by Jerry eBooks
“I won’t horse around, Rita,” Nick said, drawing handcuffs from his pocket. “I’ll cuff you down here, then go after the others.”
“Why, Nick?” She didn’t flinch away, but seemed poised, more self-reliant than seven years ago. “Tell me what I have done this time, Nick?”
“The Mayville Bank hired me. Funny, isn’t it? Me, your ex-husband. You can’t deny complicity in that job. Knowlton saw you.”
Her face paled, her eyes became greener by contrast. “No, Nick, I can’t deny it.”
Not looking at her face he cuffed her to a water pipe. She was forced to crouch.
She looked up. “Nick. This will kill my mother. I don’t care for myself, but mother—her heart—”
Grimly, steeling himself, he hefted the gun in his hand. “You should have thought of that.” He stepped toward the stairs. “I’m going after your friends now.”
“Nick!” There was vibrant terror in her voice now. “Don’t go!”
His tone was a cruel leer. “You care for the rats that much?”
“It’s not them. It’s you. Seven years, Nick. I’ve learned a lot. Don’t go up!”
“Yeah!” He spat the word, started up the dark stairs.
Rita screamed: “Don’t!”
Nick cursed, bounded upward to the darkness of the second floor. Flame lanced at him from down the corridor and the tip of his shoulder stung. He threw himself to the floor, rolled to the meager protection of the newel post, slammed a slug back at a crouching shadow.
Nick leaped up, bored in. A door opened in the dark and another dark shape caromed into him. Nick, under the impetus, was snapped back over the bannister rail. His feet lifted from the floor and he tried desperately to scissors his legs around his assailant. Metal glinted as the other swung his gun at Nick’s head. Nick jerked back, grimly holding to the gangster with his legs. The wounded man from the end of the corridor was rushing toward them.
Then the railing groaned, splintered, broke. Nick and his immediate attacker ploughed through the bannister to crash to the stairs and tumble downward. Over and over they went to come to a scrambling heap almost at the feet of Rita. Nick’s head cracked on the last step. Stunned, he looked up into the rage-twisted face of Hank Crawford.
Crawford spat. “Lousy dick, eh?” He raised his voice. “Come down, Hymie. I got me a snooper.”
HYMIE, fat, fish-eyed, lumbered down, nursing a creased neck. “Let me see him.” Then he kicked Nick in the throat and the room swam for the detective in a starlit miasma and he wheezed and coughed up blood.
“We have to work fast now, get Knowlton,” Crawford told Hymie. “If this bum found us, he might have left a trail. If nothing bothers us on the Knowlton job, we’ll come back and”—he leered at Rita—“finish up here.”
Calmly Rita said: “You double crossing snake!”
Crawford laughed and slapped her and her whole body shook. “You did your good turn, dearie. That’s all we wanted.”
Hymie, clumsily wrapping a handkerchief around his neck, growled: “Let’s get going.”
While Hymie held a gun, Crawford tied and gagged Nick and Rita. The door behind which Rita’s mother had sat, opened, framing the old woman there in her wheelchair.
“In heaven’s name, Rita—”
Crawford stepped to the door, pushed the wheelchair roughly back. Then he followed it, closed the door. He emerged a moment later, grinning widely. “That’s that!”
The two thugs left then, Hymie giving Nick a last kick in the chest. And Nick, still gasping torturedly, lost all sense of pain as he slumped into unconsciousness.
When he swam back to painful waking, he heard Rita sobbing: “Mother . . . Mother . . .”
Someone was tugging at the rope on his wrists. He turned painfully, could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the old woman on the floor beside him, trying to undo his knots. Blood flowed sluggishly from her nose and mouth, and still she persevered!
“Save my daughter,” she gasped.
The rope fell from Nick’s wrists and the old woman flopped flat and still. Quickly he ripped off his gag, brought the old woman to a couch.
“I think she’ll be all right,” he said, and stepped to remove Rita’s gag. “What a woman!”
“Nick,” said Rita. “I didn’t kill that watchman.”
He looked down at her, steadying his weakened body against a chair arm. Rita was still crouched, manacled, down by the water pipe. Nick stumbled to the door, said: “I have work to do.”
