Корнелл Вулрич - Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 50, No. 5, October 10, 1936

Crossing the room to pick up Harry’s automatic, Monty was checked by a voice with a metallic ring.

“Leave it alone!” The voice was Fleming’s.

The thing happened so quickly that Ed Kirby was taken completely off guard. The front and one side of the deformed murder chieftain’s desk dropped down.

One moment Fleming was seated behind his desk contemplating the carnage before his eyes. The next, he was crouched behind a sub-caliber Thompson machine gun capable of firing three hundred .45 caliber bullets a minute. There was a Cutts compensator attached to the gun’s muzzle to lessen its tendency to lift and fire high.

As the first stuttering chatter burst from the machine gun, Ed Kirby flung himself to the floor. Monty and Weatherby jumped to escape the heat so suddenly and violently turned on.

Kirby fired at the deformed man’s bald head and missed. The Thompson barrel swung towards his prone body. He reared up. The door leading to the hall opened suddenly and knocked him flat. Stevens, with two cops, crowded through the opening and collapsed in a pulsing heap of flesh.

Stevens’ limp fingers dropped a pear-shaped object. Ed grabbed it. Aimed and flung it for the spot on the wall behind the chattering gun. Two bullets lanced the flesh of his upflung arm. Crabwise, he crawled to Leon’s curled-up body. As he crouched behind it, leaden slugs tore off chunks of his clothing.

He flattened his head and shoulders till his face dug into the carpet. He could feel Leon’s body trembling with the shock of thudding bullets, A sharp, rancid odor stung Ed’s eyes and nose — fumes from the tear gas bomb. Then the machine gun stopped abruptly.

Ed reared up a second time. He could hear Fleming coughing and see him rubbing his eyes into the sleeve of his coat. He raised his gun, saw Monty leaping towards the death instrument, then heard a muffled thud as a gun butt lashed the deformed man’s skull.

He got up. One hand was useless, but the other still froze to a heavy automatic. His eyes were almost blinded from the fumes of the gas bomb. He went reeling across the room opening doors and the windows in the rooms beyond these doors. Then he came back to where Monty was wiping his eyes on a silk handkerchief.

He grabbed him by the arm and spoke softly, “You staying for explanations, Nels?”

Nelson Grant shook his head.

“You’re in charge, Ed. I want to keep out of it. I’m still Monty to a lot of big and little shots in this town. Chicago’s next in line for a crack down. Play the game. I’m fading.”

He stepped over the bodies of men near the door and vanished down the stairs leading to the bar of the Golden Mirror. The elevator door clanged in the hall outside and suddenly the room was filled with cops and special agents.

Ed Kirby sat down and poured himself a drink. His eyes blinked as he watched other men sort over the living from the dead, then strayed with curious detachment to the crimson stream darkening the back of his hand.

“But I’m still alive,” he thought. “ Still alive till the next showdown. And the next — and the next!” A slow smile spread over his tense face. He wouldn’t have had it otherwise. For Ed Kirby belonged to that breed of men who go down fighting for law and order. Let the Devil laugh. Ed Kirby could also laugh, and did, too, as he lunged to his feet and began to snap out orders.

Inspector Stephen Lively, off-duty and homeward bound, stopped at the newsstand underneath the stairs leading up to the Elevated station and selected one of the following day’s newspapers and one of the following month’s magazines for purposes of relaxation. His nightly trip was not only lengthy, it was in two parts — from headquarters to South Ferry by “El” and from there to Staten Island by ferry — hence the two separate items of reading-matter; one for each leg of the way.

Given a combination of two such names as his and, human nature, being what it is, what else can you expect in the way of a nickname but — Step Lively? It had started at the age of seven or thereabouts when he stood up in school and pronounced his first name the wrong way; he finally quit struggling against it when it followed him onto the squad and he realized that he was stuck with it for the rest of his days, like it or not.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, only it was altogether inappropriate. Step Lively had never made a quick motion in his life. To watch him was to think of an eight-times-slowed-down film or a deep-sea diver wading through seaweed on the ocean floor; he gave the impression of having been born lazy and getting more so all the time. And the nickname probably made this trait more glaring.

He was not, strangely enough, obese along with it — just the opposite, tall and spare, concave at the waist where others bulge. He carried his head habitually bent forward a little, as though it were too much trouble to hold it up straight. He not only walked slowly, he even talked slowly. What mattered chiefly was that he thought fast; as far as results went, his record on the force seemed to prove that the race isn’t always to the swift. He’d been known to bring in some of the nimblest, most light-footed gentry on record.

Like a steam-roller pursuing a motorcycle; it can’t keep up with it, but it can keep remorselessly after it, wear it down, slowly overtake it, and finally flatten it out. So Step’s superiors didn’t let it worry them too much that he was the despair of traffic-cops crossing a busy street, or that he sent people waiting on line behind him out of their minds. It takes more than that to spoil a good detective.

Step entered the lighted stairway-shed and sighed at the sight of the climb that awaited him, as it did every night. An escalator, like some of the other stations had, would have been so much easier on a man.

The subway, which would have gotten him to the ferry considerably quicker, he eschewed for two very good reasons. One was that he’d have to walk a whole additional block eastward to get to it. And secondly, even though you descended to it instead of climbing at this end, you had to climb up out of it at the other end anyway; he preferred to get the hard work over with at the start, and have a nice restful climb down waiting for him when he got off.

He slowly poised one large, paddle-like foot on the bottom step and eight minutes later he was upstairs on the platform, the ordeal of the ascent safely behind him until tomorrow night. As he stepped out from behind the turnstile, a Sixth Avenue train was standing by with its gates in the act of closing. Step could have made it; a man who had come up behind him darted across and did. Step preferred not to. It would have meant hurrying. There’d be another one along in a minute. The old adage about cars and women was good common horse-sense.

This was 59th, and the trains alternated. The next would be a Ninth Avenue. They separated at 53rd, but both wound up together again at South Ferry, so it didn’t matter which he took. More seats on the Ninth anyway. And so, because he refused to bestir himself — this story.

A three-car Ninth flashed in in due course. Step got up off the bench — it wouldn’t have been like him to stand waiting — and leisurely strolled across to it. He yawned and tapped his mouth as he perambulated sluggishly down the aisle. The crabby, walrus-mustached conductor, who had had to hold the gate for him, felt a sudden unaccountable urge to stick a pin in him and see if he really could move fast or not, but wisely restrained the impulse, maybe because he had no pin.