Scudder was the boss. That wasn’t a suggestion, but a command. The driver shrugged and depressed the clutch. Gears softly meshing, the red roadster fled guiltily upward into the dark hills.
Chapter III
The Death House “Kite”
A husky wind out of the northeast had been clubbing at the cloud rack, whipping it to lace, hustling it off in ragged streamers over the hills. Spangles of gold glinted from dancing water while the rout was on; then a yellow moon looked clear at itself in a little lake and gilded the roof of a bungalow on the shore.
The bungalow, log-walled, pressed to the grassy bank by the forest, belonged precisely to its setting. An artist, finding that lake and surveying its shore, would have chosen no other spot for it. But “Dutch” Gompert, owner of the bungalow and lord of the lake was no artist. Sport-shirted, heavy-shouldered, hairy-armed, he stood at the end of the broad veranda toward the water and turned a scowl upward to the sky.
“Damn the moon!” he exploded. “This ain’t going to help things any!”
In the doorway behind him, nicotine-stained fingers cupped themselves like yellow claws around a match that flared brightly between inhalations on a vulture face. The match, snapped out, described a glowing arc.
“Nature’s grand,” said the spindly man, squinting at the bright sky and then staring back along the road that curled down the hillside to the lake. “What the hell do you suppose has happened to them birds, anyway?”
Dutch Gompert directed a last glare at the unwelcome moon and turned his back on it.
“They’ll get here, all right,” he said. “It’s a case of got to. They know it, Crow.”
Corroboration, neatly timed, appeared at the hilltop above them. The headlights of an automobile climbing the far side of the rise whitened the sky.
“That’s service!” grinned the man called “Crow.” “Glad I didn’t have a bet up. Here they come now.”
“Maybe,” Gompert said, “it ain’t them yet. Maybe it’s Gwen. I told her to get here at ten o’clock, but she could be ahead of time for once in her life.”
The approaching car had shot over the hump and was coasting to them — a long, low roadster, top down. A door was opening as it stopped in front of the bungalow, and one of the three passengers jumped out.
“Okay, Lafayette!” he cried. “Here we are!”
Gompert withheld congratulation. His voice was sour. “Not any too soon,” he said “Duncan’s folding his tent tomorrow. Going back to town. If the trick ain’t turned tonight, we’re outta luck. What slowed you, Scudder? Lose your way?”
“Wait till you hear,” the flat-nosed traveler grunted. “We just got a traffic pinch, Dutch. In the dark of the moon, on the open road, miles from nowhere — up pops a cop, and we’re grabbed for speeding!”
“Jeez!” breathed Gompert. He stared, open-mouthed. “And you guys with a tommy-gun in the car!”
Scudder nodded. “Sure, with a tommy-gun in the car. And do you s’pose that we were standing for the collar?”
The Crow moved forward across the veranda, craning his scrawny neck, his beads of eyes incredulous.
“Cut the kidding,” he advised. “It ain’t funny.”
Scudder’s close-set eyes smouldered on him. “This’d be a swell time to kid, wouldn’t it? I’m telling you, a cop got on our tail and we had to blow him off of it.”
“That’s what happened,” confirmed the machine gunner in the rumble seat. “It was just a few miles down that cement crossroad. If you’d been outdoors, you could almost have heard the typewriter going when I sprayed him.”
The Crow had to believe it then. He whistled. “You left him there?” he demanded.
“Left him flat on the cement. Scudder said to.”
Dutch Gompert moistened his lips. “What kind of cop?”
“One of them fancy birds,” Scudder said. “State trooper.”
The Crow’s eyes glittered as they swung to Gompert. “Trooper!” he cawed. “Get that baby, did you? Then you can have the best in the house. Ask Dutch!”
The newcomers looked toward Gompert, waited for him to speak while he stared over the lake, brows drawn, abstractedly jingling coins in his pocket.
“If you birds croaked a state trooper,” he told them after a space, “you just saved me that much trouble. There’s only been one trooper in this district since I came up. Fella named Bradley — poison. Sooner or later it would have been a case of bump him off or get out. But — this certainly wasn’t a good night for it.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s done, anyhow. Just what happened, Scudder?”
In swift sentences, a verbal shorthand filled in by eager contributions from the roadster’s other passengers, the flat-nosed man described the chase.
“That old guy at the filling station has got me worried,” he said. “Him and your pal, the cop, might have got their heads together.”
“It’s pretty near a cinch they did,” nodded Dutch Gompert. “There would be the tip-off. Looks to me like you fellas better use my car on the Duncan trip and say good-bye to this one.”
“What do you mean, good-bye?” came sharply from the driver of the roadster.
“Good-bye — forever!”
“Yeah? Ditch four grand?”
“Drown it!” Gompert’s gaze traveled again to the water. “That lake’s better than five hundred feet deep in places — and I know some of the places. That ain’t all. I’ve sunk jobs as new and shiny as this out there. Hot ones, o’ course. Borrowed buggies that wise-aleck trooper thought he had a line on.”
Scudder reinforced him. “Dutch is right, Mac,” he said, looking regretfully at the roadster and then resignedly at the lake. “It ain’t the car you ought to be thinking about as much as the jam it might get us into. There ain’t a machine on the road — or in the showroom, either — that I’d take a chance on the hot seat for.”
With Gompert, the incident closed. “Down she goes, and that’s that,” he said. “My sedan will be better for the job at Duncan’s, anyway. Come in and I’ll give you the program.”
Inside the bungalow a four-foot log was blazing in a huge stone fireplace. Rubbing chilled hands over it, Scudder said savagely:
“Fat lot of good Veronalli’s going to do for himself, forcing this job on us. Suppose we do manage to spring him out of the death house — how long does he think we’ll let him walk the streets before he gets his?”
Gompert spat at the log. “That’ll come in its turn,” he growled. “Right now, it’s Joe Veronalli that has us on the spot. That dirty little rat ain’t running any bluff, Scudder. He’s all set to squeal on the mob if we don’t put the finger on Duncan for him. And he’s getting impatient. There was another kite from him in the mail this morning. The way he manages to swing out correspondence, you’d think he was in the Biltmore instead of in the pen. Here’s the latest, Scud. Read it yourself.”
Gompert picked a sheet of soiled paper from the long plank table in the center of the room and Scudder, after a quick glance, nodded. “It’s Veronalli’s fist, all right,” he conceded. Then he held the scrawl close to a hissing gasoline lantern suspended from a rough-hewn beam and read aloud:
“Friend Dutch:
“Twict I have wrote to you before, since they deny me that new trial, and tell you boys how you can pull me off the fire. My plan is O.K. and Big Boss Duncan will sure fall.
Listen, Dutch, you got to act quick. They bum two men here last night and my nerve ain’t so good any more. The D.A. says he would get me off if I play some ball with him. Don’t make me do that, boys. Remember, it is the only other way to beat the toaster, so hurry.