He looked at Joe’s face as the fireman took another halting step. Joe didn’t look good. He had been inside the building too long. The smoke was bothering him.
Joe took another step and tottered on the ladder. Drop her, he thought. You goddamned fool, let go of her!
And then he did. The woman slipped suddenly from Joe’s grip, and plummeted downward to the sidewalk. Her scream rose higher and higher as she fell, and then stopped completely. She struck the pavement like a bug smacking against the windshield of a car.
His whole being filled with relief. Thank God, he thought. It was too bad for the woman, but now Joe would reach the ground safely. But he noticed that Joe seemed to be in trouble. He was still swaying back and forth. He was coughing, too.
And then, all at once, Joe fell. He left the ladder and began to drop to the earth. His body hovered in the air and floated down like a feather. Then he hit the ground and melted into the pavement.
At first he could not believe it. Then he glared at the fire. Damn you, he thought. You weren’t satisfied with the old woman. You had to take a fireman too.
It wasn’t right.
The fire was evil. This time it had gone too far. Now it would have to suffer for it.
And then he raised his hose and trained it on the burning hulk of the tenement, punishing the fire.
FROZEN STIFF
AT TEN MINUTES TO FIVE the Mexican kid finished sweeping the floor. He stood by the counter, leaning on his broom and looking at the big white-faced clock.
“Go on home,” Brad told him. “Nobody’s going to want any lamb chops delivered anymore. You’re through, go get some rest.”
The kid flashed teeth in a smile. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg, put on a poplin windbreaker.
“Take it easy,” Brad said.
“You stayin’ here?”
“For a few minutes,” Brad said. “I got a few things to see to.” The kid walked to the door, then turned at the last moment. “You watch out for the freezer, Mr. Malden. You get in there, man, nobody can get you out.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I’ll see you, Mr. Malden.”
“Yeah,” Brad said. “Sure.”
The kid walked out. Brad watched the door close after him, then walked behind the meat counter and leaned over it, his weight propped up on his elbows. He was a big man, heavy with muscle, broad-faced and barrel-chested. He was forty-six, and he looked years younger until you saw the furrowed forehead and the drawn, anxious lines at the corners of his mouth. Then he looked fifty.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He picked a heavy cleaver from a hook behind him, lifted it high overhead, and brought it down upon a wooden chopping block. The blade sank four inches into the block.
Strong, he thought. Like an ox.
He left the cleaver in the block. The freezer was in the back, and he walked through a sawdust-covered hallway to it. He opened the door and looked inside. Slabs of beef hung from the ceiling. Other cuts and sections of meat were piled on the floor. There were cleavers and hooks on pegs in the walls. The room was very cold.
He looked at the inside of the door. There was a safety latch there, installed so that the door could be opened from the inside if a person managed to lock himself in.
Two days ago he had smashed the safety latch. He broke it neatly and deliberately with a single blow of the cleaver, and then he told the Mexican kid what had happened.
“Watch yourself in the cold bin,” he had told the kid. “I busted the goddamn latch. That door shuts on you and you’re in trouble. The room’s soundproof. Nobody can hear you if you yell. So make damn sure the door’s open when you’re in there.”
He told Vicki about it that same night. “I did a real smart thing today,” he said. “Broke the damn safety latch on the cold bin door.”
“So what?” she said.
“So I got to watch it,” he said. “The door shuts when I’m in there and there’s no way out. A guy could freeze to death.”
“You should have it fixed.”
“Well,” he had said, shrugging, “one of these days.”
He stood looking into the cold bin for a few more moments now. Then he turned slowly and walked back to the front of the store. He closed the door, latched it. He turned off the lights. Then he went back to the cold bin.
He opened the door. This time he walked inside, stopping the door with a small wooden wedge. The wedge left the door open an inch or so. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with icy air.
He looked at his watch. Five-fifteen, it read. He took another breath and smiled slowly, gently, to himself.
By eight or nine he would be dead.
It started with a little pain in the chest. Just a twinge, really. It hurt him when he took a deep breath, and sometimes it made him cough. A little pain—you get to expect them now and then when you pass forty. The body starts to go to hell in one way or the other and you get a little pain from time to time.
He didn’t go to the doctor. What the hell, a big guy like Brad Malden, he should go to the doctor like a kid every time he gets a little pain? He didn’t go to the doctor. Then the pain got worse, and he started getting other pains in his stomach and legs, and he had a six-letter idea what it was all about.
He was right. By the time he went to a doctor, finally, it was inoperable. “You should have come in earlier,” the doctor told him. “Cancer’s curable, you know. We could have taken out a lung—”
Sure, he thought. And I could breath with my liver. Sure.
“I want to get you to the hospital right away,” the doctor had said.
And he asked, reasonably, “What the hell for?”
