Death Sentence Read Free Page A

on the cloth inside his coat pockets. He started off in the wrong direction, brought himself up with anger and stumbled back toward the corner.
    In the edge of his vision the two young men on the stoop sat up a bit. Their hats turned, indicating their interest in his progress.
    Paul stopped at the corner and studied all four streets in turn with the great concentration of the inebriate: then he stepped carefully off the curb and weaved toward the far side, maintaining his balance with visible effort.
    Inside the drunk’s act he was afraid. You don’t have to try it. You don’t have to die. Don’t come after me.
    But the fear was on his tongue. It was familiar terror, an old acquaintance, a frightening thing compounded of their intentions and his own: he was afraid of them but afraid of himself as well, afraid of what he knew he would do. It was something he sensed but still did not understand.
    He knew they wouldn’t leave him alone. They’d had that bar staked out for hours waiting for a mark like him; they wouldn’t get a better shot if they waited a week. A lone drunk lurching into a dark street trying to remember where he’d parked his car.…
    He breathed deeply and regularly to calm himself. Into shadow now and he stopped on the edge of the curb pretending anger because he couldn’t find his car. He had his back to them but he knew they were there because their silhouettes obscured the splash of streetlight when they reached the corner.
    He stooped and tried to fit his key into the door of a car but it was the wrong car and he swore an oath—loud enough to reach the two men’s ears—and gave the offending car a petulant kick and went on, bending down to peer close at each parked car he passed.
    When they came for him they came in a rush and one of them had the wine bottle upraised, ready to strike at the back of Paul’s skull; the other had a folding knife opened to rip upward with the extended blade.
    He heard them in plenty of time but the fear paralyzed him momentarily; he moved slower than he should have—he didn’t know the gun yet, he should have allowed more time, but they were nearly on top of him when he crouched and turned, stretching his arm out.
    It stopped them in their tracks. They had a good look at his undrunk eyes and the black revolver: they knew what hit them.
    The noise was intense, earsplitting; the gun crashed against the heel of his hand.
    The man with the wine bottle bent double. Paul shifted his aim and shot the knife man in the chest.
    He barely heard the bottle shatter on the pavement. He shot both men in the heads while they were falling because they had to be dead so that they couldn’t identify him.
    In a chilly sweat of terror he staggered away.

3
    H E RACKED the Pontiac into its stall in the underground garage. The attendant was in uniform and armed with a revolver in a holster; Paul greeted him and took the elevator straight up to his floor, the seventeenth.
    It was a high-rise, 501 Lake Shore Drive, an apartment tower at the T-end of Grand Avenue. Spalter had tried to steer him to a suburban real-estate agent but Paul had spent his life in apartments except for one brief attempt to live in a house and in the end he had found Number 501 in a classified ad in the real-estate section of the Sunday Tribune and he’d taken the apartment the same afternoon.
    The steel door had the ordinary slip lock and a dead bolt above. He had to use two keys to let himself in. Behind him closed-circuit TV eyes guarded the corridor. He shut the door and turned both locks before he switched on the lamps and put down his parcel on the coffee table.
    He had taken it furnished on a sublet; he wasn’t sure how long he’d stay. The furniture was functional and as characterless as that of a hotel room; the lease tenant was an English instructor at the Univeristy of Chicago who was spending a sabbatical in London and who evidently was