by Jerry eBooks
That was the real trouble. Matt Foley had lost the personal dignity of pride in his job that every self-respecting man must have. The relentless pain of aching feet had combined with the good-natured gibes of “flatfoot” until something had rubbed raw deep in Matt’s brain.
A psychiatrist would probably have told Matt that he had a fixation that was verging upon becoming an actual phobia. Matt wouldn’t have known a fixation from a vaccination. The only phobia he had ever heard about was the variety that dogs were said to acquire in hot weather. He did know however, that a once satisfactory life had become a dreary thing of drab misery.
There had been a time when he took a man’s pride in a man’s work. From his rookie days on, Matt had never been anything but an ordinary cop, and he had never wanted to be more than that. He had been well satisfied to be one of the solid, dependable beat patrolmen who are the heart and the backbone of any police force.
But now, that satisfaction had deteriorated to a sick and hopeless feeling of inferiority. “Flatfoot” had changed from a good-natured gibe to an accusation of intrinsic weakness. What had once been the rather comic spectacle of an overweight cop on a pair of bum dogs, was verging dangerously upon becoming the bleak tragedy of a man who has lost faith in himself.
“Just a dumb, pavement-pounding lug!” Matt muttered morosely as he clumped along the hard bricks. “A thick head, and a pair of flat feet!”
It was getting close to midnight. Light still came from the windows of an occasional beer parlor, but most of the other places were closed. Matt made his usual rounds, testing each door to be sure that it had not been carelessly left unlocked.
“Nothing but a door-shaker!” he jeered relentlessly at himself. “Shaking doors and chasing cats from garbage-cans. ‘Tis a pair of jobs that even the dumb brains of a flatfoot should be able to handle!”
SLOWLY the night wore on, and the pavement wore ever harder beneath Matt’s flinching soles. The ache spread steadily upward from his arches to his shins. He felt as though he were walking over a bed of red-hot coals, liberally studded with barbed wire and broken glass.
He looked at the deserted street and was tempted. There was no one to see him if he sat on the curb, took his shoes off, and massaged his aching feet for a few minutes. Then he reluctantly abandoned the idea.
Sergeant Dougherty, his immediate superior, had a nasty habit of turning up in a prowl car when least expected, and the sergeant was certain to take a very dim view of things if he found a patrolman sitting on the curb in his stocking feet.
Matt stuck it out until after he made his midnight ring-in. He locked the box, started back up the street, then came to an abrupt stop as he reached an alley midway down the block. His lips tightened in decision. He took a quick look to make sure that the sergeant was nowhere in sight, then turned into the alley. Jerry Higgins was night watchman in a wholesale grocery whose rear loading platform was up that alley.
Jerry was a good soul and a friend of long standing. He could be trusted to keep his mouth shut if Matt dropped in briefly to shed his shoes and rub a little circulation into his tortured feet. Also, if the sergeant got snoopy, Jerry could be trusted to square the beef for Matt. After all, there could have been a prowler around the place that required Matt’s investigation.
Matt climbed the steps of the loading platform and lifted his hand to rap on lone of the big sliding doors. Then abruptly he dropped his hand again. One of the doors was slightly ajar.
His heavy brows creased in thought as he stared at the thin line of dim light between the door and the frame. Something was wrong. Jerry Higgins never left any doors unlocked when he was on duty.
Matt cautiously slid the door along its well-greased track and slipped inside. A few night-bulbs scattered through the big, high-ceilinged room before him cast a dim light over long aisles lined with towering piles of crates, boxes, and barrels. The air was heavy with the scent of coffee and spices and a dozen other food smells. Matt listened tensely, but there was no sound from anywhere among the shadowed aisles.
He had been there often enough to know the general layout of the place. He slipped over to an entrance to a central aisle that led to an office in the front of the big room.
There was a glow of light through frosted glass windows at the far end of the long aisle. Someone was in the office. It could be Jerry, but Matt took no chances. He advanced along the aisle as silently as a pair of Number 12’s could carry a 210-pound man.
