When I had tossed the gun overboard I took my foot off the emergency brake lever, straightened up the car, which had swung sideways on the road, and grinned over at the kid.
“Step on it,” I told her.
Her face was white, chalky; there was a fire in her eyes that seemed to make them blaze in the darkness, and her lips were set in a thin, determined line.
“You brute, you cad!”
I yawned again.
“That’s the way with you women. You claim the privilege of sticking a gun in my ribs, and then, because I take it away from you I’m no gentleman. You make me sick. Drive on before I take you over my knee and give you a blamed good spanking.”
She slammed the car to a stop, doubled up her knees, swung around from the back of the steering wheel, and came on me like a wildcat, biting, scratching, striking, furious. I held her as best I could, keeping her off. Her dress ripped from one shoulder, her high-heeled shoes dug into my leg as she twisted her legs about mine, and her pearly teeth snapped as she tried to bite me. It was a rough party while it lasted.
All of a sudden she stiffened, then relaxed and began to cry, and — such is the consistency of the sex — she began to bawl on my shoulder. She was a total wreck. Her stockings had come unrolled and slipped down her bare legs gleaming white beneath the dash-light. Her hair was strung all around her face, her dress was tom, and my hand was resting on the soft warmth of her bare shoulder, and blamed if I wasn’t patting her a bit, sort of comforting her. Why I don’t know — sort of mechancial, I guess; but I sure didn’t intend to sit there and console her because she hadn’t been able to kill me.
I shoved her away.
“Oh, how I hate you!” she blazed.
I nodded. “It sure looks it. The next time my taxi breaks down and a girl offers me a ride to town I’ll have my roller skates along.”
And then she made a lunge at me, pillowed her head on my shoulder again and sobbed some more. I let her cry it out. Disappointment and rage had made her pretty near hysterical, and I wanted her to calm down for a chin-chin. I wanted to find out what it was all about, get a line on this dame with the mole on her hand.
After a while she straightened, reached down and rolled her socks, then she powdered her nose and straightened her hair. Back to normal again.
She slipped up her dress, fastened it somehow, looked at me and then grinned.
“You win,” she remarked.
“Where did you want me to go?” I asked her.
The smile faded for a minute and I thought she was going to cry again. “It meant so damned much to me,” she said, “I didn’t think I could possibly fall down…”
She broke off to look at her wrist watch, then sighed again.
“I was to have you in a certain place in twenty minutes from now… I thought sure I could vamp you, then, when I couldn’t, I determined to get rough… Oh, it meant so much to me!”
I watched her curiously.
“Where was this place, and were you under orders from someone else?”
“I can’t tell you where it is, Ed, and I was under orders.”
I settled back in the cushions. “Well, get started. Don’t be so damned weepy, and drive. If anybody wants me at a certain place at a certain time, I’m just obstinate enough to go there — and what’s more, I’m going to start a little celebration when I get there. I’m getting tired of having a lot of cheap crooks try to interfere with me. I’m going to take a look at this person who sicced a cave-woman on my trail.”
She grinned all over her face.
“I thought maybe you’d come,” she gurgled, and then I knew she’d been playing me. Hang women, anyway! I’d eaten right out of her hands.
“I knew you were just brave enough to see it through, Ed Jenkins! It means so much to me, and I’ll sure remember it. Maybe I can do something for you, some time.”
With that she circled my neck and kissed me, jumped back behind the wheel, stepped on the starter, and began to take corners on two wheels. She could drive, that lady, and she was in one grand hurry.
Once in the city we headed toward Chinatown. I sat up and began to take notice. I know Chinese pretty well, know their language a bit, know something of their psychology. If the drama I was to play a part in was to be enacted in Chinatown so much the better.
We stopped before a small, dingy store, a store that had some fly-specked ivory curios in the window, and two Chinese watchmen sitting outside. That was nothing out of the ordinary. The Chinks that sit careless-like around the sidewalks of Chinatown, with their shoulders hunched forward, puffing meditatively on pipes, aren’t just enjoying the scenery, or indulging in philosophic meditation. They’re guards, watching the safety of the place in front of which they’re sitting.
“Ed,” she said, “I’m not responsible for your frame of mind when you get here. All I am supposed to do is to see that you go to a certain room and interview a certain man. I’d like to have it appear that I did a good job, so would you mind looking just a little mooney, sort of mushy, you know?”
I climbed out of the car.
“Lead the way,” I told her.
We went in, and, as we entered the place, she slipped her warm little hand into mine. Hand in hand we went back through a storeroom packed with jabbering, beady-eyed Chinese, past a guard who watched the back passageways, and into the gloom of twisting, winding corridors, through heavy oak doors and deserted rooms.
I pulled my hand loose and slipped my arm about her waist, holding her close to me. It wasn’t that I wanted to act out what she said about being mushy, but I trusted her just as much as I’d have trusted a rattlesnake.
At length we turned to the left, knocked twice before a heavy door, heard the little click of a lock that was shot back by electricity, and I found myself in a great room, a room that was fixed up with teakwood furniture, expensive tapestries and Oriental rugs. It was rich, quiet, luxurious.
A heavy teakwood desk stood in the middle of the room, and behind this desk was a great bulk of a man. He seemed soft, flabby fat as far as physical appearance was concerned, but there was an ice-cold hardness about his eyes that made them appear like two great diamonds, glittering in the half-light of the dim room.
I stiffened. For months there had been choked off whispers of a crime syndicate, of a great man who sat in an “office” and directed crime, who had systematized blackmailing, bootlegging, gem robberies. No one could be found who knew him, and yet they all knew of him, a mysterious half-knowledge compounded of whispered rumors, vague surmises, wild conjectures. I had heard this gossip of the underworld, and placed it as a fairy tale, one of those wild nightmares which run through the criminal world at times. Now I began to feel an uncomfortable certainty.
He began to speak without introduction or explanation. His voice was surprising; low, soft, almost like a woman’s. His heavy frame, thick lips and huge bulk had prepared me for a deep, booming voice, but his words came so softly, so gently, that, had it not been for the moving of the thick lips, I would have thought some woman was concealed behind him, and was doing the talking.
“Ed Jenkins, you have the reputation of being able to open any safe without leaving a single trace showing that the lock has been tampered with, or that the door has been opened.”
There was something of interrogation in his tone, but I made no move, gave no sign.
He stopped a minute; then went on: “I have a safe you are to open; an envelope you are to place in the safe. It will be done before midnight tomorrow. It must not appear the safe has been opened.”
The blue-gray eyes of ice continued to bore into me. A sarcastic retort was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it. This man was one who would stop at nothing, and I was a known crook, was in the secret passages of Chinatown, and there were big stakes in the center of the table, or I didn’t know crooks.