Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 60, November 1948

Johnny on the Spot by Cornell Woolrich

Copyright, 1936, by Cornell Woolrich

Announcement: With the help of Cornell Woolrich himself and the unselfish assistance of aficionados the length and breadth of these United States, we have just completed building a remarkable inventory of Woolrich-Irish stories — no less than thirteen (lucky number!) — and not a single one of them has ever been reprinted before or previously published in any book (including anthologies). For years we have been digging in old (and forgotten) magazines, especially in those private-eye periodicals which are no longer readily available even from the dusty stocks of secondhand specialists. These magazines take long hunting and longer patience to find, and even when found yield only a small percentage of high-assay nuggets. But those nuggets are worth the time, the effort, and the eye-strain. Indeed, the thirteen Woolrich stories are literally hand-picked. They include suck fine, but unknown, Woolrichiana as “The Humming Bird Comes Home,” “Cinderella and the Home Mob,” and “Charlie Won’t Be Tonight.” We plan to bring you these “finds” quite regularly from now on, beginning in this issue with a typically Woolrichian thriller, “Johnny on the Spot.”

The clock on the wall of the cafeteria said quarter to four in the morning when he came in from the street. He wasn’t even twenty-eight yet, Johnny Donovan. Any doctor in town would have given him fifty more years. Only he himself knew better than that. He didn’t even have fifty days left; maybe only fifty hours, or maybe fifty minutes, depending on how good he was.

There hadn’t been anyone in sight on the street when he came in just now, he’d made sure of that, and this place was half the island away from where anyone would expect to find him; that was why he’d started coming here for his food the past few nights. And that was why he’d told Jean to meet him here tonight, after her last show at the club, if she couldn’t hold out any more; if she had to see him so bad. Poor kid, he sure felt sorry for her! Married at seventeen, and a widow at eighteen — any minute now. There was one thing he was glad of, that he’d managed to keep her out of it. She knew about it, of course, but they didn’t know about her; didn’t even know she existed. And dancing twice nightly right at one of Beefy Borden’s own clubs, the prettiest girl on the floor! Taking fifty every Saturday from Beefy’s “front” down there, while Beefy had guys out looking for him all over town, and would have given ten times that much just to connect with him! It made him laugh every time he thought of it — almost, not quite.

But it wasn’t so surprising at that. Beefy was one of those rare, domesticated big-shots who, outside of killing-hours, thought there was no one like that silver-blond wife and those two daughters of his. Johnny, when he used to drop in their Ocean Avenue apartment on business in the old prohibition days, plenty of times found him there helping his kids with their homework or playing with them on the floor, maybe a couple of hours after he’d had some poor devil buried alive in quicklime out in the wilds of Jamaica or dumped overboard from one of his runners with a pail of cement for shoes. That being the case, even a lovely number like Jean couldn’t be expected to make a dent in him, often as he must have seen her trucking around on the hardwood down at the Wicked Nineties. Otherwise he would have asked questions, tried to find out something about her, But to him she was just a Jean Marvel — her own idea of a stage-tag at sixteen — just a name on one of the dozen payrolls he checked once a month with his various fronts. Not even that. She just wasn’t. She was: “No. 9 — @ 50 = $200.” She’d told Johnny that she’d said “Good evening” to Beefy one night leaving the club — after all, he was her bread-and-butter — and he’d turned around and asked someone, “Who the hell wazzat?”

He was sick of dodging them; had a bellyful of trying to save his precious hide. He had it up to his neck, this business of sleeping all day in movie houses and bolting meals at four in the morning and keeping just one jump ahead of them the whole time. The way he felt tonight he almost wished they’d catch up with him and get it over with! What was so awful about choking yourself to death in a gunny-sack anyway? You couldn’t do it more than once.

But there was Jean. Outside of wanting him straight, which had started the whole mess, she also wanted him alive — for some wacky reason or other. He could hear her now, like she had been the last time they’d stolen a brief get-together riding hidden on the back platform of the Shuttle. That was last Sunday. She had laced it into him, eyes flinty, voice husky with scorn:

“Yellow. No, not even yellow, orange! A quitter. And that’s what I married! Ready to take it on the chin, aren’t you?” And then pointing to her own lovely dimpled one: “Well, this is your chin!” And pounding herself furiously: “And this is the chest that gets the bullets when you stand up to ’em! Don’t I count? No, I get left behind — without my music, without my rhythm, without my guy, for all you care! Not while I know it! Who is this Beefy Borden — God?” Then suddenly nearly breaking in two: “See it through for me, Johnny. Stay alive. Don’t welsh on me now. Just a few days longer! The dough will come through by the end of this week — then we can both lam out of this hellhole together!” And after the train had carried her back to the Times Square end and he’d lost himself in the Grand Central crowd, hat down over his mouth, he could still hear it ringing in his ears: “Stay alive for me, Johnny. Stay alive!” Well, he’d done his best, but it couldn’t keep up forever.

There was a taxi driver dozing in the back of the place. He was the only other one in there. Have to quit coming here after tonight; he’d been here three nights in a row now; time to change to another place. He loosened the knot of his necktie and undid the top button of his shirt. Hadn’t changed it in ten days and it was fixing to walk off his back of its own accord.

He picked up a greasy aluminum tray and slid it along the triple rails that banked the counter. He hooked a bowl of shredded wheat, a dwarf pitcher of milk, and some other junk as he went along. When he got to the end where the counterman was, he said, “Two, sunnyside up.” He hadn’t eaten since four the night before. He’d just gotten through collecting a meal in a place on Sixth Avenue around two when he’d spotted someone over in a corner that looked familiar from the back. He had had to get up and blow — couldn’t risk it.

