Shank let them sleep. He let himself into the hotel room, walked to the dresser and removed the capsules of heroin from the drawer. He seated himself at the table and took out the things he had purchased. Carefully he opened each capsule and diluted it with the milk sugar he had bought. He converted the thirty capsules into ninety capsules, each one-third as strong as the original ones had been. His investment was quickly tripled. He had three times the capital he had started with.
Of course, each capsule was now worth one-third of what it had originally been worth. It was, in the junkie’s jargon, beat stuff. But the buyers did not have to know this. They would discover this only when they would use the capsules and derive a lesser kick from them than what they had been accustomed to. By that time Shank and Joe and Anita would be on their way, and goodbye Buffalo.
It was a bad town, anyway. A dull gray town. Shank would connect now, and sell the ninety capsules as quickly as possible, and then the three would blow town. So long, Buffalo. Later for you, suckers. He slipped out of the room without waking Joe and Anita and took the heroin to the customers.
They were awake when he returned. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s move. We’ve got to get out of town.”
“What’s the matter?” Joe said.
“Nothing,” he said. “No more horse. All sold.”
“How?”
“Sold it for three bucks a cap,” he said. “A good price. Junk comes high in Buffalo. I was selling for half price. The buyers were very hungry. I holed up in a little bar in the middle of Spadesville and the trade was fast and thick. Half a dozen customers and we were all out and the store was closed. So we have to scram in a hurry.”
“Why the rush?”
Shank explained the customers would be ready to kill him in a very short time. He explained that he had sold one-third strength heroin for a heavy price, all things considered, and a lot of people would be mad at him when they would discover they had been taken.
“So we run,” he explained. “I got better than two and a half bills. Ninety caps, bargain rate of three bucks a cap. We can buy a car. Not the best short in the world but one that will move for us. Let’s go.”
On the way to the used car lot Joe bought an evening paper. The Buffalo paper had the story on a back page. Detective First Grade Peter J. Samuelson was dead as a lox. The police were searching for his killers.
Shank bought a seven-year-old Chevy for two hundred dollars. It was worth less than half of that but the dealer knew something was wrong. Shank had to pay his price, and did.
The car was a lemon. It rattled at fifty-five miles an hour. The brakes were in bad shape. The clutch could not work smoothly. The gears ground half the time. But it would do.
Joe drove. He had no license but neither did Shank nor Anita. Joe knew how to drive so he drove. He took Route 20 out of town and headed for Cleveland. Cleveland would be safe for a day or two. They could scrape together a little more money. Head for Chicago. Anita sat next to him in the front seat. Shank slept in the back. Joe drove slowly and steadily. He could not have exceeded the speed limit if he had wanted to, and he did not want to. Not when he had no license. Not when the three were wanted for murder. Murder.
They stopped twice on the way. They had hotdogs in Lodi and hamburgers in Ashtabula. Joe drove all the way until they were in Cleveland. He found a place to leave the car and they looked for a hotel. They found one at 13th and Paine. It bore a startling resemblance to the one they had occupied in Buffalo. Again they paid in advance. Again the room was a mess. Joe was tired from the drive and went to sleep at once. Anita stayed with Joe while Shank went out to find a beanery for a meal. On the way he stopped at a newsstand selling out-of-town papers, where he bought a copy of the New York Times.
It carried the story.
The cops knew too much. They had determined that two men and a girl had been involved in the murder. They had descriptions of Shank and Joe. They had lifted fingerprints from the apartment. They had one name— Shank Marsten. They did not have Joe’s name, or at least it had not been released by the newspapers so far.
The police further figured the trio had left town; consequently, a state-wide alarm was out. There was a report the three had showed in Buffalo. Shank read that part and cursed quietly and methodically. He wondered how the cops had ascertained that. He wondered how much else they knew.
Shank ordered a chopped steak with home fries and a cup of coffee. The meat was good, the potatoes a little greasy, the coffee weak. He ate everything on his plate and drank two cups of coffee.
He tipped the waitress. He gave her a smile and she returned it. She was a pretty girl. Light red hair. And a good pair the white uniform could not hide. A nice rear end. He wondered if he could make a pass at her. He decided not to, even though she looked as if she would be fun in the sack. Too risky.
He smiled again and she gave him back such a good, wide, toothy smile he knew she would be flat on her back the minute he asked her. He wondered what she would say if she would find out he was a vicious killer. That was what the papers called him. A vicious killer. The waitress would be scared green.
“I get off at one,” she told him.
“I’ll be back,” he said. Let her think so if she wanted to, Shank thought. Let her wait—for a vicious killer. He left the beanery and wandered back to the hotel. A vicious killer, he chuckled to himself. He remembered how it had felt, killing the cop. A strange feeling. Equal parts of power and emptiness. A funny sensation.
Now the trio was running. Running fast and running scared. In a day or so the cops would know about the car. It would have to be ditched, Shank knew. Maybe trade it in for another one. Where would they get the money?
A vicious killer. He did not feel very vicious. He remembered the way he had moved in, using the girl as a shield, his knife moving in on the cop. He remembered the funny feeling of power and emptiness. He wondered if he would have to kill again, and how it would feel a second time.
The trio stayed close to home. Two would remain in the hotel room, sleeping or waiting, while the other would prowl the gray streets of Cleveland. Shank looked for people he knew, racket people, junk people. He was on the make for some sort of a connection—and came up with nothing.
And time bled them. The hotel took its cut and the diners took their cut. And the money went—quickly, too quickly, while the car sat alone on a quiet street as the trio waited for the time to head for Chicago. Each reacted in his own way. Shank was always searching for a way, a chance, a shot in the endless dark. He tried the bars in the Negro section where horns wailed all night long and sleek dark women wiggled their hips in open invitation. He tried the waterfront, the lake shore, where bars overflowed with dock workers and where the mouths of the whores were bloody with lipstick. He tried the waiting places—the bus station, the railroad terminal, the park.
He came up with nothing.
Joe retreated to a fantasy world. He spent his money on paperback books. He bought the books five or six at a time and took them back to the room. There he read one after another, letting the prose draw a curtain shutting out reality. When he spoke to Shank or to Anita his voice was loose and easy, flip and cool, an absolute denial of running and hiding. His fingers turned the pages of book after meaningless book, and his eyes vacantly scanned words to hurry on.
Anita turned into herself. But she could find neither salvation nor escape from reality. She, like Joe, spent the bulk of her time in the small room. But she did not read, although the many books Joe had discarded lay about her. Instead, she sat on the bed and stared at nothing. She spoke rarely, and then only in answer to a question from either Shank or Joe. She thought her own thoughts without attempting to share them. They were not happy thoughts. But they were hers, and she ran them again and again.
It was evening. Joe was lying on a bed, book in his hand, a western entitled
“We got to move,” he said. He was holding a copy of the
“They made the car,” he said. “They got license, description, the works. They know we headed for Cleveland. We got to get out of here.”
“We take the car, man?”
Shank shook his head, impatient with Joe. “They made the car, damn it. They maybe already found it. They maybe have it all staked out just waiting for us to come back. We don’t touch the car. We don’t go near that car. We get the first bus to Chicago and we leave this town far behind. That’s what we do.”
“Now?” Joe said.