He reached the intersection of a cross aisle—and came to a startled halt. There was a small figure huddled on the floor in the shadows of the cross aisle. He stooped over it, then caught his breath in a sharp gasp of shocked recognition.
Whoever was in the office was not Jerry Higgins. Jerry was here on the floor, with a bullet in his brain!
Vindictive fury surged through Matt’s consciousness as he straightened up from the body of the man who had been one of his best friends. He drew his gun and started, grim and white-lipped, along the aisle toward the lighted office windows.
Floor boards creaked beneath his heavy tread. There was nothing much he could do about that. Neither his feet nor his frame were capable of achieving catlike stealth. All he could do was try to move as silently as possible and hope that the prowler in the office would be too busily engaged to hear him coming.
He reached the windows and halted momentarily, listening for any possible sound inside. He heard nothing. The office door was ajar for several inches the same as the one on the loading platform had been. The prowler apparently believed in leaving his exit route clear for emergency flight.
Matt stepped over to the door. He drew a long breath, steadied the gun in his right fist, and shoved the door violently open. Something moved in the lighted office before him. There was a rustling and clumping sound from behind tall filing-cabinets in the far corner to his right. Matt stepped through the door, with gun leveled.
“All right, you!” he barked. “Come on out of there!”
A small, hard object rammed solidly into the small of his back.
“Drop that rod, copper!”
There was a strained, unnatural huskiness in the snarling command, as though the speaker were making a clumsy attempt to disguise his voice.
Matt hesitated briefly, while muscles along his jaw bunched tight and knotted in helpless rage. Then his fingers stiffly opened and let his gun drop to the floor.
“Now get your hands up,” the husky voice ordered. “Shoulder high.”
MATT slowly obeyed. The gun muzzle lifted from contact with his back but Matt needed no eyes in the rear of his head to know that it was still within a few inches of his spine as his captor’s free hand swiftly frisked him. The exploring fingers halted when they reached Matt’s handcuffs, then disengaged them.
“Drop your right hand, flattie,” the voice husked. “Slow and easy.” Matt felt the cold touch of steel around his wrist. “Now the other one.”
In tight-lipped silence, Matt obeyed. The cuff clicked. There was a short, taut moment of waiting. Matt had a good idea what was coming next. It was that knowledge, plus the almost inaudible sound of sudden movement behind him, that made his muscles move in an instinctive effort to dodge a blow at his head.
He hunched his left shoulder high, and tried to leap to the right. His shoulder took some of the force out of the viciously swung gun-barrel, but not enough. The hard metal struck his skull with a crashing impact that sent a Niagara of sparks flaming through his stunned brain.
He staggered a couple of steps forward against the edge of a flat-topped desk. He clawed vainly at the top of the desk, trying to keep his feet, but his knees refused to bear his weight.
He twisted as he fell, landing on his back amid a shower of displaced objects from the desk top. He fought back unconsciousness while his eyes stared dazedly at a man’s figure crouched near the doorway.
“Slug Partlo!” Matt exclaimed.
Partlo’s wedge-shaped face, with its narrow chin and stir-gray ski
n stretched tight across wide cheekbones, would have been unprepossessing at its best. Now, with hate glittering in the slitted dark eyes, it was starkly reptilian.
“That was a sucker play you made then, flattie!” The disguised huskiness was now gone from Slug Partlo’s high-pitched voice.
“I didn’t want to kill no cop!” Partlo protested vehemently. “If I could’ve slugged you and got clear without you recognizing me, I’d have left you lay there. All you’d have got would’ve been a cracked skull. But no, you had to try to play it smart, and get a look at me. Now I got no choice. You’re not gonna put the finger on me for a murder rap. You get the same dose I gave to that cluck out there!”
There was an odd note of nervous fear blending with the hate in Partlo’s voice. Matt knew the reason for that fear. Cop killing is the one climactic crime that no crook commits if he can help it, unless he is a hopped-up gunsel with an insensate lust for killing for killing’s own sake.
