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out, found himself facing a table of three rigid figures, only two of them still breathing.
     
    There was a little runty man standing there, just past the booth in the other direction, as though he had been coming forward to meet the cop from the rear of the store, holding a numbers-slip in his extended hand. Still clutched in the cop's nerveless hand on the floor was, not a gun, but a dollar bill, freshly withdrawn from his back pocket.
     
    The tableau held for a frozen minute. Neither of them, the woman nor her husband, seemed able to realize what had happened to him. Then as Turner stepped forward into their line of vision, smoking gun out before him, the woman's slack jaw tautened for a scream. He dialed the gun her way and the scream suffocated to death in her larynx.
     
    "In back, the two of you!" It was the berserk yowl of an enraged tomcat on a back fence.
     
    It was impossible for her to escape from the counter that walled her in on three sides, in any direction but toward him. She was afraid to go toward him. They were ignoramuses, but they could tell they were up against something that wasn't normal, they could tell by his eyes.
     
    The little man, gums white, quavered: "Please, Momma, don't argue; you heard him."
     
    She wrung her hands, whined: "Please, mister, just let me go by, I only want to get on the other side of you, like you said; don't do nothing———" and scurried by, head and shoulders defensively lowered as though he were an overhanging branch.
     
    He shepherded them into the little back room the man had come out of, looked around to make sure there was no other way out, changed the key to the outside of the door and locked the two of them in, with a hissing "Keep quiet now, or I'll come back and———"
     
    The shop entrance was still clear, no inquisitive figures blocking it. Facing it, and the prospect of further flight, he raked distracted fingers through his hair. That dislodged his hat. He saw it, but left it lying where it had fallen. There was no time for anything but to keep going — until he dropped.
     
    Outside in the dark again, a sinister afterthought caught up with him, just too late. "I shouldn't have left them alive. They'll tell who it was, what I looked like." But there was no turning back again, either, on this satanic treadmill that had caught him up, that was wearing out his body, mind and soul.
     
    He hurried along furtively, hugging the building-line, a shadow that progressed by fits and starts, from doorway to doorway, crevice to crevice. A shadow looking for a home. Wasn't there any which way he could turn, wasn't there anyone in town who would———
     
    She came this time without the help of music. She was never very far removed from his thoughts, Eleanor. She was golden letters lighting up the frightened darkness of his mind. She'd help him. She was the only one he could' trust. She'd once loved him. All that love couldn't be completely gone, there must be a little of it left.
     
    But where was she? He couldn't remember, he couldn't remember that name. Some hotel, but he couldn't remember the name.
     
    Sometimes it seemed almost to come to the tip of his tongue, then it receded again. Commodore? No. Concord? No. Con-? Con-?
     
    He dogtrotted along through the dark, whimpering disjointedly: "Eleanor! Eleanor! I've got to find her."
     
    A cop from a radio-car had just let them out of the back room when Spillane got there. Half the neighborhood had come crowding into the store, was milling around inside it. The crowd hid the dead cop on the floor from Spillane's sight for a minute. He nearly tripped over him when it gave way unexpectedly at his pressure.
     
    The storekeeper's wife made straight for the fountain, wrenched at one of the spigots, gulped a mouthful of soda water from the hollow of her hand. Then she darted to the cash register, shut the drawer, hastily clawed at its contents. She gave a bleat of relief. "It's ull right, Poppa! Dolla