The conviction that Mrs. Havermann had made the faint sound, like a slow-moving person shifting some article in the room, was so strong that no thought of Big Tom intruded to warn him.

I’ll scare her with the gun, Skip thought. Nobody else is here now to interfere. I can beat her up a little. She ought to be plenty ready to talk by this time. He threw open the door and started inside.

Big Tom was across the room beside the open closet. He had entered the room only a minute before, had seen the woman sprawled under some fallen clothes. In that instant his mind had gulped in a vast lump of knowledge: the punks had been here; they’d bungled it; they’d run out in a panic just as he would have expected, and his own situation here in the house with a corpse was the kind of thing he dreamed about on the bad nights when he suffered from nightmares.

He ripped off his right-hand glove and bent forward to touch her, not through any instinct of mercy or a desire to revive her, but rather to convince himself that this ultimate boobery on the punks’ part had actually happened, and at the same moment he heard someone come into the room behind him. His hand clawed for the gun in his belt, the big heavy gun, and then he had pulled it free and was ready to fire even as he swung around to face the room. The Luger spoke, but at this instant fiery gnats were stinging his flesh. There was no sense of impact or penetration; it all seemed to lie in his skin, a spray of needles. The bullet from the Luger entered the floor at Skip’s feet. Big Tom folded forward slowly and struck the rug with his head.

Skip stood near the doorway. His expression was one of surprise, as if things had happened too quickly to be believed. The gun in his hand had seemed to act of itself. It was a very clever, quick, and willing little gun. He gazed at it and then at the big man convulsing on the floor, as if wondering at the connection between the weapon and the condition of the man.

Skip waited. Big Tom quit writhing and jerking so badly and tried to get his fingers on the fallen Luger, so Skip walked over and kicked it into the closet with the dead woman. Big Tom tried to prop himself up by means of an outspread right hand, and when the hand moved it had left a print in blood, quite distinct on the polished light-colored wood, and Skip regarded it with interest.