by Robert Colby
I crept up on the warehouse. It was dark. I knew it was early for Tarino and Markos to be hauling their freight to the yacht. But there might be a guard and I was quiet as a barefooted Indian.
I saw the two little windows up there; way up near the eaves and much too small. I could bet they were spy-proof, just admitting light. And if that wasn’t enough, they were barred.
I paused at the big steel door. I combed the goddamn thing top to bottom and couldn’t find so much as a handle, let alone a lock. There had to be another way in so I toed around the building, searching as I went. Nothing. A roach couldn’t get in that place without the password. Not even the Florida variety — and they’ve got wings.
Then I remembered that Myra had said there must be a bell to signal inside and I went back to the door. Since the fortress appeared to be unguarded, I took a chance and used my pencil flash. Damned if I could find anything remotely like a button.
I had to give up and go back to the car.
“What luck?” said Myra.
“The kind that goes with a two-leaf clover. It’s Fort Knox without guards. But who needs guards?”
“Great. So how do you get in, Rod?”
“Got a few sticks of dynamite you can spare?”
“Sorry, I left them in my other purse.” “That’s no excuse. A lady always comes prepared.” “Yes, sir. And what do we do now — sir?” “We wait. Know any games?” “How about rugby?” “Make it soccer. Spelled s-o-c-k h-e-r!”
“Okay. But I play rough,” she said. “Remember?” “Mmmm. Skin diving?” “That’s no game.” “It is the way I play it.” “Oh, shut up.”
I did. We waited. It was a long wait.
Ten thirty-five. A Chevy sedan rolled past and braked before the warehouse. I couldn’t see anyone in the Chevy but the driver. I used the glasses to make sure. The guy cut his lights and sat. I figured this one was a little early for the rendezvous. Or the others were late. In any case, he got bored and left the car in less than ten minutes. He went towards the warehouse.
I wasn’t far behind him.
He didn’t stop at the door. He went around the building and disappeared. I was going to follow him when I heard a beautiful sound. That big steel door was rolling upwards. He had touched the magic gismo in some secret place. Contact!
I heard him coming. But he wasn’t fast enough, because I had ducked in that door and crouched behind a crate before he rounded the corner. In a moment there was the not-so-beautiful sound of the door closing again, locking in place.
Then lights flashed dimly overhead and there was the hollow clip of his feet going away on cement.
I peeked around the crate and watched. There was a small office in one corner and he was headed towards it. He went in and closed the door. Light winked behind glass.
I crawled around among those crates and had a look. Wood sections had been removed for inspection and it was a cinch to see inside. Easy, too easy. Especially since the crates contained exactly what the man was supposed to be selling — big kitchen ranges, coffee urns, mammoth refrigerators and other such giant knickknacks for the trade.
Not at all what I had in mind.
I moved behind those crates towards the office. Loosely speaking, the equipment formed a ring around the big room. The huge center of the floor was vacant. Why? The only logical answer was that the space was needed to store other merchandise. What kind? And where the hell was it?
I got close enough to that office so that I could see practically all of it through the glass in the door. There was a desk, the usual filing cabinets, a couple of chairs. Otherwise, the room was empty. I mean, that guy just wasn’t there!
I bent low and got closer. I looked again. By God, it was empty.
Now that was impossible. Because I had seen him go in and I had been gluing my eyes to that room all the time, all the way, as a precaution. And I could swear he never came out.
I waited about a minute and then I pulled my .38 from the holster and quietly opened the door. Yup, empty. The door had a bolt inside and I shoved it in place without a sound. Nothing like giving yourself a little extra time in case of emergency.
I set the gun on the desk and was reaching for a drawer when I saw the phone. The unlisted job. For a moment I thought of calling Ulrich and telling him I was locked in this goddamn tomb with no way out that I understood. The fact is, I would have called him for sure if I had found item one that was incriminating. But you can’t arrest a man because he’s got an electric, self-locking door on his barn. And besides, the type of goods I was hunting would not fall under Ben’s domain. I had other, more casual friends in the department but they wouldn’t go out on a limb for me. After all, I had no official status and I was trespassing, plain and simple. The hell with it.
