Роберт Колби - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972

One thing about Sheriff Tomlin, his reflexes were good. As Bernie broke away at a dead run, the sheriff tackled him and brought him down not twenty yards away.

They found the tattoo rolled up in Bernie’s tobacco pouch, with tobacco shreds stuck to it.

The sheriff showed me the tattoo. At first glance it appeared to be a beautifully detailed pastoral scene, a clutch of farm buildings, a grove of trees and a pasture with grazing animals. Closer inspection disclosed faint figures etched in. They could only be longitude and latitude markings. Beside one tiny tree was an x, so small as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

I returned it to Sheriff Tomlin. “I hope you find the loot.”

“We’ll find it, never fear,” he said grimly.

I stood and watched them take a stubbornly silent Bernie away, the deputies towing him along between them up the deserted midway. It appeared everyone was bedded down now, but I knew this wasn’t true. They were watching from various points. One carnie — I doubted I would ever know which one — had turned on the lights in the House of Mirrors so I would find Vernon’s body. They would never have told the fuzz, but they wanted me to know.

Now, as the sounds of the siren died away in the distance, the midway was silent and peaceful, at long last buttoned up for the night. I sighed and started up the midway to the office wagon. I knew Tex Montana would be waiting for my report.

I learned later that Bernie finally confessed to both murders and was convicted.

When we played the Midfork Fair a few weeks later, I asked around. They had found the bank loot buried at the base of a tree on a farm a few miles outside of town, exactly where the tattoo had indicated.

The natural inclination of Homo sapiens, one might note, is remarkably similar, whatever his social stratum.

The three of US entered the brightly lighted barroom a few seconds apart, with me the last one through the door. As I stepped from the street, I pulled a stocking mask down to cover my face and took the sawed-off shotgun from beneath my topcoat. I just stood there, cradling the shotgun in my arms. I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t have to.

The room was crowded, with customers filling all the seats along the mahogany bar and most of the tables and booths. It was only seconds before a red-faced fat man noticed me and nudged the brassy redhead next to him. The news crossed the room silently, like ripples on water.

When everyone’s eyes were on me, Pete and Rocky went into action. They had walked barefaced and unnoticed through the crowd until they flanked the door to the card room. Now they pulled down their own masks and brought out their shotguns.

All conversation had stopped. Pete spoke in a normal tone, but it cracked across the large room like a lightning bolt and the heads swung to face him. “Mr. Larson,” he said politely, addressing the bar owner who was seated on a high stool where he could supervise the cash register and his bartenders. “Push the buzzer. Unlock this door.”

This had promised to be a profitable caper and it was going well. There was a high-stakes poker game going full blast in that back room with only an electric latch separating us from the money. Since the players were almost always made up of big-shot politicians and racket guys, we didn’t expect the holdup to be reported in any formal way. No one would want the kind of publicity a police report would bring.

Larson tried to stall, so Pete raised his weapon and spoke over the top of it. “Mister, if you don’t push that buzzer, I’m going to blow you all over the back bar.”

Larson released the latch, and Rocky opened the door and charged through the opening with Pete on his heels. There was a rumble of voices from the back room and then silence. I stayed where I was so no one would get the idea of leaving before the show was over.

That’s when I spotted Blacky Tolger. He was sitting at the end of the bar nearest to me, and from the set of his narrow shoulders I could tell he was wishing he were somewhere else. We’d been in the state prison together five years before and, though we’d never been close, I knew him.

Prison is full of creeps. Only one or two men in a hundred are worth a damn. The rest are all informers or worse. It’s not uncommon for cellmates to knife one another over something petty like a pack of cigarettes, or for the inmate nurses in the hospital to sell the victims their medicine. The lowest animals in prison are the merchants and informers, but Blacky Tolger was neither. He had never sold anything he had stolen from the officials, had never talked about another man to the guards, and had a solid reputation as a good convict. He had stood out like a ten-carat diamond in a refuse pile.

I took a couple of steps to my right. From there I could still cover the entrance, but I could speak to Tolger, too. “Hey, Blacky,” I said, speaking low. His head jerked up and he looked at me apprehensively in the mirror behind the bar. “You got a problem?”

He licked his lips and nodded. “I’m on paper,” he said.

That was just another way of saying he was on parole, and it explained his nervousness. Parolees aren’t allowed in bars, not in this state. If the wrong person saw him there, and the robbery was sure to get people looked at, the glass of beer he had in front of him could cause him to be sent back behind the walls.

Parole is almost always a reward given to the first offenders and creeps. If a man is an informer and displays a few other traits no sane person would want a neighbor to have, he invariably receives a parole. I was pleased to see that at least one regular guy had won an early release, and I wanted to help him stay out.

“Okay,” I said, motioning toward the door with the barrel of the shotgun. “Beat it while you can.” Blacky might not have remembered me even without the mask, but with it I was sure he didn’t recognize me.

“Thanks, fella,” he said, slipping from the stool. He disappeared through the entrance a few seconds before my partners emerged from the back room.

Rocky led the way, knocking people out of his path as he came. He had someone’s black trousers over his arm. The legs had been tied with shoelaces to form twin sacks for the loot. Pete brought up the rear, walking backward and swinging his weapon in short arcs. As they passed me, they turned their backs to the barroom and tore off their masks. Then they were through the entrance and gone into the night.

I remained planted where I was, covering their retreat, until I heard the sound of an automobile horn-two long blasts and a short tap. Then I backed through the doorway and threw myself to one side as the door closed. I was just fast enough. Six bullets ripped through the center of the door from the inside at about the level of my waist. If I hadn’t jumped out of the way, I’d have been cut down.

I went back to the door and threw it open. The crowd was surging toward me, led by a weasel-faced man with a revolver in his hand. The cylinder was swung out. He’d already ejected his spent shells and was fumbling fresh loads into the chambers with his left hand as he came. The people around him saw me at once and stopped dead in their tracks, but he must have been looking at his pistol because he took another three strides before sliding to a halt.

I brought up the shotgun and laid it on its side, pulling both triggers. One charge caught him in the chest, throwing him backward with his arms wide, while the other blast tinned his face into hamburger.

This time I didn’t worry about pursuit. I stepped out into the night and took my time walking to the car.

“Did you waste someone?” Rocky wanted to know as Pete put the car in motion.