I rushed in to see two boys in shoulder holsters, white shirts, suspenders, loosened bow ties and unshaven faces standing up hastily from a round table where a gin rummy game had been in progress. Both were smoking cigarettes and a blue haze hung in the room like bad weather. One boy was razor thin with a razor-thin mustache and slicked-back Valentino hair. He wore a revolver in a shoulder holster. The other was big and fat and sloppy and a half-eaten sandwich and several bottles of beer were before him at the table, and so was a revolver, which he went for, and I shot him twice. Once in the chest, once in the head. Shot right through my damn coat. Damn!

The woman began to scream. She was standing in a doorway to what appeared to be the kitchen. The child was not in sight.

The razor-thin guy overturned the table and began to fire at me from behind it. I ducked back out in the hall, to put a wall between us, while his slugs flew through the open door and chewed the wood of the door across the way.

“Give it up!” I said, my back to the wall. The smell of gunpowder scorched the air. “Place is surrounded. You want out alive, it’s with your hands the hell up!”

The gunfire subsided.

“Slide your rod out in the hall,” I said, my gun out from my coat pocket now. “Don’t throw it, slide it!”

After a moment or two of hesitation, the guy pitched it. It clunked against the baseboard of the floor at my left, harder than I liked but it didn’t go off; the barrel was still trailing smoke.

“Playing it smart, finally,” I said, stepping back inside, where I saw that he was indeed playing it smart-his version.

He held the small, black-haired, angelic-faced baby around its waist with one hard forearm; the child was asleep, or doped. The blonde was against a wall over at my left; her eyes were round and wet, her hard face distorted with fear, a knuckled hand up against one cheek. She wore a simple blue frock that hugged her curves. Behind her on the wall, crooked, hung a peaceful Maxfield Parrish print.