Swoboda went and beefed long and loudly to the lieutenant about it. “He’s living off me!” he complained indignantly. “I pay my taxes and I want yet protection! Each time you come too late after it’s over, and what good does that? You look for him everywhere but where he was the last time, and he knows that, so back he comes again some more yet! Now idder you do something about it, mishter, or I write a letter to the mayor!”
The lieutenant and he, between them, concocted this little scheme by which to put an end to the marauder’s depredations once and for all. Greeley, because he was already known to be a plodding, patient, dependable sort, was assigned to it. A hole was bored through the store’s partition-wall between front and rear, and for three weeks Joe Greeley sat in the back like a hen, sizing up every customer that came in from the time the store opened in the morning until it closed at six. Swoboda was to give him a signal and duck out of range. Joe got so he knew the prices of every article on the shelves. Even his wife, when he told her about it, thought Joe’s superiors might have worked it on a shift basis, not kept Joe at it all the time, for twenty-one days.
“It’s an assignment,” he said uncomplainingly. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
II
On the twenty-second day, at three in the afternoon, a man came in and asked for sugar. Swoboda picked up a large tin measuring-scoop. “Not that kind of sugar,” said the man quietly.
Swoboda dropped the ladle with a crash, got down on his hands and knees behind the counter, and stayed there with his head tucked under like an ostrich. The door opened and an elderly lady came in with a shopping basket. The counter was short and she moved up directly beside the man, on Greeley’s side of him, where she could watch the scales better.
Greeley, already in the doorway with gun bared, held his fire. He had to — there was too great a risk of hitting her. She was fluctuating, terrified, back and forth in the line of fire, like a chicken with its head cut off.
The hold-up man snapped a shot at Joe that must have singed her hair, and it clunked into one of the cans on the shelf behind Greeley, as he came out, and vegetable soup trickled out. Then the bandit turned tail and broke for the open.
Greeley hit the sidewalk only seconds after him, big as he was and with a panic-stricken woman to detour around. A slice of hindmost heel was all he saw of the man. The store entrance adjoined a corner; that gave the fugitive a few added seconds of shelter, and as Greeley flashed around it in turn, again the breaks were the lawbreaker’s.
There was a school midway up the street toward the next avenue. It was a couple of minutes past three now, and a torrent of young humanity came pouring out of the building by every staircase and exit, flooding the street. In through them the sprinting man plunged, knocking over right and left the ones that didn’t get out of his way quickly enough. If it had been hazardous to take a shot at him in the store, it would have been criminal out here.
The kids parted, screaming in delighted excitement, as Greeley tore through them after the bandit with uptilted gun, but he couldn’t just callously knock them flat like the man before him had. He sidestepped, got out of their way as often as they did his, and he began to fall behind the other, lose ground.
The kids weren’t just on that one street — they had dispersed over the entire vicinity by now, for a radius of a block or more in every direction, in frisky, milling, homeward-bound groups. Through them the quarry zigzagged, pulling slowly but surely away. He kept going in a straight line, because it was to his advantage to do so — the presence of these kids made for greater safety — but he was already far enough in the lead so that when he should finally decide to turn off — the answer was pretty obvious; a taxi or a doorway or a basement. Any of them would do.
And then Brown suddenly horned in. It must have been his beat they’d reached by now. Greeley didn’t know who it was at the time. Brown was just a blue-coated figure in the distance, cutting in between him and his quarry from the mouth of the transverse street up there.
A shot sounded, topping the kid-screeching, and the blue-coated figure went down on one knee, then got up again with the help of a basement railing. That was to be expected from a cornered rat. What did he care how many kids he hit as long as he saved his own skin? In addition, the sound of the shot had made the children dangerously volatile. They were scattering and breaking for cover in a dozen crisscross lines of obstruction. A corner loomed directly ahead and the guy was going to get away sure. Joe tried to put on more speed.
And then he saw this second cop, who had already been hit once and therefore must be suffering from nervous shock and impaired muscular control if nothing else, deliberately draw and take a sight on him. The man must be insane.
Greeley bellowed “Hold it! Don’t, you fool!” although he was still a good half block behind.
Brown didn’t even jockey for a clear line of fire, just squeezed with cold-blooded obliviousness. Bang! and the kids squealed wildly, and the fugitive went over like a log and pinned one of them under him.
For a minute Greeley couldn’t even tell which one had been hit and which one had stumbled. Then the kid squirmed free and hopped to his feet and lit out for home with the fright of his young life. That didn’t alter the facts of the case any.
Greeley came up swearing. The other cop was there ahead of him, holding his own shoulder where he’d been hit, rolling the corpse vindictively over on its back with his foot, and he saw that it was Bill Brown.
“You oughta known better than to try a thing like that!”
Bill Brown just looked at him. All he said was, “I got him, didn’t I? And you didn’t.”
And that, it seemed, was what counted when the reports came in. Bill Brown got a citation and was promoted to detective, third grade. Joe Greeley stayed right where he was, and got a calling down from his lieutenant in the bargain. Or at least, a displeased cross-questioning.
“How is it when you were planted there right on the spot, and had been for three weeks past, you let him get away from right under your nose, Joe? You didn’t doze off back there by any chance, did you?”
Greeley’s self-respect wouldn’t let him answer this last. “An old lady got in between us and I couldn’t take a chance on hitting her.”
“That’s all right, but she didn’t follow the two of you for three solid blocks, did she? How is it he got that far from the store before he was dropped?”
“There were kids ganged up on the sidewalk the whole three blocks. Any man would’ve had to be a dead shot. And even then, I couldn’t take the responsibility—”
“Brown’s no better marksman than you,” his superior said pointedly. “He got his practice on the same target range than you did.”
Joe Greeley lowered his head. But not in retraction, in stubborn refusal to admit he’d been wrong. “I did the best I could Lieutenant,” he said quietly.
The lieutenant relented a little. “I know you did, Joe; I can see your point,” he admitted. “But it’s the results in this business that count.”