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“What are you up to?” Tom-Tom Carey asked suspiciously when I rejoined Jack and him.
“Detective business.”
“I ought to have come down and turned the trick all by myself,” he grumbled. “You haven’t done a damned thing but waste time since we started.”
“I’m not the one that’s wasting it now.”
He snorted and set out across the field again, Jack and I following him. At the end of the field there was another fence to be climbed. Then we came over a little wooded ridge and the Newhall house lay before us—a large white house, glistening in the moonlight, with yellow rectangulars where blinds were down over the windows of lighted rooms. The lighted rooms were on the ground floor. The upper floor was dark. Everything was quiet.
“Damn the moonlight!” Tom-Tom Carey repeated, bringing another automatic out of his clothes, so that he now had one in each hand.
Jack started to take his gun out, looked at me, saw I was letting mine rest, let his slide back in his pocket.
Tom-Tom Carey’s face was a dark stone mask—slits for eyes, slit for mouth—the grim mask of a manhunter, a mankiller. He was breathing softly, his big chest moving gently. Beside him, Jack Counihan looked like an excited schoolboy. His face was ghastly, his eyes all stretched out of shape, and he was breathing like a tire-pump. But his grin was genuine, for all the nervousness in it.
“We’ll cross to the house on this side,” I whispered. “Then one of us can take the front, one the back, and the other can wait till he sees where he’s needed most. Right?”
“Right,” the swarthy one agreed.
“Wait!” Jack exclaimed. “The girl came down the vines from an upper window. What’s the matter with my going up that way? I’m lighter than either of you. If they haven’t missed her, the window would still be open. Give me ten minutes to find the window, get through it, and get myself placed. Then when you attack I’ll be there behind them. How’s that?” he demanded applause.
“And what if they grab you as soon as you light?” I objected.
“Suppose they do. I can make enough racket for you to hear. You can gallop to the attack while they’re busy with me. That’ll be just as good.”
“Blue hell!” Tom-Tom Carey barked. “What good’s all that? The other way’s best. One of us at the front door, one at the back, kick ’em in and go in shooting.”
“If this new one works, it’ll be better,” I gave my opinion. “If you want to jump in the furnace, Jack, I won’t stop you. I won’t cheat you out of your heroics.”
“No!” the swarthy man snarled. “Nothing doing!”
“Yes,” I contradicted him. “We’ll try it. Better take twenty minutes, Jack. That won’t give you any time to waste.”
He looked at his watch and I at mine, and he turned toward the house.
Tom-Tom Carey, scowling darkly, stood in his way. I cursed and got between the swarthy man and the boy. Jack went around my back and hurried away across the too-bright space between us and the house.
“Keep your feet on the ground,” I told Carey. “There are a lot of things to this game you don’t know anything about.”
“Too damned many!” he snarled, but he let the boy go.
There was no open second-story window on our side of the building. Jack rounded the rear of the house and went out of sight.
A faint rustling sounded behind us. Carey and I spun together. His guns went up. I stretched out an arm across them, pushing them down.
“Don’t have a hemorrhage,” I cautioned him. “This is just another of the things you don’t know about.”
The rustling had stopped.
“All right,” I called softly.
Mickey Linehan and Andy MacElroy came out of the tree-shadows.
Tom-Tom Carey stuck his face so close to mine that I’d have been scratched if he had forgotten to shave that day.
“You double-crossing—”
“Behave! Behave! A man of your age!” I admonished him. “None of these boys want any of your blood money.”
“I don’t like this gang stuff,” he snarled. “We—”
“We’re going to need all the help we can get,” I interrupted, looking at my watch. I told the two operatives: “We’re going to close in on the house now. Four of us ought to be able to wrap it up snug. You know Papadopoulos, Big Flora and Angel Grace by description. They’re in there. Don’t take any chances with them—Flora and Papadopoulos are dynamite. Jack Counihan is trying to ease inside now. You two look after the back of the joint. Carey and I will take the front. We’ll make the play. You see that nobody leaks out on us. Forward march!”