“Nick!”
He stopped, looked down again.
“When Hank and Hymie,” she said, “were busy opening the bank vault, I moved around. I found the watchman, already dead. It must have been then that Knowlton, from his hiding place, saw me. Believe me, Nick, I—”
The look in his eyes stabbed her quiet. “The watchman wasn’t all,” he growled. “You tried to finger Knowlton tonight. I heard you call to Hank on Knowlton’s lawn.”
“It was Hank’s idea, Nick. He made me go, wanted me in on a murder so that he would have something really binding on me, something besides the fact that I’d been in prison.”
“I suppose, too, that he forced you to accompany him and Hymie to the bank!”
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “He did.”
He waited, cursing himself for listening.
“Seven years in prison taught me what a fool I’d been, what I’d lost when—” His angry face stopped her on that. “When I got out I came straight here. Mother was living on a widow’s pension, but in a hospital. I brought her home, planning to let part of this house and take care of her on the proceeds.
“They came then, those men, and I let rooms to them. I didn’t know they were gangsters. Somehow, undoubtedly by prying into my papers, they learned I’d been in prison for—for murder. Mother never knew of my imprisonment, I was sure the shock would have killed her. These men reasoned the same way.”
Her eyes implored him to stay, glad that he was listening. “They—they forced me in with them, threatening to tell mother about me. They needed a lookout and someone who knew the town well. Foolishly, too, I thought that with my share of the loot, I could make life easier for mother. Please, Nick, believe me!”
HE SCOWLED at the floor. Who would ever believe that story considering her past record. This was the end, she would go to the chair sure. “Sucker!” his mind shrieked at him. “You want to pity her as she crouches there so penitent, so beautiful! Sucker!”
He looked deeply into her eyes, afraid that the goodness he thought to see there was a fictitious product of his love for her.
“Damn!” He turned to the door, stopped, looked back. His hand went to his vest pocket, and to a spot on the floor near the water pipe he threw the handcuff key. Then he was, out of the house, thundering down the porch. If nothing else, he had to try to save Knowlton.
From back in the house he thought he heard Rita cry: “Wait, Nick. The money—we didn’t—”
But then he was gone.
He sprinted to the small hotel, and with no time to summon the sheriff, leaped into his car and speeded toward Knowlton’s house. In fifteen minutes he was there, dashing toward the white porch.
He tripped, stumbled, looked down. The man on the lawn beneath his feet groaned, stirring. But Nick had no time to stop. He leaped to the porch and found the other guard there, a blue hole in his left cheek.
In an upstairs room he found Knowlton, and his stomach churned at the sight. The banker was tied to a bed, the shirt ripped from him, his chest and face pitted with burnt, watery holes.
Nick leaned over Knowlton, fighting nausea. He was beginning to realize something that had been feebly pecking at his mind for some time. Now he knew why the bandits had seemed so foolish for lingering in town! It hadn’t been merely to silence a witness against them, but something else!
He untied Knowlton, felt his pulse. He shook the man, and Knowlton’s eyelids lifted lazily.
“Where?” Nick grated. “
Where did you send them?”
Knowlton looked up, uncomprehendingly. Then, his tongue snarled with agony, he moaned: “Cellar . . . they, they—”
He stopped, exhausted, and as if to verify his words a faint clink sounded from below. Nick asked for a gun.
“There,” wheezed Knowlton, pointing to a drawer chest.
Nick found it, crept silently below. He passed the kitchen, found the cellar door, opened it soundless. Peeping below, he saw Hank and Hymie tugging a metal box from a hole they had dug. Then his foot crackled on grit on the wooden cellar stairs.
Hymie shot from his crouch and his bullet thunked into the wall beside Nick. Nick’s slug ploughed into the bandit’s mouth and Hymie’s face mushroomed blood. Crawford cursed, trying to whirl his body out of range, tripped, fell, sent a wild shot toward Nick that pounded the detective back against the whitewashed wall.
Nick sagged forward again, clutching the stair rail. He shot under it and the bullet screamed off Crawford’s gun, tore into the gunman’s throat. Crawford swayed forward, dead before he hit.