The counterman yapped through a hole in the wall behind him, “Two — on their backs!” and something began spitting. Johnny picked a table all the way in the rear and sat down with his back to the street. He couldn’t see who was coming in that way, without turning, but it made him harder to recognize from outside through the plate-glass front. He turned his collar up in back to hide the shape of his neck.

He took out a much-folded newspaper, fished for a pencil, and while crunching shredded wheat began to fill in the blank squares of a crossword puzzle. He could do that and mean it! You go arm-in-arm with death for ten days or a couple of weeks, and it loses most of its sting. Even the answer to what is “a sap-giving tree” can be more interesting for the time being — help you forget.

He didn’t see the maroon car that drew up outside, and he didn’t hear it. It came up very soft, coasting to a stop. He didn’t see the two well-dressed individuals that got out of it without cracking the door behind them, edged up closer to the lighted window-front and peered in. They exchanged a triumphant look that might have meant, “We’ll eat in here, this is our dish.”

He was half-dozing over his puzzle by this time, splinters of shredded wheat clinging to his lips. On the other hand, the somnolent taxi driver, peculiarly enough, suddenly came wide awake and seemed to remember something that required his presence in the washroom. He slipped in there very deftly without making a sound; got as far away from the door as possible, and then just stood around like he was waiting for something to be over. He passed the time away counting over a fairly solid wad of fins and saw-bucks. Then he met his own eyes in the mirror and he quickly turned his head away, like he wasn’t glad to meet himself, for once.

The two came in, and they weren’t in a hurry, and they weren’t trying to sneak up on the quarry now any more. They didn’t have to, they had him. One of them, who went in for artistic flourishes, even hung back a step behind the other and deliberately yanked two bright-green pasteboards from the box near the door, which made a dyspeptic bell sing out a couple of times; as if to show how law-abiding, how house-broken, he and his friend could be when they came in a public place. It was like a rattlesnake warning before it strikes. It couldn’t have made any difference anyway; they each had a right hand stuck deep into their coat pockets, and both pockets were sort of stiff and weighted down.

The bell woke Johnny without registering; by the time his eyes opened, he’d forgotten what did it. Then he saw them sitting at the table with him, one opposite and one right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, so close the loaded pocket dug into his hip. The one across the china table top had his pocket up too, just sort of resting on the lip of the table, pointing Johnny’s way. The counterman was busy transferring pats of butter to little paper rosettes; it wouldn’t have mattered even if he hadn’t been.

Johnny looked from one face to the other, and his own whitened a little. Just for a second, then the color came right back; he’d been expecting this for too long to stay scared.

They looked like three brothers, or three pals, sitting there huddled over the table together, intimate, familiar.

“Put it on the table in front of you,” suggested the one next to Johnny. “Keep the newspaper over it.”

Johnny reached under his left arm and took out something. If his coat hadn’t been buttoned, he could have turned it around and fired through the cloth. He would have gone, but he could have taken one of them with him. But there wasn’t room enough to turn it under his coat, it faced outward where there was nothing but a glass caseful of desserts to get at. He slid it under the newspaper and the one opposite him hauled it out on the other side and it disappeared into his clothing without the light once getting at it.

When this tricky feat had been accomplished satisfactorily, the first one said, “We wanna see you, Donovan.”

“Take a good look,” Johnny said in a low voice. “How does a guy that’s gone straight appeal to you?”

“Dead,” answered the party across the table.

“I’ve got something you can’t kill,” Johnny said. His eyes lit up like radio dials and all of a sudden he was proud of himself for the first time since he was in long pants. “I’m straight now. I’m on the level. Not all the bullets in all the gats in all New York can take that away from me.”

“They can make you smell a lot different in twenty-four hours,” the one next to him said. And the one across the way put in: “He thinks he’s gonna get bullets, no less! Wake up, pogie, this ain’t 1919. You’ll beg for bullets. You’ll get down on your knees and pray for ’em before we get through with you!”

Johnny smiled and said, “When the State turns on the heat, they give a guy a last meal; let him order his head off. This being my last meal, let’s see if you’re big enough to lemme finish what I ordered.” He took up his spoon in his left hand.

“We got all night,” one assured him. “We’ll even pay your check for you. Sing Sing has nothing on us.”

The other one looked at the shredded wheat and laughed. “That’s a hell of a thing to croak with in your guts!”

“They’re my guts,” observed Johnny, chewing away, “and it’s my party.” He took up the pencil in his right hand and went ahead with the puzzle. “What’s a five-letter word for the goddess of love?” he asked nonchalantly.

They exchanged a dubious look, not in reference to the goddess of love however. “Can’t you see he’s stalling you?” one growled. “How do we know what this place is? Let’s go.”

The ticket bell at the door rang and a very pretty girl came in alone. Her face turned very white under the lights, like she’d been up all night. But she wasn’t logy at all. She seemed to know just what she was doing. She glanced over her shoulder just once, at the maroon car outside the door, but did not look at the three men at the table at all. Then she picked up a cup of coffee from the counterman and brushed straight by them without a look, sat down facing them one table further back, and, like any respectable girl that hour of the night, kept her long lashes down over her eyes while she stirred and stirred the java with a tin spoon.

Johnny looked at her and seemed to get an inspiration. “Venus,” he said suddenly, “that’s the word! Why didn’t I think of it?” But instead of “Venus” he scribbled on the margin of the diagram: “Stay back — I’m covered. Goodbye.”

The others had been taking a short, admiring gander at her too. “Momma!” said one of them. “Is that easy to take!”

“Yeah,” agreed the other. “Too bad we’re on business. Y’never see ’em like that when you’re on y’own time!”

