“You shouldn’t have, Waldo,” he said reproachfully. “You shouldn’t have hit Sonny. You know what the boy meant to me.”
“Sonny? Hit?” Waldo attempted to make the words come out garnished with surprise, but his voice broke and he knew the attempt was sour. “Not me, Tobiah. You know I wouldn’t—”
“There isn’t another hit man in town who has the guts, friend. And it had your trademark. The quick kill. Open a door. Boom.”
“I... I hadn’t heard...”
“Don’t lie to me, Waldo.”
“So help me, I never... Hey, you wanna ask a beat cop? Bert Parker, the beat cop, or there’s my daughter, Myra. Myra will be here soon. They know, Tobiah... they know I was never outside my shop all day—”
“How do they know, Waldo? This?”
He smiled down on the record coldly. And Waldo knew fresh panic. His heart was beating so hard he thought it might jump out of his chest. Or maybe he was going to have a coronary. Things like that happened. You could read about it any day in a newspaper. People got excited, the heart couldn’t take the pace and...
“The record is clever, Waldo. Very clever. I’ve been playing this one since eight-thirty this morning. That’s almost two hours now. And there’s more to come. Make it three hours total. Very good. Plenty of time for a man to go to almost any point in the city and return.”
“Look, Tobiah, so help me—”
“You know what I want, Waldo?”
Does a traitor standing blindfolded before a firing squad know what’s coming next?
“Revenge,” Tobiah said flatly. “A favor. A hit.”
“A... hit?”
Harrison James? Waldo thought quickly. Eye for an eye?
“I set it up. You’re the executioner. No questions. No cash. No quibbling. No—”
“Sure, Tobiah! Anything!”
“Now you’re getting off the dime, friend. I like that much better.”
Waldo began to rally. “For you, Tobiah, a favor. You name it. Harrison James. Anyone. But it doesn’t mean I hit your boy. I want you to understand that. I want you to—”
“I understand just one thing, Waldo. You be available.”
By the fifth day after Tobiah Andresco’s visit to his shop, Waldo was his old self again. Composed and alert. Safe and secure. No longer afraid. And he liked himself much better that way. There was peace of mind and a feeling of being on top of things once again.
He whistled a soft, tuneless sound as he moved around the bookshop.
The phone rang at five o’clock in the afternoon.
Tobiah said, “Tonight, Waldo. Eight-thirty.” He gave an address.
“Check,” Waldo said perfunctorily.
But the hour couldn’t come fast enough, and he was restless with an inner excitement biting at him. At seven-thirty, Myra kissed his cheek and smiled down on him. “Johnny’s waiting.”
“Johnny is always waiting, isn’t he?” Waldo said approvingly.
“Every night,” Myra grinned.
Waldo watched her leave the flat over the bookshop. He gave her twenty minutes to meet Johnny Simcox and get out of the neighborhood. Then he took the Holy Bible from the couch in his office and headed for the address Tobiah had given him.
Soon his debt to the underworld kingpin would be paid.
The turn-of-the-century apartment building loomed large and lumpy in the black night There seemed to be a light in every window. Waldo took in those lights speculatively for a few moments before turning inside. Flipping the collar of his coat down, he climbed the worn steps to the second floor. The door he wanted was across the corridor at the top of the steps. Behind that door, he would find Harrison James. It wasn’t important how Tobiah had lured the loan shark to this death trap.
Waldo inventoried the lighted corridor. It was empty. He rapped vigorously on the door and lifted the Bible. He would make this one double fast and get out.
The door opened partially, but the person inside remained in shadow.
He triggered the silenced .38.
Pffft.
The girl screamed and fell back into the apartment.
And Waldo let out an ear-splitting, treble howl.
Tobiah Andresco had his vendetta.
For dead at Waldo’s feet, the hole in her angular face oozing blood, was his daughter, Myra. Across the room, Johnny Simcox stared at him with horror in his eyes.
The Hitchhiker
by Alexandra Hill
When a devastating blizzard is approaching, highways are safe for neither man nor beast. Unfortunately for all parties concerned, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them.
We had no feeling of apprehension, David and I, as we slowed to pick up the hitchhiker on that lonely North Dakota road. Even if we had had a presentiment of evil we would have stopped for him just the same, for the last weather report from our radio, before it ceased to function, was ominous. A severe blizzard moving east from the Rockies had hit the western part of the state and was headed, although deliberately at the moment, our way. Anybody caught on foot on that barren prairie would have no chance whatever of survival.
The boy climbed in and demanded, “Where you going?”
“Winnipeg,” David answered.
He sat back, offering no comment as to whether that was satisfactory to him.
David waited expectantly for a moment, then asked, “And you?”
There was a slight pause. “Winnipeg.” And silence was resumed.
I turned a little in the seat to look at him. He was crushed back into the corner behind David, blue and cold, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his tight-fitting leather jacket in order to bug in what warmth he had left in him. Random snowflakes clung to his too sleek, too artfully cut hair. He was slight in build, his small-boned face marked by a long, stubborn jaw line and small, restless, light blue eyes. It was an unwholesome face, and set in a look of exhaustion past bearing.
“Was that your car we passed in the ditch ten miles back?” I asked him.
He shot me a surprisingly vicious look that told me it was none of my business, and then gave a grunt which I took to be affirmative.
David asked incredulously, “Are you going to leave it there while you go to Winnipeg?”
“Sure!” the boy exclaimed angrily. “It’s got a broken axle.”
We were silent then. I was fairly sure that the car did not have a broken axle. On spotting it in the ditch David had stopped to see whether someone needed help. And when he found no one there, had looked over the car to ascertain whether there had been an accident. The key was hanging from the ignition, and he had turned it and stepped on the starter. The motor did not respond. And the gas gauge registered empty.
I was about to ask the boy whether he knew that he had forgotten to take his key, in fact had got as far as “Did—” when David spoke quickly, interrupting me. “There’s a blanket on the ledge behind you. You might put it over your knees.”
I was puzzled that David had stopped me from saying what it must have been obvious I was about to say. I looked at him in surprise, bur nothing seemed to be amiss. Except — yes, there was a slight movement in his jaw muscle that told me that he was biting hard on his back teeth — a sure sign of annoyance, or of anger.
We rode along silently, and made no effort to pursue what would doubtless prove to be an unprofitable conversation with our guest. And presently, on hearing a subdued snort, I looked back and saw that he had fallen into a sleep of fatigue, his mouth hanging open, his chin rolling on his chest.
There was nothing to see but the desolate, endless plains, a very occasional bleak farmhouse, and the brooding sky. The snow did not appear to be coming any faster, and it looked as though we would get through to Winnipeg before the storm caught us.