Somebody Owes Me Money

26

Five P.M. of a freezing windy Sunday in late January, the sky a solid mass of gray clouds seven miles thick, the thin vague daylight already fading toward twilight, the temperature somewhere in the teens, and where am I? Standing on a fire escape four stories up in my shirt sleeves with gunmen shouting Stop at me. Not to mention the crease in the side of my head where I’ve already been laid low by one bullet.

The thing is, we’d been more or less safe up till now because nobody had really known what was going on, everybody had been confused and had wanted to find out which end was up before doing anything irreversible like bumping off witnesses. But now Napoli and Droble were working it all out in the kitchen, and whether they succeeded in reaching an entente or not was unimportant, because either way Abbie and I were about to become extraneous. We knew too much to be let go and too little to be kept around, and that left only one choice. Ergo, the fire escape.

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.