“You give me ideas, old man,” he said. He put his own weapon in his pocket, grabbed Big Tom by the arm, pulled him nearer the closet, and then, holding Big Tom’s palsied fingers outspread, he made a big beautifully distinct print on the white-painted door.

Big Tom’s breathing sounded as if he were doing it through a ten-foot length of hose. “Goddamn . . . goddamn punk . . . I told Willy——”

“Shut up.” Skip went to the closet and got Mrs. Havermann, brought her out and laid her beside Big Tom, and then, using Big Tom’s hand as he would a paintbrush, he daubed and smeared her with his blood. “That ought to do it.” He went to the door, clicked off the lights, ran down the stairs and out through the rear of the house. He was positive he hadn’t left a print on any surface which might retain it. Nobody was going to raise any prints on old lady Havermann except the bloody ones of Big Tom’s fingers. Skip felt like whistling.

He waited in the trees above the vacant road. The night faded toward midnight, and a sense of danger stole over him. All at once some sixth sense told him what had happened to Eddie and Karen. Skip’s reaction was not one of anger. He had the only amount of loot the night had produced, some three or four thousand dollars at a guess, and he had no wish to share it with them.

He left the trees at the far end of the block and walked rapidly down to the cross-town boulevard, where he caught a bus for Uncle Willy’s. He was busily packing his belongings—all of them, this time—when Willy came in.

Big Tom awoke and looked at the dark, and the phantoms fled from his brain. He knew where he was, he even knew what the thing was lying next to him, the thing whose inert pressure he felt whenever he moved. He recalled Skip at the doorway. He had not seen any gun in Skip’s hand and so the source of the bullets confused him, though he had no doubt of their reality. They nested in his flesh now like fiery eggs. He was light headed, almost drained dry of blood, and he had to get out of here.

He inched and wriggled his way across the room to the door, out into the hall. Then he slithered down the stairs. The lower hall had one light burning in a bracket beside the front entry. He looked up at it and it swam, exploded into a red and purple nimbus, and blacked out. Big Tom lay on his face, thought and consciousness gone, and Mrs. Havermann’s big clock, the one she had brought from France when she was twenty-seven, ticked lonesomely in the silence.