Wales’s apartment was on the second floor. The fire-escape ended there with a counter-weighted iron ladder that a man’s weight would swing down into a cement-paved court.
I went down as Babe McCloor had gone, swinging down on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.
There was only one street exit to the court. I took it.
A startled looking, smallish man was standing in the middle of the sidewalk close to the court, gaping at me as I dashed out.
I caught his arm, shook it.
“A big guy running.” Maybe I yelled. “Where?”
He tried to say something, couldn’t, and waved his arm at billboards standing across the front of a vacant lot on the other side of the street.
I forgot to say, “Thank you,” in my hurry to get over there.
I got behind the billboards by crawling under them instead of going to either end, where there were openings. The lot was large enough and weedy enough to give cover to anybody who wanted to lie down and bushwhack a pursuer—even anybody as large as Babe McCloor.
While I considered that, I heard a dog barking at one corner of the lot. He could have been barking at a man who had run by. I ran to that corner of the lot. The dog was in a board-fenced backyard, at the corner of a narrow alley that ran from the lot to a street.