There weren’t any openings at all within reach of the ground. Higher up, at about third-story level, there was a row of embrasures paned with corrugated glass. He ran down the rest of its length, turned the corner to the back, looking desperately for an outside ammonia-pipe, drain-pipe, anything that would offer a way up. Nothing broke the cream-smooth surface of the concrete, for a length of half a city-block. But there was something else there, a black shape standing out from it. The car in which they’d brought her here, left outside ready for their quick get-away once Benuto was turned loose and they’d gotten rid of their encumbering hostage. O’Dare recognized it. The same hefty Isotta Benuto had gone out to do murder in earlier that night! They must have dropped him off at his own place, then gone straight to O’Dare’s flat to get her, then come direct out here.
He got up on the convexed roof, balanced there erect, saw that even that way he couldn’t reach the height of those embrasures. He jumped down again, got in. They’d left the key in it, so ready were they to start at hair-trigger timing — maybe pick up Benuto at some prearranged place along the way to save time.
He turned it up, roared out away from the walls in a big semicircle, careless whether they heard or not. Over grass and sliding sand and stones, that rocked but didn’t impede it. You only had to handle it to understand why some cars are made in Turin too. Not all are made in Detroit. He wheeled in toward the plant again, straightened out, came at that door diagonally from away off there in the open, fifty yards away, in high. He slid down the seat onto his kidneys, braced his feet. There was a jar that went up his back, exploding in his brain like a blue flash, a boom like a cannon; glass went flying up like powdered sugar from the headlights or something, came down again on the read-end of the roof with a sound like rain — but the car ducked in away from it before it was even finished falling. There was electric light inside, rows of dim spaced bulbs that showed an inner wall rushing at him. He was still stunned, but managed to kick his foot down. The car bucked, went into the wall anyway, but with a less severe jolt than the first time. Behind him, the big doorway looked somewhat like those beaded string-curtains used in the tropics.
He wanted to stay there, sit there under the front wheel, and just ache. He had a headache and a sprained back and the pit of his stomach felt like a mule had kicked him, and his mouth was gritty with tooth-enamel. A disembodied thought, “Molly!” came to him from far away. He didn’t know what it meant just then, but did what it seemed to want him to. Got one of the buckled doors open and crawled out hands-first. Just as his chin got to the ground and his feet came clear, a gorgeous sunburst of yellow beamed out from the car-engine, and an instant later a towering pillar of flame was shooting sky-high from it. It stung him and he jerked away from it side-wise along the floor, but the pain brought him to, he got up on his knees.
Feet came pounding, but not from the busted front door, from another direction, going toward it. On the opposite side of the curtain of flame. A voice cried shrilly about its hum: “I don’t know who was in it, don’t bother looking! Get out quick — give it to ’em with the tommy if they try to stop us outside!”
A figure flashed by from behind the furnace-glow heading for the open door, carrying something in front of it. A second one was right behind it. O’Dare snatched his gun out, did his best to steady his wrist but couldn’t wait to make sure. “Hold it!” he yelled. Both figures whirled. The second one, with a bared revolver, slightly telescoping the first, with a sub-machine! He saw then that the warning had just been a medieval anachronism on his part, instantly fired first before they had, from where he was, on his knees. It was the second one went down, not the one with the tommy. He’d cleared the way for it, that was all. He dropped flat on his face in a nosedive, as though there were water under him, not cement-flooring.
It was popping, and something that sounded like horizontal rain was hissing by above him. Then it broke off again after about two rounds, and he raised his face from the little pool of blood the nosebleed he’d given himself had formed under it. The guy was on top of the weapon, shaped like a tent, bending too far forward over it, blocking it with his own body from O’Dare. Then he straightened out in a flat line along the floor, and McKee came in from outside holding a feather of smoke in his fist. He spread his legs and stepped over him.
“Got him, didn’t I?” he said almost absent-mindedly. “First time I ever shot a man in the back!” Then taking in O’Dare’s blood-filmed face, “Great guns! you’re a goner! Shot your puss off—”
“I hit it on the floor ducking!” snapped the cop impatiently. “What was you doing, picking daisies out there the last two hours?”
McKee held the side of his jaw. “I took a nap on the road. Next time don’t be so—”
The blaze from the car was collapsing into itself, turning red. O’Dare ran around it, past the dick and in toward where they had come from just now. An arctic blast hit him in the face. There was a long corridor, it seemed to stretch for miles, lined on both sides with gleaming white refrigerator-doors. Dazzling, like a snow-scene, each door big enough to take whole beeves in at a time. He ran down to the far end of it, turned, came back along a second one. “Molly!” he yelled, “Molly!” and then a sudden premonition freezing him, screamed it like an inmate of a madhouse. “Molly!” The sound of his own voice rang mockingly back in the vast, cold, empty place. “They’ve done away with her! She’s in one of these things, I know it!”
There was a sudden scampering of fugitive footsteps somewhere nearby. He heard McKee, in the next aisle over, stop short, call out, and dart back the other way, as though chasing someone. O’Dare’s yells changed as he too raced toward the sound, hidden from him by the towering row of refrigerators. “McKee! Don’t shoot him — whoever he is! He’s the only one can tell us where she—! Don’t shoot!”
And then, in despairing finality, a gun cracked out there where the car was. Just once.
There was a third prostrate figure this side of the other two when he got there, head toward the door in arrested flight. McKee was standing stock-still, looking down. The inspector and the rest, who had just gotten there, were coming in from outside.
O’Dare Hung himself down on the still form like a long-lost brother, tried to sit it up.
“He’s dead,” a voice said, “Whaddya wanta do that for?”
“I didn’t do it,” McKee said, white, “they got him from outside, like I did the first one.”
“She’s in one of them ice-boxes, I tell ya!” O’Dare screeched, “Now we’ll never find out which one—!”
The inspector barked, “Get in there quick, you men! Open ’em up—” A sudden mass-panic gripped them, horror was on their faces as they rushed forward in a body.
It was O’Dare who sighted the thing, with seconds that were centuries pounding at his maddened brain. Didn’t know how he had for the rest of his life. A little fleck of color down the long dazzling-white of that vista, a tiny thing, a mote, a dot. Green. Smaller than the smallest new leaf in May. The edge of a dress caught in the airtight crevice between ponderous refrigerator-door and refrigerator. A thing that in another age they would have called a miracle; that still was a miracle in this 1937, call it what they might.
They got it open and she slumped into their arms, lips blue, fingernails broken, in the bright-green dress he’d kidded her so for buying only a week before. (She still has it; he won’t let her wear it, but he won’t let her give it away either. He touches it to bring him luck, keep them from misfortune, every time he goes out on duty — as a detective, third grade.)