“What’s a three-letter word—” Johnny began again. Then suddenly losing his temper, he exclaimed: “Jeeze! I can’t do this damn thing!” He tore the puzzle out of the paper, crumpled it irritably into a ball, and tossed it away from him — toward the next table.

The girl sitting at it dropped her paper napkin at that minute, then stooped to pick it up again.

The three men got up from the table together and started toward the front of the place. They walked fairly slowly, Johnny in the middle, one on each side. Their three bodies were ganged at the hips, where the coat pockets were. The one on the inside, although he hadn’t eaten anything, helped himself to a toothpick from the counter from force of habit and began prodding away with one hand. The washroom door opened on a crack, a nose showed, and then it prudently closed again. The girl at the table was very white and kept stirring her coffee without tasting it, as if she didn’t know what her wrist was doing at all.

The counterman just then was further down the line, hauling a platter of fried eggs through the hole in the wall. It was exactly ten minutes since Johnny Donovan had first come in, five to four in the morning. The short-order cook must have had to heat up the frying pan first.

“Two bright-side up!” bawled the counterman. Then he looked at the table and saw that they weren’t there any more. They were all the way up by the cash register. He came up after them, behind the counter, carrying the eggs. “Hey!” he said. “Don’t you want your eggs?”

“Naw, he’s lost his appetite,” one of them said. “Get in the car with him,” he murmured to his companion. “I’ll pay his check.”

He let electric light in between himself and Johnny, fished out some change, and tossed down the three checks, two blank and one punched. Johnny and the other fellow went out the door, still shoulder to shoulder, drifted across the sidewalk, and got into the back of the maroon car. The door slapped smartly and the curtains dropped down behind the windows.

The counterman didn’t like people who just came into his place to warm chairs and then walked out again on blank checks. He made the mistake of charging for the eggs which hadn’t been eaten. The girl in the back had gotten up now and was moving with a sort of lazy walk toward the man who had stayed behind. She’d tacked on a bright-red new mouth with her lipstick and suddenly didn’t seem so respectable any more.

“So I’m paying for the eggs, am I?” barked the man at the counter. “Okay, hand ’em over.” He pulled the plate away from the counterman, tilted it upward on his palm, fitted it viciously across the other’s face, and ground it in with a sort of half turn. Egg yolk dripped down in yellow chains, “Have ’em on me, you mosey sap!” he magnanimously offered.

The girl gave a shrill, brazen laugh of approval that sounded like her voice was cracked. “Gee, sweetheart,” she said, “I could go for a guy like you. How does it look for a little lift in your car? I been stemming all night and my dogs are yapping.” She deliberately separated a nickel of his change and skimmed it back across the glass to pay for her coffee, then nudged him chummily with her elbow. “You and me and a flock of etchings, how about it?”, she invited.

“Some other time, momma,” he said tersely. “Got no time tonight.” He pocketed the rest of his change and stalked out. The counterman was shaking Trench fried potatoes out of his collar, but he knew enough not to say anything out loud.

The girl went out after the fellow who had just turned her down, like some sort of a magnet was pulling her toward the car.

He’d already gotten in at the wheel when she got over to it. “C’mon, whaddya say?” she pleaded hoarsely. “Don’t be selfish, just a couple blocks lift would be a life saver.” She put one foot up on the running board, put one hand to the latch of the door. Her face was all damp and pasty-looking, but it took more than that amount of dishevelment to fog its beauty.

The one at the wheel hesitated, with the motor already turning over. He looked over his shoulder into the darkness questioningly, even longingly. Evidently she’d gotten under his skin. “How about it?” he said to the other one. “Drop her off at your place and then come back for her when we’re through?” He wanted the answer to be yes awfully bad.

She had the door open by now. One more move and she would have been on the front seat next to him. The answer did not come from the one he’d put it up to at all. It came from their “guest.” It was Johnny Donovan’s voice that answered, that put the crusher on it, strangely enough. A word of warning, a single cry for help from him, and they would have been compelled to take her too, in self-defense, because she would have caught onto what they were doing. He knew enough not to do that. Instead, he said almost savagely: “Kick her out — or is this part of what I get too?”

There was a vicious slap from the rear of the car, but the remark snapped the driver out of it, showed him what a fool thing he’d been about to do. That twist had magnetism or something. He gave her a terrific shove at the throat that sent her skittering backwards off the running board and very nearly flat on her back, grunting:“Where’s ya manners? Don’t crowd like that!” And a minute later the car was just a red tail light a block down, and then it wasn’t even that.

She was still lurching from the push he’d given her. She said, “Johnny, oh my God, Johnny, you’ve killed yourself!” But she said it very low, so low that the taxi driver who had come out just then and was standing beside her looking in the same direction she was, didn’t even hear her.

They weren’t going to kill him — it was he who had killed himself! Didn’t he know she could have saved him? Didn’t he know she’d brought a little gun of her own in her handbag to this last meeting of theirs? Didn’t he know all she needed was to get into that car with them, and wail for a favorable opportunity, and she could have pulled the trick? She saw where she had made her mistake now; she should have used it right in the cafeteria while she still had the chance. But in there there’d been two of them covering him, in the car only one while the other was at the wheel. That was why she’d waited, used her eyes on them for all she was worth, been within an ace of getting away with it — and then at the last minute he himself had to snatch the chance away from her, cut himself off from help.

She knew why he’d done it, and she cursed that habit in men of sparing their women. Didn’t they know women? Didn’t they know there was nothing on God’s earth could be so terrible, so remorseless, as a woman when the one she loved was in danger? The toughest triggerman was a Salvation Army lassie compared to a woman at such a time.

