Free Hot Spot by Charles Williams Page A

me. He fought the blanket wildly, trying to get his arms up. I pulled them down, took two turns around him with the line, and tied it off, then pulled his feet from under him and set him on the floor and threw two half-hitches around his ankles. He was still yelling, the sound muffled inside the blanket.
    I had the knife out. I pulled the blanket away from his lower face and quickly cut a hole in it around his mouth. Grabbing a paper towel out of the container on the wall, I rolled it into a right ball and the next time he opened his mouth to scream I shoved it inside, hard, and plastered a strip of adhesive tape across it. I straightened, and wiped the sweat off my face. It had taken a month.
    He could breathe all right, but he couldn’t yell. It was a lot of trouble, but if I’d tried slugging him I might have killed him. He was too old.
    I opened the door a crack and peered out. It was clear. No one was in sight anywhere. I grabbed the coat and stepped out and closed the door. I was in plain sight of the street now. It was like being naked in a dream. I made it to the gate in the railing, and then I was in the vault.
    Maybe I’d expected it to be full of currency stacked everywhere on the floor like cordwood. It threw me for a second. I didn’t see anything except ledgers, papers, filing cabinets, and drawers. I started yanking the drawers open. Some of them were locked. I got one open at last that was full of currency in bundles, fastened with paper bands. I didn’t look at the denominations. Time was running; I could feel it going past me like the tide. I jerked the undershirt out of my coat pocket; it had been tied off with a cord to form a bag, and I started cramming in the bundles.
    I came out of the vault and ran up in back of the tellers’ cages, bent over and hidden from the street by the ground glass screen and the counter. In another thirty seconds I’d be out of here. It was beginning to get me now. I cleaned out the first one, and moved to the other. It was just a few seconds now. Then I stopped dead still and listened, feeling the pulse jump in my throat. There was somebody on the sidewalk outside.
    I dropped, squatting below the counter, trying to listen above the roaring of blood in my ears. The footsteps were going on past. Would whoever it was look inside and wonder why no one was in sight? Then I froze. I could feel the icy wind blowing right up my spine. The shuffling footsteps hadn’t gone past. They had come in. Somebody was inside the bank, right on the other side of the counter.
    I tried to stop the sound of my breathing. And then, in an agonizing flashback of memory, I thought of the thing I had done that day when I hadn’t seen anybody here. I had looked down inside the cages.
    He hadn’t said anything. Why didn’t something happen? I fought desperately to hold myself still, not give way to the awful compulsion to break and run for it. Then he moved again. And now I began to get it. There was another sound beside the scrape of his shoes. It was the tap, tap, tap of a cane.
    “Mister Julian? You theah, Mr. Julian? Wheahbouts the fiah?”
    I could feel myself weaken all over and the sigh coming up out of my lungs like a balloon collapsing. I throttled it and tried to hold my breath as I came slowly to my feet.
    It was awful. It could break your nerve. We were facing each other across the counter and I was looking right into the dark glasses three feet in front of my eyes. I was robbing a bank with a witness standing there so near he could reach out and touch me, a witness who could send me to the penitentiary for practically the rest of my life except for the fact that he was blind.
    “That you, Mister Julian?” he asked.
    How did he know somebody was here? Did he know it? I didn’t dare move. And I couldn’t speak. That was the way he identified people, by their voices. And I couldn’t stand there forever. He was reaching out an arm, groping for me. I leaned back, not moving my feet,