Feet pounded within the house, and Nick, his arm numb and dripping blood, crawled up the stairs, stumbled through the cellar door—into the arms of Sheriff Fowley.
Rita sobbed, “Nick . . . Nick . . .” Blear-eyed, he looked at her. “I thought—”
“No, Nick,” she smiled. “I’m not running from you this time.”
The front door slammed. Nick grabbed the sheriff’s arm. “That’s Knowlton. Get him. He robbed his own bank!”
Nick had to push the surprised sheriff. They raced to the front of the house, and from the porch the sheriff called: “Stop, Knowlton, or I fire!”
Knowlton was gunning Nick’s car. He lurched it down the gravel drive and Sheriff Fowley’s forty-five crashed. The car swerved, skidded, pounded into one of the iron posts. It bounced back, shuddering, the motor dead.
Nick ran ahead, grabbed Knowlton’s arm over the car door. “Tell him,” the detective snapped savagely. “Tell the sheriff—that there was no woman at that robbery!”
When the sheriff and Rita arrived, Knowlton, dying, rolled his eyes heavily. He said: “I killed the watchman, took the money from the vault. Then they came, the bandits—two men—and I hid, sneaking out later and hiding the money nearby. I got you, sheriff, to come back with me after the bandits.”
His hand fell on Nick’s shoulder, and it was like a friendly pat. “No,” he lied, “there was no woman with them.”
Fowley said: “He’s dead.”
Nick was holding Rita with his good arm, forgetting seven lonely years, seeing a promise of joy to come in the limpid mistiness of her eyes.
KILLER AT LARGE
Edward Ronns
HE SLOWED down as he came to the bend in the creek. The swift surge of the canoe fell off to a more leisurely and casual pace. He didn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily. He wasn’t sure there was anything to be alarmed about, really, but there was no sense taking chances.
Shirley’s figure, in dim white linen, was standing on the bungalow porch when the canoe dug into the sandy beach with a sharp hiss. There seemed to be a sense of tension in her slim, straight shoulders as she stood there in the evening gloom. She spoke before he could reach the steps.
“Alan, do you hear it?”
A lock of straw-colored hair looped over his sober, angular face. He kept his voice calm as he nodded.
“I hear it. It’s from Green Hills.” The sound came from all around them, filling the air, echoing from the gray willows leaning over the wide creek to the long slope that led to the highway above them. Now low and mournful, moaning and bewailing a loss; now shrill, high and strident, frightening—a sense of terror in its whining shriek. The prison siren, miles away, blasted endlessly through the murky evening air. It drowned out the low rumble of thunder in the east, over the city.
Shirley said tightly: “Alan, that means somebody has escaped, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.” He was up on the porch beside her now. “They’ll catch him, whoever he is.”
He gave her an intentionally dutiful, husbandly kiss, She responded by clinging to him with a sudden frightening strength.
“Alan . . .”
“Easy, honey.”
“He’s loose! I know he’s loose!”
There was terror in her voice, in her long fingers clutching desperately at his shoulders. She seemed to be trying to get inside him, to hide within his tall frame. The siren kept moaning over their heads and all around them in the hot little valley. Alan disengaged Shirley’s tight arms and shook her gently. He grinned at her white face in the dusk.
“You’re getting upset over nothing, honey. There are more than eight hundred convicts in Green Hills. It might be any one of them.”
She was obstinate in her fear. “It’s Zinzi,” she whispered. “Zinzi Mattlock. He’s loose.”
“Nonsense.”
“I’m sure of it,” she insisted.
Alan, listening to the tightness of her voice, knew her old sense of terror had flooded back, engulfing her. He felt despair, because he had thought her cured of the endless, gnawing dread that hid inside her. This bungalow, almost within sight of the penitentiary walls confining Zinzi Mattlock, had been an experiment to cure her. But now her fear had come back with even more force than before.
Thunder rumbled close overhead. It was almost dark now. Shirley’s wide, blue eyes looked inky violet, seeking strength in Alan’s brown, somewhat homely face. She thought, unreasonably, that she should never have married him and made him share her inevitable fate. Then the next moment she was overwhelmingly grateful for the strength of his arms around her.
