Death's Sweet Song by Clifton Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

looking for, the safe.
    It looked like a hell of a safe to me. It looked like the great-great-grandfather of all the safes in the world. I had seen it before, I   must   have seen it before, but I didn't remember it as being that big. It was the biggest, heaviest, ruggedest-looking damn safe I'd ever seen. It was six feet tall; at least six feet tall, and almost as wide, and there was no telling how thick or heavy the thing was. It looked as big as a Sherman tank.
    That Sheldon better be good, I thought, because it's going to take more than a can opener to get into that thing.
    “Hello, Joe. Not lookin' for a job, are you?”
    I looked, around and there was a man grinning at me from me other side of the railing, a little sharp-faced, stoop-shouldered man whose name was Paul Killman and who, so the story went, rode in on the first load of brick when they started building the box factory thirty years ago and had been there ever since.
    I said, “Hello, Mr. Killman. I.just happened to be passing this way and remembered that I wanted to see Pat Sully about something. Do you know where he is?”
    “Why, I think he's at his desk. Yes, there he is.”
    I'd been so busy looking at that safe that I hadn't seen Pat at all. But I saw him now, a big, red-faced guy about my own age, sleepily putting figures inter an open ledger.
    “All right if I talk to him a minute?” I asked.
    “Sure, sure, Joe. You know your way around here.”
    I pushed open the gate and went around on the business side of the railing. I put a five-dollar bill on Pat's ledger and said, “The age of miracles hasn't passed, after all, and here's something to prove it. Remember that five you loaned me?”
    His head snapped up. “Hell, Joe, you didn't have to come all the way out here to give it to me. To tell the truth, I'd forgotten all about it.”
    Like hell he had. He was quick enough to put it in his pocket.
    We talked for maybe five minutes about things that neither of us cared a damn about. Pat kept looking anxiously at Old Man Provo's desk, in the far corner of the room, as though he expected the sky to fall. I was sizing up that room. I was getting a picture of it in my mind that couldn't be erased. That safe was the only thing that bothered me.
    I said, “Is the water cooler still in the warehouse? Let's go back and have a cigarette. Old Provo can get along without you for a few minutes.”
    Pat didn't like it much; old Provo was hell on getting his pound of flesh from the office force. Then he shrugged. Maybe he was getting tired of the job anyway. “All right, but just for a minute.”
    I wanted to get a good look at that warehouse, because that was the way we had to come in. We couldn't come in the front way; that was well lighted and facing the highway. It had to be the back way, through the warehouse. I deliberately counted the steps from Pat's desk, which was about in the center of the room, to the warehouse partition.
    I swung close enough to the safe to get the brand name; it was a Kimble. A Kimble Monarch, the lettering said, Model K-467. It was an elephant of a safe. Why hadn't I noticed it before? No wonder the place had never been robbed, with a safe like that. If you're smart, I thought, you'll drop this thing right where it is. Let Manley and Sheldon beat their brains out trying to get inside that iron blockhouse. It's crazy to think that a man could ever open a monster like that.
    Then I was crazy, because I was not dropping it now. Sheldon was the expert on safes; let   him   worry about it.
    The water cooler was a big galvanized can with two spigots at the bottom, sitting on a couple of sawhorses just on the other side of the office partition, in the warehouse itself. Entering that warehouse was like stepping into the bleak, empty spaces of a desert. It looked as big as those hangars they used to house dirigibles in. The ceiling was two stories high, and up there somewhere, in the gloom, cranes rolled back and forth, the noise