by Jerry eBooks
The shots battered at the lock again. “Spray the room. Get ’em!” came a shout from outside.
“The jane’s in there, too!”
“Get ’em both!”
Castle sent the last shots from the cop’s gun through the door.
“Well . . . Did you?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Did I what?” said Tress.
“Find out who killed Reed?” Castle explained himself.
“Gregory himself killed Reed!” Tress rapped out through furious lips. “He admitted it! He left me for a few minutes a half hour before you came. . . . A deliberate killer! You owe nothing to a man like that, Lee—”
The noise in the corridor died. A new voice came. The voice of Gabby Lewis.
“We’ve got you, Castle. And got you right! We can drill you without a question asked—because you’re Reed’s murderer, running from the law.”
“So?” said Castle through the door.
“Come on out—and I’ll let the girl go. Stay in there and make us waste any more time, and . . . Well, you better come out with your hands up.”
“To get a dozen slugs in me, eh?” said Castle.
Gabby evaded that. “You’ll save the girl, anyway . . .”
Castle stared at the door, as though he were trying to gaze through it and divine the sincerity of the man outside. There was a line of perspiration like a mustache on his upper lip, but his voice remained steady.
“If you’d really do that—”
“The girl,” Tress said suddenly, “won’t be saved—not at your gang’s price, assuming you keep your word, which you wouldn’t. When you break in here you’ll find a gun in my hand too. And I can shoot.”
“OKAY, bluffer,” called Gabby. He laughed. “You may be interested, Castle. I hired young Gregory because he was the son of the man you nibbed out by mistake, and sicked him on the jane. I was going to land you through him—but you landed yourself by coming here. And another thing I’m going to pop you myself. And the gun that gets you—is the gun that got Breen!”
He laughed again, and hell commenced, with slugs slashing through the door like hail through paper. Castle had his arm around Tress, hard.
“This is it, honey. No use waiting. I’ll open the door . . . try to hold them . . . you lam for the window. . .
“No!”
“Might as well—” Shots drowned his voice.
“No! No! There isn’t a chance in a million for you . . . even if I could. . . .”
“I won’t take it lying down!”
Castle jumped suddenly to the door, and screamed like a man mortally wounded.
The door burst open, lock dangling, hiding Castle’s figure for an instant. Then he jumped from behind it and got the first man. Arms around him, he wrenched his gun away, using him for a shield in the meantime.
Mad move! Impossible! But he got that gun up and killed a snarling mobster at Gabby Lewis’s side as the man was trying to shoot the detective without killing his pal.
Lewis yelled. The man in Castle’s arms screamed as two of Lewis’s ruthless slugs cut through him at Castle. Screamed and died.
Blood came to Castle’s lips. One of those slugs had grazed a lung. Mad venture! But he staggered backward out of the room, with the dead man still in his arms. Backward, and down the hall toward the front, with Lewis’s men crowding after him.
“Tress! Now! Your only chance—”
Mad move! Impossible!
Two men grabbed the girl as she came through the doorway. Lewis pumped slugs through the dead man’s body. . . .
Then Lewis cried out and spun half around, with intense surprise ludicrous on his face. He fell to his knees, as a second shot and a third came from the head of the front stairs.
“Stick ’em up! All of you!” came a bellow after the shots.
Three plain clothes men and a cop charged over the top of the stairs. The cop, face red with fury, barged vengefully ahead. It was the one Castle had slugged.
“There he is,” the patrolman rasped, pointing at Castle, who lay half under his human shield. “We come here ’cause we hear shots, and find you—when we were hunting for you outside. We got you now!”
Tress’s thin, hysterical laugh rang out. The calmness of despair had dissolved in her shaky voice with hope revived.
“God! If you only knew how glad we are that you have got him—”
“Huh?” said the cop. “Glad he’s to be pinched? What—”
But Tress was on her knees beside Castle. There was a hole in the side of his chest, another in his arm, two in his right thigh. But he wasn’t quite out.
