Patti followed him out of the room. One thing he had taught them well was to open doors on command.
Zeke whispered into the mike, “All units, all units. Informant leaving house. Will follow and advise.”
16
Helen Jenkins extended her hearing as far as possible. She was stretched out on her right side, her arm under her head to lift it from the pillow. In the living room Dan and Sammy were talking, quite low but still loud enough for her to catch the conversation. Earlier, they had switched off the air conditioning, deciding the night was to cool to operate it without someone thinking it strange.
A half-hour ago she had come to bed, and been so exhausted that she had had to struggle to stay awake. But she had resisted sleep, thinking she might overhear them. For the first ten minutes she pretended she was restless, which was normal for her, and then had turned as usual from her left to her right side before simulating sleep.
Now Dan was saying, “You don’t just lose a watch. I’ve got a smell for these things. You remember the Johnson job, how we cleared out of there two hours before the cops broke the door down, because I smelled them coming?”
Sammy coughed; he smoked too much. “Big thing. She loses a watch. So what? I lose things and don’t find ‘em for weeks.”
“I don’t know where else we could’ve looked.” She could hear Dan walking about thumping a chair, the wall, the way he did when he was disturbed. “If I could just figure it
.”
Sammy was striking a match, the box kind; he didn’t like the packets. “That dame up front will be nosing around soon.”
“I’ll stall her.”
“You’re kiddin’ yourself. Once one of those dames gets started I tell you we got to move fast and without Jenkins. We got to get her off our backs. You sit around thinking, talking, doing nothing, and we’re going to get messed up for sure.”
He coughed hard, then continued. “It’s easy. Nothing to it. We drop her in one of those bins I was telling you about, over in the alley, back of the stores. What can happen driving over there? Four blocks. No stop signal. No cops hiding around at that time of night. The newsstand closes at eleven, the theater a block up the street empties about the same time. We’ll pile a lot of cartons on her and nobody’ll know until they pick up the boxes at nine the next morning.”
She broke into a sweat and a roar filled her head. A step tapped softly on the floor, coming her way. She clenched her fists so tightly she was like a board. She sensed that the step stopped in the doorway. She battled a compulsion to make a dash for the front door. If they shot her down, wouldn’t it be better than waiting here? At least she had a chance, a small one.
But her body balked, controlled by her reasoning, which prompted her to breathe long and slowly, long and slowly, as if she were sound asleep, to keep her eyes closed no matter how much they wanted to open.
The step receded, and she sagged. One of them had wanted to assure himself she was still sleeping.
She tensed again at the sound of Dan’s voice. “I don’t like any part of it.”
“She’s gotten under your skin. That’s a bad sickness. I almost got myself shot once, there was this dame
“
“Knock it off, Sammy.” Dan’s tone was deadly. “You know I never let a woman shake me up when I’m on a job. But I play it my way. That’s how we set it up. My way. Real close.”
“A guy who plays it too close, maybe he’s just plain
” Sammy thought better of it.
“Plain what, Sammy?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“I asked you, Sammy, plain what?”
“Gripes, if I could just get a drink. I tell you, I’m stir crazy. I could punch a hole in that wall, like a guy I knew once. He punched a hole clean through a wall. We got all this money, and for what? No dames, no liquor, no golf, no fresh air. We’re in a stinking, lousy jail. And her in there, she’s going to have the screaming willies. You taken a good look at her eyes? What’re you going to do when she starts yelling? Yeah, what you going to do? Put a shot through her like some goof-up kid who loses his head? And get knocked off making a break?”
Dan said slowly, “Maybe you got a point there.”
Sammy continued, “It’s not like there’d be any blood. Few minutes after she’s asleep I’ll lay her away, and we’ll have ten hours before they find her. You tell the landlady ahead of time we got a job in another town, so she won’t get all stirred up when she finds us gone. We can make five, six hundred miles
.”
“What if she screams?”
“I’ve never had one yet. These fingers, they move so fast. You should see ‘em. And strong. You wouldn’t believe it. They could strangle a horse. Comes from my ma making me take piano. She used to say, ‘I’ll give you good learnin’, start you right.’ But I never got anything out of her except these fingers. No, Dan, she won’t scream.”
They never knew how close she came to it at that second.
17
As D.C. disappeared around the Randall house, Zeke moved swiftly across the back yard. His foam rubber soles touched the thick sod softly and noiselessly. He smelled a strong burnt powder odor as he passed Mike’s “launching pad,” and then the heavy, cloying scent of a night-blooming jasmine.
Rounding the corner, he brought himself up short and scanned the long, narrow passageway between houses for sign of movement. The night was so black that he could barely discern the outline of shrubs. He was conscious of his own breathing, which was loud in the stillness. He noted he was opposite the Macdougall kitchen, and sensed a presence inside. He dropped to a squatting position.
Up near the street a luminous tail swished back and forth from under a shrub as D.C. cased the layout ahead, his eyes mica bright. A fellow couldn’t be too careful in scouting enemy territory. In that no man’s land beyond, dogs roamed about, determined to maintain their fancied superiority, thinking themselves a superior race. He hated the breed. And tomcats lurked out there like so many punk hoodlums, eager to win a reputation for themselves fighting.
D.C. swished his tail again. That jerk who had followed him out of the house was stalking him. He thought he was being quiet, as if D.C. didn’t have a good hearing. D.C. knew what he was up to. The jerk thought he had a duck buried, and the minute D.C. dug it up the jerk would steal it. From the beginning D.C. had had him pegged as a no-good, two-faced sneak.
As D.C. started to cross the street, Zeke trailed him, always keeping the same distance between them. Suddenly tires screeched as a car rounded a corner and bore down on D.C. at fifty miles an hour, its dual pipes roaring. Seized with panic, Zeke raced into the street, waving his arms and shouting. The headlights were two brilliant spots racing toward him with unbelievable speed.
D.C. neither hurried nor slowed his pace. He chose to ignore the car. There were times when a man must assert his rights to what was properly his, and he had as much right on the street as anyone.
Zeke leaped for his life as the car’s headlights encompassed him. The driver slammed on his brakes and the car shrieked to a stop, only feet from D.C., who neither turned nor ran but continued leisurely to the far sidewalk. If a man held his ground, they always stopped.
Zeke leaned against a tree, wheezing like an old race horse. The driver yelled at him, “You stupid bum. Whatcha trying to do, get yourself killed?”
He shouted other imprecations until the first shock wore off. From the far side D.C. looked up with interest. The night was starting off fairly well. He went under a parked car where he sat motionless, observing his eight-inch-high view of the world ahead and, more specifically, Greg Balter’s house and the driveway.
Zeke reduced his breathing to a point near normal, and said into the mike, “Informant under car. Repeat informant under car.”
Two miles away a police officer in a cruise car leaned forward in his seat. He had no business tuning in the FBI radio band, but he and his partner were experiencing a dull night. He asked, “Did you hear that, Tracy ? An informant under a car.”