LIGHTS OUT
It was five minutes to ten by his watch when Kirby entered the Paradox
Apartments. The bulletin board told him that his uncle's apartment was
12. He did not take the self-serve elevator, but the stairs. The hall
on the second floor was dark. Since he did not know whether the rooms
he wanted were on this floor or the next he knocked at a door.
Kirby thought he heard the whisper of voices and he knocked again. He
had to rap a third time before the door was opened.
"What is it? What do you want?"
If ever Lane had seen stark, naked fear in a human face, it stared at
him out of that of the woman in front of him. She was a tall, angular
woman of a harsh, forbidding countenance, flat-breasted and
middle-aged. Behind her, farther back in the room, the roughrider
caught a glimpse of a fat, gross, ashen-faced man fleeing toward the
inner door of a bedroom to escape being seen. He was thrusting into
his coat pocket what looked to the man in the hall like a revolver.
"Can you tell me where James Cunningham's apartment is?" asked Kirby.
The woman gasped. The hand on the doorknob was trembling violently.
Something clicked in her throat when the dry lips tried to frame an
answer.
"Head o' the stairs--right hand," she managed to get out, then shut the
door swiftly in the face of the man whose simple question had so
shocked her.
Kirby heard the latch released from its catch. The key in the lock
below also turned.
"She's takin' no chances," he murmured. "Now I wonder why both her an'
my fat friend are so darned worried. Who were they lookin' for when
they opened the door an' saw me? An' why did it get her goat when I
asked where Uncle James lived?"
As he took the treads that brought him to the next landing the
cattleman had an impression of a light being flashed off somewhere. He
turned to the right as the woman below had directed.
The first door had on the panel a card with his uncle's name. He
knocked, and at the same instant noticed that the door was ajar. No
answer came. His finger found the electric push button. He could hear
it buzzing inside. Twice he pushed it.
"Nobody at home, looks like," he said to himself. "Well, I reckon I'll
step in an' leave a note. Or maybe I'll wait. If the door's open he's
liable to be right back."
He stepped into the room. It was dark. His fingers groped along the
wall for the button to throw on the light. Before he found it a sound
startled him.
It was the soft faint panting of some one breathing.
He was a man whose nerves were under the best of control, but the cold
feet of mice pattered up and down his spine. Something was wrong. The
sixth sense of danger that comes to some men who live constantly in
peril was warning him.
"Who's there?" he asked sharply.
No voice replied, but there was a faint rustle of some one or some
thing stirring.
He waited, crouched in the darkness.
There came another vague rustle of movement. And presently another,
this time closer. Every sense in him was alert, keyed up to closest
attention. He knew that some one, for some sinister purpose, had come
into this apartment and been trapped here by him.
The moments flew. He thought he could hear his hammering heart. A
stifled gasp, a dozen feet from him, was just audible.
He leaped for the sound. His outflung hand struck an arm and slid down
it, caught at a small wrist, and fastened there. In the fraction of a
second left him he realized, beyond question, that it was a woman he
had assaulted.
The hand was wrenched from him. There came a zigzag flash of lightning
searing his brain, a crash that filled the world for him--and he
floated into unconsciousness.