“Darling,” sobbed Tress. Then she pulled herself together as the city detectives prepared to carry him down and rush him to Emergency Hospital. “Still think I’m a kid, Lee?”
Castle tried to scowl as Tress dabbed at the bloody froth on his lips with her handkerchief. Those lips moved.
“Thirty-six. Fifteen years older than . . . you. . . .”
“The better to spank me when I need it, my dear,” said Tress. She kissed him, blood or no blood. “And now shut up, will you? You’ll need all your strength for the time when they pry those bullets out of your ancient hide.”
THE END
UNDERCOVER CHECKMATE
Steve Fisher
Wounded, swimming in the cold, black sea, Lieutenant Ted Tay could summon Coast Guard aid with his magnesium flares. But on the Lady Death kidnap craft was little Martha Mason, the child movie star, who would be murdered at the first boom of Navy guns.
IT was the dimmest corner, and the dirtiest. Tay had chosen it because of that, and he sat now, slumped in his chair and gazing at the pony of ten-cent whiskey in front of him. Through the open door he could see the rotting wood of the San Pedro fish docks. The smell of long-dead mackerel, blended with the fetid odor of the barroom, put a stench in his nostrils that he did not like. He gulped the whiskey and shook his head.
The woman was still watching him. It would be a woman who would recognize him like this: unshaven, wearing dungaree trousers, an old leather jacket, and his blue service cap, minus the Coast Guard insignia. His eyes were dark, smoldering bitterly. He wiped his mouth, and ignoring her, called for another drink.
The barkeep brought the whiskey, and Tay tried to concentrate his gaze on it, but he was uncomfortable. He wanted to get up and leave, and he would have, except that he was aware that it would only make him more conspicuous.
She had a vivid, purple-checked skirt, a navy-blue slip-over sweater, and skin as white as thin milk. Her eyes were blue, but a little watery; she had a pert nose, and a mouth that was a curved slash of crimson. Crimson to contrast the chalky white of her face, and the hay-wig effect of her bleached hair. Yet, with all this, there was a hard beauty about her; and when she smiled she did not show dirty teeth as one might have expected; they were white and glistening, so that her smile captivated.
She was with two men but they did not look at Tay, and when he ordered his third drink, she got up from her table and went to the bar. She leaned on the bar and smiled over at him. Tay nodded, but there wasn’t a flicker of emotion on his face. At last she strolled over.
“Mind if I sit down?”
His voice was a little hoarse: “Not at all.”
When she was seated, her manner changed. She said: “Listen, mister, this isn’t a game.” She took a clipping from her purse and pushed it across the table to him. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
He glanced at it. It was from yesterday’s San Pedro News. There was a picture of him in his junior-lieutenant uniform, a story beneath:
LIEUTENANT TED TAY DISMISSED
FROM COAST GUARD
Officer Once Called “Trigger” Tay, Hero of
Sea Battles, Accused of Accepting
Bribes from Smugglers.
San Pedro, March 13:—Lieutenant Tad Tay, one-time hero of the Coast Guard, who figured in several thrilling conflicts at sea with smugglers and aliens, was dismissed today from the Un
ited States Service when a court-martial, trying him for bribery, failed to find him guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
Had he been found guilty, Tay would be on his way to Alcatraz; as it is, the one-time pride of the Pacific Coast Guard is on the “beach.” He maintained his innocence during the court-martial and when interviewed by reporters this morning, stuck to his story.
TAY did not finish reading the lengthy article. He pushed it back to the hay-blonde. He lifted his thin eyebrows and looked at her with burning black eyes.
“If it is me, what of it?”
“If it is you,” the blonde repeated slowly, “I want to make your acquaintance. My name is Sandra Poynter.”
Tay only nodded and drank his drink. Sandra went on hurriedly, casting glances at the men from whose table she had come: “You got pretty rotten pay in the Coast Guard, didn’t you?”
Tay smiled without humor. “They brought that, out in the trial as my motive for accepting bribes.”
“A man who doesn’t take money when he has the chance is a fool,” Sandra stated. “Don’t you agree?”
“More to the point,” Tay replied soberly, “is, are you offering any?”
