Hot Spot by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

safe to be mixed up with in a town like this as a rattlesnake. You didn’t know what she’d do. The smart thing was to get out of here and let her happen to somebody else.
    But I had to wait, unless I wanted to give up the idea which was going around in my mind. It would take at least a month. No, it would take longer, because you couldn’t just come in here, pull off something like that, and then run. It would put the finger on you. I looked at the building again. It was perfect for what I wanted—unoccupied, and not too near any of the few inhabited shacks along the street. The only hitch was that I had to get into it and out again without being seen, when the time came, and now the moon was working against me. I couldn’t take a chance on it until it started to wane, unless we happened to get an overcast or a rainy night. There were two or three shacks on the opposite side of the cross street which had a view of the side of the building, and you could never tell when somebody might be awake and looking out from one of them.
    I went on back to the rooming house and lay awake a long time still thinking about it. Sometime before I dropped off I got to wondering what was on that street next to the bank, the one the side door opened on to. I had been right there on the corner a couple of times, but I couldn’t remember. If there were a store on the opposite side with a door or show windows facing the side of the bank it would be too dangerous. That was something I had to find out before I could even consider it, but it could wait until morning.
    The next day was Sunday. I awoke around ten with a hang-over and feeling as if I’d been beaten up in a fight, listless and only half alive. I went downtown for some orange juice and coffee, bought a paper at the drugstore, and then walked slowly around the whole block the bank was on.
    It was all right. In fact, it was very good. The cross street was blind as far as seeing the side door of the bank was concerned. There was a store across there, all right, but it faced only on Main and this side was a blank brick wall. I went on around, as if out for an aimless Sunday morning stroll. Directly behind the bank there was an alley cutting all the way through the block, and where it came out into the next street the only business establishments again faced on Main. All right, I thought; so far, so good.
    Tuesday, when the draft had gone through, I went back to the bank and cashed a cheque for fifty dollars. While I was inside I looked it over again, very thoroughly. There were four men at work, one in each of the two cages, an officer of some kind at the railed-in desk, and a book-keeper busy over the tabulating machines. They were all young or in early middle age except the Mr. Chips type I’d talked to before. He would be the one who’d always get left there because he was too old and frail to belong to the volunteer fire department. The door at the rear was partly open this time and I could see it led into a washroom, all right. And it opened inward.
    I was beginning to get it all into place in my mind now. The tough part was going to be the waiting. Right now I had to work out the idea for the machine, and I already had a pretty good idea about that. I had to go out of town to buy the things I needed, however. It would be too risky to do it around here, or keep it in my room while I was working on it. You lived in a glass bowl in a town this small. On Thursday I told Harshaw I was going to take the next day off to drive down to Houston and try to collect some money a man owed me.
    I hadn’t seen any more of Dolores Harshaw at all, but Thursday afternoon I ran into Gloria Harper in the drug store. I had gone in for a Coke at three o’clock and she was sitting alone in a booth. She looked up and smiled, and I went over and sat down.
    “Are you doing anything tonight?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “Not tonight.”
    “Well, I hear they’re playing ‘The Birth of a