The memory came back to me of the time, years before, when I’d been taken on a tour through a State’s prison and had been ushered into the execution chamber, shown the square trap of the scaffold, a bit of mechanism which at first glance looked like a part of the floor, but which was precariously balanced so that it only needed the slightest touch of the tripping button to send a heavy trap-door plunging down with that ominous bang that is so hideously familiar to those who have ever witnessed an execution, a reverberating, silence-shattering noise that will for ever after be indelibly impressed upon the mind of the witness — a noise which is synchronized so that the audience watching the execution doesn’t hear the sickening snap of the bone in the neck of the condemned man as he catapults to the end of the rope and the hangman’s knot behind his ear dislocates the cervical vertebra, pulling the spinal cord loose, letting the neck stretch until it is no bigger than a man’s arm, while the rope bites into the quivering flesh.
I felt as though I was standing on one of those insecure square platforms while an executioner slipped a black bag and a rope over my face, tightened it around my neck.
Just as a matter of form I checked the agency parking lot.
Agency car number two, the one I had been driving when I ran out of petrol, the one I had abandoned when I stole the other car, was in its accustomed place.
I turned on the ignition and checked the petrol tank. It was full. The attendant didn’t know when it had been parked there, some time during the night. It had been there when he’d opened up.
I didn’t ask any more questions.
I walked into the office, the morning newspaper under my arm, trying to appear nonchalant.
Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up from her typing with a smile.
“Have a nice week-end?” she asked.
“Fine,” I told her.