The knocking came within ten minutes. He stopped dead in the middle of the oval he had been coursing endlessly around the room, one heel raised clear of the floor and held that way. It came again, and the bell chirped, and a voice said, “Sturge! Are you in here?” He recognized it as Hyland’s. Hyland was one of his team-mates.
He went over and closed the bedroom door first. Then he came back to the front door, put out his hand to it, breathed deeply, and threw it wide open.
Hyland was out there and another man named Ranch, and two uniformed cops. The last two had their guns out. But they’d already started away by the time he got the door open, as though summoning him had been only incidental.
Sturgess said, “What’s up?”
Hyland said, “Forman broke through again! At the last minute, just as we were ready to close in! We’ve picked up a cab driver that brought him as far as the corner below here — he’s holed up around here some place! I’m going to case the back.”
“You won’t find him there,” Sturgess said.
He didn’t offer to join them. All he said was, “I’m off duty.”
Hyland gave him a look, but he turned and went loping off. His voice came drifting back with a cutting edge to it. “Sleep tight — sorry we bothered you.”
Sturgess closed the door and stood by it a minute, head down. Down as low as if he were looking at his shoes, but he wasn’t.
Behind him Forman’s voice said slurringly, through the narrow opening of the bedroom door, “So you went to bat for me.”
Sturgess answered viciously through clenched teeth: “I don’t have to turn you in behind your back while you’re asleep! That isn’t my way! I’m not afraid of you!”
“No,” was the grudging admission, “it’s your own conscience you’re afraid of. And her eyes.”
“You let me do the worrying about that. And stay in there.” Sturgess took a threatening step forward. “Stay out of my sight, or I’ll settle the problem with my own two hands!”
The door eased mockingly closed again.
Sturgess was standing in his wife’s kitchen, awkwardly jockeying something hot with the help of an enveloping dishcloth, when Forman came out the second time. It was still dark, the gunmetal pall preceding dawn.
Forman lounged there in the alcove a minute, watching him. “What’s this, the prisoner’s last breakfast? Why so early?”
Sturgess just motioned to a chair drawn up at the formica-topped table. The guest sat down. Sturgess brought over an aluminum percolator, snatched his hand away, blew on his thumb. He sat down opposite the killer.
Forman studied him, detached. “You look like you been pulled through a knothole. I bet you pounded the carpet in there the whole time I was asleep.”
To that Sturgess said, “It took me three tries before I got this right.” The sink, lined with black coffee grounds, looked like some kind of flower bed. He pointed to a loaf of white bread. “You can cut some of that, if you want any.”
They sat there, after that, facing each other across the table with a peculiar sort of normality, an everydayness: like two men at a kitchen table while their women were away. Forman, wolfing great chunks of spongy white bread, looked around appraisingly. “How much you pay for this place?”
There may have been a method in his assumption of unshaken confidence, his taking of immunity for granted; or there may not. He may have been as artless as he sounded, or he may have been as wary as a man cornered in a cage with a lion, who knows that to show fear is fatal. Sturgess was past knowing or caring. “Eighty-five,” he said.
Forman mused, while he picked his teeth, “I never stayed in one place long enough to pay by the month.”
“It might have been better if you had.”
They sat a while longer in silence. Then little by little the tension grew — tension that was coming from Sturgess. His hands went down to the edge of his chair seat, gripping it on each side, like a man reluctantly about to stand up. Forman started smoking a little faster, shortening the intervals between puffs. Finally he said, “What’re you getting all white like that for? You’re getting white as a ghost. You ought to see yourself!”
Sturgess said, “We’re going over there. If you feel like starting anything, now’s the time.”
“Still looking for a way out, huh? No you don’t! You don’t get off that easy!”
Sturgess got up and left the kitchen without a word. When he came back he had his coat on and was holding an open manacle in his hand. He said thickly, “Come on — let’s get started. Shove out your hand.”
Forman slowly extended a hand flat across the table top; he started drawing back his sleeve until he had bared his forearm nearly to the elbow. On its upper reaches were transverse white scars, from breaking the glass in the submerged car window that night. He just sat and looked up at Sturgess, holding it exposed that way.
Sturgess’ lips got white, he blinked, and the manacle clicked shut on the other’s wrist. Forman got up and followed Sturgess out of the kitchen. “You can’t go through with it,” he said quietly. “It’s written all over you you can’t.”
The window was open a little from the bottom, just below the shade. Sturgess threw out the handcuff key with a flick of his free hand.
Forman said, “You don’t trust yourself, do you? It’s going to be a devil of a job now to—”
The picture was lying face-down on the radio as they went past. “Is that the way you had to do it?” Fort man said. Sturgess turned down the wall switch and the picture vanished. There wasn’t enough light outside to penetrate the room. “You’ll have to see her again,” Forman pointed out. “You’ll have to see her every day of your life. You can’t keep her face turned away from you. What’ll you do then?”
Sturgess opened the front door, swept his arm around in an arc, and towed Forman through after him. “I’m not going to beg or whine,” Forman said. “I’m going to make it tough for you. It’d be a lot easier for you if I went yellow, wouldn’t it?”
The killer was right again. His intuition was uncanny. If he had cringed and slobbered and resisted, accepted the role of a squirming, apprehended culprit, somehow he would have weakened the validity of his claim; Sturgess could have dragged him in without compunction. This way —
Sturgess closed the door and they went out side by side. It was steel blue overhead now, but still a little murky down at street level.
“You’ll get a citation for this,” Forman taunted. “You’ll get promoted. You’ll be the envy of every man in the department. And without having to lift a finger either. A man comes to you, that gave you the one thing you’ve got that you give a damn about, the one thing that holds you together, that makes you tick, he comes trusting you — You’re the lowest thing on the face of God’s earth, Sturgess. Even an alley cur has gratitude.”
“Shut up!” Sturgess roared.
They went on slowly, almost waveringly, but Sturgess was breathless with effort, as though he’d been running. The green lamps of a precinct house blinked at them as they rounded a corner, and Forman recoiled involuntarily. Sturgess could feel the hitch through the manacle.
Forman said, “They’re going to kill me if you take me in there. You know that, don’t you? You know that once we go up these steps no power of yours, nothing you can do, will get me out alive again, don’t you? I gave you your kid’s life, Sturgess. For the last time — I want my own from you!”
Sturgess’ face was glossy with sweat, and gray in the early dawn. He brought his forearm up level to his chest and nudged Forman into motion.
“Copper!” the man beside him breathed with contempt as they trudged up the steps and inside together.
Sturgess just stood there rigid, watching the clock, that last night. They tried to tell him, “Sit down, Sturge, don’t take it like that,” but he didn’t seem to hear them.