Alan was saying: “Whoever it is, he can’t be anywhere near here yet. The state cops will nab him, you’ll see. But if it will make it any easier for you, I’ll go up the hill and see what it’s all about.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said immediately.
“No. There’s no danger here. This is the best possible test of our plan, angel. You’ve got to get rid of your fear of Zinzi Mattlock once and for all.”
The girl’s eyes were miserable. “I can’t; I just can’t.”
“Stay here,” he repeated.
He was gone before she could stop him, striding up the path to the hill and the highway restaurant up there. She thought, disjointedly, that he should have taken the flashlight. It would be pitch black in a matter of minutes; black and rainy.
Somewhere in the gathering gloom ran a man at a curious crouching gait. He twisted and dodged like a hunted thing. There was a gun in his hand. He trotted across the highway, chuckling softly, and ferreted through the thick underbrush down a long wooded slope. Water glistened below him. He stumbled, fell headlong, and got up again. Nothing could stop him. Death was his mount, and Death chuckled with him and sang a siren song in the air behind him.
Shirley sat down slowly on a rocker on the bungalow porch and stared straight out over the dusk-shrouded creek. Her fingers clenched the rocker arm until the knuckles shone white through her tanned skin.
ALAN reached the top of the hill with the last of the fading daylight. He could glimpse the vast sweep of rolling Pennsylvania countryside reaching into the distance; then it was as if a curtain had been drawn over the peaceful green hills. Miles away a searchlight stabbed the sky in protest, and Alan knew it came from Green Hills Penitentiary. The siren wailed on unabated, echoing in waves of sound both loud and faint.
A little knot of men was gathered in the highway restaurant when Alan stepped in. He knew most of them as vacationers occupying other bungalows up and down the banks of the stream at this point. Three girls in bright yellow and blue play suits were sipping sodas at a corner table. A record player was thumping out a rhythmic tune.
The screen door banged behind him. He could hear snatches of conversation from the knot of men.
“Say he’s got a gun somehow and killed a guard . . . Don’t know where he’s headed . . . Trooper barracks emptied up the
road, spreading a cordon . . . Oughta warn people on the radio tonight . . .”
It was all very remote; the men’s voices held a note of pleasurable excitement.
Alan stepped closer. “Who was it?” he asked. “Who got away?”
Somebody said: “Hello, Graham. We don’t know. Ain’t heard yet. A killer, though.”
From outside came a thrumming, then a snorting sound as a trooper rode his motorcycle into the pool of bright light in front of the restaurant. Alan let the others crowd through the screen door before him. It was a young cop, very smart in his gray whipcord breeches and tunic. His Stetson was at a slant. Alan knew him. Corporal Hagan, assigned to the barracks a half mile up the highway.
The trooper swung off his cycle and ignored the battery of questions fired at him. His brown eyes jerked over the faces and settled on Alan.
“Graham. Want to talk to you,” he said shortly.
Alan nodded mutely. He thought, with a sinking sensation, that he already knew what was coming. His shoes made gritting sounds on the gravel beside the highway as he walked with the trooper.
Hagan said: “I don’t want to alarm you without reason.”
“Was it Zinzi Mattlock who escaped?” Alan asked.
“Yes. We’re putting an alarm out on the radio—it ought to be on any minute. He crushed out half an hour ago—with help, we think. He had a gun, anyway. He used it . . . murdered a guard. We don’t know where he’s headed for, but he hasn’t got a car yet. He’ll be beating his way across country, and on a night like this—” The corporal’s rugged young face looked serious.
“I see,” Alan said quietly.
“We know about your wife, of course. She testified against Mattlock and he swore he’d get her. That was last year. You weren’t married to her then, were you?”
“No. We were married shortly after the trial. I helped the D.A. assemble the case and did some pinch-hitting once in a while. My wife’s evidence was what we needed to convict Mattlock. We promised to protect her. Now that she’s my wife, I’m doing the job myself.”
Hagan said uneasily: “Anyway, I thought I’d tell you it was Mattlock. Even though he’s at large, there’s hardly a chance in the world that he knows your wife is so close to the prison, here at the creek. But if he should find out—”