Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 7, September 1954

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He whistled softly to himself as he walked, vaguely conscious of the dusty black Ford in the same disinterested way he was conscious of the evening dusk that softened the brick fronts of the apartment houses, and of the muggy August heat that seemed to deaden the sound of his heels on the asphalt.

There was no warning. Nothing at all to tell him this quiet street had been chosen for his execution. No reason to think the dusty black Ford, slowing a little now as it came abreast of him, was any different from ten thousand other dusty Fords in the city.

His first awareness that death was only a shadow’s length away was the sudden blast of the gun and the whine of the slug past his cheek. And even then the full meaning of the shot did not come to him until after instinct had sent him diving to hands and knees between two parked cars.

He heard the Ford’s motor being gunned, and the angry snarl of metal against metal as it sideswiped another car, and then realization flooded through his mind and he knew with abrupt, stomach-twisting fear who it had been that had tried to kill him — and why. It was a numbed, helpless fear, like none he had ever known before, and it was only after the sound of the Ford had died away that he felt the constriction of his throat and the ice-like sheath of sweat across his shoulders and along his ribs.

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