‘Yeah. So anyways T went by Tillie the Teller and got a hundred bucks and I’m here now, right up the street from ...‘
‘Nosh, don’t move. Get back in your car and wait right there. I’m on my way.’
‘But he’s gonna leave at seven-thirty and it’s —‘
‘Nosh, you’re not listening! Don’t go near the fuckin’ place. Stay there. Wait for me, okay?’
‘. . . Well, okay. ..‘
‘Nosh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You stay there, you hear me?’
‘Okay.’
‘Gimme fifteen minutes. I’m leaving now.’
The Nosh hung up and stepped out of the phone booth. He paced back and forth in front of the car for several minutes, watching the building.
He ambled-up Twelfth Street to the front of the building. There were no lights. The street was black, the streetlamps broken or burned out.
If the canary splits, The Nosh was thinking, I can at least nail him when he comes out.
Paint curled from the windowsills of the three-storey building and broken windows stared bleakly out at the dark street. Here and there lights flickered dimly behind old blankets.
The pits. The absolute pits, thought The Nosh.
He stood at the doorway, waving his light around, checking it out.
A furry night scavenger dashed from the doorway into the sanctuary of the bushes. It crouched there, peering out, its amber eyes glittering in the beam of the flashlight.
The Nosh stamped his foot at it and the creature ran off up the street, its ugly hairless tail dragging behind it.
He turned the light back to the doorway and approached it. The front door was gone. Inside was a small vestibule.
The inside door was propped open by a cement block. The vestibule was a litter of empty wine bottles in brown paper sacks, broken glass, crushed beer cans. Someone had dropped a sack of garbage down the stairwell. It lay just inside the main door, a splash of refuse, well nibbled-over.
The Nosh shuddered.
There were sounds inside the building, but he could not believe that people actually lived there.
Night creatures scurried into cracks in the wall. A twenty-five-watt bulb cast dim shadows on the stairwell, which smelled of rotten carpeting and sour cooking. The Nosh patted the tape in his inside pocket for reassurance and stood at the bottom of the stairs. High up, towards the third floor, the hallway lights were burned out. Somewhere in the building a radio blared Static and country music. A child was crying behind one of the doors.
At first he hardly heard the voice. He thought it was the radio or something moving in the shadows or his imagination. He looked up into the darkness.
‘Abrams...’
A whisper, barely audible.
He went up a couple of steps and listened.
Nothing.
He Looked at his watch. Another five minutes and Sharky would be there.
‘Abrams...’
The Nosh looked up again and pointed the finger of light into the blackness.
‘Down here,’ he said.
Nothing.
He went up to the first floor. The child stopped crying and started to laugh. A woman’s nasal voice joined Dolly Parton on the country-music station. The Nosh felt more secure. How could there be any danger in a building where children were laughing?
He went to the second floor.
‘Up here Abrams ...‘
‘Who’s there?’
Silence.
The stairs groaned with age as he climbed to the third floor and stood at the head of the steps in the darkness, probing the dank hallway with his Light. Apartment 3-B was at the end of the hail, the number painted sloppily on the door with house paint. He walked slowly towards it and stood outside the apartment.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