Slug Partlo was no killer, ordinarily. He was merely a lower-bracket thug who specialized in lead-pipe work on a dark street, with an occasional flyer at some flimsy old tin-can safe like the one here in this office.
But tonight something had apparently gone wrong. The shot that blasted Jerry Higgins down had swept Partlo across the line that divides mere thug from murderer. Now he was facing the necessity of crossing the final and fatal line of becoming a cop-killer, and grim knowledge of what that meant sent cold dread through his cringing brain.
He stepped toward Matt’s recumbent figure, closing the distance so that the .38 revolver in his right hand could more accurately put a slug between Matt’s eyes.
“You dumb, stupid flatfoot!” he raged.
His abusive tirade sprang largely from his need to work his nerve up to the final pitch for the kill. Matt knew that, and he knew that death hovered a matter of scant seconds away.
Somewhere beneath him, he was vaguely conscious of a tiny, metallic voice chattering querulously. It came from the telephone that he had knocked from the desk top when he fell. Dial service had not yet replaced the manual instruments in that part of town, and the operator was trying to find the reason for the open line.
Partlo was too worked up to notice the tiny voice, muffled as it was by Matt’s body. There was a chance that the operator might call the police, but it didn’t matter. They couldn’t possibly get there in time to do Matt any good.
“You lugs can never play it smart, can you?” Partlo spat venomously. “What little brains you got are all in your big flat feet!”
The gibe brought final and utter sickness of soul to Matt’s dazed brain. The events of the past ten minutes were the ultimate climax to the dreary misery of recent weeks. The jeering refrain of “Flatfoot! Dumb flatfoot!” seemed to ring in his ears like a mocking dirge of doom.
It had been the heavy tread of those clumsy feet of his that had warned Slug Partlo of his approach in time to set a trap. Partlo had merely tossed some small object over in the corner to divert Matt’s attention as he stepped through the door. It had been an absurdly simple trick, but Matt had fallen for it with a stupidity that would have shamed the rawest of rookies.
Nothing but a dumb brain in a thick skull, and a clumsy, blundering pair of flat feet! Now they were bringing Matt the climactic ignominy. All he could do was lie helplessly on the floor with his hands pinioned behind him with his own cuffs, and wait for death.
THE only possible weapon he had left was his feet. They were still free, but they offered no chance whatever against Partlo’s gun.
The thought sent memory stabbing through Matt’s brain. His mental numbness vanished in a flash of sudden hope. There was a way that a pair of feet could be used as effective weapons against even a gun, if the conditions were absolutely right!
A judo instructor had demonstrated the trick in one of the regular training classes several weeks ago. Matt had never placed any faith in those fancy combat stunts. Now in his moment of extremity the technique of this one came back clear and vivid in all its details.
Partlo took a final step toward him. The light in his narrowed eyes indicated that he was nearly ready for the kill.
“So your skull was too thick to be cracked by a gun-barrel, huh?” he jeered. “Well, let’s see if it’s thick enough to stop a slug!”
Partlo’s last step forward had brought him squarely within range. Matt drew his feet up as though flinching from the menace of the leveled gun. Partlo laughed. “Can’t take it, huh? Well, grab a nice long breath, copper. It’ll be the last one you’ll ever—”
Matt’s feet moved with the precision of flashing pistons. His left toe hooked firmly behind Partlo’s right heel. A split fraction of a second later, Matt’s right heel smashed up and into Partlo’s right kneecap with all the driving power of his heavy leg muscles behind it.
Partlo screamed from the excruciating agony of torn muscles and wrecked ligaments. He went down as though his legs had been cut from under him by a scythe. He fired as he fell. Matt was moving at the blast of the gun. Fire seared his ribs as the bullet furrowed deeply through the skin.
He floundered to his feet. Partlo drew himself up on one elbow and snapped his gun into line for a second shot. Matt swung a kick that thudded solidly into Partlo’s wrist at almost the exact second that the gun fired.
The weapon went flying from Partlo’s hand, but not before his slug caught Matt high in the left shoulder. Matt staggered, then by sheer will power managed to keep his feet.
