Young Gabby held an enormous revolver extended and pointed at a wounded Alastair Ransom whose blood had discolored both the Oriental rug and Waldo Denton, who lay trapped below what appeared a dead Alastair Ransom.
“God, Rance’s been killed!”
But Ransom’s death was not, for the moment, complete.
He moaned and shouted, with his face buried in Denton’s chest, “Damn you, girl! You’ve shot me!”
“What do you expect, breaking in here on us!” shouted Jane Francis, tears streaming, on knees over Ransom, doing all in her power to staunch the wound to his side where the bullet had exited, mud from his filthy clothes commingling with blood.
“Get this ape the bloody hell off me!” screamed Denton from below Ransom.
“Do not . . . let him up . . .” Ransom painfully muttered,
“till someone shoots him!”
“Shut up and save your energy,” Jane shouted. “This is a serious wound!”
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Griffin’s gun now pointed at Gabrielle, a fleeting thought of Gabrielle Tewes’s being the monster with the garrote instead of Denton flitting through his mind—and how awful the revelation would be—an attempt at justifiable homicide to stop Ransom’s gaining on the truth. “Drop the weapon!
Now!” he shouted.
Gabby and Jane both looked at Griffin, both startled. From the look of the room, the items on the parlor table, the overturned, broken dishware and teapot, it appeared that Jane Francis and Gabrielle had simply been entertaining—entertaining a multiple murderer in their parlor, asking young Denton, no doubt questions regarding his plans to become a photographer.
No doubt asking what Waldo thought of his employer’s arrest.
Whether he thought the man guilty or wrongly accused. No doubt, offering Denton tea and cake between inquiries.
The big cabbie who’d gotten them here in record speed without running over a single stray cat or dog, stepped through the torn-open front door and was mumbling something about having been stiffed by coppers again. “I’ll not put up with it this time!” he called out but froze when Gabby’s long-barreled cannon turned in his direction.
“I said put the gun down, Miss Tewes! This fellow and myself mean you no harm, Miss Tewes . . . Miss Tewes . . .”
Griffin calmly cautioned in his most authoritarian voice, imagining the horror of it, should she call his bluff. But her eyes met Griffin’s and he saw no malice or rancor there so much as a dazed horror that she’d actually shot Ransom. Griff had seen the look before. A look that, in a sense, acquitted her of having had any more sinister plan or thought than simply the reaction that’d resulted in defending her hearth and home and self from a mud-painted man brandishing a huge blue gun.
Still, she held the gun, albeit limply, in her hand.
“Drop the weapon,” he repeated coldly, his gun still pointed.
The huge, dark figure of the cabbie stood dripping water below him in puddles, asking, “What the devil is going on here, Inspector?”
Jane Francis shouted, “Get on my phone! Get a medical CITY FOR RANSOM
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wagon here for Inspector Ransom. He could bleed to death if we don’t act quickly.”
“Where is Dr. Tewes? Surely, he can—”
“He’s out of town,” she lied. “Besides, Ransom’s best chances are with Dr. Fenger. He’s got to be carefully transported to Cook County.”
“I’m not ready for that bloody coroner yet!” shouted Ransom.
“Just get the ambulance!” Francis shouted. “I’ve done all I can for him, but it is a nasty wound.”
“Yes, to Dr. Fenger,” agreed Griffin.
“And quickly, man! Do it, now! Use my phone.”
“Who me?” asked the cabbie.
“I’ll make the call,” said Griffin, “but you—what’s your name?” he asked the giant-sized cabbie.
“Lincoln Hardesty.”
“Take the gun from Miss Tewes and hold everyone here, and especially the one under Ransom. He’s under arrest.”
“Under arrest—I get it.” Hardesty laughed at this.
“Just watch him. He’s the bloody Phantom.”
“Him, that shrimp Denton, the Phantom?” Hardesty laughed. He knew Denton from the various cab stands. He now stood disbelieving, while the two women erupted.
“Impossible!”
“This boy?”
“You must be wrong.”
“Alastair, are you mad?”
“You cops have a sense of humor,” added the cabbie.
“Just hold him here whatever you do, and do not allow him a moment’s chance to ditch anything from his pockets.”
“He’s no more the Phantom than I am,” said Jane.
“You coppers trying to railroad Waldo?” asked Hardesty.
“I’ve seen it happen time and again in Chicago.” He then spoke to the ladies. “Cops’ll do that. Arrest an innocent man to make him out guilty.”
“But they’ve already arrested Mr. Keane for the killings,”
said Gabby.
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“Makes my point,” replied Hardesty.
Griffin had stopped listening to the civilians, but he imagined their conversation would likely be repeated throughout the city once the news of police arresting a hard-working, clean cut, good Christian boy for the Phantom’s deeds, only to release a pervert. Everyone in the city would be looking for the next victim still, and Chief Kohler will have gotten what he wanted, a humiliated and broken and demoted Alastair Ransom.
The weapon and jewelry would be crucial. Griffin knew this. After making the phone call, he returned to hold everyone at bay. With Denton, that proved quite easy. From below Ransom’s inert body, they heard Denton laboring to breathe.
“Can’t you get the inspector off Waldo?” pleaded Gabby.
“No! No, we must not move Ransom until necessary,”
said Jane Francis, “and even then with great care as to cause no more bleeding. We should leave the moving to those trained in doing the least harm.”
“Oh, that’s damned great!” shouted a still conscious Ransom. “That’d be those dirty-nailed devils, Shanks and Gwinn. Take me in Hardesty’s cab, Griff! I beg you!”
The exertion made Ransom pass out as Shanks and Gwinn started out from Cook County. Soon on hand as they waved an emergency bell overhead when acting as an ambulance, the duo handled Ransom easily, having trained under Dr. Fenger’s care, and in the meantime, Dr. Fenger had been located and was said to be prepping for a major operation.
When they’d lifted the bloody Inspector, Denton climbed to his knees under the gun of Griffin Drimmer.
They’ve come for me . . . only matter of time now . . . smells like death . . . blood and decay and death . . . Angel of Death himself will be right at home wherever I am . . .
A huge pothole sent Ransom’s body over with the stretcher in back of the meat wagon. The jolt opened his wound and Ransom awoke in the stench-filled darkness. He imagined CITY FOR RANSOM
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himself in Hades itself, and rightly so for the mistakes he’d made and the bad judgment that’d gotten him killed.
His thoughts only added to the flame of punishment in this acrid, ambling elephant gut he found himself alone in.
After an initial moment of horror and acceptance of both his death and damnation, Ransom realized precisely where he lay. The same wagon that retained the charred flesh odors of Polly and Purvis before her. The back of Shanks and Gwinn’s horse-drawn death carrier. The two coroner’s men had never heard of soap and water. The interior of the wagon shut out all light and sealed in all rot.
“Get me the bloody hell out of here!” he shouted, raised up and kicked out at the boards of the wagon. He’d chosen the spot where he guessed the buckboard seat holding Shanks and Gwinn must be. He kicked again and again like a bucking angry mustang.