Хал Эллсон - Masters of Noir - Volume 3

Elsa was half tearful, half angry. “Bart, you — why didn’t you tell me?”

Eglin looked at her. In any other man his expression would have been called shame. In Eglin it was sheepishness.

Crider was beginning to stir, with the big cop standing over him. There was a bit of irony here, thought Jordan. Crider had understood Bart Berkey thoroughly, had seen that a threat to kill Elsa would terrify Bart into silence where a threat to kill Bart himself would not. But that same threat in the end had done for Crider. When Jordan was shot and Elsa ran to him, she put herself in front of Crider’s gun. In that moment her brother lost all his fears and turned from a mouse into a tiger.

Eglin said, “Having Crider’s wire tapped wasn’t such a bad idea. We’d never have got here otherwise. Sometimes police routine is worth something.”

Eglin stood before Elsa. “Jordan here is supposed to be quite a terror with the women,” he said. “I sicked him on you. He was right about you and I was wrong. Not just wrong. I’ve never been so wrong about anybody in my life.”

Elsa didn’t reply right away. She gave Jordan a long, enigmatic look. When she returned her attention to Eglin she was smiling coolly. “Yes, Inspector.”

She had not quite forgiven him, Jordan thought. When a man thinks a woman is a tramp, and she finds it out, he is on the hook with her for a long, long time. But Jordan wasn’t sore at him any more. Jordan had looked down the barrel of a killer’s gun in line of duty. He understood that special hatred that Ben Eglin had for cop killers. He had it, too, now.

Two white-coated men came in, one carrying a bag, the other a collapsed stretcher. The one with the bag clucked over Jordan, the other spread the stretcher on the floor. Jordan felt good. He felt tough. He didn’t feel like a rookie. He decided he would walk out. The two men caught him as he fell.

“That’s shock,” explained the one with the bag. “Puts rubber in your legs.”

Elsa picked up his coat. “Bart, you stay with Inspector Eglin.”

She did not add that she was going with Jordan. She just walked out beside the stretcher and climbed in back of the ambulance as though it were her unquestioned place. Jordan lay back and watched the shape of her smile on him as the ambulance swayed through the streets. He had an odd feeling that his fancy-free days were over.