He went back in the garage. He put into a box all the shotgun shells from which he had emptied the powder. The next thing to do was bury them.
Jud wondered just how it had happened. He had built the bomb to go off at seven, or whenever the package was opened. Maybe Leslie Gramm was having a birthday dinner. Maybe he waited till he had all his presents before opening them.
Jud finished with the shotgun shells. He was getting hungry. Any minute, now, his wife ought to call him to supper.
He started cleaning up the pieces of metal, wire, and materials on the work bench. A few minutes more, and he’d be through by seven-thirty.
The noise of the opening door made him whirl around, his face twitching. Damn that snooping woman! He’d ordered her never to interrupt him when he was in the garage. She’d never dared cross him before. He’d smack her for this!
But it wasn’t his wife in the doorway. It was a cop. The cop looked at the work bench, the betraying pieces, and the telltale flakes of spilled powder.
Jud made a wild dive for the alley door of the garage. A powerful grip seized his shoulder and swung him around. Then fists like exploding dynamite were smashing his face, beating his features to pulp, breaking him in a kind of deliberate fury.
Through the pain and body concussions of those blows, Jud heard the cop’s voice, harsh and murderous, in snatches of phrase:
“Don’t care what they do to me down at H. Q. Stand up, guy, and take it. You’ve got lots more coming. Hash is all you’ll be when I’m through... Told your wife and she fainted dead in her tracks. Said you were out here.
“This paper in my fist, it’s the biggest piece of anything we found after the blast... List of groceries and the name they were to be charged to — Kerrun. She sends the kid off to get the groceries and you give him a bomb to deliver, only he didn’t get there in time.
“God, your own kid...”
Station K-I–L-L
by Theodore Tinsley
It was a network of greed over which Jerry Tracy broadcast a sentence of death.
The bullet whizzed through the crown of Jerry Tracy’s fedora, tilting the hat crookedly over his left temple. He heard the thwack of the leaden slug against the brick theater wall that paralleled the sidewalk. Whirling, he stared with dazed incredulity at the wall. There was a powdery gouge on the surface of the brick. A flattened chunk of lead lay on the sidewalk.
The explosive banging from the motor of a truck up near the corner had drowned out the crack of the pistol shot.
Butch flung his massive body in front of Tracy. He had a pugilist’s instinctive reaction to peril in spite of the fact that it was ten years since Butch had been in a ring. His loyalty to the dapper little columnist of the Daily Planet went beyond his duties as body-guard and made him risk his own life without hesitation.
But no more bullets came from the dingy row of rooming houses across the street.
“Are you hoit, Jerry?” Butch growled.
“I’m O.K. Where’d it come from? That middle doorway?”
“I t’irik so.”
That doorway, in the middle of a row of rooming houses, was slightly ajar. The street was a narrow one, and someone with a lousy aim had gummed up a perfect ambush.
“Stay here!” Tracy snapped.
“Nuts to you,” Butch said. His beefy palm shoved hard. Tracy spilled awkwardly to one knee and his tilted hat fell off. “What the hell do you think you got me for?” he growled at Tracy.
He faded across the dark street — not too fast, because a couple of pedestrians were approaching. Butch’s big hand scratched at what might have been an annoying itch under his armpit. He leaned for an instant against the casing of the rooming-house entry. A quick glance inward and he vanished without hesitation.
Tracy guessed sourly: “The gunner must’ve made a backyard sneak.”
He remembered suddenly that he was down on one knee, alongside a bullet-drilled hat and a flattened slug. The slug was still warm as Tracy palmed it and dropped it into his pocket. He got up, kicking petulantly at a crack in the sidewalk for the benefit of the two staring pedestrians.
One of them kept going. The other — the dopier of the two — said solemnly: “S’matter, Mister? Didja fall?”
“Yeah.”
“Ain’tcha gonna pick up your hat?”
Tracy looked at it. The two holes in the soft crown were hidden by the flare of the upturned brim.
“You saw me fall!” Tracy said in a brisk, lawsuit tone. He flipped out a notebook and a pencil. “What’s your name? Where do you live?”
“Who, me?” The dope reared like a pony. “I didn’t see nothing.”
He went rapidly away. Tracy picked up the drilled hat. He ripped out the monogrammed sweatband and dropped the hat in a near-by ashcan. That changed it from a front-page news item to a hunk of junk.
Butch’s big lop-eared face was peering from the doorway across the street, Tracy joined him.
“Did the guy get away?”
“Yeah. But I wanna show you something he lost.”
They tiptoed quietly across the dim floor so as not to attract any attention from curious lodgers. They descended steps to the yard. It was paved except for a strip of earth alongside the rear fence where tall weeds grew. Butch’s big feet had smudged the smaller prints of the escaped fugitive. Butch had gone over the fence in a hurry but the other fellow had enjoyed too big a start.
There was a cellar on the other side, Butch reported glumly, and a whitewashed alley that led to the rear street. The guy must have had a car parked, one with a nice, speedy pick-up.
“This here is what I meant,” Butch said, pointing downward at the weeds. “The guy musta tore it off on the same nail that almost ruined my—”
“Let’s not go into biology,” Tracy said dryly.
He picked up the white carnation that had fallen by the fence. There are all kinds of carnations, beginning with the ones you can buy for a nickel from sad-looking street peddlers. This was the expensive kind, the sort Bert Lord always wore.
There was no surprise in Jerry Tracy’s mind. He had suspected Lord the moment the bullet had ripped through his hat. The sleek, good-looking Englishman must have found out what Tracy was going to spill on the air tonight in his cigarette broadcast. It was hard to keep juicy items like that under cover. Scandal tipsters, particularly women, had a vengeful habit of phoning the victim beforehand, to make sure that the barb hurt.
Tracy wanted it to hurt. He never used poison arrows except on crooks. And Bert Lord was the dirtiest kind of crook. The sort who go after easy dough by the marriage route. It was so fatally easy, too, when the girl was twenty-three, pretty as a rotogravure special, and too decent to smell a rat hidden under a layer of barber-shop culture and British tweeds.
Tracy could have gone directly to Bruce Hilliard, or perhaps to Hilliard’s young and socially ambitious wife; but the radio method was better. When you told the world — and that included the ships at sea — that the adopted daughter of Tracy’s own cigarette sponsor, Bruce Hilliard, was in love with a sleek graduate of a British jail, it didn’t leave Alice Hilliard much chance to do anything foolish.
It didn’t leave Lord much chance either, except for a quick try at murder along Tracy’s usual route to Radio City.
The Daily Planet’s dapper columnist dropped the carnation into the pocket that contained the flattened bullet. Butch gave his employer a low-lidded glance.
“Would this thing have somepin to do wit’ tonight’s broadcast, boss?”
Tracy had recovered his composure. His voice sounded as thin as a dime. “I’ll give you the air instead of putting you on if you don’t mind your own business, Butch.”