Dummy swallowed nervously, making a sound like a baby burping. Susie gave a violent start and jerked up the knife. Slick looked over at Dummy sleepily.
'Don't make so much noise,' he said in a slow lazy voice.
They sat waiting. The silence got on Susie's nerves. The windows were closed against the heat, and the room was in the shade. But the air was motionless, and a haze of marijuana smoke collected about Susie's head.
Dummy could sense the silence, although he couldn't hear it. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and his head turned slowly from side to side as though controlled by an eccentric gear. He looked at the knife in Susie's hand; his gaze traveled upward to Susie's face, then turned and ran along the wall, passed over pieces of furniture and focused for a time on Slick's face; it traveled down the length of Slick's reclining body, then slowly returned over the same orbit.
Slick gave himself twenty minutes for the hop to settle comfortably in his head. Then he came suddenly to life.
'Now,' he said briskly, sitting up.
He picked up the automatic pistol, ejected the clip, saw that it was fully loaded, looked at the cartridge in the chamber and reinserted the clip. The safety was on; he snapped it off and laid the pistol back atop the table within easy reach.
'What do you think of this?' he asked in a conversational tone of voice, took the first of the three pages from Dummy's scratch pad and held it out toward Susie.
Susie stared at it. His babyish face did not change expression. No intelligence showed in his dilated eyes.
The play took Dummy by surprise. He hadn't expected that development. He had overplayed his hand. Now he was caught running a bluff, facing two armed men-and all he had were his fists. The fists of a prize fighter are considered lethal weapons in New York, but they won't stand up to a gun and a knife.
His body froze and his intestines knotted into a hard lump of gristle. Except for his gaze jerking back and forth from the sheet of paper to Susie's face, he might have been petrified. Now was the time when he needed all his wits, but his brain felt frozen, too.
'Here, rockhead, take it and read it,' Slick said to Susie. 'And get your brains thawed out; you're going to need them.'
Susie stood up slowly, stepped over to Slick and took the paper in his left hand. He looked vaguely puzzled. The dead marijuana butt was glued to his bottom lip like a shred of stained paper, and he held the open knife in his right hand like a riding crop. From a sitting position he looked bigger than he actually was; his shoulders looked a mile wide, and his legs resembled building piles.
His lips moved as his slow, drugged mind spelled out the words: the punk is doublecrossin you.
He frowned and looked down at Slick. The cold, repelling expression on Slick's face made him blink. It was obvious that he didn't get it. He read the line again.
'Do it mean me?' he asked incredulously.
Slick didn't answer.
Susie's gaze swung to Dummy. He pointed with the forefinger of the hand in which he held the note as though aiming a pistol. 'He wrote it,' he said thickly.
All of a sudden he went berserk. His babyish face contorted with insensate rage. He leaped at Dummy and cut at his face with a slashing motion. It went so fast no one was prepared. The big brutal blade moved faster than sight.
A hair-raising noise issued from Dummy's tongueless mouth, sounding like a wild horse screaming in terror. But his body moved automatically from an instinct born in the ring. He gripped the arms of the chair and pushed back with both feet, shifting his full weight to his shoulder blades braced against the back of the chair, and kicked out with his feet tight together. The canvas sneakers didn't carry the impact that hard-soled shoes would have, but the pushing power did the trick. They caught Susie at the top of the thighs and sent him crashing backward into the television set as the arc of the slashing blade passed within a fraction of an inch of Dummy's eyes.
With the same motion, Dummy came down on his feet as Susie bounced from the heavy television set as though his flesh were made of rubber. Susie came in, stabbing sideways in strictly an amateur's thrust, and Dummy wove beneath it and right-handed him in the solar plexus. Spit-drenched air spewed from Susie's stretched mouth in a rush of whining sound, and his eyes bugged out.
'Cut it out,' Slick said in a level voice as he picked up the automatic pistol.
Dummy didn't see him, and Susie didn't hear him. Susie moved in a rage that didn't need breath and stabbed backhanded at Dummy's crouching figure. It was a desperate, unbalanced, half-aimed thrust, but it would have caught Dummy in the back of the neck if he hadn't made a blind, headlong dive. He dove into the cocktail table and smashed to the floor, landing, belly flat, on top of the broken glass.
'Cut it out, I said,' Slick repeated without moving from his seat. He acted as though he had seen a lot of fights and had command of the situation.
But still Susie didn't hear him. The blood was beating in his ears, and his vision was blurred. He doubled to the floor, retching, his neck muscles swollen and corded from his effort to get his breath.
For a moment the tableau held.
At that moment the woman opened the door and took one step into the room. Her gaze darted about as though to locate the source of the commotion, but she didn't look at anyone in particular.
A sudden pool of silence dropped into the room like an air pocket in a raging storm, and she said in an anxious voice, 'Honey, you all right?'
Lying on his belly, Dummy read her lips and felt his hair rise.
Susie got his breath with a sound like hissing steam and straightened up. He saw Dummy and started toward him. Dummy pushed to his feet and ran, doubled over, past the woman and through the door. She didn't look at him, but when he ran past her she screamed.
'I'll kill you,' Slick said in a flat, absolute voice.
Susie pulled up as though he had run full tilt into an invisible wall.
'Put that knife away and sit down,' Slick ordered. Then he said to the woman, 'It's all right, baby.'
Susie folded the knife, stuck it into the watch pocket of his corduroy pants, went back to his chair and sat down. But he wasn't looking at Slick; he was looking at the woman and frowning.
'The other one,' the woman said hesitantly.
'He's all right,' Slick said, adding as though by way of explanation, 'he's a dummy.'
'Oh,' the woman said.
Dummy could be heard working with the locks on the outside door.
The woman returned through the door she had entered and closed it behind her. She lay on the bed, reached over to the bed table and turned up the small gilt radio she had been listening to.
Dummy had passed through the room to the hall, but he couldn't get the outside door open.
Finally Slick got up from his seat and went through the other door and down the hall, carrying the pistol loosely at his side. He touched Dummy on the shoulder and said, 'You can't get out without a key.'
It was too dark in the hall for Dummy to read his lips, but Dummy knew what he wanted. He turned, walked docilely ahead of Slick back to the front room and resumed his seat.
Slick returned to the chaise longue, ignoring the broken table.
'Let's don't have any more of that,' he said. 'It disturbs baby.' He placed the automatic on the floor beside him, then took the other two pages from Dummy's pad and held them out toward Susie.
'Now read these and let's talk about it,' he said.
Susie got up, took the pages, sat down and read them, his lips moving as he spelled out the words.
'Well, what about it?' Slick demanded.
'About what?' Susie muttered sullenly.
'Where's the money?'
'I ain't talking in front of this dummy,' Susie said. 'He's a stool pigeon.'
'So what?'
Susie began to puff up; his neck began swelling as though he were choking, and his cheeks puffed out. 'Look, man, what is you trying to do?' he challenged. 'You and him ain't trying nothing like a frame on me, is you?'
