“Say,” began Shanty with deep irony. “You think I’m dumb? What’s this — a frame? You little bitch, you trying to put me on the spot?”
“Aw, for Gawd’s sake, Shanty, don’t be like that,” pleaded Sadie. “What kind of a bum do you think I am, anyway? I wouldn’t pull any dirt like that on you, and you know it. I’m giving this to you straight because you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You got to hear yourself.”
“Where’d you say? Silent Joe’s?” questioned Shanty.
“Yeah. Make it snappy. There’s an alley running south of the dump. Go down there and you’ll find me by a window looking in.”
“Okay, kid, I’ll be there, but if you—”
“Hell, no! Please Shanty, don’t be like that!”
After he had agreed to keep the rendezvous with Sadie, Shanty was half sorry for his decision. The thing looked suspiciously like a trap, but still, deep down in his heart, he felt sure that Sadie would not put him on the spot. In view of the suspicions of Groucho and Smiling Jimmie, he did not tell them where he was to meet the girl.
“Where to?” asked Smiling Jimmie, as he retrieved his hat and slouched toward the door.
“Going to see Sadie,” answered Shanty defiantly. “Any objections?”
“None here,” answered Smiling Jimmie. “But just as a precaution, better see that the gat is loaded.”
“Don’t worry about me,” answered Shanty. “I can take care of myself with that moll without a gun.”
“Where you meeting her, just in case you don’t?” shot out Groucho.
“None of your damn business,” growled Shanty and with the words he slammed the door behind him.
After putting in her phone call to Shanty, Sadie beat it back to the black alley and her spy-hole by the window. Again she pressed her ear to the inch opening and listened. The three traitors were still speaking of their plans for disrupting their respective gangs. Their words came to her too indistinctly for her eager ears. She gambled on opening the window another inch and, swiftly following the attempt, came disaster.
The noise of the sash raising in the frame attracted Solly Gold’s attention. His head shot up and he glanced swiftly across the room. Sadie had been quick but not quick enough. The eyes of the other men at the table followed the direction of Gold’s gaze, just in time to see a disappearing head. Instantly the men were on their feet, guns drawn. Gold took swift charge of the situation.
“You stay Lefty,” he barked. “If he shows himself again, plug him. The same if he tries to get in the window. Come on, Chink. We’ll head him off down the alley.”
Without waiting for more the two men barged out of the room onto the street. They charged down the sidewalk and at top speed turned the corner into the alley. There was a sickening collision as they hurtled pell-mell into Sadie facing down from the opposite direction. The shock of their contact threw them apart for a moment, stunned, and Sadie’s automatic was wrenched from her hand to go sailing off into the night in a wide parabola.
In an instant Gold had recovered and was on her. He threw one rough arm around her head in a hammer lock, at the same time clapping his foul hand over her mouth. Sadie struggled violently, viciously, with tooth, nail and hoof, but to no avail.
The Chink came to Gold’s aid and between the two of them they managed to drag the twisting, squirming, struggling girl out of the alley onto the sidewalk.
Sadie knew their intention with her. If they once got her away from that place in a car — it was curtains. She fought like a mad woman with all the desperate abandon of an Amazon. But their combined weight was too much against her. Struggle as she might in their grip they slowly bore her to the curb and a waiting machine. Lefty came out to join them. He cursed bitterly at the sounds of struggle. Doubling up his fist, he pulled back and crashed a stiff-armed right flush to Sadie’s jaw. She went limp with a little panting sigh, and then was still.
Like a heavy sack of wet wash they threw her into the machine.
At the height of the struggle before Joe’s place, Shanty in his roadster turned into Christopher Street. He saw the swaying forms on the sidewalk and his first impulse was to charge down and investigate. Then his old gang sense asserted itself. That was an old gag — the street corner fight. The chances were that if he barged in on it, he would receive a load of lead poisoning for his trouble.
He slowed down and approached cautiously. Dimly he made out the swaying figures of three men and a girl — and that girl was Sadie. His heart constricted. Trap or no trap, he was going to investigate. With one movement he jammed his foot on the gas and whipped out his blue steel Smith and Wesson .38 special. But even as his car gained momentum he saw that he was too late. He saw with an agonized heart the slugging blow that felled Sadie; saw her tossed like a limp rag into the waiting machine; saw the three men pile in after her and roar away.
Shanty’s gun grow led once and he took up the chase. A fusillade of shots answered him from the speeding car ahead. Then the two drivers. Shanty and Solly Gold, got down to the fine points of piloting careening machines at sixty miles per hour through the narrow back alleys of New York.
They saved their lead for more sure shots, or until it was a question of fighting it out with death. Now that the other car was trying to escape, Shanty was convinced that the fight on the street was on the up-and-up and that Sadie had been on the level with him concerning the tip off.
A great sigh of relief welled to his lips. Sadie, what a damn swell kid she was! He had known all along that she wouldn’t play him dirt. And now she was being taken for a ride, for his sake; because he had tried to thrust onto her shoulders the responsibility for all his dumb mistakes. Well, he would make it up to her!
He nursed his throttle and spark and coaxed a few more revolutions out of his already straining engine. But ever the car ahead crept away from him. Corners were taken on two wheels with a skidding rush and a tear. Early morning milk-wagons were somehow miraculously missed. L pillars were skimmed by inches.
Shanty cursed bitterly, futilely. The car ahead was out-distancing him; was now a full block away. His bus was traveling with all the sauce she had. The needle on the speedometer trembled around the seventy mark but no matter how he nursed the gas, he could not get it above that mark.
Suddenly the car ahead took the next corner on two wheels and disappeared. Ten seconds later Shanty made the same turn. A burst of lead greeted his skidding advent and spattered with a spray of flying glass through his wind shield. The escaping machine had tricked him and instead of continuing the flight had pulled up to the curb to finish him off as he passed.
A stabbing, searing pain ate into Shanty’s breast. The car swerved crazily and it was only by a tremendous effort of will that he straightened it out and saved it from tangling disastrously around a lamp-post. His eyes became blood filmed. Shanty knew he was going out. Instinctively, before utter blackness fell over him, he shut off his gas and threw his gear shift into neutral.
A half hour later Shanty slowly climbed back to consciousness out of a deep well of blackness. His head throbbed abominably and a searing pain shot through his breast. He tried to sit up and found it impossible. He closed his eyes again and slowly strength ebbed back into his racked body. A moment later he stirred again to discover that he was bound, hand and foot. His mind was blank and empty. His brow wrinkled as he concentrated his hazy brain on the events of the evening. Then slowly it came back to him. The phone call from Sadie; the fight on the street: the chase and the trap.