An hour before he’d claimed to be unable to give a definite time that the game was going off. I’d growled at him and he’d whined that he was telling the truth, never knowing that my rent was due in the morning and that was what disturbed me. Yet there was still a chance that he was balking at the last moment. I was thinking of this—and of getting Mary’s car back to her—when I trudged up the steps. One foot was in midair and my door was five feet away when I saw that the light was on and someone was moving around. Heat! Like a cat with its tail stepped on, I leaped sideways and broke full tilt at the darkness beside the building, crashing like a fullback into high shrubbery and breaking through; then leaping down a fifteen-foot embankment into a brush-filled ditch. I lay silent and motionless where I landed, staring up at the brink of the ditch and listening for any sound. All I could see was the black border of clouds drifting across the face of a half moon. All I could hear was traffic in the distance.
