O’Shay turned abruptly from the glass and hurried on.
Paddy got uncomfortable as the neighborhood changed. New buildings were going up, tall offices and hotels. The grand Metropolitan Opera House reared up like a palace. If the cops saw him, they would run him in for invading the Quality’s neighborhood. O’Shay was nearing Broadway. Suddenly he disappeared.
Paddy the Rat broke into a desperate gallop. He could not return to Hell’s Kitchen without reporting O’Shay’s address. There! With a sigh of relief he turned into an alley beside a theater under construction. At the end of the alley he saw the tail of the long black coat twirl around a corner. He raced after it and skidded around that corner, straight into a fist that knocked him to the mud.
O’Shay leaned over him. Paddy the Rat saw a glint of steel. A needle burst of pain exploded in his right eye. He knew instantly what O’Shay had done to him and he cried out in despair.
“Open your hand!” said O’Shay.
When he did not, the steel pricked his remaining eye. “You’ll lose this one, too, if you don’t open your hand.”
Paddy the Rat opened his hand. He quivered as he felt O’Shay press something round and terrible into his palm and close his fingers around it almost gently. “Give this to Tommy.”
O’SHAY LEFT THE BOY whimpering in the alley and retraced his steps to 39th Street. He stood in the shadows, still as a statue, until he was sure the little weasel didn’t have a partner watching. Then he continued east under the Sixth Avenue El, checked his back, walked to Fifth Avenue, and turned downtown, still studying reflections in windows.
A mustachioed Irish cop directing traffic shouted at a freight wagon to stop so the well-dressed gentleman could cross 34th Street. Doormen-whose blue-and-gold uniforms would have done an all-big-gun dreadnought’s captain proud-scrambled when they saw him coming.
O’Shay returned their crisp salutes and marched into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
10
ISAAC BELL SPOTTED JOHN SCULLY’S RED HANDKERCHIEF tied to a hedge. He swung the Locomobile into the narrow road it marked, eased up on the accelerator pedal for the first time since he left Weehawken, and closed the cutout, which quieted the thunderous exhaust to a hollow mutter.
He steered up a steep hill and drove a mile through fallow farm fields that awaited spring planting. The resourceful Scully had procured a milk-can collection truck somewhere, exactly the sort of vehicle that would not look out of place on New Jersey’s farm roads. Bell eased quietly alongside it so the Locomobile could not be seen from the road. Then he heaved his golf bag off the passenger seat and carried it to the hillcrest where the Van Dorn detective lay flat on brown grass.
The laconic loner was a short, round man with a moon face who could pass for a trusted colleague of preachers, shopkeepers, safe-crackers, or murderers. Thirty pounds of fat disguised slabs of rock-hard muscle, and his diffident smile concealed a mind quicker than a bear trap. He was training field glasses on a house down the hill. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. A big Marmon touring car was parked outside, a powerful machine covered in mud and dust.
“What’s in the bag?” Scully greeted Bell.
“Couple of five irons,” Bell grinned, removing a pair of humpback twelve-gauge Browning Auto-5 shotguns. “How many in the house?”
“All three.”
“Anyone living there?”
“No smoke before they drove up.”
Bell nodded, satisfied that no innocents would be caught in a cross fire. Scully passed him the field glasses. He studied the house and the automobile. “Is that the Marmon they stole in Ohio?”
“Could be another. They’re partial to Marmons.”
“How’d you get a line on them?”
“Played your hunch about their first job. Their real name is Williard, and if me and you was half as smart as we think we are, we’d have tumbled to it a month ago.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Bell admitted. “Why don’t we start things off by putting their auto out of action.”
“We’ll never hit it from here with these scatter guns.”
Bell pulled from the golf bag an ancient.50 caliber Sharps buffalo gun. John Scully’s eyes gleamed like ball bearings. “Where’d you get the cannon?”
“Our Knickerbocker house dick separated it from a Pawnee Bill Wild West Show cowboy who got drunk in Times Square.” Bell levered open the breech, loaded a black-powder cartridge, and aimed the heavy rifle at the Marmon.
“Try not to set it on fire,” Scully cautioned. “It’s full of their loot.”
“I’ll just make it hard to start.”
“Hold it, what’s that coming?”
A six-cylinder K Ford was bouncing up the lane that lead to the farmhouse. It had a searchlight mounted on the radiator.
“Hell’s bells,” said Scully. “That’s Cousin Constable.”
Two men with sheriff stars on their coats climbed out of the Ford carrying baskets. Scully studied them through the glasses. “Bringing them supper. Two more makes five.”
“Got room in your milk truck?”
“If we stack ’em close.”
“What do you say we give them time to get distracted filling their bellies?”
“It’s a plan,” said Scully, continuing to observe the house.
Bell watched the lane to the house and turned around repeatedly to be sure that no more relatives came up the back road he had taken.
He was wondering where Dorothy Langner got the money to buy her father a piano when Bell remembered that she had given it to him only recently.
Scully got uncharacteristically talkative. “You know, Isaac,” he said, gesturing toward the farmhouse below and the two automobiles, “for jobs like this wouldn’t it be nice if somebody invented a machine gun light enough to tote around with you?”
“A ‘sub’ machine gun?”
“Exactly. A submachine gun. But how would you lug all that water to cool the barrel?”
“You wouldn’t have to if it fired pistol ammunition.”
Scully nodded thoughtfully. “A drum magazine would keep it compact.”
“Shall we start the show?” Bell asked, hefting the Sharps. Both detectives glanced at the woods near the house where the Frye Boys would run when Bell disabled their autos.
“Let me flank ’em first,” said Scully. Putting words to action, he waddled down the hill, looking, Bell thought, like a bricklayer hurrying to work. He waved when he was in place.