There was more life on the avenue we were on now than on the street we lived on. Louie said suddenly, “Everybody walking along the sidewalk turns and rubbernecks after us. What’s she doing?”
“Nothing,” Buck told him. “I got her covered. You’re just jittery, that’s all.” Then he glanced back through the rear insert. “Yeah, their heads are all turned staring after us!”
His face worked savagely and he brought the gun out into the open, then reburied it in my side without any pocket over it. “I don’t know what ya been doin’, but you’re through doin’ it now! Step it up,” he told Louie, “and let your exhaust out, I’m going to give it to her right here in the car, ahead of the accident. She’ll never come up from the river bottom again anyway, so it don’t make no difference if she’s got a slug in her.”
He crowded me back into the corner of the seat, sort of leaned over me, to muffle it between our two bodies. My eyes got big, but I didn’t let out a sound.
Over his shoulder I saw something that I knew I couldn’t be seeing. A pair of legs swung down off the car roof, then a man’s waist and shoulders and face came down after them, and he was hanging to the roof with both arms. He hung there like that for a minute, jockeying to find the running-board with his feet. Then he let go, went down almost out of sight, came up again, hanging onto the door handle with one hand, drawing a gun with the other.
Buck had his back turned to that side, didn’t see him in time. But the man had darkened the inside of the car a little by being there like that, and Buck pulled his gun out of ray side and started turning. He never had time to fire.
The guy fired once, straight into his face, and then Louie swerved, and the car threw the guy who’d shot off the running-board and he lay there behind us in the street.
Buck’s head fell back into my lap, and it never moved again, just got a little blood on me. I saw Louie reaching with one hand, so I freed the gun that was still in Buck’s hand, pointed it at the back of his neck, and said:
“Pull over!”
The jolting of the car to a stop threw Buck’s dead head off my lap to the floor where it belonged.
I was holding Louie there like that, hands up in the clear off the wheel, when Temple’s look-out came limping after us. He was pretty badly banged up by his fall but not out of commission. He took over.
“They ought to be here any minute,” he said. “I tipped off Temple as soon as I caught the shade signal, but I figured he wouldn’t make it in time. That tree was a natural, for stowing myself away on the roof.”
Temple and the rest caught up with us five or ten minutes later, in a screaming police car. On the way back in it with him, safely out of earshot of the handcuffed Louie, I said: “Well, what luck did you have with that collar?”
“The lab just sent in its report before I came away. It checks all right. It’s just as well we got him this way, though, because we couldn’t have used it anyway. Frank Rogers’ testimony on the way he was tricked into handling that gun can take care of Louie as an accessory, and we’ll sweat the rest of it out of Louie himself, so you can still stay out of it like you wanted to all along.” He chuckled. “Pretty neat, the way you worked it. Our fellows have waded through more dirty wash since Tuesday morning...”
“But wait a minute,” I said, puzzled. “How’d you know I was the one worked it? How’d you know that the collar was planted?”
He winked at me good-naturedly. “You held it to her mouth upside down. The cleft of the upper lip was at the bottom.” He chuckled. “What was he supposed to be doing while she was kissing him — standing on his head?”