by Gregg Taylor
At length, he shook his head a little, as if brushing aside the mote of a notion that had held him rapt, lowered his feet to the floor and turned without standing to reach for his hat behind him.
He almost jumped out of his skin at the sight of the girl in the grey catsuit crouched on his window ledge, watching him silently.
“What have I told you,” he said at length when he had composed himself a little, “about sneaking up on a guy like that?”
“Beats me,” the Flying Squirrel said with a grin, pulling her goggles to the top of her cowled head. “But it obviously wasn’t very interesting if neither of us remember it.”
“This just a social call,” the newsman asked, “or do you need another favor?”
“You alone, Petey?” asked the Squirrel.
“Sure,” he said with a smirk.
“Think again,” she said, grinning broadly.
“Wha–,” Peters blurted, turning back in to face the office he had turned from just a moment earlier. Again the newspaperman was startled, discovering the tall, imposing figure of a man in a long trenchcoat, immaculate grey suit and bright red domino mask looming over him across his desk. He managed to right himself before falling from his chair to the floor, but only just.
“I need information, Mister Peters,” the masked man intoned gravely.
“Yeah. And I need a drink. Excuse me,” he said, pulling open the third drawer of his desk and producing a bottle of whiskey. He pulled the stopper free with his teeth, splashed a liberal dose into a coffee cup that might have been clean and made a gesture of offering either of the costumed heroes a portion without really looking for a response. “Why you two can never telephone, or send a note…”
“Telephones can be tapped or traced, Mister Peters,” the Red Panda said seriously. “And notes leave evidence behind. I’ve never had the knack for disappearing ink.” The masked man smiled at last, just a little.
Jack Peters looked from one to the other. “You two just don’t want to give me anything to print, do you?”
The Flying Squirrel stepped into the room. “You really want to print a story that says we showed up at your office and pumped you for information, Petey?” she teased. “You’d look real slick with a bullet in your head.”
“We approach by stealth for your protection as well as ours, Jack,” the Red Panda promised.
“So you’re telling me you don’t like to see me jump?” Peters said, jamming the stopper back into the bottle.
“Well,” the Squirrel grinned, “let’s not get carried away.”
Out of the corner of his eye Peters could see the Red Panda turn away, just a little, to keep from laughing. Jack had known the mystery man since one of his earliest adventures. The Red Panda was lightening up all right. He was still spooky around the edges, but these days you could catch him smiling once in awhile. He was fairly certain that the reason why was sauntering over and sitting on the edge of his desk just now, though his nose for news had never been able to get a reading on that.
“Listen, Petey,” she said with a softer tone that she reserved for those she didn’t expect to have to strike for information, “all we want is a little skinny you’ve already got, and maybe a little more you can get easy enough.”
“Is that all?” Peters said, shaking his head.
“The usual… professional considerations will be paid, of course,” the Red Panda said, looking casually through Peters’ files.
“Hey, c’mon… those are private,” Peters protested weakly. Too late, he realized his mistake. The momentary flash of mirth was suddenly over.
“Jack Peters.” The masked man drew himself to his full height. “Twice I have saved your life.”
“Yes,” Jack’s hand was pressed against his temples, “I remember.”
“It belongs to me now.”
“Yes.”
“I do not demand that you serve as an agent formally because you have always been useful and trustworthy.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It’s been kind of a long day, is all. And you do tend to put me in kind of a spot. When you use info the paper has to bust a story we’ve been working on wide open… well, my editor starts to look at me funny, is all.”
“We’re prepared to offer you the exclusive on the story when it breaks, in so far as it is possible.” The Red Panda’s tone did not imply there was room for further discussion.
“All right.” Peters gave up. “What do you need?”
“You know the explosion on St Clair?” the Flying Squirrel said with a smile.
“Do I! Listen, if the police were sayin’ anything about that, you’d have read it in my column. That story’s locked down.”
“I need to know if they’ve determined the type of explosive used,” the Red Panda took over, “and any findings they may have reached regarding the detonator, as well as the identities of the men whose bodies were taken from the wreckage.”
“Is that all?” Peters said with a snort.
“Petey, we all know you’ve got cops who’ll talk to you and nobody else,” the Squirrel said lightly.
Peters was unimpressed. “Sure, the cops know they’ll get a fair shake from me, and most of the breaks, and they do me a few favors to keep me so inclined. But I can only lean on them for so much. Why should I burn that kind of credit over this?”
“Because one of those corpses blew himself and his pals to smithereens on purpose, Petey,” she batted her eyelashes sarcastically.
“He did?”
“Yeah. An’ that ain’t normal.”
“No. I guess not.”
“So get right on that, wouldya?”
Peters rolled his eyes and smiled grimly. “Listen, from what I understand, there wasn’t a lot left of the bodies, and the shopkeeper… what was his name–?”
“Northcott,” the Red Panda broke in. “He isn’t talking to anyone, but he didn’t see anything that we didn’t.”
“You two were there?” Peters’ jaw dropped. “Can I print that at least?”
