Jail Bait

Jane frowned. The clerk had sounded nervous. She tapped her stockinged foot impatiently. She rattled the lever. The silence on the line was oppressive. Far too oppressive, she realized suddenly. And the clerk had been too nervous. A picture came into her mind, a picture of a faceless man leaning over the desk clerk’s shoulder, listening in on the conversation, then demanding to know what floor the call had come from.

She banged the phone down, scooped up her bag and shoe and scampered for the door. She pulled it open. She heard the crackling of the newspaper behind her as Joseph lowered it to stare at her.

The hall was empty. She banged the door shut behind her. The bronze arrow had begun to move upward. She turned back and tried the door she had just closed. It had latched behind her. She ran for the fire escape, put her hand on the cold door handle, turned and looked behind her.

She could hear the elevator. The arrow was almost at ten. She yanked the door open and went out onto the concrete landing. She held her breath and listened. There was no sound. Inch by inch she moved forward until she could look down the shaft. For a moment she saw nothing. Then a familiar wisp of blue smoke drifted out into the shaft two stories below her.

As she turned to climb higher she heard a fire door open below her. She heard a man’s low voice. Echoes blurred it so she heard but a few words. “Phone... up to ten... got past you.” She heard the mumbled response. Then door swung shut down there.

Chapter Five

Jane began to climb again, her heart thudding heavily, painfully. She risked a glance down the shaft. The hand was sliding upward again. She looked up. There were three more floors above her. That was all. She wished there were dozens. She felt as though they were driving her into an ever-narrowing space.

She tried to estimate how many of the hunters there were. There was at least one at the desk. One in the stair well. And probably two who had come up to her room. They had been in her room when she sent the call down from ten. And one of them had gone immediately to the elevator to check ten and the other one had alerted the man on the landing.

She hoped that beyond that last lighted landing there would be a dark flight that would lead to the roof. She kept climbing. The stairs ended right there, at the landing. A bulb hung from a cord and there was a skylight above it.

The sound of falling rain was clear up here. She tried the door cautiously at first, and then with greater effort. It would not open. She pulled so desperately that her hand and shoulders hurt. She had lost track of the number of floors. This could be twelve, or thirteen. If it was twelve, it meant that she would have to return to the landing directly over his head in order to get out onto the eleventh floor. She looked down. She could not see the hand. She waited.

Then the lighter made its scratching noise, then clinked loudly, and she saw the smoke, two floors below. She looked across the shaft at the stairs she would have to go down in order to get to the eleventh floor. She computed the man’s angle of vision. In order to get to the landing directly over him, she would have to pass where he might see her.

She sat down, trembling violently. She was sitting on the top step. This was a nightmare variation of hide and seek. She wanted to get up and hammer on the locked door and scream until there was no breath left in her.

She looked at her purse. She knew they would find some quick way to silence her once they caught her, and then they would take her quietly down the concrete stairs and away. And if she was taken this way, all the rest of his life Howard would never know exactly what had happened to her. Nor would she ever have the chance to tell him that she had changed her mind. He was enough for her now. He was all the mystery, all the glamour, all the excitement she wanted from life. It was suddenly important to find some way of leaving word for him.

She dug into her purse and found the stub of a yellow pencil, laid it aside and began to look for something to write on. She found a reddish piece of cardboard that was blank on one side. She had to write small.

“Please see that the police get this note. It is to be shown to Howard Saddler. Darling, they’ve found me here in the Farrington. I guess they are the same ones. I’m hiding but they’ll find me soon. I love you. I talked nonsense. Please forget it. I didn’t mean it. Jane.”

She hitched herself closer to the fire door. She glanced at the other side of the piece of reddish cardboard.

It was a parking-lot claim check, the Safety Parking Lot, just around the corner from her apartment, and the date stamp was for Monday afternoon.