Mystery and detective stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
"Getaway," she cried, flecking her hand as if it burned, "where did you
get this?"
"It's for you, Fairylin, and more like it coming. It weighs a carat and
a half. That stone's worth more than a sealskin jacket. You're going to
have one of those, too. Real seal! Now are you sore at me any more? Now
you've a swell kick coming, haven't you? Now! Now!"
"Getaway," she cried behind her lit hand, because her palm was to her
mouth and above it her eyes showing the terror in their whites, "where
did you get this?"
"There!" he said, and kissed her hotly and squarely on the lips.
Somehow, with the ring off her finger and in a little pool of its light
as it lay at his feet, where he stood dazed on the sidewalk, Marylin
was up the stoop, through the door, up two flights, and through her
own door, slamming it, locking it, and into her room, rubbing and half
crying over her left third finger where the flash had been.
She was frightened, because for all of an hour she sat on the end of the
cot in her little room trembling and with her palms pressed into her
eyes so tightly that the darkness spun. There was quick connection in
Marylin between what was emotional and what was merely sensory. She
knew, from the sickness at the very pit of her, how sick were her heart
and her soul--and how afraid.
She undressed in the dark--a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window
across the areaway. The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger,
covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into
careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes
closet. Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away. And
then, in her bare feet and a pink-cotton nightgown with a blue bird
machine-stitched on the yoke, stood cocked to the hurry of indistinct
footsteps across her ceiling, and in the narrow slit of hallway
outside her door, where the stairs led up still another flight,
the-ball-of-a-foot--squeak! The sharp crack of a voice. Running.
"Getaway!" cried Marylin's heart, almost suffocating her with a dreadful
spasm of intuition.
It was all so quick. In the flash of her flung-open door, as her head
in its amber cloud leaned out, Getaway, bending almost double over
the upper banister, his lips in his narrow face back to show a white
terribleness of strain that lingered in the memory, hurled out an arm
suddenly toward two men mounting the steps of the flight below him.
There was a shot then, and on the lower flight one of the men, with
an immediate red mouth opening slowly in his neck, slid downstairs
backward, face up.
Suddenly, from a crouching position beside her door, the second
figure shot forward now, with ready and perfect aim at the
already-beginning-to-be-nerveless figure of Getaway hanging over the
banister with the smoking pistol.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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