“I got to get closer,” he told himself aloud.
He walked across the sidewalk – the automatic held stiffly before him – stepped down into the roadway, and began to stride toward where pencils of fire sprang to meet him from Yust’s gun.
And as the little man strode he chanted his silly chant, and fired, fired, fired… Once something tugged at one of his shoulders, and once at his arm – above where he had felt the burn – but he did not even wonder what it was.
When he was within ten feet of Rip Yust, that man turned as if to walk away, took a step, his big body curved suddenly in a grotesque arc, and he slid down into the sand of the roadway.
Owen Sack found that the weapon in his own hand was empty, had been empty for some time. He turned around. Dimly he made out the broad doorway of Upshaw’s place. The ground clung to his feet, trying to pull him down, to hold him back, but he gained the doorway, gained the cash register, found the shelf, and returned the automatic to it.
Voices were speaking to him, arms were around him. He ignored the voices, shook off the arms, reached the street again. More hands to be shaken off. But the air lent him strength. He was indoors again, leaning over the firearm showcase in Jeff Hamline’s store.
“I want the two biggest handguns you got, Jeff, and a mess of cartridges. Fix ‘em up for me and I’ll be back to get ‘em in a little while.”
He knew that Jeff answered him, but he could not separate Jeff’s words from the roaring in his head.
The warmer air of the street once more. The ankle-deep dust of the roadway pulling at his feet. The opposite sidewalk. Doc Johnstone’s door. Somebody helping him up the narrow stairs. A couch or table under him; he could see and hear better now that he was lying down.
“Fix me up in a hurry, Doc! I got a lot of things to tend to.”
The doctor’s smooth professional voice:
“You’ve nothing to attend to for a while except taking care of yourself.”
“I got to travel a lot, Doc. Hurry!”
“You’re all right, Sack. There’s no need of your going away. I saw Yust down you first from my window, and half a dozen others saw it. Self-defence if there ever was a case of it!”
“’Tain’t that!” A nice man was Doc, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. “I got a lot of places to go to, a lot of men I got to see.”
“Certainly. Certainly. Just as soon as you like.”
“You don’t understand, Doc!” The doc was talking to him like he was a child to be humoured, or a drunk. “My God, Doc! I got to back-track my whole life, and I ain’t young no more. There’s men I got to find in Baltimore, and Australia, and Brazil, and California, and God knows where – all. And some of ‘em will take a heap of finding. I got to do a lot of shootin’. I ain’t young no more, and it’s a mighty big job. I got to get going! You got to hurry me up, Doc! You got to…”
Owen Sack’s voice thickened to a mumble, to a murmur, and subsided.
TOM, DICK, OR HARRY
I don’t know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head – naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the colour and texture of Manila paper – propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.
Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.
I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.
“I want a list of the stuff yon lost,” I told Toplin, “but first -“
“Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”
Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.
“Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.
Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.
The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.
“Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”
“So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.
“Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”
That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt – always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.
“Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”
“Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewellery – the valuable pieces – home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”
“What time was this?”
“Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda” – nodding at the blond maid – “came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He -“
“Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”
“Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my – my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and -“
“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand” – Toplin took the story away from his servant – “it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again – no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed – he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word – just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”
“How bad did he bang your leg?”
“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”
“Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.
“No, sir.”
“Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”
None of them had.
“What happened after he locked you in the closet?”
“Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”
“Who’s McBirney?”
“The janitor.”
“How’d he happen along with a policeman?”
“He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there – keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver – until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and – and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”