Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

He scraped insulation off one of the cords that fed the lamp on the head of the four-poster. Beside him was the closet-door.

“That’s only a reading lamp you’re fooling with,” she challenged, her tone displaying steel under the velvet.

“You got ground interference here somewhere, lady. I’m right close to it, now.”

“No kidding,” she snapped. “I think you’d better skip the static gag, brother. I’ve got to go out. And so have you!”

“Anything you say.” His nerves tautened. He reached for the knob of the closet door to help himself to his feet.

“Keep your hands off that door!”

But Don pulled the door open as he stumbled laboriously erect. He got a fast glimpse of the closet. The pink and gray dress wasn’t there. A row of shoes was: women’s shoes, slippers, mules, sandals, all colors. Plus a stub-toed pair of Scotch grains, with ankles in them!

It was risky stuff, he knew, but he nerved himself to take his time about closing the door, clamping his foot against it as if by accident when he bent over his tool kit.

He came up with a hammer, a fist full of six-penny nails.

He wouldn’t have been shocked at the blast of a pistol, the sudden pain of a bullet crashing into his back, yet he jumped as if he’d touched a hot wire when she raked his face with needle-sharp nails.

He punched her. With the hand that held the nails. She went over backward as if he’d hit her with the hammer.

Before she could scramble to her feet he was smashing away at the first nail, driving it into the jamb and through into the frame.

There was a crashing blow from inside the closet. Wood strained, cracked. The top of the door bulged out an inch or so.

He drove another nail home before she came back. With a carving knife.

“Come near me with that, I’ll split your skull with this hammer!” he said through his teeth.

A dull muffled thump came from the closet. A splinter stuck out ominously from the door, leaving a small, round hole. Don stepped to one side, hammered in another big nail.

She moved in on him, catlike, knife held low for an underthrust.

He drove one more spike in near the top of the door before she was close enough to strike.

He lashed out with the hammer. She dodged, slashed at him viciously.

“Come on in, boys!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “We got both of ’em!”

She whirled. He flung himself on her back, wrested the weapon away from her.

Thump, bump, bump bump!

Four more holes, nicely shaped, low in the closet door. Don gave thanks, as he tapped the girl behind the ear with the hammer, that he hadn’t been standing there when those bullets came through the paneling. She sagged limply. It only took a couple of seconds to twist wire around her wrist and ankles. Then he went back to the door.

The man inside had reloaded, was shooting at the lock. Don lay flat on the floor, reached up, drove another nail. Another, another...

Before he went out in the living room to phone, he pushed the girl over against the door. For luck.

When he ran into the living room, the door to the hall was opening, noiselessly, slowly.

There was an eternity for Don to realize he’d been dumb enough to forget that the killer and his girl might have pals.

“Turn around!” A cold command from the hallway. “Stick your thumbs in your ears! Stay that way!”

Don obeyed. What a sap! Caught like this! His mind flashed to Annalou. She’d been right. It had been a matter for the police. And now... now—

He remembered how Bill had looked, there on the gravel.

Something prodded him between the shoulder blades. A finger.

“Holy cow! If it isn’t Young Sluefoot!”

It was O’Hare. Beside him, Wiley. Don closed his eyes, opened them again. It was no trick of his imagination. The officers were really there.

While they were smashing down the closet door, while a strangling coughing indicated that Larry, the Gong, was choking on his own powder fumes, Wiley bawled Don out:

“Just because you get some cute notion about where this dame—” the Lieutenant nodded at the willowy figure sitting up with her back against the end of the bed and her front covered with a blanket, “— hangs out—”

“I tried to tell you.” Don dabbed at claw marks on his cheek with his handkerchief. “Annalou remembered the dress this girl wore. She knew it must be brand new.”

“Murder wears the New Look,” O’Hare said, caustically.

“That’s right,” Don inspected his face in the mirror. “Annalou thought maybe the store that sold it would have a record of the customer, if there weren’t too many like it. It was unusual. Rhinestone embroidery gimmicks. So I went around and asked. There’d only been a couple sold, like the one this lady—” he considered a moment, changed it. “—this hellcat, wore last night. One was to a friend of the Mayor’s. The other was sold to Miss Tolman, of this address. So I came here.”

“Just like that,” Wiley said. “Singlehanded. You realize you might have scared them both away? That we might never have nabbed either of them?”

“Never thought about it.” Don admitted.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” O’Hare said. “If we hadn’t come along when we did, no telling who’d be spending that reward dough.”

Don turned. “Did you say — ‘reward’?”

“Five hundred fish,” Wiley said. “Gas companies offered it, tonight. Don’t you ever read the papers?”

“I will from now on,” Don promised. “Especially those furniture ads.”

He went out to call Annalou.

Popular Detective, September 1949

Lieutenant Steve Koski leaned against the bulkhead of the pilothouse, motionless as a statue. In the faint glow from the binnacle bowl he looked like a statue, too. A rugged, weather-bronzed figure, Koski wore a melton jacket that was buttoned close around his neck. A beat-up felt, soggy with moisture, was pulled low over his ice-blue eyes that searched the pale opaqueness of the fog.

He didn’t move even when Sergeant Mulcahey spoke on a subject that touched a sore spot.

“I see by the mornin’ papers,” the sergeant said, putting the wheel down a spoke, “that Commissioner Andrews has finally succeeded in breakin’ up that ring of dock thieves which has been nibblin’ away at pier cargoes to the tune of sixty, seventy thousan’ a month. Commissioner, in a pig’s pazook! We know who rounded up them rats!”

“Sure.” Koski continued to squint into the curtain of mist blanketing the Brooklyn waterfront. “But what’s the use beefing, Irish? The Harbor Division’s always been the stepchild of the Police Department. It always will be.”

“It gripes my innards, though,” Mulcahey said. He swung the Vigilant’s bow a point toward the nun buoy at the head of Governor’s Island. “We stay out, twenty hours a stretch, sloppin’ around in freezin’ rain. We let them cargo snatchers use us for clay pipes in a shootin’ gallery. An’ then, when they’re in front of them floodlights in Headquarters’ lineup, some loud-mouth politician in a soft leather chair tells the taxpayers how he—”

“Clam!” Lieutenant Koski held up a palm for silence.

Against the jumble of harbor sounds — the mournful clanking of the bell at Buttermilk Channel, the deep hoarseness of a tramp steamer feeling her way through the shrouding fog like a blind man, the high, frantic toots of a tug — came the hollow turkey-turkey-turkey of a two-cycle motor, echoing flatly over the calm surface of the water.

Sergeant Mulcahey bent over the binnacle, peering forward, his plump, ruddy features burnished by the glow spilling up from the card.