He got her by an arm, hauled at her and she went sliding across the room. Kerr had taken three steps toward Rockley who was scrambling to his feet in the doorway. The girl whirled into Kerr and both of them went down in a heap. Her gun jolted out of her hand, landed on Shuford’s writhing figure and bounced out into the hall.
O’Hara went for it and Rockley went for it at the same moment. Their bodies tangled and O’Hara’s foot struck the gun, kicked it a dozen feet way. Rockley wheeled out of O’Hara’s arms, went to one knee, slid after the gun.
O’Hara let him. He’d seen the .32 he had dropped a few minutes before. It was almost at his feet and he bent, scooped it up.
He said, “Hold it, Rock.”
Rockley had the other gun by that time and he began getting to his feet, grinning. He panted, “No good, Ken. Has a broken firing pin. Knew it when I gave it to you. Now get back in that room and we’ll wind this up in a more friendly way. Go on.”
O’Hara pulled the trigger, got only a click, and Rockley lifted his gun, said sadly, “If you insist, Ken.”
From no more than a block away a siren bit into the night, wrapped its scream around them, went higher and higher. It jolted Rockley, confused him for a bare second and O’Hara swung his arm, let the useless gun slide from his hand. It spun end over end at Rockley, caught him between the eyes, put him out on his feet. Plunging at him with the same motion, O’Hara got a hand on Rockley’s gun. Rockley hung onto the gun and O’Hara put his arm, his shoulder and his back into a punch that lifted the pink-faced man off his feet, jolted him into the corner of a long divan, put him out completely.
Behind O’Hara, Inez Dana cursed and choked and he swung around, saw her writhing and spitting and clawing in Kerr’s arms.
Kerr said, “You’re asking for it, babe,” and back-handed her across the face hard.
She stopped struggling. Kerr half-carried her, half-shoved her across the floor and flung her down beside Rockley. She crouched there, sobbing wildly and suddenly wilted and cowed. O’Hara found handcuffs at Shuford’s belt and tossed them at Kerr and Kerr cuffed Rockley and Inez Dana together.
Then he stood back, said in his impersonally amused fashion, “Some fun, O’Hara, some fun. Satisfied now that I’m pure?”
“As the driven snow,” O’Hara said. “Sorry.”
“Think nothing of it.”
Davenport came down the stairs, step by step and slowly, a pale and very frightened man. His long lock lopped over his eyes but he was too terrified to think of patting it back in place. He tried to find words, managed to say, “I... I heard everything. O’Hara, I swear to you I didn’t know Lawton’s death was murder. I was... was—”
“The fall guy,” O’Hara supplied. “Never mind that now, Councilman. Get on the phone, get cops, get an ambulance.”
Davenport wavered toward the phone and over all of it the siren kept on screaming, not getting any closer, not letting up.
O’Hara pulled back Shuford’s coat, his shirt. There was a blood-oozing crease across the man’s belly muscles, a round bluish hole through the flesh just above the right hip. Shuford groaned and moved and O’Hara said, “Take it easy, Otto. You’re not so bad off. Just take it easy.”
He was still on his knees beside shuford when Tony Ames ran into the hallway from the porch. She said, “Ken, are you all right? What happened? What about that shooting?”
“You?” O’Hara said.
“Me.”
O’Hara grinned. “I might have known it’d be you when I heard all that siren noise. You can turn it off now.”
“First I want to have some hysterics. I’ve been staving them off ever since I heard that first shot.”
“Where were you?”
“Just outside. When Shuford rode you off from the Barcelona I tried to follow in your car but the plugs must have been wet — I couldn’t get it started for a while. I supposed he’d take you to the Westwood station so I took a short cut over there and you hadn’t arrived. Finally an ambulance brought Shuford in unconscious and I went half frantic phoning around to see if I could locate you. They were working over Shuford and he’d just come to when I called the paper and the operator told me you’d said you were coming here. Shuford heard my end of the conversation and piled me into a police car and raced over here, all steamed up because you’d slugged him.”
“I didn’t, but let it go.”
“Anyway, when we got here he told me to stay put in the police car. Naturally I didn’t and I was almost up to the porch when that shot sounded. I didn’t know just what to do, I didn’t have a gun, so I ran back to the car, started the motor and tied the siren cord to the handbrake and let it rip.”
“Good head,” O’Hara said. “It saved the O’Hara epidermis, if you’re interested.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ve always wanted to play with a siren anyway.” Her eyes took in Rockley and Inez Dana, cuffed together. She said, aghast, “Ken, you don’t mean that Joe Rockley—”
“Yeah,” O’Hara said. “He and Dana thought up the whole caper. I’ll tell you all about it later.”
Shuford stirred, opened his eyes briefly. He said incredulously, “Inez! She shot me!”
“Take it easy, Otto.”
Shuford said, “But Inez! Why did she—” He stopped, shook his head as though he couldn’t figure things out. His fat, florid face was almost comical with its expression of bewilderment and hurt. He said, “Why, I’d have given my life to help her.”
Tony Ames sniffled suddenly. She said softly, “The poor guy, Ken, the poor guy. Ain’t love hell?”
O’Hara looked up at her, smiling. The hard planes of his angular brown face weren’t quite so hard.
“Sometime when I’m in the mood, my siren,” he said, “I’ll give you an argument on that.”
Nothing To Worry About
by Herbert A. Woodbury
Standing there, the last in line at the teller’s grilled window, drably inconspicuous in his steel-rimmed spectacles and his baggy brown suit, Horatio Boggs kept telling himself over and over again that there was nothing to worry about.
If the crinkly, crisp, brand-new, twenty-dollar Federal Reserve note, the amount of which he had entered upon his deposit slip, didn’t pass the muster of the teller’s, Dan Meyers’, eagle eye, why then Dan would confiscate the note, of course. But Dan, who’d been taking Mr. Boggs’ deposits every Friday afternoon for twenty-four years, wouldn’t guess for an instant that he, drab, dowdy little Mr. Boggs, possessed, hidden away in a safety deposit box, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two more such counterfeit twenties. No, there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
Often, during the long years that he had worked as a runner for Cameron and Calahan, Bonds, Mr. Boggs had been tempted. Again and again when he had been sent out to deliver fifty or a hundred or a thousand unregistered coupon Liberties, he had thought wistfully how easy it would be, simply to walk off with them; disappear. But it was a mood which had always passed. For Horatio Boggs had the prudence and the good sense to realize that it wouldn’t really be easy at all. They’d broadcast his name; his picture. And eventually, in Tahiti, or in Honolulu, or in Bali — which the travel circulars called the last paradise — wherever he’d fled the detectives employed by the company which had insured the bonds against theft would find him.
No, he might dream. He might scheme and plot. He might occasionally pilfer postage stamps from the office till. But that was all.