The footsteps were perfectly clear. Carleton Nairn was making no attempt to be silent.
“Empty,” he noted, in the tone of someone making conversation to fill a gap.
Matt waited where he was, huddled to the floor among a corral of manual typewriters.
“I guess I’ll just step outside and reload.” The footsteps came louder, then softer. “Take five Benz. You can wait here, or try to get past me in the parking lot. Makes no neveryoumind to me.”
Matt didn’t move. He had watched too many westerns to be drawn out by such an offer,
“Have it your own way.” The footsteps moved along.
They were still moving when Matt stirred. He could make out the form of Carleton Nairn just as it vanished among the corridors of obsolescence. He crawled from shelter.
Rising slowly to his knees, he moved slowly through the hodgepodge zone to the spot where the rows of rubbish stood in orderly ranks. Was Carleton Nairn waiting just behind those shelves on the right, where Matt had last seen him? Or would his murderer assume he was watching, and slip around these to come up from behind?
Nothing moved to provide a clue, and he heard no more footsteps. The roof creaked and moaned to disrupt any attempt to concentrate. Just before Christmas, too: what a terrible time to be dying. “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” was in no state to be sorted out by a literary executor. His heroes were wandering in the Great Green Trackless Forest. They wouldn’t be attacked until they got out. Matt blinked and looked around. Yeah, but he didn’t have the same writer they did.
He thought that over. He nodded. It wasn’t that he had convinced himself, no. But his hands were like ice and crawling on concrete hurt his knees. If he was going to die anyhow, why not try to get a little more comfortable? Last moment, and all: why go with sore knees?
Natt-the-Writer, meanwhile, was reminding him that there were methods of finding someone in a great trackless wilderness, green or grey. Carleton Nairn’s best move would be to take up a position by the door to the parking lot. No matter what route Matt took to get there, Matt would need to reach it, unless overnighting in the warehouse with an armed enemy seemed appealing. It did not: freezing to death would simply accommodate Carleton Nairn.
So Matt strode into the maze of stacked civic ephemera. No gunshot ended his career. At length, he found his scatter of Styrofoam peanuts. The little peephole between boxes still waited.
So was the door, casually standing where he remembered it. Carleton Nairn was nowhere in evidence, but this was no great blow to Matt-the-Writer’s suggestion. Boxes were heaped here and there to either side of the door, forming excellent little sentry boxes. Matt wished he’d paid attention to these on the way in; he might be able to tell if any had been moved. After that, he wished Matt-the-Writer had an idea how to tell whether the gun was waiting there, or actually still coming up from behind.
He checked over one shoulder. He saw nothing move. He heard nothing move. With mild panic he checked the door again. He saw nothing there, and heard no sound from that direction either.
When sound did come, it was nothing that he’d expected. Matt stepped back, crunching five Styrofoam peanuts under one foot, and then fell forward, nearly taking the shelves with him. Carleton Nairn leapt from the cover of the boxes to the left of the exit.
“I know I shut off that alarm,” he snarled as he caught hold of the door, hunting the source of the high-pitched wail.
Light poured through the doorway and Nairn leapt away from it. Matt couldn’t see Carleton Nairn’s face in the flood of brightness, but the man’s movements showed anger from every angle. His quarry had somehow found a way to make him expose himself, to silhouette himself against the light entering the warehouse, a perfect target for whatever attack Matthew Benz had in mind.
Matt, nothing in his mind but amazement, was thus the first to notice the blue-and-white parked next to Nairn’s car in the lot. Gravel crunched. Two more official cars pulled in, and then a third.
Nairn heard the gravel and saw the lights flashing on the now five-car committee. “Godlemighty.”
Men and women stepped from the cars, in no particular rush. One uniform carried more metal than the others. The man in it carried a bullhorn. He turned a knob, nodded to the others, and raised it to his lips.
“You in there, Nairn?”
Some kind of pattern, obviously rehearsed, was being formed by his subordinates. He lowered the bullhorn, waited for an answer, and then raised it again.
“Come on out, Nairn. We can talk about Miss Skull.”
Matt glanced at Carleton Nairn. No calm superiority remained in the washed-out face. Mastery of the situation had slipped away, leaving only a scared man with a gun. Matt, knowing how desperate a scared man with a gun could be, clamped his hands more tightly on the shelf and forced his face against the peephole between boxes.
“Real bad mistake, Nairn,” said the bullhorn. “That gun. You aren’t even allowed to drink beer on City property, Nairn. Target practice is a no-no.”
There were more guns in evidence in the parking lot than Matt had ever seen before, in real life.
“The Chief didn’t like Miss Skull’s love notes, Nairn. Let’s talk.”
Carleton Nairn didn’t move. Matt wondered if the police would. He had forgotten there was a character named Matthew Benz in this scene at all. Also forgotten was the fact that this Matthew character was pushing his dace against old boxes stacked too many to the shelf in an old City warehouse.
Matt was not interested in those boxes at all, barring that they were so close together he could hardly get two eyes to look through the gap at the same time. He had to know what happened next. He put up one hand and gave the box on his left a little shove.
With a smash and a tinkle, a box toppled off the far end of the shelf. Carleton Nairn whirled and fired three shots, all of them well wide of Matt’s position. Carleton Nairn realized this even before Matt did.
Their eyes met over the clicking gun. Carleton Nairn glanced at the gun and made as if to throw it to the floor. He paused. He clutched it to his chest. He looked behind him at the doorway.
The ranks were moving in. He looked across at Matt again. Matt felt an urge to apologize, but couldn’t think of any good words.
“Benz.” Carleton Nairn’s voice was low, casual, as if they had just met at the elevator out of Down at the end of a long day. “Benz, you ever hear the joke about the man who committed suicide with an empty gun?”
Carleton Nairn turned his back on Matt.
Matt remembered the joke. “No! hey! Wait!”
“Ah, catch the bus!”
Screeching, Carleton Nairn lunged past the screen door. As it flapped against the wall, he planted his feet, raised the gun, and pointed it at the man with the bullhorn.
He spun left. Then he flopped to the right. He was dead five times before his nose hit gravel.
Now it was all over but the headlines.
