The old man on the pallet watched them fold their disguises into small packages.

"Not even a little taste of King Kong," he whined.

"Naw, nothing!" Sheik said.

The old man raised up on his elbows. "What do you mean, naw? I'll throw you out of here. I'se the janitor. I'll take my keys away from you. I'll-"

"Shut your mouth before I shut it and if any cops come messing around down here you'd better keep it shut too. I'll have something for you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? A bottle?"

The old man lay back mollified.

"Come on," Sheik said to the others.

As they were leaving he snatched a ragged army overcoat from a nail on the door without the janitor noticing. He stopped Sonny in the passage and took the noose from about his neck, then looped the overcoat over the handcuffs. It looked as though Sonny were merely carrying an overcoat with both hands.

"Now nobody'll see those cuffs," Sheik said. Turning to Inky, he said, "You go up first and see how it looks. If you think we can get by the cops without being stopped, give us the high sign."

Inky went up the rotten wooden stairs and through the doorway to the ground-floor hall. After a minute he opened the door and beckoned.

They went up in single file.

Strangers who'd ducked into the building to escape the shooting were held there by two uniformed cops blocking the outside doorway. No one paid any attention to Sonny and the three gangsters. They kept on going to the top floor.

Sheik unlocked a door with another key on his ring, and led the way into a kitchen.

An old colored woman clad in a faded blue Mother Hubbard with darker blue patches sat in a rocking chair by a coal-burning kitchen stove, darning a threadbare man's woolen sock on a wooden egg, and smoking a corncob pipe.

"Is that you, Caleb?" she asked, looking over a pair of ancient steel-rimmed spectacles.