The swarthy man and I headed for the front porch—a wide porch, grown over with vines on the side, yellowly illuminated now by the light that came through four curtained French windows.
We hadn’t taken our first steps across the porch when one of these tall windows moved—opened.
The first thing I saw was Jack Counihan’s back.
He was pushing the casement open with a hand and foot, not turning his head.
Beyond the boy—facing him across the brightly lighted room—stood a man and a woman. The man was old, small, scrawny, wrinkled, pitifully frightened—Papadopoulos. I saw he had shaved off his straggly white mustache. The woman was tall, full-bodied, pink-fleshed and yellow-haired—a she-athlete of forty with clear gray eyes set deep in a handsome brutal face—Big Flora Brace. They stood very still, side by side, watching the muzzle of Jack Counihan’s gun.
While I stood in front of the window looking at this scene, Tom-Tom Carey, his two guns up, stepped past me, going through the tall window to the boy’s side. I did not follow him into the room.
Papadopoulos’ scary brown eyes darted to the swarthy man’s face. Flora’s gray ones moved there deliberately, and then looked past him to me.
“Hold it, everybody!” I ordered, and moved away from the window, to the side of the porch where the vines were thinnest.
Leaning out between the vines, so my face was clear in the moonlight, I looked down the side of the building. A shadow in the shadow of the garage could have been a man. I put an arm out in the moonlight and beckoned. The shadow came toward me—Mickey Linehan. Andy MacElroy’s head peeped around the back of the house. I beckoned again and he followed Mickey.
I returned to the open window.
Papadopoulos and Flora—a rabbit and a lioness—stood looking at the guns of Carey and Jack. They looked again at me when I appeared, and a smile began to curve the woman’s full lips.
Mickey and Andy came up and stood beside me. The woman’s smile died grimly.
“Carey,” I said, “you and Jack stay as is. Mickey, Andy, go in and take hold of our gifts from God.”
When the two operatives stepped through the window—things happened.
Papadopoulos screamed.
Big Flora lunged against him, knocking him at the back door.
“Go! Go!” she roared.
Stumbling, staggering, he scrambled across the room.
Flora had a pair of guns—sprung suddenly into her hands. Her big body seemed to fill the room, as if by willpower she had become a giantess. She charged—straight at the guns Jack and Carey held—blotting the back door and the fleeing man from their fire.
A blur to one side was Andy MacElroy moving.
I had a hand on Jack’s gun-arm.
“Don’t shoot,” I muttered in his ear.
Flora’s guns thundered together. But she was tumbling. Andy had crashed into her. Had thrown himself at her legs as a man would throw a boulder.
When Flora tumbled, Tom-Tom Carey stopped waiting.
His first bullet was sent so close past her that it clipped her curled yellow hair. But it went past—caught Papadopoulos just as he went through the door. The bullet took him low in the back—smeared him out on the floor.
Carey fired again—again—again—into the prone body.
“It’s no use,” I growled. “You can’t make him any deader.”
He chuckled and lowered his guns.
“Four into a hundred and six.” All his ill-humor, his grimness was gone. “That’s twenty-six thousand, five hundred dollars each of those slugs was worth to me.”
Andy and Mickey had wrestled Flora into submission and were hauling her up off the floor.
I looked from them back to the swarthy man, muttering, “It’s not all over yet.”
“No?” He seemed surprised. “What next?”
“Stay awake and let your conscience guide you,” I replied, and turned to the Counihan youngster. “Come along Jack.”
I led the way out through the window and across the porch, where I leaned against the railing. Jack followed and stood in front of me, his gun still in his hand, his face white and tired from nervous tension. Looking over his shoulder, I could see the room we had just quit. Andy and Mickey had Flora sitting between them on a sofa. Carey stood a little to one side, looking curiously at Jack and me. We were in the middle of the band of light that came through the open window. We could see inside—except that Jack’s back was that way—and could be seen from there, but our talk couldn’t be overheard unless we made it loud.
All that was as I wanted it.
“Now tell me about it,” I ordered Jack.