She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable...
I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't d...
Evans made himself their spokesman. Charlie and Joe, he offered. Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time. Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a m...
But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. Fo...
After she's gone, another brief lull sets in. This one is probably the last. But what good is a lull? It's only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened. Because anticipatory fear is always t...
You his brother?''Yes, damn it!' I burst out. And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!''Funny,' said a dick dryly, 'but so do we.'I didn't like him much after that. Sarcasm is out...
They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.But she failed to add: if you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn't y...
One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intert...
Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. (I'm Dangerous Tonight)
He just lingers long enough to see his plane put to bed properly, then grabs a cab at the airport-gate. The Settlement and forgetting that he's not inland any more, that Shanghai's snappier than Chica...
Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the...
It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he's missing a lot by being like this - fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is h...
I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling Tonight, velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Wint...
And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It mus...
I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're lo...
I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor....
That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, New York. You wouldn't know you were in Ch...
Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reach...
There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on,...
The struggle doesn't last long; it's too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it's easy to pry the disabled on...