Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich Read Free Book Online Page A

get me anyway in the end.   A difference of a few seconds.   He had a gun, I knew, that he was going to use on me in the open, over at Lakeside Park.   I was hoping that here, indoors, in order to make his own escape more practicable——
      Time was up.
      The flash of the shot lit up the room for a second, it was so dark.   Or at least the corners of it, like flickering, weak lightning.   The bust bounced on my shoulder and disintegrated into chunks.
      I thought he was jumping up and down on the floor for a minute with frustrated rage.   Then when I saw him dart by me and lean over the window sill to look for a way out, the sound transferred itself rearwards and downwards, became a pummeling with hoof and hip at the street door.   The camera-finish after all.   But he still could have killed me five times.
      I flung my body down into the narrow crevice between chair arm and wall, but my legs were still up, and so was my head and that one shoulder.
      He whirled, fired at me so close that it was like looking at sunrise in the face.   I didn't feel it, so — it hadn't hit.
      "You——"   I heard him grunt to himself.   I think it was the last thing he said.   The rest of his life was all action, not verbal.
      He flung over the sill on one arm and dropped into the yard.   Two-story drop.   He made it because he missed the cement, landed on the sod-strip in the middle.   I jacked myself up over the chair arm and flung myself bodily forward at the window, neatly hitting it chin first.
      He went all right.   When life depends on it, you go.   He took the first fence, rolled over that bellywards.   He went over the second like a cat, hands and feet pointed together in a spring.   Then he was back in the rear yard of his own building.   He got up on something, just about like Sam had——The rest was all footwork, with quick little corkscrew twists at each landing stage.   Sam had latched his windows down when he was over there, but he'd reopened one of them for ventilation on his return.   His whole life depended now on that casual, unthinking little act——
      Second, third.   He was up to his own windows.   He'd made it.   Something went wrong.   He veered out away from them in another pretzel-twist, flashed up toward the fifth, the one above.   Something sparked in the darkness of one of his own windows where he'd been just now, and a shot thudded heavily out around the-quadrangle-enclosure like a big bass drum.
      He passed the fifth, the sixth, got to the roof.   He'd made it a second time.   Gee, he loved life!   The guys in his own windows couldn't get him, he was over them in a straight line and there was too much fire escape interlacing in the way.
      I was too busy watching him to watch what was going on around me.   Suddenly Boyne was next to me, sighting.   I heard him mutter: "I almost hate to do this, he's got to fall so far."
      He was balanced on the roof parapet up there, with a star right over his head.   An unlucky star.   He stayed a minute too long, trying to kill before he was killed.   Or maybe he was killed, and knew it.
      A shot cracked, high up against the sky, the window pane flew apart all over the two of us, and one of the books snapped right behind me.
      Boyne didn't say anything more about hating to do it.   My face was pressing outward against his arm.   The recoil of his elbow jarred my teeth.   I blew a clearing through the smoke to watch him go.
      It was pretty horrible.   He took a minute to show anything, standing up there on the parapet.   Then he let his gun go, as if to say: "I won't need this any more."   Then he went after it.   He missed the fire escape entirely, came all the way down on the outside.   He landed so far out he hit one of the projecting planks, down there out of sight.   It bounced his body up, like a springboard.   Then it landed again — for good.   And that was all.
      I said to Boyne: "I got it.