“Come on, I’ve got everything!” I interrupted frantically. “What’re we waiting for?” I picked up both valises, heavy as they were, just to break Louie’s chain of thought.
“Make sure you don’t leave nothing behind,” Buck said. He widened the closet door to take a last look in. His voice sounded hollow, coming from inside it. “Hey, you dope, what’s the matter with this coat?”
Clump went the two valises to the floor. I just stood there between them. Dead already, for all practical purposes, just waiting to fall down. I didn’t even turn to look, just waited for it to come.
Buck came out holding it up by one hand, and the room was suddenly full of loud checks. Louie gave a jolt out of his chair, like a tack had run up through it.
“That’s the coat!” he yelled. “I’d know it anywhere! That’s the coat I seen come out of the Kitteredge babe’s house five minutes after I left there Tuesday morning! So you wanna know who ratted on you! So you wanna know who! Ask her what she was doing down there. Ask her how the gun turned up clean. Ask her how the stiff come to give a high-sign when you left her dead.”
“Did I answer at this end when you called up right afterwards — did I or didn’t I? Tell him that!” I yelled.
“Sure — so out of breath you couldn’t hardly talk at all,” Louie said.
“Don’t let him put a knife in me, Buck. What’s he trying to tell you?” But I could tell by Buck’s eyes I’d lost the bout already. They would have cut window glass, they were so hard.
“He wouldn’t make up a thing like that,” he said. “Know why? He hasn’t got imagination enough. And there’s not another coat like yours in town; they told you that fifty times over when you bought it.”
Buck unbuttoned his topcoat, spaded his hand under his jacket, heaved once, brought out his gun, leveled it, squinted at my stomach. Gee, it was awful watching him do it, he seemed to do it so slow. He crooked his left index finger at me, kept wiggling it back and forth, and smiling. You had to see that smile to know how awful a smile can be.
“C’m over here and get it,” he said. “You’re not worth moving a step out of the way for. Come on, this way. The nearer you are, the less you feel it. This is where you came in, baby.”
I picked up one foot and put it down on the outside of the valise and stayed that way, straddling it. I noticed a funny thing; I wasn’t so scared any more. I wasn’t as scared as I had been just before they’d found the coat. I kept thinking, “It won’t take long, I won’t feel it. I’ll be with Gordon now, anyway.”
“Not here,” Louie said nervously. “What’d we go to all that trouble about the first one for if you’re only gonna pull a kill, big as life, where they can’t miss it?”
It was hard for Buck to put on his brakes, his blood was so hot for a kill. But Louie was talking sense, and he knew it. He put his gun away slow, even slower than he’d brought it out.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. And she’s not worth taking a rap for. We’ll go up to the place in the sticks. I’ll get in touch with my mouth as soon as we get up there. He can handle the Kitteredge thing easy; he’s handled worse ones than that for me.
“Let’s see, now; she’ll start with us, but she won’t get up there with us though. You and me, Louie, will have to hike it the last lap of the way in. We’re going to have an accident with the car before we get there. You know that hairpin turn, where the road twists around that bluff high over the river? It always makes me nervous every time I pass that stretch of road, especially the way you drive, kind of close to the edge.”
He gave another of those smiles of his, and Louie grinned back at him in answer. “That ain’t far from the place,” he said. “I don’t mind hoofing it from there in.” He thumped himself over the belt buckle. “Matter of fact, I don’t get enough exercise.”
“I like accidents,” Buck said. He kept on smiling. “You take the bags, Louie, I’ll take the body.”
He linked his arm through mine, like a guy often walks with a woman. Only the hand on the end of it stayed in his coat pocket, and the coat pocket stuck into my side, hard and heavy.
“Now if you’re in a hurry,” he said, “if you want it fast, right away instead of later, just sing out between here and the car. It don’t make any difference to me if you take the ride with us dead or alive. You’re just short-changing yourself out of about forty minutes of life, that’s all.”
The shade, I kept thinking, the window shade. My signal to Temple. It was as out of reach as if it had been on the window of a house across the street. “If I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go,” I said dreamily. “But won’t you let me take just one last look at the town from the window? You see, I won’t be seeing it again. You can keep the gun at my back; you can make sure I don’t try nothing.”
“Aw, let her take one last look,” Louie said. “It’ll hurt that much more, don’t you get it? Here, I’ll hold her hands behind her back, so she can’t signal with them in any way, and you keep the gun on her.”
They shoved me up in front of the window, keeping back out of sight behind the curtains. “Okay, Mae, say good-by,” Buck laughed.
The cord was hanging in a loop in front of me but Louie had both my wrists in a vise behind me. I had a lot of clothes to wear. I could have had on almost anything that day — anything that wouldn’t have done any good. But he’d hustled me out so fast to get that laundry I hadn’t had time to doll up. I’d shoved into a skirt and a blouse. A blouse with a couple of big flat buttons on each side of it.
I don’t know how I did it. I bet I couldn’t do it over again now if I tried. The cord was hanging in a loop that rested against my chest. “Gee, it’s pretty,” I said, and turned a little to look up one way. “It’s tough to leave it,” I said, and turned again to look down the other way. I couldn’t get a full loop into it, but I got it snagged around the button, which was the size of a silver dollar. He did the rest.
“C’mon, that’s enough,” Buck said, and he jerked me back and started to swing me around on my way to the door. The button took the cord with it and pulled it tight over my shoulder. Whirr! and the shade came all the way down to the bottom, so fast and hard it tore partly off the roller, creased, and wouldn’t go up again.
It looked so much like an accident they didn’t even tumble. He just gave me a clip on the head, and freed the cord by wrenching the button off. Then we went on out of the place and down to the street, him and me first and Louie behind us with the two bags.
If I had expected the shade stunt to get me anything, I was out of luck. The street was dead, there wasn’t a soul in sight up or down the whole length of it. Buck’s car was standing a few yards down from the door, where there were a couple of big fat leafy trees. He had a habit of parking it under them, to keep the sun from heating up the inside of it too much.
We went down to it and he shoved me into the back seat, climbed in next to me and pinned me into the comer with his shoulder. Louie dumped the bags in the trunk, got in and took the wheel. “So he had a look-out posted, did he?” I thought bitterly. “Where — over in the next county?”
We started off with kind of a thud, that didn’t come from the engine. “What was that?” asked Buck.
Louie looked out and behind us. “One of the branches of that tree musta grazed t he roof. I see it kind of wobbling up and down.”
We rounded the corner and started out for the express highway that later on turned into the upstate road we wanted. Buck had his gun on me the whole time, through the pocket, of course. I just sat there in the corner resignedly. It was too late for anyone to horn in now. Temple’s look-out had muffed it. Must have gone off to phone in the alarm just as we came out of the building.