The trousers and a pair of shoes beneath them stood just inside the doorway leading to the second floor. The man was holding himself flat against the wall so that he couldn’t be seen from the automobile. The heels of the shoes were backed against the baseboard, the feet sticking out, and the trouser legs slightly twisted as the man inside them craned his neck around the door frame.
The car door slammed shut, jerking the detective’s attention around to the wormy man. In spite of himself he hunched his shoulders and waited for the shrill, climbing screech of the gadget.
The sudden blast blew him backwards out of the chair, hurling him with terrific force across the office. His head struck a desk leg. The window rained down in a million splinters.
There was a quick, blinding flash of orange-yellow light from under the hood of the car, followed by a stinging, hot rush of tortured air that swept everything before it like a gale. After that came the thunderclap. Horne couldn’t be sure it was the flash of light or the rush of baked wind that knocked the glass out of the windows. In his dazed mind it seemed to be the awful, deafening explosion of sound that smote him seconds after everything else was all over.
It was an illusion of course, but he wasn’t sorting illusions just then. He was flat on the floor attempting to hold onto the desk leg with both hands and still cover his ears to shut out the blasting crash of thunder that bounded up from the street and played havoc within the four walls.
Two
Charles Horne put his aching head back against the inviting softness of the doctor’s bosom and waited for her to finish the tape job.
He found it pleasant waiting. She had been running; had taken the back stairs two at a time coming up to the office; his head rose and fell with her labored breathing. The doctor possessed an elegant bosom.
Dr. Elizabeth Saari was new to Boone; she had come in from Chicago less than six months before to open a practice, and had rented a suite of rooms just across the hall from the office of Confidential Services. Because people need doctors more than they need detectives — even confidential ones — her daily volume of business put his to shame. It was his habit to sit most of the day with his feet on the desk, listening to the trampling of people going in and out of her door, wondering what he’d do and say if just one of them wandered into his office by mistake.
It was a decision he’d never yet had to make.
The doctor was an efficient, alert young woman not many years out of medical school. She made friends easily and customers easier.
He found Dr. Saari to be an intelligent, attractive, chestnut-haired model with all the standard fixtures; about twenty-seven years old, and single. It pleased him. When standing near him on her medium heels she almost made it to his chin-level. Almost. And they had done each other a few favors since her arrival in town.
Chief among those favors was the finding of an apartment for her in an already overcrowded, underhoused community. Horne liked to remember that. With his usual sly cunning and adroitness, he told himself, the discovery of an apartment was simplicity in itself. He merely created one, and after an appropriate wait the better to impress her and to allow her hotel expenses to pile up, he “found” the empty apartment and moved her in.
He lived in a rather exclusive rooming house owned and operated by a sentimental old-maid character he called “Mother Hubbard.” He couldn’t recall just what her real name was. It was exclusive because the two of them were the only tenants of the house — until Dr. Saari was moved in. Using his slick tongue and his persuasive manners, he privately admitted, it was fairly easy to convince Mother Hubbard of the evil perils apt to be encountered by a big city girl in a small town... and you know how those hotel bellboys are. He talked Mother Hubbard into converting three rooms, front, on the ground floor into a “vacant” apartment.
Dr. Saari clinched the deal by volunteering to pay the telephone bill.
Nearly a week went by before the new doctor discovered her benefactor lived in the same house in the two upstairs rooms that comprised the second floor. Then, his slick tongue failed him, but only momentarily.
That was six months ago.
At the moment he was plagued with an insistent, violent headache and he was one of those people who are immune to aspirin. His ears hurt and no sound was coming through them. The strange silence didn’t help his peace of mind; the raging headache had been with him since he had picked himself up from the floor of his office twenty minutes past.
Jingling shards of window glass had fallen from his body to the floor when he sat up, some of them stained a reddish brown. The ears were beginning to sting deep down inside, but he was picking up sounds. He passed a dazed hand across his eyes to wipe away the mist and it had come down smeared with blood.
People were running and shouting down in the street. He had probably lain on the floor longer than he at first suspected for already the low whine of the police ambulance was coming through the shattered windows. It usually required from five to ten minutes for those boys to get around. A very heavy motor was thumping not too far away; the reverberations seemed to be coming through the floor. Presently he recognized it. Someone had turned in a fire alarm and a heavy-duty pumper was working down in the street.
Clutching the corner of the desk for support, he clawed his way upright and hung there for long minutes weakly. Rubble crunched under his hands. The room and its few contents were spinning, the dripping mist persisted in clouding his eyes. He wiped it away again and his shirt sleeve was sodden with blood. The three windows of the office, all facing the street, were broken. Only the jagged edges remained, clinging to the long-dried putty. The chair on which he had so recently sat was in three or four pieces scattered over the floor. Only the heavy desk was solid and dependable beneath his hands.
The seemingly cool night air of the open window invited him. Looking out, he found the streets and sidewalks jammed with milling people and unmoving automobiles. A second, steadier glance revealed that the automobiles were not on the sidewalks, it only seemed that way. People and cars were in the street, all tied together in a beautiful jam. The thumping fire truck stood at the intersection on the left, astraddle the streetcar tracks. The still-unused hoses snaked flatly away from an orange fire hydrant.
“Jeez,” Horne addressed the crowd below him. “That was some bang, wasn’t it?”
The oily worm’s big automobile with the big license number had been parked between two light standards up the street to his right. He craned his neck. Had been parked. He located the light standards: they were twisted around in pretzel shapes, looking like the newsreel pictures of the palm trees in a tropical hurricane. Of the car there remained only a gaping hole in the asphalt street.
The street surface immediately around the crater was swept clean by the force of the explosion; what remained of the car itself was hundreds and perhaps thousands of blasted pieces of anonymous metal scattered in every imaginable direction, including the pockets of souvenir hunters. There were chunks of it lying inside store windows and imbedded in brick walls, and still other chunks would be found in second-floor offices and on roof tops for days to come.
All in all it was a very successful practical joke, eh Mr. Horne? It was, he grimly answered himself. The only question being: was the fat man appreciating it now, wherever the hell he was? Could the deadly redhead have been his wife? How did she like being a widow? Damn her, I didn’t expect her to take my unspoken thought so literally.
A ragged and hastily organized police line was being thrown at an angle across Wilsey Street, making a clearing around the crater and lampposts. The mob was barred from the upper end of the block altogether. He looked to see why.