“They’re not going to have him!” Jean Donovan whispered into the night that surrounded her, eyes hard as mica and so big they seemed to cover her whole face. “They’re not — going — to — take — him away from me!” One look at her expression and the taxi driver, who had been considering taking up acquaintanceship where the other two had left off, changed his mind and slunk away. You don’t try to make dates with a tiger.

He took a deep belly breath of relief as he saw the guy in front push her off the car and nearly on her ear. “Thank God,” he said to himself, “she stays out of it!” They hadn’t, evidently, either one of them recognized her from the Club; Beefy had two or three, and the Long Island City one was where they did most of their hanging out when they did any. It had been chiefly a Long Island outfit from the beginning. But one peep from her just now, one “Johnny!” and she would have been sunk. He’d been scared stiff that she’d give herself away. It was okay now though. She’d look pretty in black, poor little monkey. She looked pretty in anything. He turned his head around and looked back at her through the diamond-shaped rear pane as they zoomed off, then covered himself by grating, “Damned little bum, trying to horn in! I like to die private.”

The one next to him gave him another slap, backhand across the eyes, and they filled with water. “You’re gonna,” he promised.

They followed St. Nick to 168th, cut west, and connected with Riverside. “Y’got pretty far uptown for a Brooklyn fella,” the one at the wheel mentioned, “but not far enough.”

“Is Ratsy gonna be burned!” laughed his mate. “The Big Boy sends him all the way to Buffalo on a phony tip day before yesterday. And Ratsy hates Buffalo, he went to Reform School there! And while he’s gone we snag the son right here!”

There wasn’t a car in sight on the Drive at that hour; the lights of the bridge were like a string of pearls hanging up in the air behind them. They turned south, slowed, and drew up almost at once. “As quick as all that?” thought Johnny, thankfully. “Then I’m not going to get the trimmings! There wouldn’t be time, out in the open like this.”

The one in front cut the dashboard lights, said: “Hurry it up now! We don’t wanna be hanging around here too long—”

“We shoulda brought that dame after all,” the other one said. “She coulda fronted for us.” He took his gun out, turned it, swung back, and brought the butt down on the side of Johnny’s head with a pounding crash. Johnny groaned but didn’t go right out, so he smashed him again with it, this time on the other side, then went on: “That gal coulda made it look like a necking party, while we’re standing still here like this.”

“Get busy, and we don’t need to be standing still!” was the answer. “Got the blanket? Fix it so it looks like he’s soused.”

The one in back took out copper wire from the side pocket, caught the limp figure’s wrists behind him, coiled it cruelly around them. The skin broke instantly and the strands of the wire disappeared under it. Then he did it to his ankles too. Then he propped him up in the corner, took the lap robe and tucked it around him up to his neck. He took out a bottle of whisky, palmed a handful, sloshed it across Johnny’s face, sprinkled the blanket with it. “Let’s go,” he muttered. “He smells like a still. He oughta be good for a hundred fifty traffic lights now!”

The lights went up, the driver kicked his foot down, and they arched away like a plane taking off. “It musta been great,” he lamented mournfully, “in the old days before they had traffic lights!”

“They had no organization in them days,” said his companion scornfully. “They went to jail like flies — even for cracking safes, mind ya! Take it slower, we’re getting downtown.”

Johnny came to between two red-hot branding irons just as they swerved out onto the express highway at Seventy-fourth. The outside of his mouth was free, but a strip of tape fastened to his upper gums clamped his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The only sounds he could make sounded like the mumblings of a drunk. He saw the black outline of the Jersey shore skimming by across the river.

They took Canal Street across, then followed the Bowery, which still showed signs of life; he knew it by the El pillars shuffling past. Then the wire lacework of one of the bridges, Brooklyn probably. A tug bleated dismally way under them. There hadn’t been, strictly speaking, any traffic lights all the way down; they’d all gone out hours ago. It was the street lights flickering in and out of the car they were on guard against. They had to slow up once, in downtown Brooklyn, for a street accident, and there must have been a cop near. They both got very talkative and solicitous all at once. “Head still going round and round, Johnny?” the one in front asked. “Never mind, you’ll be home in bed in no time now.”

“What he needs,” said the one in back, gun out under cover of the blanket, but not pointing at Johnny this time, “is a good strong cup o’ black coffee.”

“Looks like your friend can’t hold his liquor,” said a third voice, outside the car, and a face peered jocularly in at him, under a visor.

“Ing, ing, ing,” Johnny panted, sweat coursing down his face. He reared desperately toward the silhouette.

The face pulled back again. “Ouch, what a breath! I could get lit meself on that alone.”

“I told him not to mix his drinks.” They swerved out, then in again, sloshed through some water, sped on. The one next to him caught him by both cheeks with one hand, dragged them together, heaved his head back into the corner of the seat. His lower lip opened and blood came out. “That cop,” he observed calmly, “don’t know how lucky he is he didn’t get what you were trying to tell him!”

“Did he lamp the plates?” he asked the driver.

“I turned ’em over just as we came up.” He did something to the dashboard and there was a slapping sound from the rear fender.

The lights got fewer, then after awhile there weren’t any more; they were out in the wilds of Jamaica now, Beefy’s happy hunting ground. A big concrete building that looked like a warehouse or refrigerating plant showed up. “Well, anyway,” one of them said to Johnny, “we gave you your money’s worth; it wasn’t one of those short hauls!” When he looked closer he saw that Johnny was out again; he’d been lying on his mangled wrists at an acute angle ever since they’d left the place where they met the cop.

