I got up on my feet and went on. I came up beside the car, a small coupé, rather old. The gun was down at my side, pulled around my hip as far as the cuffs would let it come.
The coupé was empty. Water gurgled in the radiator. I listened and heard nothing from the house. No loud voices, no quarrel. Only the heavy bong-bong-bong of the raindrops hitting the elbows at the bottom of rain gutters.
Yeager was in the house. She had let me go and Yeager was in there with her. Probably she wouldn’t tell him anything. She would just stand and look at him. She was his boss’s wife. That would scare Yeager to death.
He wouldn’t stay long, but he wouldn’t leave her behind, alive or dead. He would be on his way and take her with him. What happened to her later on was something else.
All I had to do was wait for him to come out. I didn’t do it.
I shifted the gun into my left hand and leaned down to scoop up some gravel. I threw it against the front window. It was a weak effort. Very little even reached the glass.
I ran back behind the coupé and got its door open and saw the keys in the ignition lock. I crouched down on the running board, holding on to the door post.
The house had already gone dark, but that was all. There wasn’t any sound from it. No soap. Yeager was too cagy.
I reached it with my foot and found the starter, then strained back with one hand and turned the ignition key. The warm motor caught at once, throbbed gently against the pounding rain.
I got back to the ground and slid along to the rear of the car, crouched down.
The sound of the motor got him. He couldn’t be left there without a car.
A darkened window slid up an inch, only some shifting of light on the glass showing it moved. Flame spouted from it, the racket of three quick shots. Glass broke in the coupé.
I screamed and let the scream die into a gurgling groan. I was getting good at that sort of thing. I let the groan die in a choked gasp. I was through, finished. He had got me. Nice shooting, Yeager.
Inside the house a man laughed. Then silence again, except for the rain and the quietly throbbing motor of the coupé.
Then the house door inched open. A figure showed in it. She came out on the porch, stiffly, the white showing at her collar, the wig showing a little but not so much. She came down the steps like a wooden woman. I saw Yeager crouched behind her.
She started across the gravel. Her voice said slowly, without any tone at alclass="underline"
«I can’t see a thing, Lash. The windows are all misted.»
She jerked a little, as if a gun had prodded her, and came on. Yeager didn’t speak. I could see him now past her shoulder, his hat, part of his face. But no kind of a shot for a man with cuffs on his wrists.
She stopped again, and her voice was suddenly horrified.
«He’s behind the wheel!» she yelled. «Slumped over!»
He fell for it. He knocked her to one side and started to blast again. More glass jumped around. A bullet hit a tree on my side of the car. A cricket whined somewhere. The motor kept right on humming.
He was iow, crouched against the black, his face a grayness without form that seemed to come back very slowly after the glare of the shots. His own fire had blinded him too — for a second. That was enough.
I shot him four times, straining the pulsing Colt against my ribs.
He tried to turn and the gun slipped away from his hand. He half snatched for it in the air, before both his hands suddenly went against his stomach and stayed there. He sat down on the wet gravel and his harsh panting dominated every other sound of the wet night.
I watched him lie down on his side, very slowly, without taking his hands away from his stomach. The panting stopped.
It seemed like an age before Silver-Wig called out to me. Then she was beside me, grabbing my arm.
«Shut the motor off!» I yelled at her. «And get the key of these damn irons out of his pocket.»
«You d-darn fool,» she babbled. «W-what did you come back for?»
NINE
Captain Al Root of the Missing Persons Bureau swung in his chair and looked at the sunny window. This was another day, and the rain had stopped long since.
He said gruffly: «You’re making a lot of mistakes, brother. Dud O’Mara just pulled down the curtain. None of those people knocked him off. The Batzel killing had nothing to do with it. They’ve got Mesarvey in Chicago and he looks clean. The Heeb you anchored to the dead guy don’t even know who they were pulling the job for. Our boys asked him enough to be sure of that.»
«I’ll bet they did,» I said. «I’ve been in the same bucket all night and I couldn’t tell them much either.»
He looked at me slowly, with large, bleak, tired eyes. «Killing Yeager was all right, I guess. And the chopper. In the circumstances. Besides I’m not homicide. I couldn’t link any of that to O’Mara — unless you could.»
I could, but I hadn’t. Not yet. «No,» I said. «I guess not.» I stuffed and lit my pipe. After a sleepless night it tasted better,
«That all that’s worrying you?»
«I wondered why you didn’t find the girl, at Realito. It couldn’t have been very hard — for you.»
«We just didn’t. We should have. I admit it. We didn’t. Anything else?»
I blew smoke across his desk. «I’m looking for O’Mara because the general told me to. It wasn’t any use my telling him you would do everything that could be done. He could afford a man with all his time on it. I suppose you resent that.»
He wasn’t amused. «Not at all, if he wants to waste money. The people that resent you are behind a door marked Homicide Bureau.»
He planted his feet with a slap and elbowed his desk.
«O’Mara had fifteen grand in his clothes. That’s a lot of jack but O’Mara would be the boy to have it. So he could take it out and have his old pals see him with it. Only they wouldn’t think it was fifteen grand of real dough. His wife says it was. Now with any other guy but an ex-legger in the gravy that might indicate an intention to disappear. But not O’Mara. He packed it all the time.»
He bit a cigar and put a match to it. He waved a large finger. «See?»
I said I saw.
«Okay. O’Mara had fifteen grand, and a guy that pulls down the curtain can keep it down only so long as his wad lasts. Fifteen grand is a good wad. I might disappear myself, if I had that much. But after it’s gone we get him. He cashes a check, lays down a marker, hits a hotel or store for credit, gives a reference, writes a letter or gets one. He’s in a new town and he’s got a new name, but he’s got the same old appetite. He has to get back into the fiscal system one way or another. A guy can’t have friends everywhere, and if he had, they wouldn’t all stay clammed forever. Would they?»
«No, they wouldn’t,» I said.
«He went far,» Roof said. «But the fifteen grand was all the preparation he made. No baggage, no boat or rail or plane reservation, no taxi or private rental hack to a point out of town. That’s all checked. His own car was found a dozen blocks from where he lived. But that means nothing. He knew people who would ferry him several hundred miles and keep quiet about it, even in the face of a reward. Here, but not everywhere. Not new friends.»
«But you’ll get him,» I said.
«When he gets hungry.»
«That could take a year or two. General Winslow may not live a year. That is a matter of sentiment, not whether you have an open file when you retire.»
«You attend to the sentiment, brother.» His eyes moved and bushy reddish eyebrows moved with them. He didn’t like me. Nobody did, in the police department, that day.