“Radium treatments. Radical surgery. We can help you, make the pain easier, delay the progress of the disease—”
Make me live longer, he had thought. Make it last longer, and hurt longer, and cost more.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Mr. Malden—”
“Forget it. Forget I came to you, understand? I never came here, I never saw you, period. Got it?”
The doctor did not like it that way. Brad didn’t care whether he liked it or not. He didn’t have to like it. It wasn’t his life.
He took a deep breath again and the pain was like a knife in his chest. Like a cleaver. Not for me, he thought. No lying in bed for a year dying by inches. No wasting away from two hundred pounds to eighty pounds. No pain. No dribbling away the money on doctors and hospitals until he was gone and there was nothing left for Vicki but a pile of bills that the insurance would barely cover. Thanks, doc. But no thanks. Not for me.
He looked again at his watch. Five-twenty. Go ahead, he told himself angrily. Get rid of the wedge, shut the door, lie down, and go to sleep. It was cold, and you closed your eyes and relaxed, and bit by bit you got numb all over. Go ahead, shut the door and die.
But he left the wedge where it was. No rush, he thought. There was plenty of time for dying.
He walked to the wall, leaned against it. This was the better way. In the morning they would find him frozen to death, and they would figure logically enough that the wedge had slipped and he had frozen to death. Vicki would cry over him and bury him, and the insurance policy would pay her a hundred thousand dollars. He had fifty thousand dollars of straight life insurance with a double indemnity clause for accidental death, and this could only be interpreted as an accident. With that kind of money Vicki could get a decent income for life. She was young and pretty, they didn’t have any kids, in a few years she could remarry and start anew.
Fine.
The pain came, and this time it was sharp. He doubled over, clutching at his chest. God, he hoped the doctor would keep his mouth shut. Though it would still go as accidental death. It had to. No one committed suicide by locking himself in a cold bin. They jumped out of windows, they slashed their wrists, they took poison, they left the gas jets on. They didn’t freeze themselves like a leg of lamb. Even if they suspected suicide, they had to pay the claim. They were stuck with it.
When the next stab of pain came he couldn’t stand any longer. It had been hell trying not to wince, trying to conceal the pain from Vicki. Now he was alone; he didn’t have to hide it. He hugged both hands to his chest and sank slowly to the floor. He sat on a slab of bacon, then moved the slab aside and sat on the floor. The floor was very cold. Hell, he thought, it was funny to sit in the cold bin. He’d never spent much time there before, just walked in to get some meat or to hang some up. It was a funny feeling, sitting on the floor.
How cold was it? He wasn’t sure exactly. The thermostat was outside by the door; otherwise the suicide wouldn’t have been possible, since he could have turned up the temperature. The damn place was a natural, he thought. A death trap.
He put his hand to his forehead. Getting cold already, he thought. It shouldn’t take too long, not at this rate. And he didn’t even have the door closed. He should close the door now. It would go a little faster with the door closed.
Could he smoke a cigarette? Sure, he thought. Why not?
He considered it. If they found the cigarette they would know he’d had a smoke before he froze to death. So? Even if it were an accident, a guy would smoke, wouldn’t he? Besides, he’d make damn sure they’d think he tried to get out. Flail at the door with the cleaver, throw some meat around, things like that. They wouldn’t make a federal case out of a goddamn cigarette.
He took one out, put it between his lips, scratched a match and lighted it. He smoked thoughtfully, wincing slightly when the pain gripped his chest like a vise. A year of this? No, not for him. The quick death was better.
Better for him. Better for Vicki, too. God, he loved that woman! Too much, maybe. Sometimes he got the feeling that he loved her too hard, that he cared more for her than she did for him. Well, it was only natural. He was a fatheaded butcher, not too bright, not much to look at. She was twenty-six and beautiful and there were times when he couldn’t understand why she had married him in the first place. Couldn’t understand, but remained eternally grateful.
The cigarette warmed his fingers slightly. They were growing cold now, and their tips were becoming numb. All he had to do was flip the wedge out. It wouldn’t take long.
He finished the cigarette, put it out. He was on his way to get rid of the wedge when he heard the front door open.
It could only be Vicki, he thought. No one else had a key. He heard her footsteps, and he smiled quickly to himself. Then he heard her voice and he frowned.
“He must be here,” she was saying. Her voice was a whisper. “In the back.”
“Let’s go.”
A man’s voice, that one. He walked to the cold bin door and put his face to the one-inch opening. When they came into view he stiffened. She was with a man, a young man. He had a gun in one hand. She went into his arms and he kissed her hard.
Vicki, he thought! God!
They were coming back now. He moved away, moved back into the cold bin, waiting. The door opened and the man was pointing a gun at him and he shivered. The pain came, like a sword, and he was shaking. Vicki mistook it for fear and grinned at him.
She said, “Wait, Jay.”