They drove into the building, car and all, and got him out between them, and a new guy took the wheel of the car and an elevator took it down below some place out of sight. Yet this wasn’t a garage. When Johnny Donovan regained consciousness for the second time that night, it was with the help of a fistful of shaved ice being held between his eyes. He was up in the loft of this building, a big barn of a place, half of it lost in shadows that the row of coned lights overhead couldn’t reach; it was cold as a tomb, sawdust on the floor, and a row of porcelain refrigerator doors facing him gleamed clinically white, dazzled the eyes.

Beefy Borden was there, with a white turtle-neck sweater under his coat jacket, perched on a tall three-legged stool, gargoyle-like. The two that had brought Johnny had turned their coat collars up against the cold, but him they promptly stripped to the waist as soon as he had opened his eyes. The skin on his stomach and back crawled involuntarily, half dead as he was, and contracted into goose pimples. They had left him upright for a moment, and his knees immediately caved under him, hit the sawdust. He held his spine straight by sheer will power and stayed that way; wouldn’t go down any further.

Beefy lit a cigarette, handed his two henchmen one, studied Johnny interestedly, seemingly without hatred. “So that’s how they look when they go straight,” he murmured. “Why, I thought I’d see something — pair of wings at least, or one of these here now hellos shining on top of his conk. I don’t notice anything, do you, boys? I wouldn’t gotten up at this hour and come all the way out here if I’da known.” All very playful and coy, with a wink for each one.

One of them jerked his head back by the hair, pried his mouth open, and tore out the tape. A little blood followed, from the lining of the checks. They took away the copper wire from his wrists next.

Beefy flicked ashes from his cigarette, drawled: “Well, I’ll tell you, I think he’s had enough, don’t you? We just set out to frighten him a little, didn’t we, boys? I think he’s learned his lesson. Whaddya say we let him have his clothes back and send him home?” He gave them each a long, meaning look so they got the idea. “Only first, of course, he’s gotta show the right spirit, ask for it in the proper way, say he’s sorry and all like that. Now suppose you crawl over here, right in front of me, and just ask, beg real hard — that’s all y’gotta do, and then we’ll call it quits.”

Johnny saw his foot twitch; knew it was loaded with a kick for his face when and if he did. It wasn’t the obvious phoniness of the offer that held him back, even if it had been genuine, even if it had been as easy as all that to get out of it — he still wouldn’t have done it. Life wasn’t that precious. Man has a soul — even a kid from nowhere whom nobody would miss, trapped in a refrigerating plant.

He writhed to his shackled feet and hobbled a little way toward Beefy. One of them was holding his coat and shirt up for bait, but Johnny didn’t even glance that way. He stared into the pig-eyes of the Big Shot. Then suddenly, without a word, he spat blood and saliva full into his face, “That’s the cleanest thing ever touched you,” he said hoarsely. “Gimme death, so I won’t have to keep on seeing and smelling you! Those are my last words. Now try to get another sound out of me!”

They knocked him down flat on his back, and he just lay there looking at the ceiling. Beefy got down from t he stool very slowly, face twitching all over and luminous with rage. He wiped the back of his hand across one cheek, motioned with the other. “Hand me that belt of his.” They put it in his hand. He paid it around, caught it at the opposite end from the thin, flat silver buckle. “Go down below and bring up a sack of salt on the elevator with you.” His eyes never left Johnny’s face. He addressed the remaining one: “Put your foot on his neck and hold him down. When I tell you to, you can turn him over on the other side.” Then he spoke directly to Johnny: “Now listen while you’re still able to, listen what’s coming to you. You’re gonna be beaten raw with your own belt. The salt — that’s so you’ll know it. That’ll keep the blood in too, so you’ll last awhile, an hour or two anyway. Stinging and smarting to death.”

Johnny didn’t answer. Beefy stripped off his coat, swung the buckled strap back in a long hissing arc, brought it over and down again with the velocity of a bullet. His assistant steadied his foot against the spasm that coursed through what he was holding down. There wasn’t a human sound in the place from then on.

It wouldn’t be listed in the phone book, of course, so she didn’t even bother looking it up. Every second counted. The wheels of that death car were racing around like mad under him this very minute, and here she was stuck way up here on the edge of creation, miles from anywhere. But that bloated swine that was behind all this, he had a home somewhere, he lived somewhere in this town, there was somewhere she could reach him. Oh, it was too late by now to beg or plead for Johnny’s life — the ride had started already — and even if it hadn’t been, she knew how much good it would have done her, but at least she could put a bullet through him!

The police? Weren’t they those men in blue that directed traffic at crossings? They’d find Johnny’s body eventually — that was about where they fitted in. And even then — that Druckman case awhile back, for instance. There was only one man who could stop what was going to happen in time, and that was the man who had started it. Thank God, she knew that much at least; knew which direction the blow had come from. She had wangled the whole set-up out of Johnny weeks ago.

She darted out into the roadway, where anything on wheels would have to stop for her, and began to run crazily along. A pair of heads twinkled across from left to right at the next intersection, half a block down, and she screamed at them, brought them around in a half circle to a stop. It was a private machine with a “girl scout” in it. “Wanna lift?”

She came up panting. “Fifty-eighth Street — oh, for the love of God, get me down there!”

“Whoa! That’s not the right spirit. Y’wanna look at this thing a little more sociably. I’m not in the hacking business—” But she’d lied onward already.

She got her cab a minute later, it had turned in toward her. “The Wicked Nineties,” she strangled. “No, never mind your meter. I’ll give you twenty dollars flat, twenty-five, anything, only get me there. Cut loose!” She took out the hard-earned money that was to have gotten them to Miami, shook it at him. “It’s a matter of life and death, d’you understand?”

