“So, why were they giving her money?”
“She told them she was going to hire a man with a gun. The man was going to take care of me.”
“Blackmail with a twist.” Wilson grinned. “And let me guess, after they’d paid her the money, something would go wrong.”
Bruno nodded. “How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Nancy would telephone them a few days later. She’d tell them I had found out all about it. She’d tell them I had killed the man with the gun. She’d then say I had shot her and she was dying, and now I was coming after them and they ought to run.”
“And they left town by sundown.”
“Yeah.”
Wilson nodded. “Okay, so why then did you shoot dead the guy with the glass eye in Merkon’s bar?”
Bruno didn’t like that question.
A gunshot rang out. It echoed inside the theater like thunder. Bruno fell to his knees and clutched his stomach. He was bleeding. He’d been shot from behind and the bullet had gone right through him. A second later he flopped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
There was another gunshot. This one was aimed at Wilson. Wilson could feel it slice the air next to his head as he leaped from the stage.
Three more shots chased Wilson as he sprinted up the aisle of the theater towards the entrance. Several divisions of both the German and Italian armies had failed at putting a bullet into Wilson, and he had no desire to change his batting average now.
Back at the bus terminal, Wilson slid his key into locker 221. He needed its contents now more than ever. He opened the locker and pulled out a rolled-up newspaper.
Wilson went to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall. He unrolled the newspaper and pulled out an old war buddy — his Colt semiautomatic.
Wilson tucked the pistol into his inner jacket pocket.
Wilson’s apartment building was staked out. Two police officers dressed in long coats and reading newspapers stood on the steps by the front door of the building and pretended not to be police officers.
There’d be others inside for sure. In the hallway, on the roof, and probably a couple of them waiting right inside his living room — playing poker and eating his leftovers.
Wilson was starting to get annoyed. They were his leftovers and he was hungry.
“Are they police officers?” a voice asked him quietly.
Wilson nearly jumped out of his skin. He thought he had been alone standing in the darkness of the alley across the street from his building.
“Those guys on the steps?” It was the redhead from the bar. She had somehow managed to sneak up on Wilson without making a single sound.
“Yes, they’re cops.”
“I thought they might be,” Sophie said. “They’re only pretending to read those newspapers.”
“What are you doing here?” Wilson asked, seeing Sophie’s eyes in a sliver of moonlight.
“I was looking for you.”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“You’re in the telephone directory,” Sophie reported.
“Why are you looking for me?”
“I found the candy box.”
Sophie’s room was above an all-night drugstore. Red light flicked on and off outside her open window — vertical neon letters:
T
O
R
E
Sophie flicked on the ceiling light. She pointed Wilson in the direction of the dining table.
Sophie’s room was small, but tidy — a single bed, a couple of chairs. Her dining table had a surface area equivalent to that of a chessboard. On top of it lay a small candy box — tartan-patterned.
“It was inside the jukebox,” Sophie explained. “It fell out when those cops put a bunch of holes in it trying to shoot at you.”
“Music to my ears.” Wilson grinned. “Do you know why they were trying to shoot me?”
“Yeah, they said you shot a woman.”
“Do you believe them?”
“I don’t know, you seem okay to me.”
Wilson pulled the lid off the candy box. Inside the box was a passport. Wilson flicked the passport open.
The photograph inside the passport was of the dead man with the glass eye. The dead man’s name was apparently Paul Johnson. He was an American citizen, born in Akron, Ohio, in 1896.
“Mr. Merkon must have taken this off the dead man right after he was shot,” Sophie supposed. “And then he didn’t show it to the police.”
“Merkon wanted to play his own game,” Wilson said. “By the way, the woman I’m supposed to have shot was your predecessor, Nancy Stillwater.”
“I heard,” Sophie said.
Two cars pulled up outside with abrupt screeches of tires.
Wilson went over to the open window. Two police cruisers were parked in the street below — six large cops were climbing out. The cops were brutish-looking, hairy, fat Neanderthals of law enforcement. Two of them had to lift their hands to stop them dragging on the ground.
“The police are getting awfully serious,” Wilson remarked, pondering the sight below.
“They must have followed us,” Sophie said, flicking off the light. “They must have seen us across from your building.”
“Should I run or just throw them some bananas?”
Sophie decided for both of them. She led Wilson down the stairs from the second floor.
When they got to the first floor they didn’t stop, they kept on going and went down into the basement.
Sophie muttered something about a laundry and adjoining cellars. Wilson couldn’t make out the exact words, but by the time the cops had gotten to the stairs leading up to Sophie’s room, he and Sophie were coming up the stairs in the neighboring building — directly into Mr. Song’s laundry service.
Mr. Song was pleased to see young Sophie. Her clothes were ready anytime she wanted to collect them. Wilson stopped and made brief inquiries about having some pants turned up at the leg.
By the time the cops burst their way into Sophie’s room, she and Wilson were coming out into the pitch-black alley behind the neighboring building.
They marched briskly. A handful of stars above were about the only light in the alley.
“Did the guy asking questions at the bar last week have a big old-fashioned moustache?” Wilson asked.
“Yes, he did,” Sophie replied.
“His name is Filbert, he works at the newspaper. I ran into him earlier this evening.”
They got out of the alley and onto a cross street. They had planned to head back to the bar. But they hadn’t walked more than a block before the black sedan pulled up at the curb next to them and the familiar sight of a barrel of a .45 was pointed in their direction.
Bruno was apparently not dead.
“Do you ever do anything in life where you don’t point a gun at someone’s head?” Wilson snapped at Bruno.
Bruno was not dead, but he was rapidly running out of blood and growing paler by the minute. With his gun pointed in their direction, he drove them back to his theater. He parked out the back, and then gun-pointed them back inside.
“If all the world’s a stage, why am I back on this particular one?” Wilson moaned, clomping his way across the wooden boards to the center of the stage again.
“Shakespeare?” Sophie inquired, right behind him.
“Kind of.”
“Who’s Shakespeare?” Bruno asked, trying to point the gun at both of them.
“Nobody special,” Wilson commented.
“Did he shoot Nancy?”
Sophie shook her head. “Shakespeare didn’t shoot anybody. He’s been dead for hundreds of years.”
Bruno nodded knowingly. “Somebody got him, huh?”
The three of them stood in the center of the stage, with Bruno aiming his gun in their general direction, with his other hand holding a clump of blood-soaked cloth to his chest.