I rolled him off. The blond police detective—not very blond now—got up.
At the other end of the passageway, an open door showed an empty kitchen.
Pat and I went to the door that Elwood had been playing with. It was a solid piece of carpentering, and neatly fastened.
Yoking ourselves together, we began to beat the door with our combined three hundred and seventy or eighty pounds.
It shook, but held. We hit it again. Wood we couldn’t see tore.
Again.
The door popped away from us. We went through—down a flight of steps—rolling, snowballing down—until a cement floor stopped us.
Pat came back to life first.
“You’re a hell of an acrobat,” he said. “Get off my neck!”
I stood up. He stood up. We seemed to be dividing the evening between falling on the floor and getting up from the floor.
A light-switch was at my shoulder. I turned it on.
If I looked anything like Pat, we were a fine pair of nightmares. He was all raw meat and dirt, with not enough clothes left to hide much of either.
I didn’t like his looks, so I looked around the basement in which we stood. To the rear was a furnace, coal-bins and a woodpile. To the front was a hallway and rooms, after the manner of the upstairs.
The first door we tried was locked, but not strongly. We smashed through it into a photographer’s darkroom.