She took out the gun, fixed it, while they lurched down the endless lengths of St. Nicholas Avenue. Bannerman, her boss, Beefy’s “front” down there — he’d know; he’d be able to tell her where to reach him, if she had to shoot him to get it out of him.

“Good boy!” she breathed fervently as he tore into the park at 110th instead of taking Fifth. Fifth was straight and the park had curves, but he knew what he was doing; you could make any speed you wanted to in there at this dawn hour. When they came out at Fifty-ninth, the street lights had just gone out all over town. Two two-wheeled skids more and they were in front of where she worked, not a light showing outside of it any more.

“Here’s thirty,” she said, vaulting out. “Now stay there, wait — you’ve got to take me some place else yet! You’ll get all the rest of this, if you’ll only wait!”

She ran down the long carpeted foyer, past her own picture on the walls, burst into the room beyond like an avenging angel. The last customer was out, the lights low, the tables stacked, the scrubwomen down on their knees. If he’d gone already, Bannerman, if she’d missed him! His office door flew open at her push, so he was still around somewhere. He wasn’t in there; she could hear him washing his hands in his little private cubbyhole beyond. He heard her, but she beat him to the lavatory door, locked him in from the outside.

“Hey, you!” He began to pound.

She went through the desk like a cyclone, dropping papers and whole drawers around her. She couldn’t find it; it wasn’t left lying around like that. Then she saw he’d hung his coat up on a hook before he went in; it was in a little private memorandum book in the inside pocket of that. Both of them, the home address and the telephone number. Just the initials, B. B. But that was it. Way over in Brooklyn somewhere.

She grabbed up the hand-set and began to hack away at it. Dead. More grief, the club operator had gone home long ago. She picked up Bannerman’s bunch of keys, found the one to the office door, slipped out, and locked that up after her too. A minute later she heard a crash as he busted down the lavatory partition. She was already around at the main switchboard off the foyer, plugging in her call herself. Not for nothing had she once done a stretch of that.

No answer — but then it was a 5 A.M. call. “Keep it up, operator, keep it up!” She turned her head and yelled at one of the terrified scrubwomen: “Keep away from that door, you! He’s drunk as an owl in there!”

Suddenly there was a woman’s voice in her ears, sleepy, frightened too. “Hello, who — who do you want?”

“Lemme talk to Borden. Borden, quick! Got an important message for him!”

“He’s not here—”

“Well, where can I reach him! Hurry, I tell you, I’m not kidding!”

“He didn’t say where he was going — he never does — he—”

“Who is this? Speak up, can’t you, you fool! No one’s gonna bite you!”

“This is his wife. Who are you? How’d you know where he lives? No one ever rings him here—”

“I’m the girl with the dreamy eyes! And I’m coming over there and give the message myself!”

The driver was still turning the three tens over and over when she landed in back of him. “Ocean Avenue — and just as fast as ever!”

Bannerman got to the club entrance all mussed-looking just as they went into high. Breaking down two doors in succession had spoiled the part in his hair.

It was a skyscraper apartment house on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue, the number that had been in Bannerman’s memo book, and naturally he’d have the roof — she didn’t need the night operator to tell her that. She gave the hackman another thirty. “Now wait some more. I know you think I’m crazy, but — but maybe you once loved someone too!”

“It ain’t my business,” he said agreeably, and began thumbing his sixty lovingly.

She wasn’t coming back this time, at least she didn’t think so then, but it wouldn’t hurt to have him handy. “Certainly I’m expected,” she told the hallman. He didn’t like the hour, but he’d already made a half-turn toward the second of two elevators. “Well, just a minute until I find out.” He went over to the house phone.

It was Beefy’s private lift, no doors in the shaft up to the penthouse, and it was automatic; by keeping her thumb pressed to the starter he couldn’t reverse it and get her down again. He’d bring cops in right away; they were probably eating out of Beefy’s hand for miles around here, too.

The elevator slide let her right out into the apartment, and the hallman was already buzzing like mad from below to warn them. Borden’s young wife was heading for the instrument from the room beyond, in pattering bare feet, as Jean got there. She’d thrown a mink coat over a nightgown. She stopped dead for a minute, then went right on again under pressure.

“Don’t make me do something I don’t want to,” Jean said softly. “Just say it’s all right; that you were expecting me. Well, go on, say it!” She motioned with the little gun.

“ ’Sallright, was expecting her,” the woman slobbered into the house phone. Jean clicked it off for her.

“Now, where is he?”

“Uh-uh-uh,” the Borden woman sputtered, stalling for time.

“Come on! Can’t you tell by my face not to fool around with me?”

She didn’t know. He’d been gone since about ten that evening. He never told her anything about his business.

“Business — ha!” There was more to be leery of in her laugh than there had been in her anger. “He’s got my man in a spot — right now, this very minute — and I’m going to pay him back in his own coin! Either you help me head him off in time or you get it yourself!”

“He doesn’t do things like that, not my Beefy. You’ve got him wrong. They’ve given you a bum steer. Now wait a minute, honey; don’t lose your nice ways! Honest, if I knew where he was I’d tell you. One of his club managers, Bannerman, he might know.” Her loosened hair fell down over her face.

“That’s what I’m thinking too,” Jean said curtly. “I just came from Bannerman, but I didn’t have any — inducement — then, to get him to tell me. We’ll try our luck now — but not from here. Come on. You’re coming with me — back to my own place! Pick up that house phone! What’s the guy’s name down there? Jerry? Say, Jerry, will you come up here a minute? Take the public elevator.”

The gun raised her to her feet like a lever. “Jerry, will you come up here a minute? Take the public elevator.” Then she said craftily, “Yes.”

