Marihuana Read Free Page B

on the sleeper's face. Only, now there was a difference: if that face awoke, that face would go to sleep for good. Halfway across, a worn floorboard creaked treacherously, and he flexed his knees and crouched. The sleeper's hand slid down from his eyes to his mouth. But his eyes didn't open.
     
    He went on. The door sill nudged his heel, and he was over and out in the hall. He eased the door back to its original width, and started sidling along shoulder to wall, toward the next doorway down, behind which the card-playing lookout was.
     
    He stopped just short of it and held his breath. He'd never known before that cards, a game of solitaire, could be heard so clearly. He heard: -snap!- and then a long wait, and then -snap!- again, as the unseen player laid them down one by one.
     
    And then, just as he was starting to inch the gun muzzle past the frame of the doorway, preparatory to swerving it around and training it into the room, there was a catastrophic interruption. A sudden knocking on wood sounded, so close by it almost seemed to hit him in the face. A chair scraped back, and the card player cut out into the hall less than a foot ahead of him, so close his back almost grazed the gun point. The doorkeeper turned toward the front without looking back the other way, or he would have seen him there immediately behind him. Turner saw the light blur of his shirt sleeves recede into the shadowy haze of the hall just ahead.
     
    He took a furtive step after him, his intention to champ the gun into his spine as soon as the chains were let down and overawe his way out. Again something happened to freeze his inflamed blood to new lows of panic.
     
    The lookout had stopped before the panel, head tilted to the peephole. "Who are you?" Turner heard him ask gruffly.
     
    A blurred voice answered something indistinguishable from outside. Turner couldn't catch it directly, was too far back, but he got it — or thought he did — indirectly, through the lookout's abbreviated repetition.
     
    "Dicks?" he heard him say clearly.
     
    Dicks! Detectives had already been summoned, were at the door to arrest him. Evans and Gordon must have betrayed him, must have gotten word out in some way, perhaps through the windows overlooking the street, or perhaps by some telephone he had failed to notice, as soon as he'd left the death chamber.
     
    The reaction of the lookout in the face of this situation should have had some meaning, but it failed to register on his jangled faculties. The lookout didn't seem unduly perturbed, he started unlacing the chains without trying to warn those in the front of the flat. Perhaps the password he had heard was: "A friend of Dick's" and not "Dicks!" Turner was never to know.
     
    To retreat was simply to return to the scene of his crime. To step aside into the kitchen was simply to be discovered by the lookout within the next moment or two. To carry out his original idea of weaponing his way out gun-first was now suicide; detectives were a different matter.
     
    Then his eyes focused on this closet door, down ahead but on the opposite side of the hall from the kitchen — and the other doorways. It must have been there all along, but it only now peered through to his taut consciousness. It was so close to the end of the hall it formed nearly a right angle with the front door. It meant almost treading on the lookout's heels to sidle in through it.
     
    There was no time to weigh chances. He crept up behind the lookout, knifed his hand behind the refuge-door — it hadn't been shut tight into its frame — drew it out and slid in in back of it. Then he reversed it to about where it had been before, to avoid the risk of the latch tongue clicking home.
     
    He was in darkness. He could feel something soft hanging beside him, like an old sweater. Whatever noise there had been had blended with the opening of the other door. He heard feet shuffle by outside his hiding-place, and a voice said: "Straight down the hall,