OK Sing-Sing, what now? Take that surprised look off your face, and get me out of this.
For a moment, nothing. Then the god smiled in his mind’s eye, and quite coincidentally he felt the hinges pressing into his back.
Shit! A door. He was leaning against a door.
Grunting with pain he turned and ran his fingers around this escape hatch at his back. To judge by touch it was a small ventilation grille no more than three feet square. Maybe it let on to a crawlspace or maybe into someone’s kitchen – what the hell? It was safer inside than out: that was the first lesson any newborn kid got slapped into him.
The siren-song wailed on, making Barberio’s skin creep. Foul sound. It quickened his heart hearing it.
His thick fingers fumbled down the side of the grille feeling for a lock of some kind, and sure as shit there was a padlock, as gritty with rust as the rest of the metal work.
Come on Sing-Sing, he prayed, one more break is all I’m asking, let me in, and I swear I’m yours forever.
He pulled at the lock, but damn it, it wasn’t about to give so easily. Either it was stronger than it felt, or he was weaker. Maybe a little of both.
The car was slinking closer with every second. The wail drowned out the sound of his own panicking breath.
He pulled the gun, the cop-killer, out of his jacket-pocket and pressed it into service as a snub-nosed crowbar. He couldn’t get much leverage on the thing, it was too short, but a couple of cursing heaves did the trick. The lock gave, a shower of rust scales peppered his face. He only just silenced a whoop of triumph.
Now to open the grille, to get out of this wretched world into the dark.
He insinuated his fingers through the lattice and pulled. Pain, a continuum of pain that ran from his belly to his bowel to his leg, made his head spin. Open, damn you, he said to the grille, open sesame.
The door conceded.
It opened suddenly, and he fell back on to the sodden sacking. A moment and he was up again, peering into the darkness within this darkness that was the interior of the Movie Palace.
Let the cop-car come, he thought buoyantly, I’ve got my hidey-hole to keep me warm. And warm it was: almost hot in fact. The air out of the hole smelt like it had been simmering in there for a good long while.
His leg had gone into a cramp and it hurt like fuck as he dragged himself through the door and into the solid black beyond. Even as he did so the siren turned a corner nearby and the baby wail died. Wasn’t that the patter of lawlike feet he could hear on the sidewalk?
He turned clumsily in the blackness, his leg a dead-weight, his foot feeling about the size of a watermelon, and pulled the grille-door to after him. The satisfaction was that of pulling up a drawbridge and leaving the enemy on the other side of the moat, somehow it didn’t matter that they could open the door just as easily as he had, and follow him in. Childlike, he felt sure nobody could possibly find him here. As long as he couldn’t see his pursuers, his pursuers couldn’t see him.
If the cops did indeed duck into the lot to look for him, he didn’t hear them. Maybe he’d been mistaken, maybe they were after some other poor punk on the street, and not him. Well OK,
whatever. He had found himself a nice niche to rest up awhile, and that was fine and dandy.
Funny, the air wasn’t so bad in here after all. It wasn’t the stagnant air of a crawlspace or an attic, the atmosphere in the hidey-hole was alive. Not fresh air, no it wasn’t that, it smelt old and trapped sure enough, but it was buzzing nevertheless. It fairly sang in his ears, it made his skin tingle like a cold shower, it wormed its way up his nose and put the weirdest things in his head. It was like being high on something: he felt that good. His leg didn’t hurt anymore, or if it did he was too distracted by the pictures in his head. He was filling up to overflowing with pictures: dancing girls and kissing couples, farewells at stations, old dark houses, comedians, cowboys, undersea adventures -scenes he’d never lived in a million years, but that moved him now like raw experience, true and incontestable. He wanted to cry at the farewells, except that he wanted to laugh at the comedians, except that the girls needed ogling, the cowboys needed hollering for.