Jean’s hand sealed the orifice like a flash. “He asked you if there was anything wrong, didn’t he?” She raised the gun. “Make it, Yes, we think we see a man outside on the terrace.” She tore her away from it. “Now, come on!” She began pulling her after her to the waiting private elevator.

“My feet are bare!” the captive wailed.

There was a pair of galoshes standing near the elevator. Jean scuffed them into the car. “Stick ’em in those going down!” Further back, in a recess, a red-glass knob had lighted up warningly.

They started down. Again Jean kept the ball of her thumb on the button. He couldn’t cut them off from above. The lobby was deserted. She pulled Mrs. Borden, in nightgown, galoshes, and mink coat, into the cab after her, “Manhattan!” she clipped at the avaricious driver. “And this time you’re really going to get dough!”

It was getting lighter by the minute now, but was still too early for anything to be open. She stopped him at an all-night drug store down near Borough Hall, hauled her furred freight in after her. “This woman’s real sick,” she threw at the sleepy clerk, and the two of them crushed into one phone booth, Mrs. Borden on the inside.

She didn’t know where to reach Bannerman at his home, any more than her prisoner did (and she believed her), but she was praying he’d stayed on at the Nineties on account of those two smashed doors and to see if she’d lifted anything from his office. She rang the club. He answered himself.

“Now listen, and listen carefully! Get Beefy Borden on the wire from where you are — I don’t care where he is, but get him — and keep the line open, waiting! I’m going to call you again in ten minutes, from some place else. You better have him when I do! And he better have Johnny Donovan still alive for me!”

“I don’t know whatcha talking about,” he tried to say. “Who’s Johnny Donovan? And for that matter, who’s Beefy Borden?”

“He’s thinks I’m ribbing!” she raged at Mrs. Borden. “Tell him about it yourself!”

“Dave, for God’s sake, do what she says!” the haggard blonde croaked into the transmitter. “It’s June, can’t you hear me? June! She’s taken me off with her in a cab and she’s got a gun on me!”

Jean pushed her aside. “Do you know who that was or don’t you? Ten minutes,” she warned him, and hung up. They went hustling out again, Jean’s right fist buried deep in the rich mink, and got back into the cab again.

They lived on Fifty-eighth, she and Johnny; at least he had until two weeks ago. All his things were still up there, and it had broken her heart nightly for fourteen nights now just to look at them. Just one-room-and, but in a fairly slick place, the Parc Concorde.

She brought out all the rest of the Miami money, spread it out fanwise in her hand, offered it to the driver. “Help yourself and forget all about what you’ve seen tonight!” Mrs. Borden was too near prostration by now to budge, even without a gun on her.

“One from each end and one from the middle,” he gloated, picking them out, “and I get a radio put in.”

She crammed the rest of it back into her bag. There was still more than enough left to get them to Miami — the thing was, would she get the chance to use it?

Too late, in the elevator, June Borden came to. “Don’t let her take me in there! She’s — I dunno what she’s gonna do!”

“All this row just because I bring you home to put you under a cold shower! You will mix your drinks!” She slipped a ten into the hallman’s hand.

He grinned reassuringly. “You’ll be all right in the morning, lady.” He gave Jean the office. “Mrs. Donovan would not think of hurting ya, wouldja, Mrs. Donovan? You just do what she tells ya!”

Jean closed the door after them and locked it. “Sit down in that chair and let’s find out if you live or die.”

She got the Wicked Nineties back, calmly stripping off her hat and coat while she waited. She opened her bag with one hand and took the gun out.

Bannerman had a voice waiting for heron another wire, hut they couldn’t connect the two lines. She hadn’t thought of that in time. So near and yet so far! “Plug me through the club switchboard!” she rasped.

“I don’t know how, I never worked it!” He tried it and she found herself talking to a produce market up in the Bronx. She got him back again, her heart turning inside out. “Is he alive — only tell me that, is he alive?”

“I can’t swing it while both lines stay open. Gimme your number, then hang up a minute, let them call you—”

Mrs. Borden came over, starting to cry. “Dave, Dave, do what she says! You gotta get Beefy, I tell you!”

“Listen,” Jean said. “Pull out his plug on your callboard, got that? Then cut mine into the socket you got his out of — that’s all you’ve got to do!”

There was a click, and then another voice came on. It was Borden’s. She knew it just by that one “Who the hell wazzat?” he’d thrown after her in the club alley one night. It echoed hollowly, as though he was in some sort of a big hall or arena. “All right, twist. What’s all this jalappy you’re handing out?”

“You’ve got Johnny Donovan there with you. I’ve got June Borden here with me. Do we swap, or don’t we?”

“Trying to do, throw a scare into me? You’ll wish you’d never been born when I get through with—”

“I know you’re checking this number like blazes while you’re trying to string me along. Listen, you could be right at the door now and you wouldn’t be in time to save her. Matter, don’t you believe I’ve got her here? Don’t you believe Bannerman? All right, help yourself.” She motioned her prisoner over. “Sell yourself!”

“Max! Max!” his wife bleated. “I’m alone with her here — she came and took me out of my bed. Max, don’t you know my voice? Max, you’re not gonna let me — Hou-hou-hou—” She dropped the phone and went staggering around in a sort of drunken circle, hands heeled to her eyes.

Jean picked it up again. His voice was sort of strained now. “Now, wait a minute. Don’t you know you can’t get away with—”

“You’re gonna hear the shot right over this wire—” Then she heard something that went through her like a knife. The scream of a man in mortal agony sounded somewhere in the background, muffled, blurred in transmission. She moaned in answer to it.

