He had kept an eye on the rearview mirror but had seen no indications that he was being followed.
So far so good, he thought.
He parked directly in front of the apartment house and doused his lights; but he sat for a moment casing the street before alighting. Everything looked normal. Nothing was moving for the moment but the cool breeze coming up from the river. Cars parked for the night lined the inside curb despite a city ordinance forbidding it. Nevertheless he had his pistol in his hand when he got out on the street side and walked around the front of the car.
Wop was already getting out on his side and Ginny followed. They crossed the sidewalk in single file and she unlocked the apartment house door with her own key.
Coffin Ed let them both precede him, then said, “Wait here.”
He went down the hall to the elevator door and brought the elevator to the ground floor. He opened the door and looked inside of it, then closed the door to the elevator itself and stood for a moment studying the outside door to the elevator shaft. There was nothing to be seen. The floor of the elevator was flush with the floor of the hall and the top of the elevator door was flush with the top of the door to the shaft.
He came back and said, “All right, let’s go down,” leading the way.
They came out in the basement corridor and found the night lights turned on as was customary. Coffin Ed stopped them for a moment and made them stand still while he listened. He could see the doors to the janitor’s suite, the toolroom, the staircase, the elevator and the laundry, and the one at the back which opened onto the back court. There was not a sound to be heard, not even from outside. His gaze lit for a moment on a short ladder hanging from the inside wall beneath a fire extinguisher. It must have been there before but he hadn’t noticed it.
At the end of the corridor, toward the janitor’s door, the cheap worn luggage, trunks and household furnishings of the new janitor were stacked against the wall. But the janitor hadn’t moved in. There was a police seal on the janitor’s door.
Coffin Ed opened his Boy Scout knife and broke the seal. Ginny unlocked the door, stepped inside and switched on the light.
She drew back and cried out, “God in heaven, what happened?”
It looked the same as when Coffin Ed had seen it last, except the corpse of the African had been removed.
“Your friend got his throat cut,” he said.
She stared in horror at the patches and clots of black dried blood and began trembling violently. Wop’s teeth began to chatter again.
“What the hell you so horrified about? It ain’t your blood,” Coffin Ed said bitterly, including them both.
Ginny began turning green. He didn’t want her sick so he said quickly, “Just get me the keys.”
She had to pass through the room to the kitchen. She skirted the edge, bracing herself with her hand against the wall, as though traversing the deck of a ship in a storm.
When she returned with the ring of house keys, Coffin Ed said to Wop, “You stay here.”
Wop looked at the dried blood and the wreckage and turned a shade of light gray that seemed impossible for a person with black skin.
“Do I got to?” he stammered.
“Either that or go home.”
He stayed.
Coffin Ed pushed Ginny into the corridor, closed and locked the door on Wop, then went and bolted the back door that opened onto the rear court. Ginny stood beside the elevator door as though she were afraid to move.
“Stay put,” Coffin Ed directed when he returned and got into the elevator.
Her face broke out in alarm. “You’re not going to leave me here?”
“No worry,” he said and shut the door in her face.
He heard her protesting as he took the elevator up to the first floor but he paid it no attention.
He left the elevator and started down the stairs and ran head-on into Ginny as she was coming up.
“Whoa, where you going, baby?” he said, heading her off.
“If you think I’m gonna-” she began, but he interrupted, taking her arm:
“You’re going to show me how to cut off the power to this thing.”
“Awright, awright, you don’t have to be so mother-raping rough every time you open yo’ mouth,” she grumbled but she obeyed readily enough.
She showed him a small square key on the ring which opened the basement door to the elevator shaft. The power switch was inside. “Just push it,” she said.
He found a button switch and pushed it.
“Anyway, it’s not in there,” she said. “They said they looked in there.” Her voice wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t lowered.
He looked into a pit of blackness. “Shut up and give me a light,” he said.
“There’s a light inside. Feel down below and you’ll find the switch.”
He groped in the dark and found a small switch. A naked bulb at the end of an extension cord lying on the oil-covered floor lit up, showing a six-foot concrete pit at the bottom of the shaft.
A heavy spring bumper supporting a thick steel block rose from the center of the pit. In the back were the cable pulleys and the large electric motor that operated the lift cable. Beside it were a switchboard and adjustment levers.
He lowered himself into the pit, found some greasy cotton waste, and wiped off the instruction plates on the motor and above the levers. One of the levers worked with the motion of a jack handle, and was used to jack the elevator up or down to make it flush with the corridor floors.
He jacked it down as far as it would go, about three feet. Then he climbed out of the pit and, leaving the light on, closed the door to the shaft.
He turned the power back on and brought the elevator down to the basement. Now when he opened the door the floor of the elevator was three feet below the floor of the basement. It was now possible to crawl on top of the elevator from the door of the elevator shaft.
He took the ladder from the wall, propped it against the front of the elevator, and climbed up.
“Do you see it?” she asked breathlessly.
He didn’t answer.
He put his head and shoulders through the opening atop the elevator, ascended the ladder as far as he could, then wriggled forward on his belly.
“Have you found it?” she called anxiously.
“Pipe down,” he said, feeling about for the blue canvas utility bag.
When he found it he drew it forward beside his hip, then turned over on his back and drew both revolvers. He checked them in the dim, reflected light coming up the sides of the elevator from the pit. They checked.
He began worming forward on his back, inch by inch, moving the bag forward with his elbow.
“It’s not there?” she asked. Her voice was strained to the breaking point and jarred on his nerves.
“Will you shut up and let me look!” he grated.
He kept inching forward until his feet touched the ladder. Only his head and shoulders and his hands holding the revolvers remained unseen. Then he knocked the bag out onto the basement floor.
“He’s got it!” she screamed, and dove into the elevator.
There was a slight grunting sound as Coffin Ed jumped and came down like a cat somersaulting in the air.
Simultaneously the hophead gunman leaped into the corridor from the staircase.
Both shot before their feet touched the floor. Coffin Ed shot left-handed with Grave Digger’s pistol, shooting from the hip in a manner he despised. The gunman shot right-handed with the silenced derringer across his left shoulder, the police positive dangling from his left hand.
In the tight narrow corridor the very air exploded with the hard heavy thunderclap of the long-barreled.38 revolver, drowning the slight deadly cough of the silenced derringer.
The brass-nosed.38 slug hit the gunman on the pivot of the jaw and scattered bone, blood and teeth into the air, while the.44 slug from the derringer burned a hole through Coffin Ed’s left sleeve and seared his flesh like a branding iron.