Her eyes got so big that I thought they would fall from their sockets.
“Good God! How did you know all about that?”
I laughed again.
“Another trade secret. Will you play with me, play fair?”
She brushed back her hair, and nodded, her eyes starry, watching me with awe.
“As far as I can I will, Ed Jenkins,” she whispered, swaying toward me, “and this will seal the bargain.”
With that she tilted her face to mine and gave me a long, clinging kiss. The next moment and she had gathered her skirt about her and was gone.
I sat in the car, my lips tingling with that kiss, it dawning on me that I knew virtually nothing about this girl, except that I had been warned against her by a man who had given his life for the warning, a grim sacrifice to friendship.
Also I knew that somewhere in that great, throbbing city was a crook whose name I did not know, a crook with a fat face, puffy lips and ice-cold eyes. He had two papers that I would get.
Sitting there in the machine I made a vow that I would have those papers and exonerate the girl with the mole from the murder charge that he might place against her. The world would be too small to hold this fat crook with the icy eyes and myself. It would be a battle to the death.
Slowly I drove the car along the boulevard. I had no intention of ever returning to my apartment. After what had happened in the house of L. A. Daniels, after the probating of the genuine Brundage will, this fat crook who fancied himself the master mind of crookdom, would realize that he had been outgeneraled, would understand the challenge I had flung him in the death of his two trusted accomplices, in the switching of wills. I fancied I would hear more of this man.
Smiling grimly, I turned back the windshield so the cooling air of the night would come to my flushed face, and drove aimlessly into the night, looking for a new place to hide, a place from which I could plan my campaign.
Come and Get It
I gazed into the black muzzle of the forty-four “Squint” Dugan was holding to my face, and secretly gave him credit for being much more clever than I had anticipated. I had hardly expected to be discovered in my hiding place, least of all by Squint Dugan.
I watched the slight trembling of his hands, and listened to the yammering of his threats. Dugan is of the type that does not kill in cold blood, but has to bolster his nerves with dope, arouse his rage by a recital of his wrongs. Gradually, bit by bit, he was working up his nerve to tighten his trigger finger.
“Damn yuh, Ed Jenkins! Don’t think I ain’t wise to the guy that hijacked that cargo. Fifty thousand berries it was, and you lifted it, slick and clean! Just because you worked one of those Phantom Crook stunts don’t mean that I ain’t hep to yuh. I got the goods on yuh, an’ I’m collectin’ right now. I ain’t alone in this thing, either; not by a hell of a lot, I ain’t. There’s men back of me who’ll see me through, back me to the limit…”
He blustered on, and I yawned.
That yawn laid the foundation for a little scheme I had in mind. Crooks of the Dugan type really have an inferiority complex. That’s what makes ’em bluster so much. They’re tryin’ to make the other man give in, tryin’ to sell themselves on the idea that they’re as good as the other bird.
“Rather chilly this evening,” I remarked casually, after that yawn had had a chance to soak in, and got up, calmly turned my back on the blustering crook, and stirred up the fire with the poker. Apparently I didn’t know he was alive.
That got him. His voice lost the blah-blah tone, and rose to almost a scream.
“Damn yuh! Can’t yuh understand I’m croakin’ yuh? I’m just tellin’ yuh what for. I’m puttin’ out your light, yuh hijackin’ double-crossin’ dude crook. You’ll never see the sun rise again…”
I had been holding a chunk of firewood poised over the top of the wood stove, and, without warning, I tossed it at him — not in a hurry, just easily, smoothly.
If he’d had any guts he’d have stood his ground and fired, but he didn’t have the nerve. He quailed a bit before his muscles tightened his trigger finger, and that quailing was what I had counted on.
A knowledge of fencing is a fine thing, particularly for a crook, and I’d hooked the toe of that poker through the guard of his gun and jerked it out of his hand before his wrist had dropped from the blow I struck first.
“Now I’ll talk,” I said, as he cowered in the corner before the light that was in my eyes.
“You don’t need to tell me there’s been a crime trust organized. I know it. I bargained with the very head of that trust to receive certain papers in return for services rendered, and he held out on me. I can’t locate him, but I do know certain members of the gang, and I’m declaring war.
“You got hijacked out of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of hooch, and the reason you couldn’t get any trace of it afterward was because it was dumped in the bay. I didn’t want the hooch. I just wanted to attract somebody’s attention.
“Now you go back to the man that sent you and tell him to tell the man higher up to tell the man who is at the head of this crime trust that Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook, is on the warpath, that until I get those papers they can’t operate. I’ll spoil every scheme they hatch up, ball up everything they try to pull; and if anyone harms a hair of the head of Helen Chadwick in the meantime, I’ll forget my rule of never packing a gun, and start on the warpath and murder the outfit.
“Now get going!”
It was tall talk, but it was the kind of talk that gets through with men like Dugan. Those crooks had never seen me really in action, but they had heard tales from the East. A man can’t be known as the Phantom Crook in a dozen states, because he can slip through the fingers of the police at will, without having something on the ball.
Squint Dugan knew that I meant what I said. He took the opportunity to go, and he didn’t stand on the order of his going. I knew that my message would reach the chief of that gang, would come to the ears of the man who was so careful to keep his identity a secret from all save his most trusted lieutenants. Also I knew that I had been careless, that I had slipped in allowing them to get a line on my apartment, and that I would have to get another hideout, and be more careful when I did it.
Before Dugan was down the stairs I was working on a new diguise, planning a new place to conceal myself. It was to be a war to the bitter end, with no quarter given nor asked, and I knew it and the other side knew it. Also, I had won the first round, taken the first trick.
My diguise I slipped in a handbag — a white beard, slouch hat, shabby coat. I took a heavy cane and locked the apartment. It was a cheap joint in a poor district, and the rent was paid. I wouldn’t be back.
Before I put on the diguise I took a cab to Moe Silverstein’s. Moe knew every crook in the game, never forgot a face or a gem and was the smoothest double-crosser in the business.
He looked up as I entered his room on the third floor of a smelly tenement. As soon as he saw me he began to rub his hands smoothly together, as though he were washing them in oil. He was fat, flabby, bald, and he stunk of garlic. His eyes were a liquid, limpid brown, wide, innocent, hurt. He had the stare of a dying deer and a heart of concrete.
“Mine friend, ah, yes, mine friend. It is so, mine friend, Ed Jenkins, the super-crook, the one who makes the police get gray hairs, and you have something for me, friend Jenkins? Some trinket? Some bauble? Yes?”