The brown sedan swished across the wide parking plaza, its left rear door jolted open, swaying, a wide gray arm reaching out and trying to pull the door shut. Glennan’s revolver rang hoarsely, three times. Then, thinking that he had missed, he expended his remaining three bullets in the direction of the gas tank. A huge gray shape tumbled out across the running board of the swaying sedan. Slowly, painfully, it was trying to pull itself back inside as the car swerved around the corner into Comanche Street. Glennan had missed the gas tank, but one of his first three bullets had found a fleshy resting place.
He leaped to the bloody running board of the parked car. People screamed, all around him. Detective Johnson and Sullivan, the driver, had the blank stare of death frozen in their eyes. Out of the red-spattered rear seat came a faint sigh. It was Cohen; he died in the ambulance, five minutes later.
Glennan snapped to the paralyzed taxi driver behind him: “Switch on. Back out I Switch her on, I tell you—” He ran to the lamp-post and wrenched open the big green box. He jerked the receiver from its hook and said rapidly: “Glennan on Number Forty-three. Carload of hoods shot up Bureau car just now, at this point. Ambulances, squads, Union Terminal. Brown sedan went south on Comanche Street — stop all brown sedans at city limits! Medium-sized car — might be an Olds or Chrysler. I’m on my way—”
A traffic cop was sprinting from the Bailey Street intersection, and another from the east plaza. People screamed, screamed.
Glennan fell into Fred Cepak’s green taxicab. “Get going down Comanche,” he gasped. Through the open window he howled down to the nearest traffic cop: “Stay on it, Bert!” and the cab went swaying toward the corner, with Officer Nicholas Glennan reloading his gun in the back seat.
He snapped the cylinder home, and climbed out on the running board. In front of the Alcazar Hotel a newsboy was out in the street. “That sedan—” yelled Glennan.
“Went south — south—”
There wasn’t much traffic. The cab skidded around the left side of a southbound street car, narrowly missed a northbound car, and screeched down the tracks. There were men lining the curb — a few of them. Somebody pointed, waved. Yes, they must have seen that fat gray shape on the sedan’s side, slowly pulling its wounded self back to safety. “Keep the horn going, buddy,” said Glennan to Taxicab Operator Fred Cepak.
“Okay.”
Looooooo, wailed the horn.
A block away from Paxton Boulevard they could see the traffic cop waving his arms. “Slow!” snapped Glennan. He leaned out and waved an answering hand.
The traffic cop’s face was familiar, but to save his life Nick couldn’t recall his name.
“Brown sedan? Think it’s a Chrysler. She just made a left turn, on the yellow. East on Paxton. What’s—”
“They just rubbed out a whole carload from the Bureau,” Glennan snarled. “Get over on the box for orders.” But he was a hundred yards away as he said the last words, and the cop could only stare after him with puffy eyes.
At the top of the hill by the Episcopal Church, Nick could see the long length of the boulevard sluicing away toward the misty smoke of suburbs. Cars, glistening blotches, the wide band of concrete was dotted with their beetle shapes. Between his dry lips Glennan muttered a curse. This would be the same old story. Lost in traffic. Give any car a minute’s start, and the driver had a good chance for a clean getaway. I had to phone, he kept hurling at himself, I had to! Block the highways — get the news on the radio — stop a brown sedan at the city limits — yes, he had to phone — And that extra minute or two, which brought an ambulance: it might mean life for Van Wert or Cohen. There had been that faint sigh from the shambles of the death car. An extra minute — an ambulance... had to phone.
“Keep going; bud,” he said to the chauffeur.
They raced on, at each of the next three corners, Glennan shrieked to pedestrians or grocerymen in front of their shops: “See a brown sedan? Speeding?”
The men gaped at him. Yes, she went that way. No, that was— Did you say a black car? Hey, Pete, wasn’t there a car just went speeding past? Yeh, she went north. Right there. Up that street. Yeh. Going like hell —
With Fred Cepak and the green cab Nick Glennan went hurtling up the cross street. North. A car — going like— He overtook it; a small roadster with three high school girls in it.
“Swing her back,” he groaned wearily. “It’s the same old story, sure as life. The damn sedan’s gone...”
They came back into Paxton Boulevard. Sirens moving toward them from the east and from the west. Glennan jumped off the running board and held up his hand. A big, black limousine let its brakes crunch; the tires burned in brown ribbons on the concrete. Hard faces, hard eyes staring at him. “Brown Chrysler. Out this way. That’s all we know... Make for Five Mile Corners, Al.” They whistled away; someone was opening the rifle box and dealing out ammunition.
And so it went. There was a cordon around the whole town in less than ten minutes. The telephones jangled and squawled; teletype ribbons took up the story, and state police began to whine up and down the long, open highway on their motorcycles. Brown sedan after brown sedan — farmers, schoolteachers, radio repairmen, dentists, Fuller Brush men — car after car, they were overhauled and lined up, their hands above their heads. What’s your name? Where you been? Let’s see your license. Keep ’em covered, Jack. Car after car...
Detective Abraham Cohen died while the ambulance was still seven blocks away from General Hospital. As for Johnson and Van Wert and the driver, they were past any need for hospitalization. And Mr. Rainy Moper, extortionist and five times a murderer, had gone to his own private brimstone pool with all speed. The women who had fainted were being revived in drug stores beside the station. Newspaper reporters, policemen, gabbling witnesses — a herd of men festered around the blue touring car with its shattered windshield and wet leather cushions.
Nobody was sure what mob had done it. It was hard to believe that any hoodlums, however hopped and demoniac they might be, would cheerfully kill four officers in their eagerness to effect the demise of Rainy Moper.
Nick Glennan got back to the Union Terminal plaza in time to find his brother, Detective Sergeant Dave Glennan, on the job. Fourteen other officers of various kinds were with him.
Before Nick went away to report, he took a walk across the street. He found something lying on the asphalt, near the corner of Comanche Street. It was at this point that the big man in the gray suit had sprawled out of the open door when Nick fired. Glennan picked up the object, looked at it dazedly, made as if to throw it away, and then thrust it into his pocket. Slowly he made his way through the packed crowd and into the wide, guarded circle.
“Four of the best guys who ever lived,” his dry-eyed brother muttered to him.
Nick Glennan nodded dully. “Yes,” he whispered.
They checked up: block by block and man by man. As the brown sedan passed the Alcazar Hotel, the big man who sprawled through the open door had managed to pull himself inside; a man in the front seat had reached back and slammed the door. The cop at Paxton and Comanche was positive in his identification; it must have been the same sedan, he declared — a shiny one with three men in it — which made a left turn into Paxton Boulevard. He blew his whistle at them. If they’d made the turn on the red light, he would have grabbed a car and gone after them, but it was getting on toward the rush hour for city-bound traffic, and any driver is apt to make a mistake and turn on the yellow light instead of the green. Just a split second’s difference.