I had my mitt on the middle drawer when I heard a sound. A distant hum, an electric motor opening a door. I grabbed the .38 from the desk and went to peer into the outer room. Couldn’t see a damn thing. Steel door still closed, no one about. Anyway, the sound had stopped. Which was no relief at all. It was weird.
Oh, Christ, I thought. This time I’ve done it I’ve fallen in over my head.
That was true. Because at the very second I was about to turn around, hard metal poked the back of my neck and someone said, “Drop it, bastard. Fast!”
I mean it, this guy was actually behind me in a locked empty room … He couldn’t be? Don’t argue with success, brother. He was there!
I dropped the gun. The damn thing was cocked and it went off. Wham! The slug zinged around the room like an angry lead bee. It had the sound of opportunity. But this was a very cool character. He just jammed that barrel another inch into my neck, pushing my nose against the glass of the door.
“Dumb son-of-a-bitch,” he cursed.
“You said drop it, buddy.”
“Hands behind your head!”
I obeyed. He pawed over me, backed off, said, “Turn around.”
I did. He was a burly guy with a parrot beak and a pocked face. He wore tan GI slacks and a dark short-sleeved sport shirt. He had muscles like hawsers — to moor the Queen Mary. There was a tattoo on one forearm. Nothing original. A belly dancer.
He was a perfect mate to the guy described by Massey as the one who gave him a thumping over. His muscles didn’t scare me at all. But something else did. He was leveling Mr. Thompson’s idea of a very portable machine gun. The kind that spits .45 slugs a lot faster than you can dodge them. This sort of weapon can give you a gutted feeling like few others.
“Who are you, bastard? And what’s your game?”
I didn’t answer.
“Your wallet. Toss it on the desk. That goes for the rest of your junk, too. Turn them goddamn pockets inside out.”
I emptied my pockets but he didn’t seem interested in anything but the wallet. He gave it a going over in such a way that he never really took his dirty eyes off me.
“Private snooper, eh?” He sat on the edge of the desk, sneering. “You’re dead. you know that? You’re already dead, buster.”
I knew he was right. The stuff these boys were pushing spelled death in any language. To stand where I was meant you knew too much.
“You make a mistake with me and you’ll be the dead one,” I bluffed. “How the hell do you think I got in here? I’m doing a job for Eddie Tarino.”
“Oh yeah? Is that right, now?”
“That’s right.”
He looked unconvinced but a flicker of doubt touched his ugly pan.
“What kind of job for Eddie Tarino?”
“Sorry, friend. I’m a clam. Those are my orders.”
“Yeah? A clam, huh? Listen, wise guy. Eddie don’t hire punks like you. Don’t con me, bastard.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “Tarino will hire punks like me to watch punks like you.”
At that moment his eyes flicked left and down. I followed the direction and right away a lot of things became clear. My Christ, there was a goddamn hole in the floor in a corner of the r
oom. A square section of the cement flooring yawned and a ladder descended. The hole would just admit a man, the area so small I had missed it just now in the excitement. Of course the hole wasn’t there when I entered the office. Because the guy had triggered a motor which closed the section after he went below.
“You know what’s down there?” he said. “Sure. Toys for Carga’s children.” “You’re very goddamn funny.”
“I told you I was in. But don’t take my word, fella. Ask Tarino.”
He glanced at the phone and I coiled myself for the big gamble. There are times when you have to shoot dice with death or crap out by default This was one of them.
“Go ahead,” I taunted. “Go ahead, call Tarino.”
While he hesitated a moment longer, I wondered if by some idiot luck, Myra had heard that shot. What a joke. Those walls would hold the sound of a bomb.
“Hurry it up,” I snapped. “We’re on the same payroll and I’ve got work to do. C’mon, c’mon! Call Tarino.”
