I had to get in off the street. I couldn’t make another doorway. I couldn’t get there. This was only 406, still three houses away, but this was as far as I could go. I fell twice, once outside the threshold and once inside. The feet were coming nearer. I picked myself up and zig-zagged back to where some stairs began.
I pulled the steps down toward me with my hands, got up them that way, scrambling on all fours like somebody going up a treadmill. I got to the first landing, reared upright, fell again, clawed up another flight of steps.
They got there. They made a blunder outside the door that gained me another flight, a third. They went on past, one doorway too many. I could hear them arguing. “No, it’s this one back here, I tell you! I seen him!”
They’d doubled back now, and come in after me, down below. I could tell by the hollow tone their bated voices took as soon as they were in out of the open. “This is it. Sec the blood-spots across the doorway?” Two of them must have preceded the others. There was a short, surreptitious whistle, by way of signal. “In here.”
And then an order from Donnelly, in a husky undertone: “You two stay out there, me and Chris’ll go in after him. Bring the car down this way and keep it running. Keep your eyes on all these doors along here, he may try to cross over the roofs and come out one of the others—”
I could hear every word, through the silence, up there where I was. And they could hear me, wrenching at the last barrier of all, the roof-door that ended the stairs, warped and half-unmanageable, but held only a rusted hook and eye on the inside. “Listen, he’s up above there, hear him?”
I was out now, in the dark, stars over me, gravel squashing away from under my feet. I kept going blindly, in the same direction as down below in the street. A low brick division-rampart, only ankle-high, came up. That meant 408 was beginning. I had to keep count, or I’d go too far. I couldn’t raise my feet that high any more, to step over it. I had to kneel on it and let myself fall over to the other side. I got up again, it got wet all over again where the bullet had gone in, but I managed to pull myself up again.
I stumbled on. Those stars were acting funny, they kept blurring and swirling, like pinwheels. Another brick partition came up. I crawled over that full-length, like an eel. This was 410 now. This was safety, down under my feet somewhere. Only his door, his was the only one was any good against that tin badge.
I found the roof-door, in the little hutch it fitted into. And then — something was the matter. It would come out just so far, about a hand’s breadth, and then it wouldn’t come out any further. That same hook and eye arrangement on the inside, like the other. I pulled and strained at it, but I didn’t have enough strength left —
And behind me, two rooftops away, I heard the gravel scuff as they came out after me. There was a wink of light from one of them as though he’d lit a match, but it wasn’t that. There was another of those crunches.
I’ll never know just what it was. I don’t think it could have been the bullet, such a thing happens only in fairy tales. But I hadn’t been able to open it until now, the hook was in the way, holding it back. And all of a sudden, after that flash, the hook wasn’t there any more, the door swung out free for me.
I got down the first flight, inside, on my own feet, although sometimes they were too far behind and sometimes they were too far out in front of me. But the next one I couldn’t make standing up any more, I fell all the way down. Not head-first, but in a sort of diagonal slide on my back. And then I just lay flat.
This was the third floor. It was one of these doors. But I was still as far away as I had been outside, or back in the car. All that travail for nothing. A thought passed through my mind: why do you want to live this bad? They have the money now, you have nothing. Just a bench in the park, just a paper out of a bin.
Give me that, I breathed, but let me live.
There was a door just inches beyond my numb, outstretched arm lying along the floor. I couldn’t move those few inches. I couldn’t reach it.
I heard another one open, somewhere behind me, as though the sound of my sliding fall just now had attracted someone’s attention. Feet moved toward me and stood there before my glazing eyes.
Someone’s arms dug under me, and I was hoisted up, propped against the wall. My blurred vision cleared for a moment, and Limpy’s face came through. It blotted, then came into right focus.
“They’re coming down after me,” I breathed hoarsely. “From up there. And there are others waiting down below outside the door. I haven’t any place to go but here—”
He just stood looking at me.
I reached out and caught him weakly by the shoulder. “Limpy, it’s me, don’t you know me, can’t you see my face? What’re you standing waiting for like that? Take me inside with you, close the door. Don’t you want to save me?”
They were opening the roof-door. He still didn’t move. But he spoke at last.
“Would you?” he said. “Would you if you were me? You see, I happen to be — the real Lee Nugent.”
My first day out of the hospital, I came along a pathway in the park. It could have been any pathway, they were all alike to me and I had nowhere to go, but it happened to be that particular one. I slumped down on a bench.
I sat there thinking over what had happened that night. How he’d hauled my half-conscious form inside with him at the last minute, after they were already clattering down the stairs; barred the door and shoved things up against it to hold them off for awhile. “Sure, I’m Lee Nugent,” I’d heard him say softly, “but you’re still my friend.”
I suppose they would have gotten us there, in the end, though — the two of us together, the real and the fake, instead of just me alone. There was no telephone, no weapon, not even an outside window through which to call for help.
But those truck-drivers who had been in the collision earlier with the death-car hadn’t beer, as gullible as they had appeared to be. They went straight to the police from there, reported a car from which a man had been seen to break away, followed by suspicious flashes that might have been silenced shots, and gave its license number. The cops closed in turn around them, and jumped them just as the door was splintering under their vicious assault, caught them pretty, the whole lot of them. The two who had stayed behind were picked up later. Donnelly and one other guy had been shot dead in the fracas.
And that was about all. Except, and this came weeks later, I was free to leave the hospital whenever I was in condition to go. Lee Nugent, the real Lee Nugent, didn’t want me held, was willing to drop all charges against me. He felt I’d been punished enough already for my week of stolen high life, and if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been able to come into unhampered enjoyment of the money himself.
So here I was back where I’d started, slumped on a bench in the park, staring meditatively down at the ground before me. I heard a car brake in the driveway out front, and footsteps approached.
I stared at the expensive custom-made shoes and then on up to his face. He was smiling. “They told me you’d checked out when I tried to find you at the hospital just now. I’ve been looking for you. Don’t take offense now, but there’s something that I want to do, I won’t be happy until it’s off my mind. I’m a firm believer in completing the circle of events, ending things where they began.” And he took out his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill, one of those same tens I used to give him all the time. “Remember?” he grinned.