Borden said, almost hysterically, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that wasn’t him, that was one of my own men — he, he got hurt here!”

“Then put him on the phone,” site said. “I’ll count five. Come over here, you! I’m holding the gun right at her!” She began to count, slowly, remorselessly. The woman was half-dead already, with sheer fright.

She could hear his breathing across the wire, hoarse, rasping. The tension was almost unendurable; she could feel her mind slipping.

“Four,” she heard herself say. “Better put him on the phone quick!”

“I can’t,” came from the other end. “He’s gone — half an hour ago. You’re — too late!” There was a choked terror about the way he said it that told her it was true. She let the receiver drop to the end of its cord like a shot.

His wife read her doom in her eyes. She gave a single, long-drawn scream of nameless terror that hung in the air. Then the pounding at the door told Jean why he’d come out with it like that just now, made no bones about it; they’d traced her fast, all right. They’d gotten here already — her address was on tap at the club — but just the same, he’d timed himself wrong. They weren’t in yet, there was still a door between, and a pin can fall on a cartridge much quicker than a door can swing open! She’d been half an hour too late — but he’d been half a minute too soon! They’d both lost, and the winner was the same old winner — death.

A passkey turned in the door and a voice from the other world groaned, “Jean!”

She shivered all over and turned to look, and the hallman was holding Johnny up in the doorway. He was naked under a coat, and his feet were hobbled with copper wire, but his eyes were alive and he groaned it again, “Jean!” as the man brought him into the room, leaning on him. He’d kept his word, he’d stayed alive!

She saw through the open coat what they’d done to him, and choked back a scream. “They strapped the hell out of me,” he said, and smiled a little, “but — but — I left before the finals—” And he fainted.

“Whisky!” she said. “Bandages — they’re in there! Quick!”

Yet it wasn’t as bad as it had looked. Cut-up wrists and ankles, a flaming chest and abdomen — but he’d stayed alive, he’d come back from a ride. The very same maroon death car was at the door right now! She pitched the gun into a corner. Mrs. Borden was sitting there snuffling a little, slowly calming down. She didn’t make a move to go; seemed to be lost in thought — unpleasant thought.

He opened his eyes again, gave a deep sigh, like pain was a habit by this time. She gave him the cigarette he asked for, then went ahead washing and bandaging. Tears were slowly coursing down her cheeks, tears of gratitude. “No — no cops,” she said to the hallman. “You see, it wouldn’t do us any good. We’re going to Miami. Can you make Penn Station with me, darling?”

He didn’t tell her what they had intended doing; just told her what they’d actually done. “They kept sprinkling salt, as the belt buckle opened the skin. J gave a heave, I guess, I don’t know; threw the one that was holding me down with his foot off balance, sort of forward. The buckle coming down caught him, tore his eye out. He went mad with pain, went for Beefy; picked up a sharp knife they had waiting for me. They had a terrible time with him. My arms were free, but my feet weren’t. I kept rolling over and over — just to ease the burning at first — then I rolled right onto this flat freight-elevator that had no sides, pulled the rope and went all the way down, into the basement without knowing it. The car was there they’d brought me in, and the mechanic was dozing. I cracked him with a wrench, dragged myself in, drove it onto the elevator and managed to get off with it at street level. Then I drove it all the way back here with a blanket around me, so I wouldn’t get pinched for indecent exposure. The open air sort of kept me going—”

“It’s my fault. Are you sorry,” she sobbed, “you went straight?”

“No,” he murmured. “It was worth it — even if I hadn’t come back. Just help me with a pair of socks and shoes, and I can still make the train with you—”

Mrs. Borden was saying, in a strange smoldering voice, “I never thought he’d go that far — do that to any human being. At home he wouldn’t hurt a fly—” She covered her eyes suddenly, as if to shut out the memory of Johnny’s frayed, reddened skin before the bandages hid it from sight. “He — he would’ve killed you, if you hadn’t gotten away!”

“That,” said Johnny tersely, “seems to have been the chief idea.”

“Why?” she wanted to know.

“Because I knew too much.”

She seemed to be talking to herself more than to the two of them. “Oh, I’m not a plaster saint, God knows,” she groaned. “I knew our money wasn’t straight. I’ve always known it. Too much of it too quickly. I knew he was in beer back in the Twenties, and I know that lately he’s been running clubs and sending girls on South American vaudeville tours—”

“Is that the new name for it?”

“But still and all,” she went on, “I never thought he’d try to take someone’s life. Oh, if someone doesn’t stop him, he’ll kill someone yet!”

All Johnny said was, “Yet?”

She stood up suddenly, staring at him. “Then you mean he has — already? Me and the kids, we been living on blood money! I guess I know the reason now why so many times the morning paper has whole columns torn out of it when I come to read it.” She stared at the mink coat; suddenly sloughed it off, horrified. “What’s that trying to tell me? It’s turning red, look at it, bright red!” she screamed. “I’ve been living in the same house with a killer — sleeping with a murderer! He’s gonna end up in the chair yet—”

“He’s ten years overdue,” Johnny muttered. “It’s pretty late in the day to—”

“But it’s not too late! I love him! I don’t care what he’s done! I’ll save him from that. Anything but that! I’ll put him where he’s safe! If I can’t have him, the chair won’t get him either!” She picked up Jean’s phone. “Get me the district attorney’s office,” she sobbed.

Jean was buttoning her husband’s coat. “Lean on me, darling,” she whispered. “We’ve got a date with ourselves down in Miami.”

“Mrs. Maximilian Borden,” the woman at the phone was saying as they limped out of the room arm-in-arm and quietly closed the door behind them. “You tell the attorney I want a personal interview with him — in strict confidence!”