“Print what?” the Squirrel snorted. “That unconfirmed, unsubstantiated reports of witnesses who refuse to be identified–”
“We just say ‘anonymous tip’. It’s easier to spell,” Peters grinned.
“Boss?” she turned to the Red Panda.
“The one small problem with having virtually wiped out the organized gangs in the city,” the Red Panda began, turning his attention from the filing cabinet, “is that these fiends will be almost certain that we’re coming for them next.”
“We have kinda lost the element of surprise,” she agreed.
The Red Panda gave Jack Peters one of his long stares. Just long enough to make the newspaperman uncertain of what might follow. “I don’t see how it can affect our investigation, Jack,” he said at last. “If you can get some mileage out of it, feel free, though I would think your editor–”
“My editor’s got a pretty good idea of where I get my information on you two. He doesn’t ask ‘cause he doesn’t really want to know, but he gives me plenty of rope. Especially when there’s a chance to splash the words ‘Red Panda’ all over the front page.”
The Red Panda turned to his partner and nodded quickly.
“All right, Petey. You owe us somethin’ special,” she said, stepping back out the window in one smooth motion.
The Red Panda moved to join her. He paused at the last moment and turned back to Peters.
“One more thing, Jack. I wonder if any of your police contacts can tell us something more about a Constable… What was the name again?” he said, turning to the girl on the ledge.
“Parker,” she said, poking her head back into the room. “Constable Andy Parker.”
“You’re kidding, right? This is a put-on?”
The Red Panda regarded Peters a moment without speaking. At last he sighed a little.
“You’re a good man, Jack,” he said. “Why does it have to be a tap dance for every little–”
“No, you got it all
wrong,” Peters interrupted. “The cop, Parker… he was here an hour ago, asking about you!”
Fifteen
The crowd at the Golden Goose was, as always, well-dressed and bubbling with enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard to see why, since the Goose was one of the city’s most fashionable nightspots, and the clientèle was carefully screened to ensure that only those well-off enough to ensure that they had no cause to be anything other than gay were admitted. Here, the Depression checked its hat at the door and was soon lost in the flowing rivers of champagne and cocktails.
A short, stocky man with a carefully trimmed van Dyke beard moved easily and confidently through the crowd. He reached the back of the room and turned down the hall that led to the kitchen. At the far end, he nodded with curt familiarity towards a pair of well-heeled toughs who stood by the doorway at the end of the hall, failing utterly in their attempts to look casual.
The stocky man rapped three times in quick succession on the well-guarded door, and took a moment to straighten his handsome white dinner jacket. A small panel slid open in the door and a pair of eyes peered out momentarily. The door was flung open at once.
“Good evening, Mister Grant,” the doorman said.
The man with the beard smiled at the young man on the door. He had seen him elsewhere, in other clubs of a similar vein. He passed through the door and pressed a bill into the hand of the doorman, who thanked him sincerely. The man with the beard hardly heard a word of what the young man said. He was regarding the swelling scene before him. The main room of the Golden Goose held the cream of the Toronto society, but this room would leave those celebrants blinking in wonder. The room was richly appointed from top to bottom, and in every corner, gambling tables and roulette wheels raked in a steady business from those who could afford to lose fortunes, all in the name of good fun.
Many of the patrons of the room were basically honest. Some were much less so. Others were downright shady, though unaffiliated with the new club. It was from those men that the man called Grant received the most nods of acknowledgment. To them he was Miles Grant, a numbers man and occasional confidence racketeer. A trustworthy sort of crook, and well thought of. Word round the campfire was that Grant had pulled some very profitable out-of-town jobs over the last few years and had returned to the city flush and ready for new enterprise. It was only natural that he would seek out the city’s newest gambling spot.
Grant smiled and chewed lightly on the end of his unlit cigar. There had been an illegal gambling house in the back room of the Golden Goose off and on for years. When the club was in the hands of the Ryder mob, it was rough and tumble, but very profitable. It took no less a hand than Big Joe Tennutti to give the place some class, but it had fallen in raids led by the city’s masked crime-fighters months ago. The back room had been shut down; the Goose itself was under new and supposedly legitimate ownership. To re-open the club and do it this publicly was either very stupid…
“Or a challenge…,” thought the man, surveying the room quietly from a tactical standpoint. The usual gorillas in evening wear were easily spotted throughout the room, but it didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. As he stepped into the room and ordered a drink, his keen eyes spotted what appeared to be a sliding panel, no more than twelve inches wide, high above the room with a vantage facing the door. If it was what it appeared to be, it would be the perfect spot for an unseen sentinel to pepper the room with machine-gun fire from the upper offices. He would have to deal with that.
For the man with the van Dyke beard was not Miles Grant at all. The real Miles Grant had died months ago in a plane crash while on a caper. Pains had been taken that his body would never be found, and the man in the white dinner jacket had assumed his identity, giving him access to the inner sphere of the underworld. He had engineered Grant’s supposed return to Toronto, assumed his old connections and awaited orders.
