Occasional bulbs of light dangled from ceilings, and dim rays filtered through grates up at street level, brighter when the headlamps on machines swung past. I stopped under a cone of illumination and took out my gun, thumbing the cylinder open. I usually carried five slugs loaded and left one chamber empty beneath the hammer, but dug out a folded piece of waxed paper from an inner jacket pocket, where I toted extra pills. Four were wrapped in the paper. I took one out and put it into service. Looking over, I saw a couple of Chinese labourers sitting on their haunches in the shadows, watching my movements with unflinching black eyes. I snapped the cylinder back into place and put the gun away as I moved off into the dark.
These tunnels were wide and high, but this march nonetheless reminded me of the war and running at night along the trenches. Since then dark narrow holes had little appeal for me. For a moment I almost heard the rattle of the Huns’ machine-guns, but maybe it was only a truck rumbling by overhead on Howard.
I eased a thick firewall aside on its slides and stepped through into a section I calculated must belong to Blackjack. More lights burned here, and crates were piled all over. The Fin ambled out of a door, entering from a basement.
“What the—!” he yelled when he saw me.
“Softly, Fin. You gave me an opportunity, and I took it. So, are the jewels from today’s robbery here?”
“Wha—, what—?”
“And stop stuttering. Yeah, I may want a piece. Include me and you can bump the two men out of the play and be a whole share ahead. Then you can figure out for yourself what to do with the dame.” I looked into his eyes and said confidentially, “I don’t think she goes for me.”
The youngster took on an odd expression as another grand conception forced its way into his thoughts. “Yeah. Yeah. Irene’s that kind of woman. She can give you anything you want.”
“You mean she can cook?” I asked.
He stared at me in puzzlement, as I brought a fist to the point of his jaw and dropped him. I grabbed his shirtfront with the other hand and eased The Fin to the cement floor. Then I dragged his body by an arm and stuffed him behind some boxes. If Blackjack wanted the kid, I’d give him a fair chance. Maybe the cops wouldn’t tumble, in which case justice could be served by The Fin encountering whatever perils Jerome set before him. If you asked me for an honest opinion, however, I suspected this one would make a better tool if he got honed by a few more years behind bars.
I knew I was going to have company soon. No way in this world would Mac or even some fall-guy like Riordan have sent The Fin out to retrieve the loot on his own, no matter how they instructed him. The lights cut out before I emerged from behind the packing crates. I didn’t hear the knife coming, only the thunk and hum of the blade when it bit into some wood close by.
Hunkering down, I felt my way backward along the tunnel, treading lightly on my gumshoes, fingers running over the rims of the stacks. I noticed the luminous dial on my wristwatch and quickly slipped it off and stuffed it into my pants. I pulled my coat close and buttoned it over my white shirt, and removed my hat and held it at an angle in front of my face, almost as pallid a target as the shirtfront in this murk.
The .38 felt good in my other paw. Give me a few yards and some kind of light drifting down from a grate, and I had more than an even chance. The Fin was right about one thing. It was a new century, and in these modern times efficient killing utilized bullets.
Illumination of some kind, narrow like a penlight, appeared behind some crates. I figured it must be Mac, by himself — I’d tried to give Riordan a concussion that would last for a while and was confident I had succeeded. But why ruin his night vision by snapping on the torch? Maybe he needed that thrown knife. My odds were getting better every moment.
The light moving among the stacks snapped out. Most people feared a blade pointed their way more than a gun, but I’ve been cut and shot enough times to know better. I started to advance, to take advantage of the moments it would take for his eyes to adjust, when I heard the distant rat-tat-rat-tat of machine-guns approaching and sensed more than saw a halo of diffused light appear behind me as a truck bounced along the cobblestone street overhead.
I swung to one side and felt the knife whiz by my ear. The next one caught the hat in my outstretched hand, nailing it to my flesh. Goddam! This bastard was like lightning. I flung the ruined fedora away from me and must have heard the blade clatter on the floor, but my ears strained to gauge that machine-gun rattle as it receded in the distance beyond my enemy. He’d had a second or two. Now I had my turn.
Down the tunnel spectral light drifted in from a grate as the truck rumbled past. A silhouette shaped like a man seemed to appear. In the war, when you’d catch impressions of the Germans tossing themselves over mounded earth in the flashes made by exploding shells, you’d shoot fast for the heart. I did that.
The powder flash from my rod blinded me and the report in this tunnel was like the thunder of big artillery. Keeping my hand as steady as I could, I fired another round unseeing, then hurled myself to the side against a wall of crates.
I couldn’t see or hear, but then neither could Mac. The hand hit by the knife was numb and dripping blood. I waited.
Minutes passed. Out of the darkness, I thought I heard moaning. Maybe I’d plugged him. Or maybe he was just trying to lure me into range. He must have had a last knife, for hand-to-hand, and might have had another to toss. I had four pills left, without risking reloading in the dark.
As the ringing in my ears lessened, the moaning grew clear. I couldn’t sit here all night and drip to death. I pushed my .38 into my pants belt and dug around one-handed in pockets until I felt a book of matches I’d picked up in the States Restaurant. I thumbed one to life and pushed it in among its brothers, then flung the blazing packet toward the sound.
In the fitful illumination from the flaring matchbook, I saw my target leaning back against an uneven stack of wooden boxes, like he was tacked there. A dark patch marked the shirt below his throat. He moved his head slightly. Hard to tell if the wound was fatal.
I moved clear of the boxes, raised my gun and shot him dead center.
V
Later, I regretted killing Dewey Mains. While behind the crates, he’d pulled a blade across The Fin’s throat and ended all Blackjack’s ambitions for that dull tool. Paddy Helland he’d eliminated already, and we found the corpses of Shaky Squires and B. P. Indick, the safecracker Helland had imported from Hackensack, in a cheap flop in Eddy Street the next day. They liked to tidy up as they went along, this little gang.
Which left us with only Daniel Riordan and Mabel Stearns. The wires soon were humming with messages from the Chicago office, where the banker Hobart Stearns was frantic to find his missing offspring. She’d disappeared within weeks of the robbery, which had inconvenienced her big sister on the brink of her wedding. Stearns had hired our rivals, once again, to work this wandering daughter job, but we were the ones who had her.
As pieces of the puzzle fell together, Stearns and his attorneys looked upon it as a case where Riordan had abducted young Mabel against her will. From what I had seen, I felt it was just as likely that young Mabel had conceived the plan herself and pulled that Irish fool in on it. We assembled other glimpses of their life as they spent the money from the fenced jewels, living in a fashion more in the style of a rich man’s daughter than a fellow who was only an agency detective at the height of his ambition. Another heist may have been theirs before they met Mains, but two or three more could be wiped off the books after that. Still, the lawyers made the argument that she had been nothing more than a white slave, with one of the men always on guard. Stearns could afford to settle with the wronged parties, to remove them from the contest.