Free Marihuana by Cornell Woolrich Page A

street corner, apparently chosen at random, stood for a moment in the ghostly pall of a street light until the cab's taillight had winked out ahead. "We'll walk it from here," Evans said. "Driving right up to the door in a cab, in this neighborhood, is a tipoff something's doing inside. The neighborhood grapevine would finally get word to the cops."
     
    They crossed over toward Eleventh, went up a side street on that side on foot. Turner's reluctance to accompany them, even this late in the proceedings, was plainly visible on his face, but they ignored it.
     
    They stopped finally outside one of the moldering Civil War era tenements that, interspersed with billboards and lofts, lined the dismal thoroughfare. Turner tried to extricate himself for the last time, as if assailed by some intangible premonition. "I'm going to call it off. I got a feeling something's going to go wrong if I go up there. I got a feeling something's going to happen."
     
    "Aw, don't be yellow," Gordon snarled. Turner could see by their expressions that they didn't really like him, there was no real friendship there; they wanted him to come along simply to have a good time at his expense, to make him the butt of a joke, laugh at his inexperience.
     
    They looked at him scornfully, and the girl said contemptuously, "Oh, let him go. Don't make him come up if he's afraid."
     
    It was the sort of challenge that usually works, against all reason and logic, with almost anyone. It did this time too. Turner turned toward the tenement entrance without another word, followed them in. If the girl's elbow nudged Evans' ribs in the gloom ahead, he failed to see it.
     
    "Don't make any noise now," Gordon cautioned in the murky depths of the entrance-hallway. "They don't want the other tenants in the building to get wise."
     
    There were stairs ahead, lit — or rather hinted at — by a single bead of gaslight, the size of a yellow pea, hovering over a jet sticking out of the wall. They tiptoed up them Indian-file. They had to go that way, the rickety case was too narrow to take two of them abreast.
     
    "Once you get in it's not so bad," Evans tried to hearten Turner in a stage whisper over his shoulder. "They've got it fixed up pretty nice, out of the profits they make."
     
    "Aren't they taking a chance on the law?" Turner asked, tailing the rest of them around a creaky landing and up another flight.
     
    "If the dicks do bust in, what evidence have they got? How can they prove these people aren't just having a few personal friends in for a sociable evening? How long does it take to get rid of a few dozen reefers down the air shaft?"
     
    They climbed the rest of the way in silence until they had reached the top floor of the sinister place, stood huddled there for a moment getting their breaths back. There was a peculiar, insidious trace of something in the air up here, very hard to identify — a ghostlike pungency that prickled the nostrils. Turner had never met with it before, couldn't tell what it was. But he had his suspicions.
     
    "Well, here goes." Evans took a tug at his necktie, strode forward, knocked at a door fronting the top-floor hall. The others moved after him, stood grouped there as if for mutual protection.
     
    There was a single, muffled footfall somewhere on other side of the door. The backing of a handmade peephole, bored through the woodwork with an awl, was removed, and an orange-lidded eye presented itself. That was because the light was on the eye's side, the hall where they stood held simply a pin-point of gas.
     
    Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.
     
    The eye blacked out and a chain dropped with a clunk. Then the door opened narrowly. So narrowly they couldn't see who was behind it. The invitation to enter, however