The Heat's on

But Grave Digger was still for playing it safe. “Not without a gun, man,” he cautioned again. Suddenly he was struck by an idea. “Let’s send out the dog to sniff around.”

Coffin Ed glanced at her scornfully. “She couldn’t hurt a mouse with that muzzle on.”

“I’ll fix that,” Grave Digger said and stepped over to the bitch and removed the muzzle and unhooked the chain.

He pushed her out into the corridor but she merely looked over her shoulder at him as though she wanted to come back in. He looked about for something to throw but everything movable was bloody, so he took off his hat and sailed it down the corridor in the direction of the boiler room door.

“There, boy, there, boy, go get it,” he urged.

But the bitch suddenly turned around with her tail between her legs and ran into the kitchen. They could hear her lapping up water.

“I’m going to call homicide,” Grave Digger said. “Have you seen a phone?”

“In the kitchen.”

“That’s a house phone.”

Coffin Ed stepped outside and looked up and down the corridors. “Here’s a pay phone beside the door. You got a dime?”

Grave Digger fished some change from his pocket. “Yeah.”

It was an old-fashioned telephone box attached to the wall with the mouthpiece on a level with the average man’s mouth. Grave Digger stepped around the corner, lifted the receiver and put in a dime. He held the receiver to his ear, waiting for the dial tone.

“I’m going to get a couple of wrenches or something we can use for saps, just in case,” Coffin Ed said, stepping over toward the toolroom.

“Why don’t you let it alone and let’s just wait for some cops with pistols,” Grave Digger called over his shoulder.

But Coffin Ed thought better. He pushed open the toolroom door and leaned inside, reaching for the light switch.

He never knew what hit him. Lights exploded in his head as though his brain had been dynamited right behind the eyes.

Grave Digger had just gotten the dial tone and had stuck his right index finger on the figure 7 when he heard the flat whacking sound made by the impact of a blunt instrument against a human skull. There could be no mistaking the sound; he had heard it often enough. He was moving, his head wheeling and ducking, before the sound of the following grunt reached his ears.

He never got around but his head had moved enough so that the bullet intended for his temple struck the guttapercha receiver in his left hand, shattered it but was deflected so that it merely burned a blister across the back of his neck.

The gunman was a marksman with a pistol. He was using a derringer with a sawed-off barrel and a silencer attached, similar to the one used by the gunman whom Uncle Saint had killed. At the sound of Coffin Ed opening the toolroom door, he had stepped from the boiler room into the corridor and had taken a bead on Grave Digger’s head, resting the meat side of his trigger hand in the crook of his raised left arm. But even the best of marksmen could miss with a one-shot gun, so he also held a.38-caliber police positive in his left fist as insurance.

Grave Digger’s left hand and the whole left side of his head went numb and he felt as though he had been kicked in the head by a mule. But he was not stunned. He erupted into motion like the snapping of a clock spring. He went down into a rolling plunge toward the open door of the janitor’s suite.

He wasn’t looking toward the gunman; his eyes, his mind, his straining muscles, and all his five senses were concentrating on escape. But somehow his mind retained the impression of a face — a dead-white, death’s head face with colorless lips pulled back from small yellow teeth and huge deep-set eyes like targets on a pistol range: black balls rimmed with a thin line of white about which were large irregular patches of black — a hophead’s face.

The gunman straightened out his left arm and fired the police positive.

The bullet caught Grave Digger in his spin as he was turning on a long slant, almost horizontal to the floor. It went in underneath the left shoulder blade and came out three inches above the heart.

Grave Digger grunted once like a stuck hog and was knocked flat on his face. But he didn’t lose consciousness. He felt his face skidding across the slick cool surface of linoleum and he knew he had got inside the room. With a quick convulsive movement which consumed the last of his strength, he rolled over on his back like a cat turning in midair and kicked with his left foot toward the door, trying to close it. He missed it and his foot was in the air. His stabbing, desperate gaze went across it, and he found himself looking straight down the barrel of the police positive.

He thought fleetingly, without fear or regret, Digger, your number’s up.

That’s the last he knew.

Hopped to the gills, the gunman stalked forward on the balls of his feet to place another slug in the absolutely motionless body, but the second gunman, standing by the toolroom, door, shouted, “For chrissakes, cummon, Goddammit! Did you have to use that sonofabitching cannon?”

The hopped-up gunman paid him no attention. He was intent on pumping another slug into his victim.

But suddenly a woman let out a scream. It was a scream of unbelievable volume and immeasurable terror. You could tell it was a colored woman screaming by the heart she put into it. It was the loudest screaming the hopped-up gunman had ever heard and it shattered his control like glass breaking.

He started to run blindly and without direction. He ran headlong into the second gunman, who grappled with him and they struggled furiously for a brief moment.

The colored maid was standing as she had stepped from the elevator. The basket of soiled clothes lay overturned on the floor where it had fallen from her hands. Her body was rigid. Her mouth formed an ellipsoid big enough to swallow an ostrich egg, showing the chewing edges of her molars, a white-coated tongue flatted between the bottom teeth and humped in the back against the tip of a palate which hung down like a blood-red stalagmite. Her neck muscles were corded. Her popeyed stare was fixed. Screams kept pouring from her mouth with an unvarying, nerve-shattering resonance.

The second gunman got his left arm free and slapped the hopped-up gunman twice across the face.

Sanity returned to the dilated pupils, along with terror.

He holstered the police positive in a right-shoulder sling, dropped the derringer into his right coat pocket, and went up the stairs as though the furies were after him.

“Not so fast, you hophead bastard!” the second gunman called from behind him. “Walk out into the street.”

11

The Queen Mary sailed at twelve noon sharp.

Wharf attendants said they had never witnessed so much confusion at the sailing of a Cunard Line ship.

Two of the tugboats on hand to ease the big ship from its mooring ran together. An able-bodied seaman was knocked into the drink and one of the tugboat captains choked on his false teeth.

Two stout businessmen celebrating the departure of their wives, along with a fat lady seeing off her daughter, fell off the dock and the Queen had to backwater until they were fished out.

The dock police trying to keep the people behind the guard lines were mobbed. Fights broke out; several people were trampled.

Fifteen hundred passengers were on board and five thousand people on the dock to see them off. With the blowing of the tugboat whistles, the shouting of orders, the screaming of goodbyes from six thousand five hundred throats, there was enough noise to arouse the inhabitants of a cemetery.

Authorities said it was due to the excessive heat. The threat of a thunderstorm had passed over and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky.