Dick Tracy

by Max Allan Collins

  The other hoods took all this in as well.

  Ramm’s mouth was an ugly, sneering thing; he grabbed the front of Big Boy’s tuxedo and wadded it with both hands. “You stupid greaseball! What have you done—”

  But Big Boy’s automatic was now in Ramm’s stomach; the dapper gangster backed off slowly.

  “Now,” Big Boy said, giving everybody a good look at the gun in his hands, “we can lose our heads and fight amongst ourselves, or we can use what little advantage we got left in this situation.”

  Ramm’s frown turned thoughtful. “You mean, go downstairs and take hostages?”

  “No,” Big Boy said. He pointed at the floor. “We go to our cars—right now. And make a fast getaway, before the cops make their move. They’re not going to hit us till they figure out what to do about all those customers downstairs, capeesh? So we move. Now.”

  Ramm breathed in deeply. Nodded curtly.

  The hoods went to the ammunition closet and began arming themselves with machine guns and shotguns.

  “They’ve got my number,” Big Boy told them. “But the rest of you guys got a chance.”

  Doucet was getting his gun out. “Let’s make a break for it then,” he said philosophically.

  “You boys know where the garage is,” Big Boy said, opening the door for them. “I’ll be right there. Try not to let the patrons see your rods, or tip ’em to anything bein’ wrong. Okay? Keep it calm, cool, and collected, girls.”

  Ramm was still seething. But he went along with the others as they quickly exited the conference room. Norton, the accountant, lingered.

  “What about me, boss?”

  Big Boy placed a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “This is it, Numbers. Lock all the doors. Burn the records. Have the boys downstairs break out the guns.”

  Norton shook his head sadly and sighed. “Jeez, boss—Tracy’s dame?” And Norton looked at Tess and shook his head again, as if witnessing the act of a stubbornly wayward child.

  Then he went out.

  While Tess watched with silent contempt, Big Boy crouched at his safe, unlocking it and removing packets of money. He stuffed as many of these into his pockets as he could manage. He had upwards of a cool half million on him. Enough to take an early retirement.

  Then he took Tess roughly by the hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, baby,” he said. “We gotta get outta this joint.”

  “You animal,” she snarled, “let go of me!”

  “Don’t make me slap you, baby,” he advised, raising a palm. “I hate hittin’ dames.”

  Then he paused in the empty office, surveyed this throne room he was now reluctantly vacating.

  “Look what your boyfriend done to me,” he said to her, as if his feelings were hurt.

  And he dragged her out of there.

  Back down on the street, in front of the club, Tracy joined Chief Brandon and Sam Catchem behind a barricade of police cars. The club’s neon merged with the cherry tops of the squad cars, tinting the night red.

  “You’ve got the area cordoned off?” Tracy asked.

  Brandon, bullhorn in hand, nodded. “No fish are getting out of this net. We were positioned two blocks away with those plainclothes men you requested staking out the place in unmarked cars. But once we heard those shots from the roof, I moved in with the uniformed troops.”

  “Wise,” Tracy said, and filled Brandon in.

  “Thank God, Tess is alive,” the Chief said. Then the relief on his face was replaced with concern, even fear. “What if Caprice tries to bust out of there and brings Tess with him?”

  “Big Boy’s too smart for suicide,” Tracy said. “My instinct is we’ve got to go in after him.”

  “Tracy’s right, Chief,” Catchem said, a tommy gun cradled in his arms. “The only way we’ll get inside this joint is bust our way in.”

  “I don’t know,” Brandon said, troubled. “So many civilians in there . . . Tess included.”

  “The longer we wait,” Tracy said, “the more danger the potential hostages are in.”

  Brandon’s face flinched in thought. Then, suddenly, he spoke into the bullhorn: “Big Boy Caprice! You and your men, come out with your hands up! Everybody else—stay put! You’re all under arrest. Remain calm!”

  Catchem, wide-eyed, said to Tracy, “The Chief just arrested the whole nightclub.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Tracy allowed. The detective nodded toward the club building. “Sam, you come with the Chief and me.”

