“Did he leave anything for me?” Marty asked eagerly — too eagerly.
“Oh — I think I know what you mean,” was the reply. “He did say something about a hitch developing at the last moment. I’m dreadfully sorry.”
Just like that — she was sorry and he was a dead man. There was a click and the line went dead, too. Hell, everything was going dead.
But with hope gone, Marty went into action. There was no sense in staying cooped up, like a beast in a cave. Sooner or later, when they got tired of waiting for him to come out, they’d come in and get him. They’d buy the hotel if they had to — and they had the resources to do it.
But they wouldn’t be expecting him to leave right away. They’d be figuring on having a little more fun with him first. He knew how their minds worked — knew much too well. A rear entrance? No, they’d be having them watched in any case. It was going to have to be smack through the big revolving door.
And then what? The first half minute was going to be the crucial period. If Marty could survive that long, if he was lucky enough to get a good cab driver who could shake the pursuit in traffic, he could make a little private airfield on the outskirts — not the big airport, they’d have that cased, too. If his luck didn’t run out, he could make Canada. And Big Nick couldn’t operate so well north of the border. And you could get a passport forged in Canada as easily as here.
A slim chance? Yes, but better than waiting for the slaughter. Within himself, for the first time in longer than he could remember, Marty felt the rise of excitement — not fear, but the old overwhelming eagerness to meet a challenge, to whip it, to walk away the winner. In this case, of course, the only prize in sight was his survival. But that and the money in the hotel safe were all he had wanted all along.
Marty took a deep breath before he opened the door. Automatically, his fingers rose to straighten his tie. He wasn’t taking the luggage — it was much too risky. And he could pick up a new wardrobe once he was safe again. As his hand came down, quite involuntarily, he crossed himself. Then he opened the door and walked out.
The hall was empty. The door of the big punk’s room across the way was ajar and the maid’s key was in it. Marty thought of giving Ellen a tip, then decided against it. After all, what had she done for him. For all he knew, she might have been the one who put the finger on him.
In the elevator, he even swapped remarks with the pilot about the ball team and its chances for the pennant. But he was thinking, enviously, of the big punk with all the hot records and the soft-voiced girlfriend. Considering what lay ahead of himself, and the soft path ahead of the big punk, he wondered why things weren’t arranged more fairly. Stop being a cry-baby, he thought.
The day desk-clerk greeted him pleasantly and took Marty’s receipt for the alligator-skin briefcase.
As he reached the revolving door, he stopped his mental wandering, took another deep breath. This was going to be it, this next thirty seconds, give or take a few. He was either alive or dead. And, as he pushed boldly through, he felt an inward, singing assurance that he was going to win — and live.
The doorman in his light blue and gold uniform gestured toward a cab. There was nothing wrong with the early morning traffic picture, not a person or a car out of place. The cab pulled up and the doorman opened the door. Marty stepped inside and said, “McMasters Airfield.”
“Sorry,” said another voice almost in his ear. “We’ve got an errand in town first.”
As the cab door shut, Marty looked slowly around. The big punk from across the hall, the one with the funny name — Binny — was sitting there, almost filling the back of the cab, grinning at him like an overgrown, friendly pup.
He held the big automatic as if he’d been born with one in his hand.
For a flickering instant, Marty wondered who had betrayed him — Ryan, Louis, Ellen, one of the waiters, the desk clerk? Or perhaps more than one of them. But, looking into unsmiling steel-grey eyes in that boyish, smiling face, he knew he was never going to find out. There wasn’t going to be time.
Hot
by Evan Hunter
Everybody kept telling him to kill the skipper. After a while, it began to look like a good idea.
I wore moccasins, which were against Navy regulations, and the heat of the deck plates scorched up through the thin soles of the shoes, blistering my feet. I sat aft on the fantail, looking out over the heat of Guantanamo Bay, watching the guys from one of the other ships diving over the side and into the water. The water looked cool and clear, and the guys from the other can seemed to be enjoying it. They didn’t seem to be afraid of any barracuda. They seemed to be ordinary guys taking an ordinary swim in the drink.
The Cuban sun beat down on my head, scorched through the white cap there, left a soggy ring of sweat where the hat band met my forehead. The old man made sure we wore hats, and he posted a notice on the quarterdeck saying no man would be allowed to roam the ship without a shirt on. He was worried about us getting sunburned. He was worried about all that sun up there beating down and turning us lobster red.
But he wouldn’t let us swim.
He said there were barracuda in the water. He knew. He was a big-shot Commander who’d politicked his way through Annapolis, and he knew. Sure. He couldn’t tell a barracuda from a goldfish, but he’d pursed his fat lips and scratched his bald head and said, “No swimming. Barracuda.” And that was that.
Except every other ship in the squadron was allowing its crew to swim. Every other ship admitted there were no barracuda in the waters, or maybe there were, but who the hell cared? They were all out there swimming, jumping over the sides and sticking close to the nets the ships had thrown over, and nobody’d got bitten yet.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and I sucked in a deep breath, trying to get some air, trying to sponge something fresh out of the hot stillness all around me. I sucked in garbage fumes and that was all. The garbage cans were stacked on the fantail like rotting corpses. We weren’t supposed to dump garbage in port, and the garbage scow was late, but did the old man do anything about that? No, he just issued stupid goddamn orders about no swimming, orders he...
“Resting, Peters?”
I jumped to my feet because I recognized the voice. I snapped to and looked into the skipper’s face and said, “Yes, sir, for just a moment, sir.”
“Haven’t you got a work station?” he asked. I looked at his fat lips, pursed now, cracking and dried from the heat. I looked at his pale blue eyes and the deep brown color of his skin, burned from the sun and the wind on the open bridge. My captain, my skipper. The Commander. The louse.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I have a work station.”
“Where, Peters?”
“The radar shack, sir.”
“Then what are you doing on the fantail?”
“It was hot up there, sir. I came down for a drink at the scuttlebutt, and I thought I’d catch some air while I was at it.”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded his head, the braided peak of his cap catching the hot rays of the sun. The silver maple leaf on the collar of his shirt winked up like a hot eye. He looked down at the deck, and then he looked at my feet, and then he said, “Are those regulation shoes, Peters?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Why not?”
“My feet were sweating in...”
“Are you aware of my order about wearing loafers and moccasins aboard ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why are you wearing moccasins?”
“I told you, sir. My feet...”
“Why are you wearing white socks, Peters?”