"I'm getting dressed...."

"It's three o'clock in the morning."

"So? I don't give a damn."

"You'll come back. Drunken louse."

He laughed softly and smiled at her in the darkness with ice-white Marlon Brando teeth. Then he was gone.

Oswald Williams. Good old Ozzie, best man in the whole philosophy department. Five foot two, one hundred and seven pounds, milky eyes. Wrote an outstanding paper on the inherent fallacies of logical positivism.

"Louise," he whispered, "I feel uneasy. Very uneasy."

His wife lifted her fatty head and gazed happily down at Oswald. "Go to sleep," she said.

"If you'll excuse me, I think that I shall take a walk."

"But, Oswald, it's three o'clock in the morning!"

"Don't be irrational," he whispered. "If I want to take a walk, I shall take a walk."

"Well! I don't think you ought to, or you might catch a cold."

He rose and dressed, donning a tee-shirt and tweed trousers. With snake-swift Marlon Brando hands, he tossed his plaid scarf in her face.

"Excuse me, Louise," he whispered, "but I gotta make it...."

Then, laughing softly, he strode from the room.

At three o'clock in the morning, even a large city is quiet and dark and almost dead. At times, the city twitches in its sleep; occasionally it rolls over or mutters to itself. But only rarely is its slumber shattered by a scream....

"Johnny! Hey, Johnny!" cries Chester McRae, his eyes as dull and poisonous as two tiny toads.

"Let's make it, man ... let's split...." whispers Bartholomew Oliver, one finger brushing his nose like a rattler nosing a dead mouse.

"I don make no move without my boys," says Oswald Williams, his hands curled like scorpion 

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