She looked at him sharply for a moment, then said: “Yes. We need a man like Trigger Tay on the Lady Death.”
He asked: “Rum?”
There was a strange look in her watery-blue eyes. “Better than that, Tay, and more dangerous—not that you’d mind.”
He asked: “Narcotics?”
“Maybe,” she answered. “Want to try out for a week, with a thousand dollars in the pay envelope on Saturday?”
He looked around, fingered his empty whiskey pony. The men at the other table were watching him now. He looked back at Sandra. He didn’t know why, but his heart was in his throat, beating like the pulse of a man with fever.
“It’s a deal,” he said softly.
The Lady Death docked not at a wharf, but underneath it. A high, old-fashioned wharf which was falling to pieces, and on which stood a galvanized tin warehouse that had long ago been condemned and out of use. There was a float under the wharf, and a gangplank from it up into the warehouse. An ingenious, if not a neat, arrangement.
The Lady Death was by no means so ancient. It had been a pleasure yacht, but was stripped in both lines and engines for high speed. Although it was no longer than forty feet, the compartments were compact, and guns could be rigged in four of the portholes, either starboard or port, in less than a minute. Added to that was the three-incher on the forecastle, which, in daylight sailing, was disguised as a winch covered by canvas. The Lady Death was not unlike a minute replica of the navy’s vest-pocket cruisers.
Tay sat in the bridge, on a chart table, smoking a cigarette. He had shaved, so that his bronze face was smooth and hard, like velvet stretched over steel. He wore his blue cap pushed back on his head.
“Isn’t it about time you told me what the racket is?” he asked quietly.
A big, red-haired man turned toward him, brown eyes glittery. He had said his name was Holtz, and that he was the boss—otherwise the captain.
“Never mind, Mr. Trigger Tay,” he said; “you’ll find out.”
Tay arched his eyebrows, replied, “I suppose,” and tossed his cigarette out the bridge window.
At that moment there was a rumbling sound overhead on the wharf, the sound of a car’s motor, which presently died. Holtz straightened up, grew tense.
“Wait here,” he snapped. “Signal the engine room to start the motors. We’re getting underway at once. You’ll take the helm, I’ll con.”
Tay said dully: “Okay.”
But his blood was racing, and when Holtz rushed from the bridge out on deck, Tay got up and went to the enunciators. He signaled the engines, walked over to the gyro and glanced at it. He knew the harbor, from Wilmington through the Pedro channel, right out into the breakwater, by heart.
THE engines started and the bulkheads of the Lady Death throbbed and quivered as the deep, steady purr droned up from the lower decks. Holtz rushed back into the bridge, very excited. He signaled the engine room “ahead full.” Tay took the wheel, started ahead of him and wondered at the advisability of speeding through the busy harbor.
The powerful little boat lunged forward suddenly, roared out from beneath the wharf and skimmed like a comet across the water. Tay had his hands full dodging the dim lights of the inner channel freighters and smaller vessels.
“Give me hard spotlights and a hand on the whistle,” he snapped.
“I’ll take care of the whistle,” Holtz growled.
They zoomed around a sailboat coming in under its auxiliary motor, headed straight down past the San Pedro Fifth Street landing, where navy motor launches tied up. From now on, the channel would be thick with shore boats, going to and fro from battleships, and navy gigs and launches.
“Don’t you think we should take it easy?” Tay asked.
“Easy, hell. Not with our cargo.”
Ted Tay’s black eyes flickered. He kept his hands hard on the wheel, spoke out of the side of his mouth: “Where aweigh when we hit the breakwater?” He was thinking: a coast guard boat would play hell chasing this craft!
“We’ll veer south,” Holtz replied. “Shoot right in between the battleships California and Idaho and set a course for the San Clemente Islands.”
Water was slicing from the sharp bow, the Lady Death lay first port, then starboard, sweeping around the shore boats and launches.
Tay spoke: “San Clemente Islands our destination? They’re pretty bleak and barren.”
