Dreadful Summit Read Online Free PDF Page B

pocket left. My glasses were all smashed too on the floor. I forgot about them in my pocket and now they were done for, but good. I just let them lay there.
    I was going to put the gun in my other pants pocket then, but the thought of having it on the left-hand side was so uncomfortable in my mind that I just stuck it right back in the torn pocket. It stayed in there all right, only the barrel was against my leg cold as death.
    Then I buttoned up and went around to the door. I didn’t have my key with me, so I fixed the lock to stay open. It didn’t matter what with the money upstairs. Then I remembered something. I had the tickets and the gun, but I didn’t have any money along. And the money box was upstairs.
    For a second I figured on going back to the bedroom and taking some money out of the box, but then maybe my luck would run out and Flanagan or my father would see me. Anyhow I could get a dime from Mr Ehrlich in the candy store, because he would always lend you a dime if you needed it.
    I took a quick look from the corner of the window shade to see if anybody was hanging around the front of the bar, but nobody was there. When I opened the door, the wind was so bad it nearly pulled it out of my hand and banged it against the wall. I just grabbed it in time. Then I pulled it shut and stepped out into the street.
    There was dust and stuff blowing along so hard it stung my eyes. All up and down the block you could hear the tin signs banging back and forth, and I saw that Mr Ehrlich had taken all the papers off the news stand. He only did that in bad weather or on Halloween night when the kids were out for a good time, so the papers wouldn’t get spoiled. He would stack them up on the candy counter in the store then, and all the guys who wanted a free look would crowd in and you could hardly breathe.
    When I thought of the guys in there, and what they would be saying about my father, I almost felt like not going in. But I needed that dime bad, so I had to. I didn’t waste any time. I ran over to the door of the candy store and pushed it open. There were plenty of guys in there all right, getting their free look, and the first one to get a good look at me was Kennealy, the new cop on the beat.

Chapter Six
    F OR a slow count of five I stood there frozen, with my back pasted up against the door. Maybe it’s a lucky thing I froze up like that, because if I didn’t I might have gone right out through the door again and then Kennealy would sure have started to smell something fishy.
    Kennealy was a new cop, and old Mr Reardon who was retired on a pension and hung around the bar every night for a couple of hours used to say new cops were always funny the way they went looking for trouble. They figured maybe they could become heroes and get on plain-clothes, so they went around stirring up what they couldn’t see. Besides, I always used to tighten up around cops. I could walk down the street not doing a thing and when a cop came by and gave me the eye I would feel just like a crook and I could feel the way I was walking and looking, I looked just like a crook too.
    And there I was standing without my glasses and with my father’s good hat shoved on my head, and that big gun scraping along my leg, and knowing in my head I was going to kill Al Judge, watching Kennealy look at me. He was standing in front of the soda fountain with a glass of seltzer and chocolate in one hand and a marshmallow cracker that was half gone in the other hand. When he first saw me he was sloshing the soda around in the glass, I guess to mix it up, then after he got a good look he drank it all down and waved the glass at me to come over.
    I walked over very slow and all I knew was if he tried anything funny like frisking me or something, I would pull away and try to get the gun out and let him have it. I didn’t even get started on what I was going to do, and no cop was going to spoil it right off. There wasn’t