5 Detective Novels Magazine — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

48 touch him, he thought. He looked past the seven greenhouses, that trailed away from the firing shed, to the highway skirting the desolate, ploughed-over fields, now stiff and hard with winter’s frost. There was the old cauliflower field. There was last fall’s Simpson let- tuce patch. The siren’s wail was reced- ing, dying in the distance. “Phil!” The call came faintly through the shed’s wall. He looked toward the door. “Phil!” the call came again. He turned up his coat collar and went outside. The wind was pushing hard, and he thrust into it, his breath trailing away in a ragged silvery ribbon. He gripped his coat tighter about his throat. By morning, he knew, it would be zero or below. : | She was at the side window of the neatly kept colonial adjoining the green- houses, her figure a hazy blur behind the frost-fretted window. In milder weather she would have raised the win- dow to tell him what she had to say. Now, she motioned toward the door. She was there by the time he reached it. She opened the double panels and he shut them after him as he stepped quick- ly inside. Pat Rizzuto was nineteen, her hair a dark soft wave, her face delight- fully young. “Did you hear the siren?” Phil asked. “There was just a flash on the radio,” she said. “It was the Runley Bank. Two men tunneled under it and into the safe.” “Ig that why you called me?” Phil asked. Her somber pout gave way to a smile. “Silly! I called you because I want you to go to the store for me and get some cokes and potato chips. Six cokes and two bags of chips. Mother and Dad al- ways like to have some when they get back from the movies, and there’s not a crumb in the house. Six cokes and two potato chips—will you remember that?” OULD he remember it? Was he a child? Anger rose in him and died. FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE What had been the start of it—these menial jobs and this solicitude that would make a spineless rag of him? Was it his limp? Well, that hadn’t slowed him up. He was as competent as he ever had been. Was it because, at thirty, his hair was a grizzled gray? Well, if any- one had gone through— “Did you hear me, Phil? Did you hear me?” “Why, yes. Sure.” He was back again in Runley. Back again, firing furnaces and trying to make a stake so he could have just one more try at a business of his own. He said, “I’m thinking, Pat, if it’s such a good idea to leave the houses in weather like this.” “But the store’s only down the road. You won’t be gone five minutes.” Five minutes? It would take ten, but, anyway, she was right. Nothing could happen to the flowers and cukes in the time he’d be gone. Tom Rizzuto hadn’t liked trusting him, Phil knew. As if he weren’t even capable of handling a simple stoking job. “Okay,” he said. “You'd better put on a coat before you go,” she called after him. He didn’t look back or answer. In the boiler shed he threw several shovels of coal on each fire, level near the door and banked neatly on one side. The flames sang and licked upward, cracking the new coal so that chips flew. Phil closed the lower drafts and opened the dampers. It would keep them burn- ing slowly. He shouldered into his coat and knotted his muffler. The pickup was in the truck shelter out back. He slid into its chill cab. The metal of the dash and the plastic of the wheel were ice. The starter strained and labored, the motor barely turned. It went over once, twice, then gave up. Phil snapped off the key and waited be- fore trying again. Across the frozen fields he watched a man break from the woods. He followed the man’s erratic course for a moment without really thinking of its signifi- MICLOO co iS