He knocked open the door and scooped his gun off the seat as he bounded out. Figueroa saw him and dropped everything but the gladstone. He leaped and ducked beneath the station platform. MacBride went under after him, stumbled over a track and rebounded to his feet.
Figueroa jumped from behind a supporting pillar, scaled the tracks and went under the platform opposite. MacBride followed and crowded him against a stone wall. He walloped his gun against Figueroa’s stomach and flattened him upright against the wall.
“Give me that dough, you punk!”
“I... I—”
“You heard me! I’ve got to get out on the Old West Road and deliver it. Wayne’s a friend of mine and if I had the time to pinch you I’d do it. But I’ll get you later. Wayne’s the only guy matters now. Shake it out, you two-timing so-and-so!”
Far up the line a locomotive whistle hooted.
“I can kill you,” MacBride gritted. “I can let you have it in your dirty guts and by I will if you don’t fork over that money!”
Figueroa’s breath was stifled. He shoved his hand into his inside pocket, dragged out the brown envelope. MacBride snatched it and stepped back.
“Remember, greaseball,” he said, “I’ll be after you inside of an hour. But there’s no time now.”
He turned and raced across the tracks, beneath the platform. He reached the flivver and as he whipped it down through the underpass he heard the train puff into the station. He hit the Black Horse at sixty miles an hour, wheeled the car into Riding Pike and held the accelerator flat to the boards on the way north. For once he wasn’t a cop. He was a friend of governor-elect Wayne. He had to deliver shake-down money to insure the release and safe return of Cortland Wayne. It was against his code, against his principles. It griped him, but a life that mattered was at stake.
He took the turn into Old West Road much too fast. He felt the car heave. He toiled with the wheel, heard the rasp of the rubber, felt the rear end slew, then snap back again. He was off the road. He saw the windows of a filling station rear up in front of him, heard a man’s hoarse cry. He hit. Glass exploded and flew. Metal snarled and cracked and the hard stone of the filling station did not budge.
He went through the curtains, did a somersault and landed asprawl on cinders. He lay slightly dazed and blinking while figures ran around him and bent over him. Time seemed to fly, but somehow an ambulance got there and he was still blinking while a white-coated figure ran fingers over his body. Suddenly he made a sweeping motion with his hands and sat up.
“Hey, take it easy,” a voice growled.
MacBride saw things clearly. He saw the ambulance, the doctor, a motorcycle cop, and the flivver. The crushed and hardly recognizable flivver.
“Now, now,” the doctor was saying.
“I’m MacBride,” the skipper declared.
The doctor said: “I don’t give a damn—”
“Oh,” the motorcycle cop cut in. “That’s right! Captain MacBride! This is Enders, Captain; Ninth Precinct.”
“Hello, Enders.”
MacBride was on his feet. Moriarity’s hat was ruined and the seat was completely removed from Moriarity’s overcoat. But MacBride slapped the hat on and looked comically pugnacious. He brushed the doctor out of the way and jumped to the wreck of the flivver. From its ruins he drew the brown envelope. But somehow it had been gashed in two. He held the pieces up and looked at them. The envelope had been stuffed with newspaper.
He whipped around. “Enders! Enders, where the hell are you?”
“Here, sir!”
“Lend me your motorcycle.”
He forked the machine, gunned it hard, walked it off the cinders and went booming away towards the city.
Enders scratched his head. “The skipper always was wild as a coot.”
The maid let MacBride in. He went past her without seeing her. He even forgot to remove his hat. Moriarity’s hat was cocked over one eyebrow and the seat of the skipper’s pants showed through the ragged hole in Moriarity’s coat. His jaw looked teak-hard and a bitter glint was in his eye.
He ran into Davenport. “Mr. Davenport, more dough — and as quick as you can get it. That greaseball pulled the old two-time and Cort—”
“Sh! Sh!”
“Now don’t shush me. I figured that guy was a heel and I tailed him. He didn’t take the Old West Road. He lit out down Riding Pike and went over Black Horse to the Wentwood main-line station. I took the envelope away from him. I wanted to pinch the sweet double-crosser but I had no time. I wanted to get that dough to the spot. I piled up the car into a filling station — and lucky I did. The envelope contained newspaper. He’d taken out the dough and was on the lam. Come on now — rake up some dough—”
“Not so loud. Not so loud. Cort just came back.”
“What!”
“He’s in bed. Upstairs. Mrs. Wayne is with him.”
“You mean to say—”
“Please, Captain, please!”
MacBride straightened and his jaw set. He clipped: “Okey.” He pivoted and walked hard-heeled to the telephone. Davenport heaved after him and grabbed his arm.
“What are you going to do?”
“Get Figueroa. I know what train he’s on.”
Davenport got between MacBride and the telephone. He shook his white-maned old head. “No, Captain, No.”
“What the hell do you mean — no?”
Davenport’s blue eyes keened to fine glacial points. “You promised you’d do everything within your power to keep Cort’s name clean.”
“What’s this got to do with Cort? Get away from that phone.”
“No. Listen. Figueroa is on his way. Everything has worked out as I hoped. I know where he’s going. New York. He’s booked on the steamship Magnetic for France. I had a secret agent following him. I know just what he did.”
MacBride narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get you.”
Davenport took a deep breath. “You know how I feel about Cort. You know I said that I would do anything to prevent a blemish on his name or his household. I know I can tell you this in strictest confidence. I know or suspect that you already have some knowledge of how things stood.
“In Cort’s kidnaping I saw an opportunity to get rid of Figueroa. It was a long chance but I took it. Had not Mrs. Wayne suggested that he go with the money, I should have done so. I wanted him to go. I knew from what I’d heard of this leech that once he got fifteen thousand in his hands he would abscond with it. I wanted just that to happen.”
“But—”
“Let me finish. I knew that Figueroa and Mrs. Wayne were more than friends. I was resolved one way or another to get rid of Figueroa without breaking an inch of scandal and without making Cort aware of the fact that this liaison was existent.
“So Figueroa was to take the money to the designated point. A trusted agent of mine followed him. This man also carried an envelope containing fifteen thousand. If Figueroa had gone to the designated point, my agent should have gone on about his business. But we had Figueroa reasoned out. He absconded. My agent, who was only a block behind you when you reached the underpass, carried the money to the rendezvous and shortly afterward Cort walked in that door, haggard and worn but all right otherwise. He had been kept blindfolded all the time. He was helped from a car at a North Side street corner, still blindfolded, and the car had driven away before he got the blindfold off.
“Figueroa is gone. You might say I could have offered him a sum outright, but with bribery there is always backwash, later on. Now he has committed robbery, grand larceny. But no one knows but you and my trusted agent. He will not come back. Leave it that way, Captain.” MacBride rocked on his heels. “What am I going to tell that flock of newshawks? Here I’ve been clowning all around town, busting up cars and a filling station.”