Red Harvest (17 page)

Then it was all over. We were out of range, sight and sound of the Silver Arrow, speeding away from Personville.

Reno turned around and did his own holding on. I took my arms in and found that all the joints still worked. Dinah was busy with the car.

Reno said:

“Thanks, kid. I needed pulling out.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “So that’s the kind of parties you throw?”

“We had guests that wasn’t invited. You know the Tanner Road?”

“Yes.”

“Take it. It’ll put us over to Mountain Boulevard, and we can get back to town that-a-way.”

The girl nodded, slowed up a little, and asked:

“Who were the uninvited guests?”

“Some plugs that don’t know enough to leave me alone.”

“Do I know them?” she asked, too casually, as she turned the car into a narrower and rougher road.

“Let it alone, kid,” Reno said. “Better get as much out of the heap as it’s got.”

She prodded another fifteen miles an hour out of the Marmon. She had plenty to do now holding the car to the road, and Reno had plenty holding himself to the car. Neither of them made any more conversation until the road brought us into one that had more and better paving.

Then he asked:

“So you paid Whisper off?”

“Um-hmm.”

“They’re saying you turned rat on him.”

“They would. What do you think?”

“Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me.”

He looked at me while he said it. He was a man of thirty-four or -five, fairly tall, broad and heavy without fat. His eyes were large, brown, dull, and set far apart in a long, slightly sallow horse face. It was a humorless face, stolid, but somehow not unpleasant. I looked at him and said nothing.

The girl said: “If that’s the way you feel about it, you can—”

“Look out,” Reno grunted.

We had swung around a curve. A long black car was straight across the road ahead of us—a barricade.

Bullets flew around us. Reno and I threw bullets around while the girl made a polo pony of the little Marmon.

She shoved it over to the left of the road, let the left wheels
ride the bank high, crossed the road again with Reno’s and my weight on the inside, got the right bank under the left wheels just as our side of the car began to lift in spite of our weight, slid us down in the road with our backs to the enemy, and took us out of the neighborhood by the time we had emptied our guns.

A lot of people had done a lot of shooting, but so far as we could tell nobody’s bullets had hurt anybody.

Reno, holding to the door with his elbows while he pushed another clip into his automatic, said:

“Nice work, kid. You handle the bus like you meant it.”

Dinah asked: “Where now?”

“Far away first. Just follow the road. We’ll have to figure it out. Looks like they got the burg closed up on us. Keep your dog on it.”

We put ten or twelve more miles between Personville and us. We passed a few cars, saw nothing to show we were being chased. A short bridge rumbled under us. Reno said:

“Take the right turn at the top of the hill.”

We took it, into a dirt road that wound between trees down the side of a rock-ridged hill. Ten miles an hour was fast going here. After five minutes of creeping along Reno ordered a halt. We heard nothing, saw nothing, during the half-hour we sat in darkness. Then Reno said:

“There’s an empty shack a mile down the way. We’ll camp there, huh? There’s no sense trying to crash the city line again tonight.”

Dinah said she would prefer anything to being shot at again. I said it was all right with me, though I would rather have tried to find some path back to the city.

We followed the dirt track cautiously until our headlights settled on a small clapboard building that badly need the paint it had never got.

“Is this it?” Dinah asked Reno.

“Uh-huh. Stay here till I look it over.”

He left us, appearing soon in the beam of our lights at the shack door. He fumbled with keys at the padlock, got it off, opened the door, and went in. Presently he came to the door and called:

“All right. Come in and make yourselves to home.”

Dinah cut off the engine and got out of the car.

“Is there a flashlight in the car?” I asked.

She said, “Yes,” gave it to me, yawned, “My God, I’m tired. I hope there’s something to drink in the hole.”

I told her I had a flask of Scotch. The news cheered her up.

The shack was a one-room affair that held an army cot covered with brown blankets, a deal table with a deck of cards and some gummy poker chips on it, a brown iron stove, four chairs, an oil lamp, dishes, pots, pans and buckets, three shelves with canned food on them, a pile of firewood and a wheelbarrow.

Reno was lighting the lamp when we came in. He said:

“Not so tough. I’ll hide the heap and then we’ll be all set till daylight.”

Dinah went over to the cot, turned back the covers, and reported:

“Maybe there’s things in it, but anyway it’s not alive with them. Now let’s have that drink.”

I unscrewed the flask and passed it to her while Reno went out to hide the car. When she had finished, I took a shot.

The purr of the Marmon’s engine got fainter. I opened the door and looked out. Downhill, through trees and bushes, I could see broken chunks of white light going away. When I lost them for good I returned indoors and asked the girl:

“Have you ever had to walk home before?”

“What?”

“Reno’s gone with the car.”

“The lousy tramp! Thank God he left us where there’s a bed, anyway.”

“That’ll get you nothing.”

“No?”

“No. Reno had a key to this dump. Ten to one the birds
after him know about it. That’s why he ditched us here. We’re supposed to argue with them, hold them off his trail a while.”

She got up wearily from the cot, cursed Reno, me, all men from Adam on, and said disagreeably:

“You know everything. What do we do next?”

“We find a comfortable spot in the great open spaces, not too far away, and wait to see what happens.”

“I’m going to take the blankets.”

“Maybe one won’t be missed, but you’ll tip our mitts if you take more than that.”

“Damn your mitts,” she grumbled, but she took only one blanket.

I blew out the lamp, padlocked the door behind us, and with the help of the flashlight picked a way through the undergrowth.

On the hillside above we found a little hollow from which road and shack could be not too dimly seen through foliage thick enough to hide us unless we showed a light.