  They were crossing the street to the front door when a car horn sounded within the garage over at their left; Tracy stopped momentarily and held up a cautionary hand, and then all hell broke loose.

  The garage doors flew off their hinges as a car smashed through and tommy-gun fire ripped through the night, stitching bullet holes in the side of the nearest police car.

  Tracy dove behind the front fender of the Chief’s car, while the Chief and Catchem scurried behind the line of cars, joining the uniformed men there, whose hands were filled with revolvers and riot guns, but who were holding fire till Tracy, the Chief, and Sam got out of their way.

  “Here they come, boys!” Tracy yelled over the bursts of gunfire.

  No sooner had he taken cover than Tracy stepped back out into the line of fire, with his .38 thrust forward; he moved out into the street, like a western sheriff, aiming and firing, cool and methodical. One of his first shots punctured the speeding car’s front tire. The vehicle swerved out of control and rolled over onto its left side and onto its hood and skidded across the pavement into the front of a warehouse across the street, which it hit like a metal fist, and exploded into flames.

  The red night was truly an inferno now.

  A second car rocketed out of the garage and Tracy rolled for cover again. From behind the left bumper of the Chief’s squad car, Tracy unloaded on the speeding sedan as it swung around, a gunman with a tommy gun catching a bullet before he’d fired a single shot and dropping the gun reflexively; it fired a few rounds on its own, spinning, then fell silent. The car, meanwhile, found several of its tires blown by Tracy’s well-placed rounds and fishtailed its way into a telephone pole, which it cracked like a toothpick, and then into a water hydrant, which geysered but was not close enough to the other burning car to put the fire out.

  Tracy stood between flames that licked the sky and a fountain of water and fired his gun at the third fleeing car, which Itchy was driving, Flattop leaning out the window with a tommy gun, his cupid lips peeled back over babylike teeth, his normally hooded eyes round as silver dollars.

  “I’ve got you now, Tracy!” Flattop screamed. “I’ve got you now!”

  Then Tracy’s gun was empty, and the pavement around him was getting chewed up; he dove out of the way, rolled, bumped against something.

  The tommy gun that the one gunman had dropped.

  Tracy filled his arms with it and, on his back in the street, arching up to aim, he let the tommy gun fly; the recoil was incredible.

  So were the results.

  Itchy caught several rounds, the car went out of control, veered into the Chief’s car, sideswiping it; a badly wounded Itchy tried to back up and only crashed again, abutting and locking with the rear of one of the barricaded police cars. The car ground to a halt; stalled. Hunched behind the wheel, Itchy reached a hand back over his shoulder where he’d caught a bullet; it was as if he were trying to scratch a place he couldn’t quite get at. Then he fell forward, on the horn, adding to the pandemonium even as he was subtracted from it.

  “Give it up, Flattop!” Tracy yelled.

  But Flattop climbed out, the tommy gun in his arms; his face was bruised, bloodied, dirty, his hair askew, making an odd contrast with his tux and white carnation.

  “Where’s Big Boy?” Tracy demanded, moving forward with the tommy gun in hand. “Where’s Tess?”

  Flattop responded by firing a wild volley.

  Tracy ducked behind a front fender for cover, then stepped back out and let the tomm
y gun rip.

  Flattop did a jerky dance as he took the slugs and began to shoot at the pavement; the weapon was like a jack-hammer in the hands of a madman, the recoil of the tommy gun propelling him about. But when the ammo ran out, so did Flattop: he hit the pavement hard, spread out on his back like a kid making an angel in the snow. Only there was no snow, and Flattop was no angel, even in death.

  “Tracy,” Catchem said, rushing up beside him, tommy gun still in hand, a question mark of smoke curling out the barrel. “You all right?”

  Lowering his own tommy gun, Tracy nodded curtly and surveyed the after-battle landscape. No sign of Tess or Big Boy among the cars that crashed out of the garage. The night was suddenly quiet. The crackle of flames and the gush of the hydrant were the only sounds.

  Then he heard another sound; faint, but he heard it: a rumbling—metal on metal. Faint, but distinct. He knelt at the pavement, put his ear to it, like a frontier tracker.

