Holocaust House | Page 2

said Doan. "So sorry, please."
He hung up the receiver and put the telephone back on its stand. It began to ring again instantly, but he paid no further attention to it. Whistling cheerfully, he went back into the bedroom.
He washed up, found a clean shirt and another tie and put them on. The telephone kept on ringing with a sort of apoplectic indignation. Doan tried unsuccessfully to shake the wrinkles out of his coat, gave up and put it on the way it was. He rummaged around under the socks in the top drawer of his bureau until he located his .38 Police Positive revolver. He shoved it into his waistband and buttoned his coat and vest to hide it.
Going over to the bed, he picked up the metal case and put it gently in his coat pocket and then went into the front room again.
"Okay," he said to Carstairs. "I'm ready to go now."
It was a sodden, uncomfortable morning with the clouds massed in darkly somber and menacing rolls in a sky that was a threatening gray from horizon to horizon. The wind came in strong and steady, carrying the fresh tang of winter from the mountains to the west, where the snow caps were beginning to push inquiring white fingers down toward the valleys.
Doan stood on the wide steps of? his apartment house breathing deeply, staring down the long sweep of the hill ahead of him. Carstairs rooted through the bushes at the side of the building.
A taxi made a sudden spot of color coming over the crest of the hill and skimming fleetly down the slope past Doan. He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled. The taxi's brakes groaned, and then it made a half-circle in the middle of the block and came chugging laboriously back up toward him and stopped at the curb.
Doan grabbed Carstairs by his studded collar and hauled him out of the bushes.
"Hey!" the driver said, startled. "What's that?"
"A dog," said Doan.
"You ain't thinkin' of riding that in this cab, are you?"
"Certainly I am." Doan opened the rear door and shoved Carstairs expertly into the back compartment and climbed in after him. Carstairs sat down on the floor, and his pricked ears just brushed the cab's roof.
The driver turned around to stare with a sort of helpless indignation. "Now listen here. I ain't got no license to haul livestock through the streets. What you want is a freight car. Get that thing out of my cab."
"You do it," Doan advised.
Carstairs leered complacently at the driver, revealing glistening fangs about two inches long.
The driver shuddered. "All right. All right. I sure have plenty of luck--all bad. Where do you want to go?"
"Out to the end of Third Avenue."
The driver turned around again. "Listen, there ain't anything at the end of Third Avenue but three abandoned warehouses and a lot of gullies and weeds."
"Third Avenue," said Doan. "The very end."
CHAPTER II.
EXPLODING CIGAR
THE THREE WAREHOUSES--like three blocked points of a triangle--looked as desolate as the buildings in a war-deserted city. They stared with blank, empty eyes that were broken windows out over the green, waist-high weeds that surrounded them. The city had been designed to grow in this direction, but it hadn't. It had withdrawn instead, leaving only these three battered and deserted reminders of things that might have been.
"Well," said the taxi driver, "are you satisfied now?"
Doan got out and slammed the door before Carstairs could follow him. "Just wait here," he instructed.
"Hey!" the driver said, alarmed. "You mean you're gonna leave this--this giraffe..."
"I'll only be gone a minute."
"Oh no, you don't! You come back and take this--"
Doan walked away. He went around in back of the nearest warehouse and slid down a steep gravel-scarred bank into a gully that snaked its way down toward the flat from the higher ground to the north. He followed along the bottom of the gully, around one sharply angling turn and then another.
The gully ended here in a deep gash against the side of a weed-matted hill. Doan stopped, looking around and listening. There was no one in sight, and he could hear nothing.
He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted: "Hey! Hey! Is there anyone around here?"
His voice made a flat flutter of echoes, and there was no answer. After waiting a moment he nodded to himself in a satisfied way and took the metal case out of his pocket. Going to the very end of the gully, he placed the case carefully in the center of a deep gash.
Turning around then, he stepped off about fifty paces back down the gully. He drew the Police Positive from his waistband, cocked it and dropped down on one knee. He aimed carefully, using his left forearm for a rest.
The metal case made a