suit. Costs big bucks. Take him, Charley."
Charley said, "Well, I got this here date with Mingus, but..."
As the pursued man came abreast of them, the one with the glasses said,
"Now."
The one with glasses stepped out and bumped into the man. Charley stepped
forward and said out of the corner of his mouth, "Whyncha watch where ya goin'?"
That was all.
All, except that across the street, a cruising dolly car saw what had
happened. A cop in the dolly car said, "Charley just dipped that character."
The other cop said, "You'd think these crumbs'd learn they can't work in
daylight, wouldn't ya?" He sighed. They got out of the car. The four street
loungers saw the cops too late. They started to split. But one of the cops
grabbed Bates.
He grabbed him before he could ditch the leather. This is a fatal mistake
for a pickpocket. The cop shook him the way you would a bad puppy. He ran his
hands down Bates body. He found the stolen wallet.
Holding on to Bates with one hand, he flipped the wallet open. Only then,
when he saw the name that was under the celluloid of the identification card,
did he look up and see that the man whose wallet had been stolen had
disappeared.
The cop said, "What a break! There's a three state alarm out for that lad!"
Bates said, "Of all the lousy breaks... I have to lift into a deal like
that!"
Through a dirty window two flights up, the man whose wallet had been
stolen looked down at the tableau on the street. He saw the cop look up from
his wallet. He saw Bates point at the house into which he had run.
This really tied it. Now he was lost. His money gone, hidden in a house
which he had never seen before, in a city in which he had never been, with the
cops outside, and his trailer... he looked further out the window. There,
perhaps a hundred feet away, was his implacable trailer.
All around him myriad cooking smells smashed in. Garlic and the ghost of
eaten garlic was like a live thing. The peeling plaster on the walls looked
like something you would see upon turning up a stone.
The stairs were rickety, and noisy as the smells that pushed at him. He
took another look out the window. His trailer was easing around the little
huddle where one policeman talked to Bates and the other was holding on to
another of the four who had been leaning against the lamp post when he walked
up.
Two of them had run away. They had made a getaway. Why couldn't he? But
then they didn't have the tall, lean man after them. There, he was coming up
the stoop of the house.
The man in the hallway looked around. This was the dead end, unless... he
looked up the narrow stair well. Some of those old houses, he had read
somewhere, had stairs leading up to the roof. If he could get to the roof, run
across a couple of buildings and come down into a completely different house,
perhaps he could still...
But as he started up the stairs, he could hear only a floor below him the
steady determined footsteps which were getting to be the only reality in the
all encompassing nightmare that tore at his sanity.
Only a floor separated hunted from hunter. There would not be time to make