  “Tracy?” Catchem asked, looking curiously at his kneeling partner. “What are you . . . ?”

  Tracy stood and stared at the pavement; he rubbed his chin.

  Sirens split the silence; then came the voices of cops rounding up the surviving crooks. Soon paddy wagons, ambulances, and a fire truck or two would roll in. It was over.

  But it wasn’t.

  Big Boy dragged Tess Trueheart through the showroom where the socially elite patrons of the Club Ritz cowered panic-stricken under tables and against walls. Outside, the squeal of tires and the tattoo of tommy-gun fire provided a muffled but distinct backdrop. Inside, an insectlike murmuring filled the air; but not a soul confronted Big Boy about the situation, perhaps because he was wild-eyed and had a revolver in one hand even as he dragged a bound-and-gagged woman across the shiny floor, as if in a parody of an Apache dance.

  88 Keys, a cigarette insolently dangling, sat on his piano bench; he looked spiffy in his black dinner jacket with red carnation, and bored. As Big Boy passed, hauling Tess Trueheart, Keys played a brisk rendition of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” smirking to himself. Big Boy knew he was getting razzed, but he resisted the urge to blow the bum’s smug face off.

  He did take time, as he dragged the dame, to look sharply back at Keys.

  “If you was in on this frame-up,” Big Boy snarled at the pianist, whose fingers now had frozen over the keys, the sarcastic serenade halted, “you’d be better off practicin’ a funeral march.”

  Keys swallowed and said nothing.

  The muffled sound of gunfire continued outside; there were occasional sounds vaguely recognizable as screams. The customers clung to each other under their tables; some of the women were sobbing. Most of the men were wanting to.

  Watching with seeming dispassion as Big Boy and his pretty package moved in her direction, Breathless remained seated at the bar, ravishing in a silver gown, her lush legs crossed, her generous bosom dripping with diamonds.

  “Cig me,” she said to the bartender, who was crouching behind the counter.

  Without moving, he said, “Cig yourself, honey.”

  Her beautiful mouth twitched with disgust.

  An arm around the waist of the captive Tess, Big Boy was moving behind the bar, toward the wine-cellar door. He opened it, then paused to look back at Breathless. “You want to come along, baby?”

  “Looks like you already have a girl.”

  “You change your mind, you know the way.”

  She laughed at him. “Bon voyage, tough guy,” she told him, with quiet contempt.

  Big Boy would have shot her, but he was too busy. He clomped down the cellar stairs, dragging Tess behind him. Yanking her by her bound hands, he led her through the rows of racked wine bottles. He moved to the far end of the low-ceilinged cellar and sat her down on a wine barrel, while he went to a wall covered by a wine rack, the bottles on which were secured and filled with nothing.

  The wall was movable—a heavy cement door that yawned groaningly open onto darkness, but the cellar was well enough lit to reveal what lay beyond: a small flatbed railroad car on tracks in a low-ceilinged tunnel. Just inside the tunnel was the switch that turned on electric bulbs strung sporadically along its ceiling.

  He hauled Tess into the tunnel, which was barely tall enough to stand in, and picked her up bodily and laid her on her stomach on the flatbed of the dolly. After putting the wine rack back in place as best he could, wedging several loose boards in front of the wall to keep the opening obstructed, he situated himself next to her, half on top of her. She smelled good.

  Up to this point he’d said almost nothing to the woman; now, he turned to her and whispered almost tenderly, “You got nothin’ to worry about. You just behave yourself. I never hurt a dame in my life.”

  That was a lie, of course, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Yet.

  Big Boy released the brake and the dolly moved quickly down the incline of the tracks, but not too quickly; he’d only used the thing once before, on a practice run. Keeping this little getaway cart handy was one of the few smart moves Lips Manlis had ever made. The tunnel—which connected the nightclub with Manlis’s warehouse and a riverfront loading point—had been useless since prohibition ended; it had even been blocked off from the rest of the city’s underground railroad system.

  But as a means of back-door escape, it was useful indeed. He would end up near the dock, near a waiting motor launch. From the river he could head to the lake, where he could go any number of places. A foghorn echoed down the tunnel, beckoning them. The sound made him smile; it was comforting, somehow.

