The Follower Read Free Page A

see it. That gave him only a few hours’ leeway in which to find Ellie. A few hours were not enough.
    Okay, there was only one thing to do. He’d have to get Corey out of here.
    This decision, so wildly different from anything he had ever expected to have to do, seemed perfectly natural to him. His exaggerated calm made him feel that he had never been more lucid. To conceal a body was a criminal offence. Okay. That couldn’t be avoided. Things were bad enough already; they might as well be that much worse.
    But, for the eventual show-down with the police, he drew, on a sheet of Ellie’s elegant grey stationery, a precise, engineer’s diagram indicating the exact position of the body. At least that would show that he was not being irresponsible. Having completed it, he folded it neatly and put it in his bathrobe pocket.
    He sat down again on a bar stool, looking at Corey. Whatever his plan for the body’s removal, he would need a car. He did not own one himself, but Ellie’s Cadillac was parked in a garage a couple of blocks away. At least, it was if she hadn’t gone off with it. Before he did anything else he’d have to go around and check.
    He dressed in the bedroom, putting on the same clothes he had worn in the plane and transferring the diagram to his jacket pocket. He glanced through Ellie’s closets, trying to find out whether she had taken any baggage with her, but she had so many clothes that he couldn’t be sure.
    His tactical plan was already half formulated. The service elevator was self-operating and the man who worked it during the day was off duty at eight-thirty. On the ground floor a service door opened into an alley which led to the crosstown street. If he parked the Cadillac at the mouth of the alley, he could bring the body down in the elevator and, maybe, manage to carry it to the car without being seen. At least there would be no danger from the man on the front elevator.
    After that … the rest of the plan was still vague. Perhaps he could take the body and dump it either by the river or in the park. The simplest plan was usually the safest.
    He put on his topcoat in the foyer and moved out into the vestibule. He pressed the button of the service elevator; a little red eye winked on. When the cage came up he stepped inside. Someone had left an old mop and a pail of dirty water in it. He rode down with them to the ground floor. He had never been there at night before, and the anxious thought came that perhaps the door leading to the alley was locked. But it was merely bolted on the inside. He released the long bolt, and, stepping out, drew the door almost shut, so that, to a superficial glance, it would seem to be closed.
    It was still snowing. He moved down the hundred or so feet of the alley to its mouth, paused, glanced to left and right, and then went out into the deserted street. On this hurried walk to the garage he passed only a scattering of pedestrians. None of them looked at him. Their heads were bent low against upturned collars. The snow, blurring identity, shut each of them off in a little world of his own.
    He reached the garage. The dim overhead lights of its lower floor revealed packed, gleaming rows of automobiles. Joe, the night attendant, was not visible.
    The large cement ramp loomed in front of him. Ellie’s normal parking place was upstairs. As he started towards the ramp he heard a clatter deep in the garage and saw for a moment the dungareed figure of Joe stooping over a car at the back.
    His rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the cement, he walked up the ramp. The upper floor was enormous and desolate. The cars, parked in long parallel lines, seemed to be waiting for some sudden inrush of people that would bring them bursting to life. He moved along the broad central aisle. With quickening of his pulses, he saw the sleek rear end of Ellie’s Cadillac parked where it usually stood, just a few cars from the sliding doors which led to Dead Storage.
    So far so