Shayne circled, listening for Brad’s breathing, waving his left hand slowly as though feeling for cobwebs. He was wound up tight. Listening hard in the tense silence, he heard something dripping near the door.
The dripping stopped. For another long moment the silence was complete. It was broken by the rattle of a sauce pan in the kitchen. Shayne moved fast. Halfway across the living room he slipped on the backgammon board and crashed to the floor. He rolled in the same motion and went into the kitchen in a crouch. He found the switch and flashed on the light for just long enough to make sure the kitchen was empty.
He listened at the open window. There was a faint clanging noise several flights below. Thinking about it later, he realized that Brad had made this noise by dropping something through the iron slats of the fire escape, probably a coin. Actually he was crouching on the sixth floor landing, in the pool of deep shadow against the building, waiting for Shayne to come through the window so he could knife him from behind and then go back inside to finish off Kitty.
Shayne swung up on the sill and put one leg out the window.
He straddled the sash for a moment before deciding to let the old man go. He had come this far in a kind of reflex, as a part of a linked series of actions that had started when they had been feeling toward each other in the dark, each with an edged weapon. But Brad had used up his menace for tonight.
Shayne was wrong. As he started to pull his leg back in, Brad lunged upward, trying to hamstring him.
He missed the tendons as Shayne’s leg jerked. The knife entered Shayne’s calf.
Shayne was blinded by a sudden surge of rage. He uncoiled through the window and followed the old man as he plunged recklessly down the iron steps. Halfway down the first flight Shayne’s leg gave way and he had to grab the railing.
Brad was two floors below, scuttling like a cockroach. Gripping the railing tightly, Shayne watched him go.
A light on the fourth floor came on. Reaching the second floor, Brad hurled himself out on the vertical ladder. It tore loose with a screech and jammed halfway down. He danced on the bottom rung in an effort to free it. Shayne found that he was still holding the broken bottle. Leaning far out, he threw it at Brad. It crashed into the court and Brad jumped from the ladder.
He landed badly, trying to start running too soon, and went down on his left fist, in which he still gripped the knife. When he lurched to his feet he was staggering. His crippled right hand dangled at his side. Wiping his eyes with the back of his left hand, he reeled along the delivery alley to 19th Avenue, where he stood for a moment, outlined in the light of a street lamp at the corner of 19th and 28th Street. Then he disappeared.
Other lights came on in Kitty’s building. Shayne turned to go back up the half-flight to the open window, and then Brad backed into the light at the end of the alley.
A voice shouted. He turned and started across the street at a shambling half-run, clutching his stomach. The shout was repeated. It was followed by a single shot.
Brad went down in a heap. A man walked into the light, his gun ready. He stopped warily a few steps from the crumpled figure. A moment later he was joined by a second man, also holding a gun. When the old man didn’t move they approached him together and looked down at him for a moment before putting away their guns.
Shayne hesitated, thinking.
Then he hobbled back to the sixth floor and swung in through the window. He forgot the saucepans. He kicked them out of the way angrily, snapped on the light and limped into the living room.
“Kitty?”
There was no answer.
“It’s O.K.,” he said. “He lost.”
When there was still no answer he went into the bedroom and turned on the light there. The room was a shambles. He looked in the bathroom, in the closet. Then he got down on hands and knees and looked under the bed, afraid she had been hit by one of Brad’s random shots. After that he checked the coat closet in the living room and returned to the kitchen.
At that point he accepted the fact that she was gone.
chapter 7
Shayne dropped onto the sofa, where he uncorked the gin bottle and took a long drink, after which he rolled up his pant leg to look at the damage.
It wasn’t as bad as he had feared. He went to the bathroom, where he found nothing more elaborate than band-aids in the medicine cabinet. He tore up a sheet, washed the cut as well as he could without being able to see it, and was binding it up when he heard a tapping at the outer door.
He unlocked it without bothering to use the peephole. It was Kitty, wearing Shayne’s jacket, which came down nearly to her knees. She looked lost inside it.
“I locked myself out,” she said faintly. “I went up to the roof.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re hurt!” she exclaimed, seeing the trailing bandage.
“It’s not too bad. It’s just a hell of a place to get to.”
“I’ll do it.”
They returned to the bathroom. Kitty pushed back the long sleeves, took Shayne’s clumsy bandage apart and put on a better one, which stopped the bleeding. Using a wet towel, she sponged off his back and shoulder. Her touch was deft and sure.
“You can use a few stitches, Mike. In your leg, mainly. These cuts up here can take care of themselves.”
Using cotton at the end of a short stick, she sponged the cuts carefully with antiseptic. He was straddling a chair while she worked on him from behind.
“If I’d known what I was getting you into!” she said. “First I all but drown you. Then I win your money and more or less force you to make love to me. And right in the middle of that I get you involved in a knife fight with a crazy old man.” She gave a light nervous laugh. “I was so scared! I couldn’t make out what happened at the end. Was that a policeman who shot him?”
“Yeah. Sometimes they’re around when you need them. Not often, but sometimes.”
“He was staggering.”
“He had to jump from the fire escape,” Shayne explained. “I think he fell on his knife. All the emergency switches were turned on by then, and when the cops told him to hold still and explain the knife, all he could do was run. Now I want you to hold still, Kitty. I need an explanation of a couple of things.”
Her hand stopped on his back. “Yes. About me and Cal. You want to know if what Brad said was true. Yes, Mike. More or less.” She sighed. “It lasted for-oh, about half a year. I got in the habit of denying it, and that’s one subject it’s too easy to lie about. I wasn’t ashamed of it at the time. I am now, a little. I don’t need to be told it was the wrong thing to do. I’ve tried to understand why it happened, but you’d have to know Cal. He made me feel so-important, Mike. I thought it was love. There were other things mixed up in it.”
Her voice was dry and flat. “And that’s why I don’t want to let those zombies sell the Key! They didn’t give a damn for Cal when he was alive. Now all they care about is how much money they can squeeze out of the one thing that ever really mattered to him. Mike? Say something. You can see why I didn’t tell you.”
“People don’t usually tell me the truth the first time they talk to me,” Shayne said dryly. “Did you go to see Ev Tuttle the night he burned to death?”
She answered quietly. “Yes. He lost his only income when Cal died. I gave him money sometimes when I had it. He phoned me from a bar that night and I met him there, a seedy little bar on the other side of the river. I gave him a few dollars and he used it to get drunk So indirectly perhaps I’m responsible for what happened. If he hadn’t been drunk, he wouldn’t have fallen asleep with a cigarette in his mouth.”