  As Caprice and his unwilling passenger coasted down the tracks—which were a pretty straight shot to the riverfront, only a matter of half a dozen or so city blocks—he felt calm again, confident again. His pockets stuffed with money, he was starting to feel like Big Boy once more.

  But in the recesses of his mind he was beginning to wonder: Why did the Blank do this to him? Was the Blank in fact Frank Redrum, and had Redrum been planning all along to depose him and take over?

  The overhead lights were spread out, so eerie shadows were cast on the rounded, smoothed concrete walls of the tunnel. Now and then the foghorn called out to them from their destination. The rumble of the steel wheels on the tracks echoed down the gently snaking passageway. The woman wasn’t making any noise at all; no sobbing, no moaning, no nothing. She had pride, this dame; moxie, too. It was a crying shame he had to ice her.

  But once he was well away, she’d be excess baggage; and living evidence. It almost made him sad. He didn’t kidnap her, after all! Well—he didn’t kidnap her first . . .

  Now the tunnel moved through the basement of the Manlis warehouse; up ahead there was, finally, light at the end of the tunnel for Big Boy.

  If not for Tess.

  Tracy knelt at the pavement; the sound of metal on metal had faded, but he thought he might know what it was.

  “Don’t you think,” Catchem said, confused by Tracy’s behavior, “we ought get inside that joint?”

  He stood. “Yes.”

  And the detective stormed into the Club Ritz, past patrons cowering under tables, and stopped before Breathless Mahoney, who sat regally at the bar, drinking a cocktail as casually as if at a country-club soirée.

  “Where are they?” he said.

  “Who?” Breathless asked innocently. She didn’t meet his eyes.

  He heard something; not the metallic sound this time: something else. Something faint, something mellow, like a musical instrument.

  “Where’s the basement?” he demanded.

  She nodded behind the bar. “Door leads down to the wine cellar.” She pointed halfheartedly. “He took her through there.”

  Tracy just looked at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked with no apparent irony. “Don’t you trust me?”

  His eyes tightened as he heard the sound again: mellow but commanding.

  He moved behind the bar, to the door, and hurtled down the steps, where he found himself i
n a shadowy dank cellar. Almost immediately he noticed a certain wall engulfed by a well-stocked wine rack. A wall that was slightly ajar . . .

  He put both shoulders into it, but something on the other side was wedging it so that the wall simply would not budge.

  And then, as he stood helplessly facing that wall, he heard the sound again, coming from behind it: a foghorn.

  He ran up the stairs, past Breathless, without looking at her or giving her a single word; he burst out the entrance, where Catchem was cuffing a sullen 88 Keys.

  “I’m going after Big Boy!” Tracy yelled as he ran. “He’s got Tess, and I think I know where he’s taken her . . .”

  And he sprinted down the street, toward the riverfront.

  Catchem exchanged glances and shrugs with Chief Brandon; neither of them knew what to make of it.

  Nor did the boy who had earlier hopped the Chief’s spare tire and, unseen by anyone, witnessed the entire shoot-out. A boy who, still unseen, staying in the shadows, ran along after the man whose name he’d taken.

  The tunnel ended at the riverbank, and Big Boy helped the doll off the dolly, and ushered her out of the viaductlike opening into the chill of the night. The foghorn welcomed them; the harbor lights winked on the surface of the river, but the fog was such that you couldn’t see across to the other side.

  While his own tux seemed none the worse for wear, the dame’s red-and-black dress was dirty now, and ripped here and there; her reddish blond hair was mussed. But she was a good-looker. Nice shape on her. It was a pity, but once they were out on the lake, she’d have to be fish food.

  He held her by the arm and she walked along with him, her head held high; he didn’t have to drag her anymore.

  “Gonna be fine, missy,” he said, dragging her by the elbow toward the limestone stairs of the massive municipal drawbridge. On the other side of the bridge was the private dock where Big Boy, unknown to even his closest cronies, kept a getaway boat waiting. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be back with that square-jawed boyfriend of yours ’fore you know it.”