A thousand pieces of glass, china, plaster, exploded upward at my feet.
I tilted head and gun together.
A Negro’s red-silk arms were still spread over the balustrade above.
I sent him two bullets. Pat sent him two.
The Negro teetered over the rail.
He came down on us, arms outflung—a dead man’s swan-dive.
We scurried down the stairs from under him.
He shook the house when he landed, but we weren’t watching him then.
The smooth sleek head of Raymond Elwood took our attention.
In the light from above, it showed for a furtive split-second around the newel-post at the foot of the stairs. Showed and vanished.
Pat Reddy, closer to the rail than I, went over it in a one-hand vault down into the blackness below.
I made the foot of the stairs in two jumps, jerked myself around with a hand on the newel, and plunged into the suddenly noisy dark of the hall.
A wall I couldn’t see hit me. Caroming off the opposite wall, I spun into a room whose curtained grayness was the light of day after the hall.