turn of the body. A gun, now, that was a man’s weapon, and this was a man’s killing.

He’d paved the way for the gun long ago; he knew where to get it, whom to get it from, and how much it was going to cost him to get it. But he hadn’t wanted to get it until he was ready to use it; it was an illegal gun, it had to be, and to carry it around on him for any length of time beforehand was too risky — it would be asking for trouble in the worst way. Even to keep it hidden somewhere on his own premises was no longer safe. The police now had this new break-in-and-search procedure, which didn’t stand back to wait for warrants, and you could never tell when they were going to spring it on you. Violence that had become almost an everyday commonplace in the city had in turn brought about police methods that were often not strictly out of the lecture room or official handbook.

So the gun was his for the asking and paying — he’d already seen it and handled it; but he needed the extra day to get it. He hadn’t had the faintest idea he was going to meet Dade that night, and in this unlooked-for way.

“Take this gentleman up to Room 211,” the deskman instructed a bellboy.

The door to Dade’s room was squarely, point-blank opposite his own, he saw when he got up there. And the separation wasn’t the width of the main corridor, but of a side corridor. He could step from his door to Dade’s without putting down the same foot twice.

Lingering behind a moment while the bellboy fiddled around the room, he imagined he could even hear Dade’s breathing coming through the opposite door, with the cloying heaviness of approaching sleep.

Sleep tight, he wished him grimly. It’s your last night on earth for doing so. Tomorrow night this time you’ll be sleeping in a different way — cold and doughy and smelling of formaldehyde.

The bellboy went out, and Killare picked up the phone without a minute’s waste of time, almost before the door had latched back into place, and asked for a number. It was in the Yellow Pages, but you wouldn’t have found it if you’d looked under “Guns.”

There was an unusually long wait, as though the telephone was ringing in the back of somewhere. The back room of somewhere. Then even after the connection opened up, there was nothing — no voice, no one said anything. As though the person standing by it was very cagey, very wary about answering his calls, didn’t even like to commit himself to a noncommittal “Hello” until he had some idea who was calling.

Finally, to break the deadlock, Killare said, “How about it? You there?”

“Whosis?” came back a guarded voice — so guarded it was barely allowed to pass through the speaker’s lips.

“Remember me? I was in there a couple of times about — something.”

“I don’t remember you,” the voice said peremptorily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am—” Killare started to elaborate.

The voice cut him off almost hysterically. “Look, no names! There could be woodpeckers somewhere along the line. Tap, tap, tap — you know? Everybody has them nowadays,” he went on. “Even housewives.”

“This has nothing to do with your regular business. It’s something we discussed on the side.”

“Oh,” the voice said, enlightened. “Now I know.” The voice sounded almost relieved, as though bargaining over the sale of an illegal gun was a mere nothing, a bagatelle, compared to the man’s main-line occupational hazards.

“You know that package?” Killare said. “That package you’re holding for me? I’m coming around to pick it up. I have to have it tomorrow. I’m coming around tomorrow about five.”

The voice was still determined to play it safe. “A lot of people leave packages in my care that I don’t know anything about. It’s like I was running a parcel service. Sometimes they never show up again, sometimes they show up a year later and expect me to remember.” Which would be his “out” if the gun were ever to be traced back to him; Killare got that. “You could come around here tomorrow at five, like you say, and I still wouldn’t know you from Adam.” Which was an oblique way of saying, All right, come ahead around at five; and Killare understood that too.

“Even if you brought four hundred dollars with you, I still wouldn’t know you.” And he understood that too.

Killare gave an unmirthful laugh. “Price has gone up, I see.”

“When you want a thing bad it always goes up.”

“I want it bad,” Killare said to himself.