I spread that blanket there and we settled down.

The girl leaned against me and complained that the ground was damp, that she was cold in spite of her fur coat, that she had a cramp in her leg, and that she wanted a cigarette.

I gave her another drink from the flask. That bought me ten minutes of peace.

Then she said:

“I’m catching cold. By the time anybody comes, if they ever do, I’ll be sneezing and coughing loud enough to be heard in the city.”

“Just once,” I told her. “Then you’ll be all strangled.”

“There’s a mouse or something crawling under the blanket.”

“Probably only a snake.”

“Are you married?”

“Don’t start that.”

“Then you are?”

“No.”

“I’ll bet your wife’s glad of it.”

I was trying to find a suitable come-back to that wise-crack when a distant light gleamed up the road. It disappeared as I sh-sh’d the girl.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A light. It’s gone now. Our visitors have left their car and are finishing the trip afoot.”

A lot of time went by. The girl shivered with her cheek warm against mine. We heard footsteps, saw dark figures moving on the road and around the shack, without being sure whether we did or didn’t.

A flashlight ended our doubt by putting a bright circle on the shack’s door. A heavy voice said:

“We’ll let the broad come out.”

There was a half-minute of silence while they waited for a reply from indoors. Then the same heavy voice asked: “Coming?” Then more silence.

Gun-fire, a familiar sound tonight, broke the silence. Something hammered boards.

“Come on,” I whispered to the girl. “We’ll have a try at their car while they’re making a racket.”

“Let them alone,” she said, pulling my arm down as I started up. “I’ve had enough of it for one night. We’re all right here.”

“Come on,” I insisted.

She said, “I won’t,” and she wouldn’t, and presently, while we argued, it was too late. The boys below had kicked in the door, found the hut empty, and were bellowing for their car.

It came, took eight men aboard, and followed Reno’s track downhill.

“We might as well move in again,” I said. “It’s not likely they’ll be back this way tonight.”

“I hope to God there’s some Scotch left in that flask,” she said as I helped her stand up.

The shack’s supply of canned goods didn’t include anything that tempted us for breakfast. We made the meal of coffee cooked in very stale water from a galvanized pail.

A mile of walking brought us to a farmhouse where there was a boy who didn’t mind earning a few dollars by driving us to town in the family Ford. He had a lot of questions, to which we gave him phoney answers or none. He set us down in front of a little restaurant in upper King Street, where we ate quantities of buckwheat cakes and bacon.

A taxi put us at Dinah’s door a little before nine o’clock. I searched the place for her, from roof to cellar, and found no signs of visitors.

“When will you be back?” she asked as she followed me to the door.

“I’ll try to pop in between now and midnight, if only for a few minutes. Where does Lew Yard live?”

“1622 Painter Street. Painter’s three blocks over. 1622’s four blocks up. What are you going to do there?” Before I could answer,
she put her hands on my arm and begged: “Get Max, will you? I’m afraid of him”

“Maybe I’ll sic Noonan on him a little later. It depends on how things work out.”

She called me a damned double-crossing something or other who didn’t care what happened to her as long as his dirty work got done.

I went over to Painter Street. 1622 was a red brick house with a garage under the front porch.

A block up the street I found Dick Foley in a hired drive-yourself Buick. I got in beside him, asking:

“What’s doing?”

“Spot two. Out three-thirty, office to Willsson’s. Mickey. Five. Home. Busy. Kept plant. Off three, seven. Nothing yet.”

That was supposed to inform me that he had picked up Lew Yard at two the previous afternoon; had shadowed him to Willsson’s at three-thirty, where Mickey had tailed Pete; had followed Yard away at five, to his residence; had seen people going in and out of the house, but had not shadowed any of them; had watched the house until three this morning, and had returned to the job at seven; and since then had seen nobody go in or out.

“You’ll have to drop this and take a plant on Willsson’s,” I said. “I hear Whisper Thaler’s holing-up there, and I’d like an eye kept on him till I make up my mind whether to turn him up for Noonan or not.”

Dick nodded and started the engine grinding. I got out and returned to the hotel.

There was a telegram from the Old Man:

I put the telegram in my pocket and hoped things would keep on breaking fast. To have sent him the dope he wanted
at that time would have been the same as sending in my resignation.

I bent a fresh collar around my neck and trotted over to the City Hall.

“Hello,” Noonan greeted me. “I was hoping you’d show up. Tried to get you at your hotel but they told me you hadn’t been in.”

He wasn’t looking well this morning, but under his glad-handing he seemed, for a change, genuinely glad to see me.

As I sat down one of his phones rang. He put the receiver to his ear, said “Yes?” listened for a moment, said, “You better go out there yourself, Mac,” and had to make two attempts to get the receiver back on its prong before he succeeded. His face had gone a little doughy, but his voice was almost normal as he told me:

“Lew Yard’s been knocked off—shot coming down his front steps just now.”

“Any details?” I asked while I cursed myself for having pulled Dick Foley away from Painter Street an hour too soon. That was a tough break.

Noonan shook his head, staring at his lap.

“Shall we go out and look at the remains?” I suggested, getting up.

He neither got up nor looked up.

“No,” he said wearily to his lap. “To tell the truth, I don’t want to. I don’t know as I could stand it just now. I’m getting sick of this killing. It’s getting to me—on my nerves, I mean.”

I sat down again, considered his low spirits, and asked:

“Who do you guess killed him?”

“God knows,” he mumbled. “Everybody’s killing everybody. Where’s it going to end?”