The gun was on the floor half a dozen feet away. Partlo started to lunge to his feet to dive for it, then went flat on his face as his useless leg collapsed beneath him. Matt stepped quickly past him and kicked the gun safely beyond reach under the desk.
He heard the click of steel behind him. He whirled and saw Partlo drawing himself up on his good leg, with the six-inch blade of a spring-knife glittering in his right hand. Matt kicked frantically at the knife-hand. Partlo was too quick for him. His free hand caught Matt’s swinging ankle arid jerked savagely.
Matt twisted free of the grip on his ankle, but the effort threw him too far off balance. He came down heavily on his back.
Partlo lunged erect on his uninjured leg, and flung himself headlong upon Matt’s prone figure. Matt drew his legs up just in time to get both feet under Partlo’s descending body. Partlo’s knife slashed viciously into Matt’s thigh, but no vital muscles were damaged. Matt’s legs straightened with the driving power of an unleashed catapult. Partlo hurtled bodily backward and crashed into a steel filing-cabinet.
The impact sent the knife spinning from his hand and stunned him for the brief moment that Matt needed to stagger clumsily to his feet. Partlo recovered quickly, but not quite quickly enough. His hand was just closing over the knife on the floor when Matt’s foot came down. Matt heard knuckles crunch and break as he ground his heel down with all his 210 pounds on top of it.
Partlo howled in pain, and grabbed at Matt’s leg with his other hand. Matt lashed a quick backward kick that sent Partlo’s head thudding against the cabinet with brain-numbing force. A flick of Matt’s toe sent the knife to join the gun under the desk.
Matt’s own gun was still where he had dropped it on the floor over by the door, but it might as well have been in Tibet. Partlo was too crippled and battered to reach it, and Matt had no interest in a gun at the moment.
There was only one thought in Matt’s reeling brain. That was to finish this fight the same way he had begun it, with only his feet as weapons. He closed warily in upon the trapped and half-conscious Partlo, and went methodically and efficiently to work.
A pair of cops from a radio cruiser that the telephone operator’s call had summoned, got there in a matter of minutes, but by that time Matt’s job was adequately done. He was too groggy to note their arrival. They came to a sudden stop in the office door and stared wonderingly at the scene before them.
Matt was swaying dizzily on his feet, keeping erect by sheer stubborn determination. His usually ruddy face
was gray from the blood he had lost. His eyes were dull from the pain of his bitterly punished body. But on the whole, his features bore the proud and confident look of a man who has again found the integrity of his manhood. That same pride was in his voice as he addressed the groveling figure at his feet.
“So a cop’s brains are all in his big flat feet, you say! You may be right. But those flat feet have more brains than you’ll find in the thick skull of any crook who ever lived! They were more than enough to be your master. Give them their honest due. They’ve well earned it. Salute them again, you murderin’ rat!”
And Slug Partlo, blubbering and whimpering as only an utterly beaten man can whimper, raised his battered face in humble obedience and pressed his swollen lips against the broad square toe of Matt’s right shoe.
LITTLE MAN, YOU’LL HAVE A BLOODY DAY
Russell Branch
He was such a little man, John Quigley was, to have so much blood on his hands. . . . To have so much blood that when the fat man came after him, calling, “Quigley . . . Quigley!” . . . bulking large, like the figure of Fate itself . . . Then a little, more blood didn’t matter anymore. . . .
CHAPTER ONE
Appointment With Death
IT WAS eight o’clock, and John Quigley had an appointment with Death, Eight o’clock. The moment he had been planning for, existing for, during a whole month past . . . and now he seemed rooted to his chair by a hundred fears and the pounding of his own heart.
The second-hand on his wrist watch moved relentlessly around in its tiny circle. The schedule . . . he had to meet the schedule! It had all been calculated, on paper, down to the last minute. The paper had been carefully burned, but it was still etched on his mind, every word and figure of it. And the time was now. Now or never.
Martha didn’t even look up as he reached for his hat. He paused, feeling suddenly angry and cheated that it was going to be this easy.