“No, that’s not where we end up.” Holtz said: “but that’s where we lose anybody smart that tries to follow. We dart in and out through the islands, then shoot to open sea and head for Mexico.”
Tay grinned tightly, pointing the bow of the Lady Death between two battleships to race through the breakwater. “I’ve followed you as far as Clemente myself, and we’ve been lost there,” he said. “We looked into every rocky crevice out there and found nothing. That’s why I asked.”
At that moment Sandra Poynter came on the bridge.
“Take the wheel, Holtz,” she said, “the big shot wants to see our new man.”
The shift was made at top speed, which was another rule of navigation that Tay had never before broken. He followed the girl down the narrow deck to a lighted cabin. When he entered, his lips tightened, and his face became inscrutably hard. Lou Landers, whom every G-man in the country had a finger on, but never a hand, sat behind an oak desk. On the deck behind him was something in a gunny sack.
Landers had a narrow, crafty face, dark-complexioned skin, and high cheekbones. His eyes were narrow, an odd color of slate. His forehead was high, and he had dark, patent-leather hair. His lips were thin, cruel. He wore a neat blue suit. An automatic lay on the desk in front of him.
“Sit down, Tay,” he said coldly.
Tay sat down, never taking his eyes from Landers. Lou Landers leaned back, lit a cigarette. When his thin lips parted, Tay could see a gold tooth.
“I guess you know why we hired you,” Landers went on softly. “Not because of your seamanship. Seamen come a dime a dozen these days.” He paused, then: “You’re feeling a little bitter about the Coast Guard, aren’t you?”
Tay grinned tightly. “That’s right,” he said. “I need this job. I didn’t have any money saved. I can tell you about the service and maybe keep you out of the way of the cutters. They are after the Lady Death.”
Lou Landers’ eyes were bright flames. “Are they?”
Tay nodded. “But your boat is too fast, and your route too tricky. I don’t think you’ve any worries on that score.”
Landers leaned forward. “What business do they think we’re in?”
“Dope.”
The criminal’s facial muscles relaxed a little. “Do they know that I am the power behind the activities of the Lady Death?
“No,” Tay answered soberly; “else they would have put barbed wire
s across the channel.”
LOU LANDERS smiled this time, a crooked smile. It was evident that he felt much better. He pulled out a bottle of Scotch and, setting down three ponies, poured drinks. Sandra reached over and took hers, gulping it down.
Tay said: “I don’t touch the stuff when I’m on board ship.”
Lou Landers replied: “Go ahead, it’s the best there is. It will do you good. So the service gave you a dirty deal, eh? Maybe it’s a good thing, Tay. We’ll treat you right on the Lady Death. The Coast Guard has been all wrong. We don’t deal in anything so petty as dope.”
“No?” Tay’s thin* eyebrows were arched.
Landers got up, went to the gunny sack, and jerking the cord from the top of it, shook the object inside. Sandra rushed over, her face white.
“Be careful,” she rasped, “you’ll hurt her. You promised me if I came you wouldn’t hurt her, Lou. You—”
“Shut up,” he snapped. “She’s all right!”
Tay’s eyes dilated as he stared down at the trussed up figure of a little girl. She was very little, but very famous. Tay recognized her golden curls and big brown eyes at once. She was terribly frightened.
“Martha Mason, the child star,” Landers said. “You see, we—”
His words stopped short. Tay had taken the automatic from the table and was holding it on Landers and Sandra. His words were short, clipped:
“There’s more than one way of bagging a rat! This is one of the unconventional ways—getting the San Pedro News to publish a fake story about an officer named Tay being court-martialed and dismissed so the opposition will take him in.”
Lou Landers’ teeth closed tightly. “Unconventional but old,” he snapped. “Just like the trick of the unloaded gun on the table as a test for double-crossers.”
Landers’ jerked a gun from his shoulder-holster. Tay’s rage, when he had seen the helpless little child star, had made him give way to the hysteria of falling for the gun trick. He jerked the trigger of the automatic. It clicked empty. As Landers’ weapon roared, Tay sprang forward, the automatic reversed in his hand.