Grant took one more look around, then took pains to blend in to the happy crowd of gamblers. At last he lit his cigar and steeled himself for the task ahead. For this was Gregor Sampson, Agent of the Red Panda. He had taken on the dangerous task of being his chief’s eyes and ears inside the city’s underworld. Sometimes he served by gathering intelligence… names, dates, targets. Sometimes he played a more active role. Tonight was one of those times.
He moved casually towards the corner of the room, stopping to chat with those he knew in the crowd. Halfway to his goal he glanced over to make sure that the nearest security men had not taken an interest in him. Sure enough, their eyes were elsewhere, though with an intensity that caught Sampson’s eye. They seemed to be focused rather intently on one of the waiters. Sampson glanced over at the men near the door. They, too, were focused on the same waiter as he moved through the crowd. Sampson did not want to be associated with whatever was attracting so much casual attention, but he could not resist a glance. The waiter in question was a big man, maybe twenty-five. His hair was close-cropped and sandy-blond, and he carried his tray awkwardly, as if he had never held one before in his life.
“That,” thought Gregor Sampson at once, “is the single worst piece of undercover work I have ever seen.”
He wondered if the man was a policeman, a private detective or if he simply had some private agenda worth dying for. He made a mental note to ask the man’s widow later. For the moment, he made an excellent distraction.
Sampson slipped down a service hallway without being seen. He could hear the muffled sounds of the casino nearby. The voices, the music… It was loud enough that he almost certainly wouldn’t hear someone coming up behind him until it was far too late. He would have to work quickly.
At last he spotted what he was looking for: the main power box. From here the electricity branched off for every part of the Golden Goose, including the back room and, by the look of it, the offices above. He attached a small device to the base of the relay box and pressed a series of three buttons on it in a rapid pattern. There was a barely audible whirring sound, and then nothing.
Sampson looked around quickly. The way was clear. He moved swiftly back up the hall, all the while pressing the jewel in his ring in what appeared to be an absent-minded fashion. In fact, the motion was anything but random. The jewel in Gregor Sampson’s ring was the switch of a miniature radio sending device, transmitting a short-range signal on a very special frequency. As he passed back into the room he finished sending the message in the dots and dashes of Morse Code:
“Agent Thirty-Three in place. Ready. Counting down now.”
And as he sent the last dash of his message, Sampson pressed a switch in his pocket and the carefully trimmed van Dyke beard began to move, just a little, as Gregor Sampson began slowly and evenly counting down from thirty. As he kept careful, even count, he moved into a position directly across from the sliding panel he had spotted earlier. When he reached five he fixed his eyes directly to the panel, in spite of the risk of being spotted. Out of the corner of his eye, he could just see two security men moving from opposite ends of the hall, each on their way to intercept the mysterious waiter. Sampson nodded to himself. They would be out of position and away from their partners. Whoever this fool was, he had done them another good turn.
At the moment that the count reached zero, the remote timer triggered the device he had planted, and with a sound like thunder, the back room of the Golden Goose was plunged into darkness.
The effect on the crowd was instantaneous. They might not have known what was coming, but they had a general idea that it was nothing they wanted to be near. They wanted out and they wanted out now. Unfortunately, they each had a different idea of which direction “out” was, and they made little progress in the windowless black of the gambling room.
The noise was great, and Sampson could hear nothing from the spot on which he continued to focus his eyes despite the blackness, but after just a few seconds the panel must have slid open, as the beam of a powerful torch appeared and began to sweep the crowd. Sampson knew from that angle they wer
e perfectly positioned to rain down hot, leaden death on the room and anyone in it, but he held his hand another moment. As the beam swept past him and over the room, Sampson could just spy clearly the silhouette of a machine-gun barrel. He had been right after all.
As he reached into a hidden pocket in the lining of his jacket, his fingers brushed against the powerful .45 he carried, hidden from prying eyes, but not unexpected in one with his supposedly criminal tendencies. In an instant it would be child’s play to bring down the watcher with the gun, but another might be nearby to take his place. Besides, he noted grimly as he pulled the pin on the gas grenade in his pocket, if he shot anyone, he’d have to explain himself to the Red Panda.
Sampson drew his arm back to throw. The light presented a target, but in the pitch darkness, it was difficult to judge the distance. This would have to be perfect. The roar of the crowd muffled the release of the gas bomb’s charge an instant later, but the beam of light vanished all at once and did not return. The upper level was clear. It had been a full fifteen seconds since the room was plunged into darkness. Sampson could not understand the delay. If the Red Panda was giving the crowd time to escape, he was also giving his enemies time to prepare a reception. It made little sense.
“Unless that’s the whole point…,” Sampson thought.
He could feel the crowd pushing past him on the stairs now, charging through the darkness for the hidden doors. He held on to the rail to avoid being swept along. The chief may need him yet.
Suddenly, a dozen red flares burst forth from every part of the room, bathing the gambling hall in an eerie glow. Sampson looked around the room. In those few seconds of panic, the crowd had done the work of a wrecking crew on the fashionable hall. Everywhere tables were overturned and gambling apparatus’ were smashed. Sampson wondered who had planted the flares. Was one of his fellow agents in the room? Or was it…