Then he was back. “That was the second elevator. I’ve blocked it. Only two more left. Why wait, Susan? Get it over with. Just walk down the stairs. One instant of pain, and it will all be over with. Just walk down the stairs.”
He clicked the receiver down and the speakers were silent. Another elevator must have arrived.
Susie buried her face in her hands and gave a strangled sob. She was trapped. There was only one means of escape from her fear. For a second, she was on the brink of yielding to him.
With an effort, she dropped her hands to her sides, opened her eyes and looked at the empty lobby around her. The man’s assured, persuasive voice, with its veneer of sympathy, had held her mesmerized, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an onrushing car. But it wouldn’t work. She would not give up. If she had time, she would use it. When Hellmuth came for her, he would not find her unarmed.
There must be something she could use as a weapon. She nearly sank into hopelessness again as she cast her mind over the contents of the office: books, files, pencils... Nothing that would help.
And then Susie had it. With a steady hand, she unlocked the security door and went through to the reception area. Her weapon was in the copying room, and she started to run down the hall toward it — then hesitated.
She turned back to the door. There was no use locking it, for Hellmuth had the key. But still she stood swinging the door to and fro on its hinges for a few precious seconds. The weapon was not enough. She needed something that would give her an opportunity to use it. Her idea, once again, was for a practical joke — the oldest, dumbest practical joke in the world. But it would give her a chance... if she had time to set it up.
In fact she was ready for Hellmuth in plenty of time. She heard his footsteps echoing up the concrete stairwell, and through the crack in the door she watched him cross the lobby toward her. He was moving slowly, breathing hard from his exertions.
He paused in the doorway, frowning at her where she sat behind the reception console. That smug, contemptuous frown.
“It would have been easier if you’d come down, Susan. For both of us.”
She was silent.
“It’s over now, in any case. Come out from behind that desk. You can’t—”
“Shut up!” Susie shouted at him. “I’ve heard enough talk from you.”
His jaw set and his right hand came up, holding the heavy paperweight. He threw the door open. The Black’s Law Dictionary slipped from its perch atop the door and slammed onto his shoulder.
He gasped in pain and staggered forward. “Of all the stupid — you—”
He did not finish. Susie leapt from behind the console and swung at him.
The blade from the paper cutter was not very sharp, but it was heavy, and it had all her strength behind it. There was a gritty thud as it cut through to the bone of Hellmuth’s forearm. He cried out and clutched at his wound. But he did not let the paperweight fall.
Susie fell back a step, gripping the cutter tightly in both hands. “Drop it,” she pleaded hoarsely. But a look at Hellmuth’s face told her that he would not.
He transferred the paperweight to his bloody left hand and came at her again. Susie hefted the blade to her shoulder and swung it two-handed, like an axe.
The blow caught him squarely on the temple. He toppled over. Black blood seeped from beneath his thinning hair into the elegant beige carpet.
Susie dropped the blade and backed away, choking on sobs of horror and relief. She spun and ran. Ran twenty-one stories, down to the street.
Stakeout
by Dan J. Marlowe
An unauthorized surveillance is a tricky business. It gets trickier when one corpse too many turns up!
I cut the ignition and switched off the car lights at the blinking yellow signal of the intersection. Beside me on the front seat, my detective partner, Tony Costanza, checked the set of his shoulder holster as our unmarked black police sedan rolled ahead silently into the next block.
The car curved in a sweeping arc into the shadowed mouth of an alley and drifted down a narrow, walled-in passageway. I eased the car to a stop with just a touch of the brake as the early-morning stillness settled in around us.
I raised an arm and sleeved the breathless summer night’s perspiration from my forehead, then sat for a second listening to the low-pitched street noises and other night sounds peculiar to this particular backwater of the city.
“Let’s go, Mickey,” Tony growled. “Move it. He’s not comin’ to us out here.”
“He’s not coming to us in there, either, if he hears us,” I said softly. “Don’t slam the car door when you get out.”
Tony’s snort was muffled. “Eleven nights in a row we stake out this miserable hole, an’ eleven nights you got to say ‘Don’t slam the car door’? At least get yourself a new line.”
I slid out on my side. The macadam underfoot was damp with night mist. Tony’s sardonic whisper floated out to me from the front seat. “I was tellin’ Louise before you picked me up tonight it was a damn good thing this had been her idea in the first place, or she’d never have trusted me out till all hours all these nights, even with you as chaperone.”
I grimaced at the mention of Louise’s name. I removed my watch with its tell-tale radium dial and put it into my pocket. Across the alley Tony scrambled from the sedan. We met at the front of the car, Tony’s solid two hundred pounds bulking larger-than-life in the night.
Tony had been my detective partner for two years. He was three years younger. We had both made plainclothes from the ranks, within a month of each other. With little in common between us, the partnership had worked. Originally we had tolerated each other. Lately it had been something less than that. And no wonder.
I turned left into the darkness and followed the alley brickwork with my palm until I came to a heavy wooden door set flush with the building line. “Bronson called me this mornin’ an’ asked for his keys back,” Tony muttered from behind me.
“Tell me inside,” I said tautly.
I wanted no distractions while we were getting inside. The big key in my left hand opened the alley door whose bottom sill was eighteen inches above the bed of the alley. I felt the familiar tensed apprehension in stomach and chest as I stepped up into the pitch-black opening. Automatically I freed my arm from the clinging pull of my shoulder holster, the leather made sticky by the night’s humidity.
I took two steps forward and stopped, listening, my hearing pitched up into the forefront of my consciousness. Behind me I could hear Tony’s breathing and the faint rasp of the closing door. I crept soft-footedly down the wooden-floored corridor, so solidly dark it was like pushing into a substance with weight.
I placed my feet carefully, a hand on the wall beside me checking off the corridor doors. At the third one I produced another key and with infinite care unlocked and eased open the door.
In a sliver of murky light from the front room of the jewelry shop beyond, I could see the usual jumble of materials on the watchmaker’s bench in the dingy little workroom immediately before me. I widened the aperture silently and stepped inside.
Tony moved in past me, and I closed the door gently. A man might get used to that dry-mouthed, adrenalin-accelerated, heart-pounding corridor-walk in a hundred years, I reflected. And then again, he might not.
I could see the heavy timber leaning against the wall, the timber that should have fitted snugly into the stout braces bolted to either side of the door through which we’d entered. It had taken a lot of talking to induce Joe Bronson to leave that timber down eleven nights in a row. Talking wouldn’t have been enough if I hadn’t had something on Joe Bronson.