“Kick that gun of yours over to me, Garret,” Ryder said. “Be quick about it!”
He was going to have trouble getting them all with the shells in one gun. And he wouldn’t dare to try to reload! Garret kicked the gun part way.
“I began to get on to you when you told me Narriver’d heard the cops located Darcy’s body. The only person I told about putting Darcy in that vacant store was Brann. So if the cops knew, they’d been tipped off by Brann, or someone he told.”
“Boot that clear over here! Hurry, or I’ll use one of these cartridges on Shirley,” Ryder snapped.
Garret took his time and he was clumsy; the gun bounced away when he kicked it — toward Ken Brann. He said, “But I wasn’t sure of you, Ryder, until you told that cage operator in Ajax to let us off at the two-thousand-foot level. Neither Prodger, there, nor I had mentioned Fear Street — or any place on the two-thousand-foot level. But Ken Brann’s warning to you in Morse code had definitely referred to Fear Street.”
Ryder tried to hook Garret’s gun nearer to him, with his toe.
“So I knew you’d read the warning and knew what it meant,” Garret went on rapidly. “Any man who would know telegraphers’ abbreviations — the kind you used to give Darcy a description of me — would be sure to know Morse code.”
Brann began to understand that Garret was talking against time. He tried to help out. “The reason I wrote that warning was that Shirley had come back from a meeting with you and told me you were going to investigate Fear Street.”
“Sure.” Garret knew it was going to be a matter of seconds now. Ryder had the other gun! “And after leaving that warning for the guy you were too loyal to, you took your things out of the office, Brann. You went over to check on Loomis to see if he suspected anyone in his outfit of working with Ryder.”
“That’s right.” Brann kept up his end. “I found Loomis was supposed to have gone up in an abandoned stope. So I followed — and found his body. Then Jarnstrom trailed me and found me bending over Loomis’ corpse.”
“He’d become suspicious of Jarnstrom” — Garret got ready to fling himself prone as Ryder leveled the detective’s gun — “when I brought up the subject of old iron. Ryder, you probably went over to Consolidated to see Jarnstrom. He told you Loomis was suspicious, and had gone up the drainage tunnel. So you followed, killed him, and left his body in the warm water. When Scat Prodger fished him out, half an hour to an hour later, you tried to pull something about Loomis not having been dead more than ten or fifteen minutes. Though, of course, his body would have stayed relaxed for hours in that warm stream.”
Ryder snarled, “Too bad a hard-working fella like you couldn’t have made a little something out of all that dope you gathered! What you are going to get you can take with you.”
“Offering me a cut of the quarter million or so you and Darcy and Jarnstrom must have been splitting every year from the ten tons of metal you took out of Ajax drainage and melted down into blister copper in Consolidated’s furnaces? Plenty of dough for one more—” He flung himself sideways as the gun in Ryder’s hand spat flame.
Garret was rolling on the floor and trying to reach the cover of the desk before the pistol barked again. But there were no more shots. Only a voice with a brogue, saying, “You wuz askin’ for cops, Mr. Jarnstrom? Faith, it looks like you needed some!”
Then the office was full of bluecoats and Charlie Ryder was wearing shiny bracelets and Shirley Brann was on her knees beside Garret.
“I’m so terribly sorry!” she cried. “It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t told Ken you were going to investigate Fear Street. You see, I was afraid—”
“—that your brother was mixed up in it some way. I know.” He got to his feet painfully. “I figured that. It worked out okay, too. I kind of like the kind of girl who sticks up for her brother.”
She went to Ken, looked at the flesh wound in his shoulder.
“But don’t get me wrong,” Garret added hastily. “That sister stuff is fine, as far as it goes. Only I wouldn’t want you to be a sister to me, Shirley. If you know what I mean.”