To the east are some fields, and beyond them, Bayport. Bayport is a kind of summer resort town and some of the houses are built up on poles because of the tides and storms. It has a little lagoon for the boats of the fishermen who go out after crabs.
To the south of the hide-out is the dirt road leading to the cement highway. The nearest house is about half a mile away.
It was late in the afternoon when Glasses and I got there. We brought groceries for a couple of days, figuring Larsen might want to stay. Then, along about sunset, we heard Larsen’s coupe turning in, and I went out to put it in the big empty garage and carry in his suitcase. When I got back Larsen was talking to Glasses. He was a big man and his shoulders were broad both ways, like a wrestler’s. His head was almost bald and what was left of his hair was a dirty yellow. His eyes were little and his face wasn’t given much to expression. And that was the way it was when he said, “Yeah, Inky got it.”
“Luke Dugan’s crazy gunmen sure hold a grudge,” I observed.
Larsen nodded his head and scowled.
“Inky got it,” he repeated, taking up his suitcase and starting for the bedroom. “And I’m planning to stay here for a few days, just in case they’re after me too. I want you and Glasses to stay here with me.”
Glasses gave me a funny wink and began throwing a meal together. I turned on the lights and pulled down the blinds, taking a worried glance down the road, which was empty. This waiting around in a lonely house for a bunch of gunmen to catch up with you didn’t appeal to me. Nor to Glasses either, I guessed. It seemed to me that it would have been a lot more sensible for Larsen to put a couple of thousand miles between him and New York. But, knowing Larsen, I had sense enough not to make any comments.
After canned corned-beef hash and beans and beer, we sat around the table drinking coffee.
Larsen took an automatic out of his pocket and began fooling with it, and right away I saw it was Inky’s. For about five minutes nobody said a word. Glasses played with his coffee, pouring in the cream one drop at a time. I wadded a piece of bread into little pellets which kept looking less and less appetizing.
Finally Larsen looked up at us and said, “Too bad Inky didn’t have this with him when he was taken for a ride. He gave it to me just before he planned sailing for the Old Country. He didn’t want it with him any more, now that the racket’s over.”
“I’m glad the guy that killed him hasn’t got it now,” said Glasses quickly. He talked nervously and in his worst college professor style. I could tell he didn’t want the silence to settle down again. “It’s a funny thing. Inky giving up his gun—but I can understand his feeling; he mentally associated the gun with our racket; when the one was over he didn’t care about the other.”
Larsen grunted, which meant for Glasses to shut up.
“What’s going to happen to Inky’s dough?” I asked.
Larsen shrugged his shoulders and went on fooling with the automatic, throwing a shell into the chamber, cocking it, and so forth. It reminded me so much of the way Inky used to handle it that I got fidgetting and began to imagine I heard Luke Dugan’s gunmen creeping up through the sea-grass. Finally I got up and started to walk around.
It was then that the accident happened. Larsen, after cocking the gun, was bringing up his thumb to let the hammer down easy, when it slipped out of his hand. As it hit the floor it went off with a flash and a bang, sending a slug gouging the floor too near my foot for comfort.
As soon as I realized I wasn’t hit, I yelled without thinking, “I always told Inky he was putting too much of a hair trigger on his gun! The crazy fool!”
Larsen sat with his pig eyes staring down at the gun where it lay between his feet. Then he gave a funny little snort, picked it up and put it on the table.
“That gun ought to be thrown away. It’s too dangerous to handle. It’s bad luck,” I said to Larsen—and then wished I hadn’t, for he gave me the benefit of a dirty look and some fancy Swedish swearing.
“Shut up, No Nose,” he finished, “and don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t, I can take care of you, and I can take care of Inky’s gun. Right now I’m going to bed.”
He shut the bedroom door behind him, leaving it up to me and Glasses to guess that we were supposed to take out our blankets and sleep on the floor.
But we didn’t want to go to sleep right away, if only because we were still thinking about Luke Dugan. So we got out a deck of cards and started a game of stud poker, speaking very low. Stud poker is like the ordinary kind, except that four of the five cards are dealt face up and one at a time.
You bet each time a card is dealt, and so considerable money is apt to change hands, even when you’re playing with a ten-cent limit, like we were. It’s a pretty good game for taking money away from suckers, and Glasses and I used to play it by the hour when we had nothing better to do. But since we were both equally smart, neither one of us won consistently.
It was very quiet, except for Larsen’s snoring and the rustling of the sea-grass and the occasional chink of a dime.
After about an hour, Glasses happened to look down at Inky’s automatic lying on the other side of the table, and something about the way his body twisted around sudden made me look too. Right away I felt something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what; it gave me a funny feeling in the back of the neck. Then Glasses put out two thin fingers and turned the gun halfway around, and I realized what had been wrong—or what I thought had been wrong. When Larsen had put the gun down, I thought it had been pointing at the outside door; but when Glasses and I looked at it, it was pointing more in the direction of the bedroom door. When you have the fidgets your memory gets tricky.
A half-hour later we noticed the gun again pointing toward the bedroom door. This time Glasses spun it around quick, and I got the fidgets for fair. Glasses gave a low whistle and got up, and tried putting the gun on different parts of the table and jiggling the table to see if the gun would move.
“I see what happened now,” he whispered finally. “When the gun is lying on its side, it sort of balances on its safety catch.
“Now this little table has got a wobble to it and when we are playing cards the wobble is persistent enough to edge the gun slowly around in a circle.”
“I don’t care about that,” I whispered back. “I don’t want to be shot in my sleep just because the table has a persistent wobble. I think the rumble of a train two miles away would be enough to set off that crazy hair-trigger. Give me it.”
Glasses handed it over and, taking care always to point it at the floor, I unloaded it, put it back on the table, and put the bullets in my coat pocket. Then we tried to go on with our card game.
“My red bullet bets ten cents,” I said, referring to my ace of hearts.
“My king raises you ten cents,” responded Glasses.
But it was no use. Between Inky’s automatic and Luke Dugan I couldn’t concentrate on my cards.
“Do you remember, Glasses,” I said, “the evening you said there was maybe something queer about Inky’s gun?”
“I do a lot of talking, No Nose, and not much of it is worth remembering. We’d better stick to our cards. My pair of sevens bets a nickel.”
I followed his advice, but didn’t have much luck, and lost five or six dollars. By two o’clock we were both pretty tired and not feeling quite so jittery; so we got the blankets and wrapped up in them and tried to grab a little sleep. I listened to the sea-grass and the tooting of a locomotive about two miles away, and worried some over the possible activities of Luke Dugan, but finally dropped off.