That did it. He shrugged. His expression was damn near apologetic. He reached for the phone. And in the instant that he lowered the barrel of that Thompson just enough, I sprang forward and climbed all over him.
The gun came up and fired one quick burst that blew the glass out of the door and hurled crazy tinkling splinters into the warehouse. But I had snaked around the barrel and I was in close, hammering on that bent nose, straightening it out with the first fracturing blow.
The gun clattered to the floor and his head snapped back and I thought he was finished. But this guy loved a fight and pain was just a short fuse to explode him into action. He rolled and leaped off the desk to his feet. He came crouching towards me with his bloody mash of a nose drooling down his shirt. His eyes were slits and his fists were great knotty clubs anchored to bulging pistons of muscle. Now he saw the gun on the floor and made a quick move to reach for it.
That was only a dodge to get me in close. But by the time I found out, I had hurled myself at him and he had danced away to clobber the side of my head with a frozen ham that numbed my whole skull and damn near blew the lights out No more of that, I decided. And when he followed it up with a rush, I gave him a judo chop in the apple with one hand and a beauty in the gut with the other. When he doubled, I chopped the back of his neck and kneed him in the face for good measure. He began to fold and I kicked in a rib or two so he wouldn’t change his mind. He didn’t.
He cooled the hard way, the dirty way. But clean living will get you nothing but lilies from a hood. And the best hood next to a dead one is one that’s half-dead.
Well, this guy was down on the cement canvas and he wasn’t going to rise in any hurry. I always carry bracelets when there might be trouble, and just to make sure he was cozy, I cuffed his hands behind his back and under a leg of the desk.
I picked up my .38 and gave it to my holster. Then I took the Tommy and went down those stairs. I saw plenty of light below before I got to the bottom.
This cave down there was as big as the one above, though not as high to the ceiling. It was spread with rows and rows of cases — the type I knew I was hunting. But what really had me gaping was the sight of two ten-ton trucks in the center of the floor. I couldn’t understand how the goddamn things got down there. Not until I saw the ramp leading right up to — the ceiling? What else? The ceiling was also the floor above and it must slide back to let those trucks out. How, was a problem I didn’t have time to investigate.
I discovered a whole mess of tools on a bench in a corner and in a couple of minutes I had pried half a dozen of those cases open.
I found what I expected.
BAR’s. Browning Automatic Rifles.
TMG’s. Thompson Machine Guns.
GR’s. Garand Rifles, Model M-1.
Now you can’t buy that stuff and you don’t find it lying around. So I knew the weapons had been stolen from government armories and maybe a couple of army posts, too. It was a giant haul and they must have been gathering it a long time from a good many parts of the country. I didn’t know where it was headed but I had a pretty fair idea. This all added up to a very big rap for Messrs. Tarino and Markos — and friends.
There were cases of .45’s and other assorted hand guns, much easier to come by. There were some light machine guns, caliber .30. And also a few heavies, .50 caliber. Ammunition to spare for everybody. For all I knew there were grenades and flame throwers. There wasn’t time to ask all those boxes.
Well, I started upstairs to get to that phone. But half way, I caught on that I had delayed just a little too long. Because when I raised my head to look for that opening, it was gone. The floor had closed. I had a hunch it didn’t close by itself. And my friend with the broken beak was helpless. So guess who?
I almost smiled when I thought about having enough guns and ammunition to fight a minor war. But the smile didn’t quite come off.
Because just then the lights vanished and I was alone, sealed tight in the dark.
Twenty-One
It was a hell of a fix to be in. Just before I went down the stairs I had grabbed my wallet from the desk. But I was in a hurry and figured to go right back up, so I left the rest of the stuff the hood made me toss from my pockets. That included my pencil flash, and my lighter. I don’t carry matches. So I was really in the dark.
I was surrounded by a sea of ammunition. But I didn’t have a prayer of finding the right shells for my two guns. If I ran out, that was it.
