Terry couldn’t actually see Sulla from the bed, but he knew he was doing these things because he had been doing them steadily for hours. He didn’t seem to tire from his position on the hard, straight chair. No doubt his fat hips and buttocks were adequate cushioning, making him impervious to discomfort in the area.
After a while, Terry got up from the bed and swept an arm in circles above his head in the darkness until his hand contacted a hanging string. He pulled the string, and a 60-watt bulb came to feeble life near the ceiling. Moving to the open door, he looked across the living room to the tilted Sulla. Red lips parted wetly over gleaming teeth. The shiv held still, arrested in its useless work.
“It’s eleven o’clock,” Terry said. “This going to be a formal execution, maybe? Death at dawn and all that stuff?”
Sulla shook with silent laughter, his belly bouncing above the handy gun.
“Nothing so nice, Terence, boy. You don’t rate any ceremony. Like I said, the boss is busy, and he wants to see you before you go. I think maybe he wants to see that you don’t go too fast. I think maybe he wants to see that you stay around awhile to enjoy things.”
Terry turned back out of the doorway and crossed the bedroom to the bath. Above the lavatory, a bulb was screwed into a tarnished brass socket projecting from the wall. He pulled the short chain hanging from the socket, heard the crackle of a faulty connection, saw a brief flurry of sparks preceding the diffusion of light. Looking at the reflection of his face for a moment in the mirror, he wondered what was in it to make a gal like Liza go off the deep end. He tried immediately to close his mind to the thought, because the thought of Liza was now an added burden of pain for which he had no heart.
Turning, he stood leaning against the lavatory and looking at the old-fashioned water heater at the foot of the bathtub. He let his eyes drift up and along a string clothesline that someone had stretched back and forth between the walls above the tub. After a minute, he knelt beside the heater and turned the tap on the gas ring, which emitted a soft hissing and an acrid odor.
He closed the tap and went back into the bedroom. Stripping the bed of a dirty sheet, he carried the sheet into the bathroom and began tearing it into strips. Some of the strips he stuffed into the cracks around the frame of the small window above the tub.
Removing the string, he tied one end to the end of the chain hanging from the old socket above the lavatory. And then he turned on the gas full force under the heater and went out, quickly threading the string through the keyhole of the door and closing the door behind him. The remainder of the strips he stuffed in the crack around the door.
Sitting on the bed, he waited fifteen minutes, checking the time by the watch on his wrist. When the time had passed, he was beginning to smell, in spite of the stuffing, the faint odor of gas. Getting up, he took the mattress from the bed and dropped it against the living room wall. He returned, taking the loose end of the string, and went over to the wall. He lay down between the wall and the mattress, then, saying something like a prayer, he pulled the string.
There was a great, cushioned puff, as if the air itself had flown apart into its elements, and the bathroom door was suddenly hanging by one hinge. The concussion rolled against Terry like a hard wave, plastering him to the wall, and he fought to gather and retain his senses in a siege of silence which seemed, after the explosion, vast and eternal. Actually, it lasted a few seconds only, and then the flabby but feline Sulla was coming through the door in a crouch, gun ready.
Pushing out from the wall, using the hard edge of his hand like a hatchet, Terry hacked down viciously into the fatty base of Sulla’s neck. The gun clattered to the floor, and the fat hood sagged to his knees. Crowding the advantage, Terry got a handful of oily hair and jerked back until the round, olive face was parallel to the ceiling at the end of spinal tension.
Then, using the heel of his hand, he smashed down and skullward upon Sulla’s nose. He felt the bones splinter, forced back and upward toward the brain, and he let Sulla twist slowly off his knees and flop. If the hood was not dead, death would be soon, and Terry, without checking, retrieved the gun from the floor and went out.
Below, on a dark, narrow street illuminated inadequately in spots by old lamps, he turned toward the heart of the city and began to walk. Time seemed to move faster, flowing past him with a rush, so after a few minutes he began to trot to keep up. Ten minutes later, on a broader, brighter thoroughfare, he found a cruising cab and crawled in. It was then twenty minutes to twelve.
“Municipal Air Terminal,” he said. “You win a bonus if we’re there by midnight.”
* * * *
By flouting a couple of red lights, the cabbie won the bonus. Terry made it a fin, and when he went through the wide glass doors of the main terminal entrance into the high, light waiting room, it was just thirty seconds before the hour. An amplified voice was announcing the arrival of the flight that carried the courier. Passengers would enter through gate six, the voice said.
Terry found the gate and saw, beyond it, leaning indolently against the wall, the thin man in the loose cord suit. His eyes moved over Terry indifferently. Lazily, he shook a cigarette from a pack and struck fire
