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

“Get back!” I snarled and gave him a shove. “He’s liable to turn around.” I waited a second to get set, then I mooched out of the house, took a squint at the sky, turned my coat-collar up and started down the street in the same direction. He did look back from the corner just before he turned, but I’d finished crossing to the opposite side and was out of his line of vision.

I gave him a lot of rope for the first two blocks, then I saw a subway entrance heading toward us and I closed up on him in a hurry. He went into it like I’d been afraid he would. It’s about the best way of shaking anyone off there is, but he had to change a dime or something, and when I got down the steps myself he’d only just gone through the turnstile. There was a train already in, with its doors wide open and jammed to the roof. He took it on the run along with a lot of others and wedged himself in on the nearest platform just as the doors started to slip closed. There was just room enough left to get my fingernails in by the time I got there, but that was all the leverage I needed. They were the pneumatic kind. Back they went and I was standing on his feet and we were breathing into each other’s faces. “Whew!” I thought to myself, and kept my eyes fixed on the back of a newspaper the fat man next to him was reading.

He squirmed and yanked at 110th and tugged himself free. When I got up to the street myself he was just going into an A.&P. store. I took a look in the door as I went past. He was standing at the counter waiting his turn. Evidently they hadn’t even had the price of groceries until he called for that money that was coming to him. I walked all the way to the next corner, then doubled back on the other side of the street and finally parked at a bus stop and stood there waiting. But the right bus for me never seemed to come along.

He was in there over ten minutes, and then when he came out his arms were still empty anyway. Meaning he’d ordered so much that he couldn’t carry it himself. So they were going to stock up for the next few weeks and lie low, were they? I just barely kept him in sight after this, only close enough to tell which building he’d hit, as I knew there would be a last look back before he ducked. He finally got where he was going, gave a couple of cagy peeks, one over each shoulder, and then it was over. He was in — in Dutch.

I sized it up from where I was, tying my shoelace on somebody’s railing. It was a President McKinley-model flat on the south side of 109th, crummy as they come, without even a service entrance. That meant the groceries would have to be delivered at the front door when they came around, which was a chance for a lot more than groceries to crash in. No lights showed up in any front windows after he’d gone in, so I figured they had a flat in the rear. I eased myself into the vestibule. Half of the mailboxes had no names in them, so they were no help. I hadn’t expected his to have any, but if the rest of them had I could have used a process of elimination. It was so third-class the street door didn’t even have a catch on it, you just opened it and walked in.

I worked my way up the stairs floor by floor, listening carefully at the rear doors on each landing. There was a radio going behind one of them, but nobody seemed to be in any of the others. If I had them cornered they were lying mighty low. I hated to think I might have slipped up in some way. I started soft-shoeing my way down again, and just below the second floor met the groceries coming up in a big box about twice the size of the lad struggling with it. “Where they going?” I said.

“Fourth floor, rear.”

I had him put them down, then I thumbed him downstairs. “I’ll see that they get them.” He was too exhausted to argue. I unlimbered my gun, gave the door a couple of taps, and flattened myself back to one side of it.

Not a sound, not even a footfall, for a couple of minutes. Then all of a sudden a voice spoke from the other side of the door, only a few inches away from me. “Who’s out there?”

I thinned my voice to make it sound like a kid’s. “A.&P., boss.”

A chain clanked and fell loose. The lock, I noticed, was shiny and new, must have just been put on. I reached out with my heel and kicked a can of tomatoes to give him confidence. The door cracked and before it was an inch wide I had the gun pushing in his belt buckle. “Up,” I snapped. He lifted them all right but couldn’t keep them from shaking. He didn’t have anything on him though, so the precautions must have been just to give them time to make a get-away, and not because he’d intended fighting it out. There was no hall and the door opened right into the living room. I cuffed him to me and started to push in.

“What’s all this about?” he tried to stall, and I heard a window go up.

“Hold it!” I yelled, and covered her from across his shoulder just as she raised one leg to go over. “Come on in again, baby.”