I stepped aside. MacMan moved to the other side.
McCloor took a backward step to keep us from getting him between us and started an angry word.
MacMan threw himself on McCloor’s gun arm.
I socked McCloor’s jaw with my fist. I might just as well have hit somebody else for all it seemed to bother him.
He swept me out of his way and pasted MacMan in the mouth. MacMan fell back till the taxi stopped him, spit out a tooth, and came back for more.
I was trying to climb up McCloor’s left side.
MacMan came in on his right, failed to dodge a chop of the gun, caught it square on the top of the noodle, and went down hard. He stayed down.
I kicked McCloor’s ankle, but couldn’t get his foot from under him. I rammed my right fist into the small of his back and got a left-handful of his wet hair, swinging on it. He shook his head, dragging me off my feet.
He punched me in the side and I could feel my ribs and guts flattening together like leaves in a book.
I swung my fist against the back of his neck. That bothered him. He made a rumbling noise down in his chest, crunched my shoulder in his left hand, and chopped at me with the gun in his right.
I kicked him somewhere and punched his neck again.
Down the street, at the Embarcadero, a police whistle was blowing. Men were running up First Street toward us.
McCloor snorted like a locomotive and threw me away from him. I didn’t want to go. I tried to hang on. He threw me away from him and ran up the street.
I scrambled up and ran after him, dragging my gun out.
At the first corner he stopped to squirt metal at me — three shots. I squirted one at him. None of the four connected.
He disappeared around the corner. I swung wide around it, to make him miss if he were flattened to the wall waiting for me. He wasn’t. He was a hundred feet ahead, going into a space between two warehouses. I went in after him, and out after him at the other end, making better time with my hundred and ninety pounds than he was making with his two-fifty.
He crossed a street, turning up, away from the waterfront. There was a light on the corner. When I came into its glare he wheeled and leveled his gun at me. I didn’t hear it click, but I knew it had when he threw it at me. The gun went past with a couple of feet to spare and raised hell against a door behind me.
McCloor turned and ran up the street. I ran up the street after him.
I put a bullet past him to let the others know where we were. At the next corner he started to turn to the left, changed his mind, and went straight on.
I sprinted, cutting the distance between us to forty or fifty feet, and yelped:
“Stop or I’ll drop you.”
He jumped sidewise into a narrow alley.
I passed it on the jump, saw he wasn’t waiting for me, and went in. Enough light came in from the street to let us see each other and our surroundings. The alley was blind — walled on each side and at the other end by tall concrete buildings with steel-shuttered windows and doors.
McCloor faced me, less than twenty feet away. His jaw stuck out. His arms curved down free of his sides. His shoulders were bunched.
“Put them up,” I ordered, holding my gun level.
“Get out of my way, little man,” he grumbled, taking a stiff-legged step toward me. “I’ll eat you up.”
“Keep coming,” I said, “and I’ll put you down.”
“Try it.” He took another step, crouching a little. “I can still get to you with slugs in me.”
“Not where I’ll put them.” I was wordy, trying to talk him into waiting till the others came up. I didn’t want to have to kill him. We could have done that from the taxi. “I’m no Annie Oakley, but if I can’t pop your kneecaps with two shots at this distance, you’re welcome to me. And if you think smashed kneecaps are a lot of fun, give it a whirl.”
“Hell with that,” he said and charged.
I shot his right knee.
He lurched toward me.
I shot his left knee.
He tumbled down.
“You would have it,” I complained.
He twisted around, and with his arms pushed himself into a sitting position facing me.
“I didn’t think you had sense enough to do it,” he said through his teeth.
IX
I talked to McCloor in the hospital. He lay on his back in bed with a couple of pillows slanting his head up. The skin was pale and tight around his mouth and eyes, but there was nothing else to show he was in pain.
“You sure devastated me, bo,” he said when I came in.
“Sorry,” I said, “but—”
“I ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”
“Why’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, off-hand, as I pulled a chair up beside the bed.
“Uh-uh — you’re tooting the wrong ringer.”
I laughed and told him I was the man in the room with Joe when it happened.
McCloor grinned and said:
“I thought I’d seen you somewheres before. So that’s where it was. I didn’t pay no attention to your mug, just so your hands didn’t move.”
“Why’d you kill him?”
He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes at me, thought something over, and said:
“He killed a broad I knew.”
“He killed Sue Hambleton?” I asked.
He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”
“How do you figure that out?”
“Hell,” he said, “I don’t have to. Sue told me. Give me a butt.”
I gave him a cigarette, held a lighter under it, and objected:
“That doesn’t exactly fit in with other things I know. Just what happened and what did she say? You might start back with the night you gave her the goog.”
He looked thoughtful, letting smoke sneak slowly out of his nose, then said:
“I hadn’t ought to hit her in the eye, that’s a fact. But, see, she had been out all afternoon and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, and we had a row over it. What’s this — Thursday morning? That was Monday, then. After the row I went out and spent the night in a dump over on Army Street. I got home about seven the next morning. Sue was sick as hell, but she wouldn’t let me get a croaker for her. That was kind of funny, because she was scared stiff.”
McCloor scratched his head meditatively and suddenly drew in a great lungful of smoke, practically eating up the rest of the cigarette. He let the smoke leak out of mouth and nose together, looking dully through the cloud at me. Then he said bruskly:
“Well, she went under. But before she went she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”
“She say how he’d given it to her?”
McCloor shook his head.
“I’d been asking her what was the matter, and not getting anything out of her. Then she starts whining that she’s poisoned. ‘I’m poisoned, Babe,’ she whines. ‘Arsenic. That damned Holy Joe,’ she says. Then she won’t say anything else, and it’s not a hell of a while after that that she kicks off.”
“Yeah? Then what’d you do?”
“I went gunning for Holy Joe. I knew him but didn’t know where he jungled up, and didn’t find out till yesterday. You was there when I came. You know about that. I had picked up a boiler and parked it over on Turk Street, for the getaway. When I got back to it, there was a copper standing close to it. I figured he might have spotted it as a hot one and was waiting to see who came for it, so I let it alone, and caught a street car instead, and cut for the yards. Down there I ran into a whole flock of hammer and saws and had to go overboard in China Basin, swimming up to a pier, being ranked again by a watchman there, swimming off to another, and finally getting through the line only to run into another bad break. I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.”