Half-way to it now. The look-out had gotten in the car long ago, when he first revealed himself around the corner. But the door stayed invitingly open — like an invitation to sudden death. Metal glinted momentarily behind the glass above the dash, highlighted by the rays of the street-light far behind O’Dare. You couldn’t even see the guy’s face, just that warning glint of deadly weapon.
O’Dare had partially unlimbered himself, though the act was begging for the death-flash that was to come, closed in with his hand to his hip-bone. The odds, climbing as high against him as they could possibly have gone, now suddenly began to drop down again in his favor. He was in close now where he could do some damage himself; the guy had waited too long to drop him.
The car’s gleaming bumper flashed past behind him, he was up to the door. The guy’s face came into focus — and a little round knob pierced by a hole sighted over the top of that door into the middle of O’Dare’s stomach. He was going to take him the hard way.
“Can it, Detroit!” a commanding voice cried warningly from the doorway, “I’ll handle it, you jerk!”
The round knob with the black hole vanished, the door-top was just a straight line as though it had never been there. The glimmer of white face under the car-ceiling went “S-s-s!” through puckered lips and pinched nostrils like something letting off steam through a safety-valve. That’s very bad for a killer’s nerves, to be at firing-point and then be checked abruptly. Fiction-writers like to say they haven’t any. It’s really just the other way around; they’re all nerves. O’Dare whirled, careless of whether he got it in the back or not.
Two men were hurrying out of the doorway, across the sidewalk to the pulsing car. O’Dare drew first, looked second to see if there was menace coming from that direction. There wasn’t, at least not on the surface. The one in advance was stocky, short, matched the car. Sleek like it, glossy, important-looking. Fleecy vicuna coat with big headlight pearl-buttons flapping open as he strove to get there before anything regrettable happened. Furious, apparently, that it so very nearly had. Or maybe for other reasons that O’Dare hadn’t divined as yet, having to do with his own happening along just when he had. At any rate — this sleek pudge — had his brakes off for a moment, spoke without thinking — as though O’Dare weren’t present.
“Never one of them!” he barked hoarsely. “Don’t you know any better than that? Never one of them!” He reached the running-board, swung a short right hook in under the low-slung roof of the car. The impact sounded as it hit the dim face lurking below. Whock! “There’s never anything that can’t be straightened out if you use your head!” he raged on. A dark line was bisecting the chin of the face he had hit.
It was now O’Dare’s turn. He saw no one else was coining out of the doorway. Neither of the two new arrivals made the slightest threat toward him. The second man, less conspicuously-dressed than the shorter one, stayed in the background, lighting a cigarette with four hands — the way they shook he seemed to have at least that many. But O’Dare wasn’t forgetting that surreptitious gleam of metal behind the windshield, that bored knob atop the door. “Put up your hands!” he rasped into the car. “Step out here where I can get a look at you, and identify yourself! What was that you had sighted on me just now when I was coming up? Where is it?” His own gun was in the open now; not exactly pointed, but just there, ready.
The man in the vicuna coat spoke, as though that were a short-cut out of an unpleasant misunderstanding. “He’s my driver, brother, that’s all,” he explained blandly. “His name is Emmons, we call him Detroit because he comes from—”
O’Dare cut him short like a knife with: “I didn’t ask you, I asked him!” The man had stepped out, palms up like somebody carrying a cafeteria-tray. The blood down the cleft of his chin had widened but was drying. He glanced at Vicuna-Coat quizzically, as though asking: “Why don’t you stop this cop’s foolishness?”
Vicuna-Coat seemed to think it was about time to. “I’m Benny Benuto,” he said softly, and waited for that to get its work in.
It didn’t seem to. O’Dare didn’t even flick his eyes over at him, kept them on the driver. “Where is it?” he growled. He missed seeing the brief pantomime. The second man gave Benuto a brief, inquiring look, hand idly fingering the lapel of his coat within grabbing distance of his own left shoulder. The look might have meant: “Want me to give it to him? He’s holding us up.” Benuto answered with a negative shake of the head, a contemptuous curl of the lip, as though: “What, this harness cop? Leave him to me!”
He said aloud to O’Dare, “You don’t seem to understand, brother. I said I’m Benny Benuto.”
Again O’Dare didn’t hear, apparently. The driver had handed over the gun, a brutal-looking thing all steel and a yard wide. O’Dare pocketed it. “License?” he snapped.
Benuto cut in reassuringly, “He’s got one, brother. I wouldn’t let him carry it if he—”
“He better have!”
He did. O’Dare scanned it by the light of the dash, which he had ordered cut on. All Jake, nothing phony about it. He jabbed it back to him reluctantly.
Benuto was soaping him, “You see, he’s a sort of bodyguard of mine as well as driver; a little fidgety like all such guys are. Must have mistook you for some kind of footpad in the dark and—”
O’Dare at long last gave him his undivided attention. If he’d placed him by now, you wouldn’t have known it by any change in his voice or manner, any creeping-in of deference. “The corner-light was on me the whole way up,” he said tersely. “He saw me at the call-box even before that! I take it you don’t live here, Mr. Benuto? You can explain your presence in this building at this hour, can you?”
Benuto seemed to be trying hard to control himself. “Would you mind giving me your name, officer?”
“Answer my question!” O’Dare yelled loudly in his face. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re the biggest big-shot in town!”
“Oh, then you do know who I am.” Benuto smiled a little dangerously. “That should make it much simpler. Sure, glad to answer your question, Officer 4432.” He repeated the numerals on O’Dare’s shield aloud. The other man in the background was scribbling them down. “I just dropped in to visit an old friend. Well, I found out he doesn’t live here any more—”
O’Dare’s eyes involuntarily went up the face of the house. It was changing right while he looked. A whole half-floor went suddenly orange, or rather the windows did. A minute later the other half followed suit. Then the one below. It was waking up from top to bottom. One of the sashes went up and a frightened-looking young woman peered down at the group by the car. She seemed to be about to say something, when abruptly a man standing behind her in the room clasped his hand to her mouth, pulled her in again. His voice carried down to the sidewalk just before he slapped the sash down again: “Stay out of it! What’s matter wit’ yuh? Wanna get in trouble?”