If there was a light switch anywhere close, I hadn’t found it. Ditto, the switch to open that concrete panel. These boys had a bad habit of hiding the ways in and out of a place. Maybe they weren’t trying too hard down here. But in the dark you could grope for an hour. Something told me I wasn’t going to have near that much time. And it was even possible that they had yanked a fuse that would cut this branch of current.
There was just one thing in my favor. Only a man at a time could descend those stairs. I could pick him off with the Thompson. That meant nobody could come down, but then I couldn’t go up either.
So I was still worried. Plenty.
Then I got an idea which was so simple I wondered why they hadn’t thought of it, too. The trucks! Those babies had headlights …
I moved forward carefully. My eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness and I could see the vague outline of piled cases. I stepped around them and after a time I came to an open space. The trucks should be just ahead. They were.
I climbed into the cab of the nearest one. I saw that there was a small problem. The trucks faced the ramp and I needed light in the other direction. Well … I fished around for a key in the ignition slot. It was there. So I could back the truck into position. No, I couldn’t. The sound might reach above and I didn’t want to give anything away. The best thing was to cut the lights in and catch a certain amount of illumination by deflection. It would be enough.
Again I groped over the panel, found the light switch. I was about to give it a pull when I heard a sound. It didn’t take me long to identify that sound. I had heard a couple like it in the past hour. Somewhere a motor was spinning. This one had more guts. It set up a whine you couldn’t miss.
I dropped my hand from the dash and got the chopper in place so that the barrel poked out a window. Hell, I didn’t know which way to aim it or what was going to happen next. But I like the feel of the damn thing at the ready.
It seemed to me that very slowly the complexion of the darkness changed. It got lighter. Not much, but a little. And that was a clue.
I leaned out the window and looked up. Sure enough, they were opening the really big panel, the concrete section overhead which cleared the ramp for truck passage above. I keep saying “they” because I knew damn well that by now the others had arrived, in force, for the loading.
Anyway, I got the picture, the plan. They must have awakened pock-face and he told them what happened and who I was. They knew I was armed and they couldn’t climb down those narrow stairs. But the ramp was wide a
nd they could scramble down it in numbers to knock me off in short order. They were counting on surprise. They didn’t know I had figured the setup.
It took awhile for that big section to slide back. Maybe half a minute or more. The whole time I had my eyes fastened to the top. I would see them first. In fact, they wouldn’t see me at all in the cab.
Soon enough, three or four shadows appeared above. They started down the ramp. One at a time, not bunching together and crouched low. I leaned out and drew a bead on the first guy, eased my finger against the trigger.
Then I changed my mind. It was no good unless I caught them all together down at the bottom of the ramp. At the first shot the others would scatter back above and I’d be in about the same spot. They’d seal me in my prison again, or they’d wait for me to go up and then pick me off from hiding. No good. And what if three or four guys came down and the rest waited above? I didn’t know how many there were. God almighty!
Think! Think!
Well, three guys made it to the bottom and crouched in a huddle, whispering. I could make them out as my eyes were now sharp in the dark and there was a pale flush of light from above. I had those three lined up approximately on the other end of that barrel. You don’t need a lot of accuracy with a machine gun. You can spray an area and take everything in it with a little luck.
But hoods or not, did I want to butcher three of those bastards in cold blood? And if so, would it be over? There just had to be more than three for this kind of operation. I was sure of it. And even a half-baked lieutenant doesn’t put all his troops under fire at once. He keeps some in reserve. Yes, there must be others above.
Think! Think! One mistake would be one too many.
I let those three pass. They separated and moved among the cases. Then I made up my mind. A long shot and damn risky. But it had a chance.
I fumbled around in the dark, touching gadgets, making myself familiar with them. I knew about trucks. I had driven several in the army, a couple of civilian jobs, too. So I got ready and then I hit the starter and prayed. Don’t miss, you big bastard, don’t miss!