Read Marihuana for Free Online Page A

Instantly he was on his feet, hovering watchfully between her and it.
     
    "Who is it?"
     
    "I don't know; how can I tell, until I answer?"
     
    "Don't touch it or I'll———!"
     
    She had made an inadvertent little gesture toward it; she quickly whipped her hand back again, as if it had been burned. She shivered, stroked her own upper arms as if she were unbearably cold. Help — that was so near and yet so far.
     
    Both their gazes were fixed on it, the inanimate instrument, now; his in hair trigger menace, hers in swooning helpless frustration. If she could only knock it off the edge of the———
     
    "-Keep your elbow down!- I saw it move———" His own hitched up.
     
    "But it may be Matt, the man you saw bring me home. He knows I'm up here. If I don't answer, it'll be worse than if I do. I'll tell him I'm in bed, I'll tell him not to bother me———"
     
    The continued ringing was an irritant, perhaps that helped. "Go ahead," he gritted. "Get rid of him." But the gun had come out now, was pressed into the soft flesh of her throat, just under the chin.
     
    Her hand crept out toward the transmitter, cautiously, as if fearful of bringing on calamity if it betrayed too much eagerness. One of the breaks in the ringing had just occurred.
     
    It didn't end! It stretched — it stretched——— Silence. The call was killed. He flicked her futilely-extended hand back with the point of the gun.
     
    Her head dropped down on her chest with a swinging roll. He tilted it back with his free hand. Moisture squeezed out of her eyes.
     
    "What're you crying for?" he scowled viciously. "You musta wanted to talk to him bad? You musta wanted to———"
     
    She didn't make any answer. You don't reason with a hooded cobra or a hydrophobic dog or a time bomb. You can't. There was only silence in the room, waiting silence — and the three of them.
     
    There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.
     
    Spillane touched the requisitioned passkey gingerly to the door, gun unlimbered in his right hand and standing well off to one side of the opening. He sent the freed door back with a stub of his toe and followed his gun in like a compass.
     
    Darkness and silence.
     
    The place swallowed him up. There was a wait. Then the snap of a wall switch and a gush of light. He came back again to the outside doorway, hitched his head at the empty hallway, and a lurking auxiliary materialized around a bend in it, almost as if by mind reading.
     
    "Not here," Spillane breathed when he had approached. They both went in and he closed the door after the two of them.
     
    Eleanor's picture was still where Turner had put it down after last looking at it.
     
    "Pick your spit while we can still see," Spillane cautioned. "I'm going to kill the lights as soon as I try to get hold of her once more. He may show up from one minute to the next———"
     
    He lifted Turner's phone, slotted the dial.
     
    A voice said, "Good evening, Continental."
     
    He asked without any introductory explanation, "Did she come in yet?"
     
    The answer was given with immediate understanding, as though this was only the latest of many such calls, repeated at short intervals. "I'll try once more, but I don't think she has or I would have seen her." Then a period of vacant humming. The voice returned. "No, Miss Philips hasn't come back yet, her room doesn't answer———"
     
    "Hold her downstairs at the desk with you, if she does!"
     
    He hung up, eyed the picture somberly.
     
    "I'd better get over there myself — and fast," he said. "She's got to be tipped off the minute she comes in!"
     
    The other man had disappeared by now, though the room was still fully lighted. A low voice from behind a reversed wing chair said "I'm set. Give it the gun."
     
    The wall switch snapped a second time, and they both disappeared.
     
    "You sit tight here, we'll work both ends at once. He's still