This was the rear of the building, and looking down it seemed to me there was nothing down there but a cul de sac, concrete all the way around, high walls on three sides and this building on the fourth with what you know and I know was a well-locked door. I looked up, looked down again, looked up again, looked through the window at all those big-shouldered gun-toting gorillas pounding across the living room toward me, and when Abbie started to go down the fire escape I grabbed her arm and shouted, “No! Up!”
“Come on!” she cried, either not hearing me or not understanding me. She kept wanting to go down.
There was no time to explain things. I just clamped a hand around her wrist and took off.
She fought me for a while, yelling my name and other things, but a certain feeling of urgency gave me strength, and as I lunged up the metal stairs Abbie came bouncing and ricocheting and complaining along behind me. That is, she complained until the sound of the first shot.
That was a very strange sound, actually. It went BANG-dingdingdingding, the first part being the sound of the gun being fired and the rest being the sounds of the bullet ricocheting around the fire escape. So far as I know, it came nowhere near us, but it sure stopped Abbie from hanging back.
The building was six stories high. We went tramping and clanging up the steps, the railings ice-cold to our touch, the wind blowing all around us, and a half a dozen or so shots were fired, none of them doing any good at all. The fire escape served as a kind of screen, through which bullets couldn’t seem to find their way.
Then we were on the roof. I looked back down and saw two of them climbing out the window down there, in a hurry and in each other’s way. As I watched I saw them squabbling and pushing at each other, neither able to get out the window with the other one in the way. One from each gang, no doubt.
Well, they wouldn’t be able to hold each other up forever. I turned back to Abbie, who was standing there rubbing her wrist and glaring at me. Shouting to be heard above the wind, she yelled, “What did you come up here for? Now we’re trapped!”
“Cul de sac!” I shouted, pointing down. “No way out down there!”
“Well, there’s certainly no way out up here!”
“Come!”
I grabbed her other wrist this time, and started running. She might have wanted to argue, but you can’t argue and run at the same time, so there wasn’t any more discussion for a while.
We were in the middle of the block, on one of a row of similar buildings with identical roof heights. Knee-high brick walls separated the roof areas of each building, and on each roof there was a brick structure containing the staircase and elevator housing, a chimney, a few narrow air shafts surmounted by shielded fans and a number of teetering television aerials. We ran around all the structures and jumped over all the walls, and when we’d gone three buildings I paused to try a staircase door. Locked. I grabbed Abbie’s wrist again and ran on.
The fourth building’s door was locked. The fifth building’s door was locked. Somebody took a shot at us, and a television antenna near us said ping. I looked back, and here came half a dozen of them, all piling out onto the roof back there where we’d started.
“Oh, God damn it,” I said, and went on running. There were more bangs from behind us, more pings all around us. I initiated a dodging sort of run, back and forth, angling this way and that.
The sixth building’s door was locked.
“Hell!” I said. “If only we had that blasted gun of yours! It would get us through a door anyway.”
“Don’t talk,” Abbie advised me, gasping. “Run.”
I ran. Without my holding her wrist, Abbie ran alongside me. I don’t know about her, but I didn’t feel the cold at all.
Seventh building. I slammed into the door, it fell open, I fell downstairs.
27
Abbie was shaking my shoulder and saying, “Chet?”
“Boy,” I said. I struggled to sit up. “Wow,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“I think my chassis’s out of alignment.” With the help of Abbie and a handy wall I dragged myself to my feet.
“You ought to be more careful,” she said. “You scared me half to death.”
“Thoughtless of me,” I said. I moved all my limbs and turned my head back and forth. Everything seemed to work all right.
“Can you run?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, and staggered up the stairs.
“Not that way!” she shouted. “That’s the way we came from!”
“I know it. Buzz for the elevator.”
I tottered to the top of the stairs and slammed the door. There was a bolt, which I threw home, and then I blundered back down again, this time managing to stay on my feet.
The elevator wasn’t there yet. “It was on one,” Abbie said. She squinted at the little dial by the call button. “Just passing four.”
Somebody thudded on the door up there.
“I wonder if they’ll shoot the lock off,” I said, looking up, and a gun went bang and the door went ngngngngngn but didn’t open.
The elevator oozed into view. We jumped in, I pushed the first-floor button, and the roof door took another bullet. We began to drift leisurely down the elevator shaft.
I said, “Where’s your car?”
“In a lot on 48th Street. But I don’t have the ticket. I don’t have my purse. I don’t have anything.”
I patted my behind. Yes, I had my wallet. I was wearing my own clothes, the only problem being that I wasn’t wearing enough of them. I said, “We’ll just have to hope they remember you.”
“It was a huge lot,” she said, “with a hundred guys working there. They won’t remember me, and I don’t have any identification.”
The elevator inched past three. I said, “We have to have a car. We can’t run around the streets. If they don’t get us, the cold will.”
“I know,” she said. “Do you suppose they all ran out? Maybe we could sneak back into the apartment and get our things.”
“Abbie,” I said, “you aren’t thinking.”
“I guess that was kind of fantasizing, wasn’t it?” she said.
The second floor went by, lingeringly.
I stared at the elevator door. “We’ve got to have a car,” I said. I knew it was up to me. Time to start being the resourceful hero.
The elevator door opened. First floor, everybody out.
Abbie said, “What are we going to do, Chet?”
She was counting on me. I looked at her and said, “We’re going to run. Think later.”
“Listen!”
I heard it. Feet pounding down the stairwell. I grabbed Abbie’s hand and we ran.
Standing in the elevator we’d had a chance to cool off a bit, and when we hit the outside air with our clothing damp from perspiration we both staggered at the impact of the cold. “Oh, boy!” I shouted.
“H-h-h-h-h,” Abbie said.
I looked down to the right, just as three guys on the sidewalk in front of Tommy’s building saw us and started frantically pointing us out to each other. Any minute now they were going to stop pointing and start running. I turned and ran the other way, Abbie’s hand still clutched in mine, Abbie herself trailing along somewhere in my wake like a water skier.