Jail Bait

She stared at it, and several things began to make sense to her for the first time. Howard had given her the right ticket. She had given the wrong one — the pawn ticket — to Dave. But the main question was: How had a pawn ticket gotten into her purse? Someone must have hidden it there. The lean, dark man who had been marched out of the night club with a knife in his back? Her purse had been lying on the bench beside her that night. The lean man had evidently anticipated violence, and had slipped the pawn ticket in her purse and snapped it shut. He had obviously intended to regain the ticket later. But he had been stopped from doing that.

Then his murderers, finding he was not carrying the ticket, had broken into the Taffeta Room to hunt for it, reasoning that the lean man had perhaps hidden it there.

With the ridiculous story of Jane in the paper, the killers had reconstructed their theory a bit. The ticket might have been slipped into her purse. The newspaper article had made it easy for them to locate her. They had broken into her apartment and searched thoroughly. Howard had walked in on them, and had been sapped. Jane remembered now that Howard’s pockets were turned inside out as he lay unconscious.

How they had located her at the hotel, she could not guess. They may have followed Dave back, after picking up his trail at the hospital. Anyway, however it had been done, here she sat, huddled on concrete stairs with no escape. She pushed the note she had written on the parking ticket under the fire door, until it was entirely out of sight.

All of a sudden she passed from the bottom level of despair to the beginnings of indignation. After all, this was a civilized country. And here she was practically in the middle of the city, in terrible danger, and unable to find any way out.

Then, sitting there trapped and waiting, she did a thing which is like the donning of armor, or the sharpening of a lance. She took out her lipstick and unscrewed the cap, and held her mirror and made for herself a new red mouth, smooth and brave and almost bold. Though her hands were shaking, she applied the lipstick neatly. And as she recapped it, the top slipped from her fingers.

She made a frantic grab for it, but couldn’t reach it. It hit and bounced with a small musical note, a little shiny golden cylinder, and hit again and rolled with painful slowness out along one last step and then tumbled to the landing. With the uncanny perverseness of all inanimate things it rolled diagonally along the landing, choosing the shortest distance to the next short flight of stairs, and disappeared from Jane’s view, bounding, clinking, falling.

When all was still she sat with her fists pressed tightly to her cheeks, waiting in breathless tension. There wasn’t long to wait. Just a few moments of silence. Then the slow trudge of feet on the steel treads of the concrete stairs. She could picture the thick hand sliding up the bannister railing.

The sound stopped. It began again, higher, coming close. In a final gesture of defiance, she opened her purse and found the pawn ticket and shoved it under the door beside her, pushing it all the way out of sight.

She looked back and saw him then, below her and diagonally across the airshaft. He was looking up toward her. He wore a dark hat. The light shining down from above made a shadow across his face.

Jane got quickly to her feet and backed into the corner beyond the door. She could see him no longer. She didn’t see him until he rounded the last turn and came up the final short flight. She saw the dark hat first and then the hard jaw, the thick dark-clad shoulders, then the hand sliding upward on the rail.

She took her shoe by the toe and hurled it with all her strength directly at his face. He moved his head to one side. It was a quick, practiced motion. He didn’t move it any further than necessary. The shoe hurtled by him and struck the wall and fell to the landing below. She had seen other men move like that, on the television screen, tiny figures who danced and tried to hit each other and seldom dodged more than was necessary.

He stopped at the landing level, five feet from her, facing her. He held his hand out. The golden cylinder lay on the white palm, glinting in the light.

“You drop this?” The voice was husky.

“Don’t come near me!”

“You come on down quiet.”

“Don’t come near me!”

As he reached for her she screamed. It rasped and hurt her throat. The airshaft enclosed the scream, dampening it, muting it, smothering it. It died quickly into echoes. A man draw breath to scream again the thick hand closed on hers in a deft, practiced way, shifted quickly and found position, then seemed to squeeze ever so gently. The gentleness sent a barbed shock of pain through her, a pain so clean and pure and distilled that it was as though someone had driven an icicle through the back of her hand. It turned the impending scream into a shocked whimper. It made her knees sag and the light waver.

“You come along nice,” he said.