In the deep shadow of the building from which they emerged, they stopped, and O’Connor spoke tersely.
“Czynowski, join Wirt in the court. You’ll have to go around to the alley and in the rear. Siggy, you go with Czynowski, but stop with Kleig in the alley.” He paused, looking up at Deming, his lips drawn back off his teeth in a stiff grin. “You’re a big kid, Deming. Big and tough. Besides, you’re riding your luck. You’ll come with me.”
Czynowski and Sigman moved away, and O’Connor stood quietly, his head thrown back, staring up at the dark building across the street.
“The room’s toward the rear,” he said. “No view of the street.”
He crossed the sidewalk and stepped off, Deming at his heels. In Deming’s ears, the hollow sound of their heels on the rough brick of the old street had the cadence of a death march. He wondered wryly how long a man could ride his luck before he fell off. Maybe you use it up filling your house from a deck of cards for matches. Maybe, when you need it for bigger things, you find there’s none left. He was gratified that his pulse was now normal. What he felt was no more than a realistic acceptance of his part in what seemed an inevitable order of events.
They went up two flights of ancient stairs to the third floor hall. Up there, the cold was still and heavy and almost tangible. It wrapped itself around Deming like a clammy hand. The place was like a morgue, as if, behind closed doors, nameless corpses awaited their final, impersonal disposition. Deming twisted his stiff lips into an ironic smile, wishing that he had no more than a corpse or two to concern him. Behind one of those doors, caught in O’Connor’s patient trap, was the most dangerous of all wild animals — a human killer.
They walked the old boards cautiously, without sound. Down the hall, a door swung inward with a whisper of hinges, and Kelly, a blocky shadow, slipped into the hall to confront them. He gestured at the closed door across the hall, and O’Connor nodded. Deming saw that O’Connor’s automatic had appeared as if by magic in O’Connor’s hand. Strange, Deming thought. He hadn’t seen O’Connor reach for the gun at all.
Moving in on the indicated door, O’Connor crowded the wall and thumbed Deming behind him. Kelly flattened himself against the wall on the other side of the door. O’Connor’s heavy fist, hammering the flimsy panel, was a sudden violation of the suspended silence. His voice, raised above the racket of his pounding, retained, somehow, for all its volume, its timbre of calmness.
“Okay, Connie. We’ve got you nailed. Don’t make trouble for yourself, boy.”
Inside the room, silence. Silence for a long moment, while all sound and motion hung suspended. Then the expected, shocking explosion and the ripping of the panel where O’Connor’s hand had been a moment before. O’Connor laughed exultantly and sent a slug smashing into the old lock of the door.
“It’s dead he wants to come,” he shouted, “and it’s dead we’ll bring him!”
Beyond the door, a window screeched in its sash. Another slug ripped through the panel, and farther away, below in the court, there were a series of explosions.
“He’s on the fire escape,” O’Connor said. “Get the door down!”
Deming found himself throwing his two hundred pounds against the door. He felt the barrier give, hang for a second on an edge of metal, and then crash inward. He plunged into the room in a head-long sprawl, getting a blurred impression of curtains billowing at a window, of a seated woman staring at him with wide, stricken eyes. Then he was through the window.
On the sharp-angled steps a floor below, Czynowski lifted a face startling white in sudden illumination from the window beside him. “The roof! He went for the roof!”
From a small platform, an iron ladder went up on the perpendicular. Gun in hand, Deming took it fast, throwing himself without thinking over the parapet above. The vicious whine of a ricochet sliced into his ears. A splinter of brick ripped his cheek. He hit on a shoulder on tar and gravel and rolled to his feet, driving for the black shape of a ventilator yards away. Beyond him, another slug ricocheted off the brick.
The shots had come from the shadow of a chimney across the roof. Under cover of the ventilator, Deming crouched and waited. There was movement at the edge of the brick mass, shadow slipping within shadow, and he fired once. The shadow quieted.
Then he became aware of other movement. Not at the chimney, but wide of it and beyond it. The flat expanse of roof seemed to stir and break. A trap door lifted slowly, inch by patient inch. And Deming realized suddenly that O’Connor had not followed him into the room below and onto the fire escape. Quickly, for diversion, he snapped two slugs in the direction of the chimney, and the small movement of the roof erupted in decisive violence. Orange tongues licked the darkness, and the crash of O’Connor’s gun repeated itself.
Deming stood up. There was a wild, uncontrolled singing in his head. He felt a little sick to his stomach, and his cheek burned like fire. Carefully, spacing his feet wide, he walked over to the chimney.
O’Connor was standing there beside the body of Connie Riebeau. If he was aware of Deming, he gave no sign. It was as if he and Connie were up there on the roof alone. Deming had the sudden disquieting feeling that he was intruding on a fantastic and esoteric ceremony.
“Good-by, Connie boy,” O’Connor said in a weird, light tone of exultation.
Turning, Deming found his way to the trap door and down. In the hall below, he walked back to the room from which Connie Riebeau had fled. The woman was still there, sitting motionless in her chair. She had a thin, drawn face with big, lifeless eyes. They stared at each other, she and Deming, without speaking. Deming saw now that the woman’s chair was equipped with wheels. A light blanket covered the woman’s legs.
Behind Deming, O’Connor spoke harshly. “Connie’s dead as those he killed.”
He was speaking to the woman, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at him. Tears gathered slowly in the dead eyes and spilled over onto the worn cheeks. Tears without sound. Tears for a killer who would inspire no other grief than this.
Deming moved again, out into the hall past O’Connor, who, following, said, “I’ll call the meat wagon.”
He went into Kelly’s room and used the phone. When he came out, Deming said, “That woman in there. She’s crippled.”
“Yeah,” O’Connor said. “Paralyzed.”
“What’s she to Riebeau?”
“She was Connie’s wife,” O’Connor said. “That’s how I knew Connie would come. She was isolated here. No friends. No money. No one to take care of her. Connie had to come.”
“Look,” Deming said, “Connie was a born killer. A torpedo for hire. A guy who had no right to live. You telling me he risked his life to come back here for a woman? A crippled woman?”
O’Connor stood quietly, looking over Deming’s shoulder at nothing, his eyes carefully blank. “Yeah,” he said. “Wouldn’t anybody?”
