Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Backward Mule

“Sure.”

There were quick steps on the thin carpet behind the door, then the door opened.

Clane, lowering his shoulder, charged against the door.

The occupant of the cabin was not caught entirely by surprise. He spun back, somewhat off balance for a moment, but quickly caught himself, and Clane found he was looking into a round black hole at the business end of a .38 caliber revolver. Back of the weapon were eyes that were hard with desperation and a species of insane defiance. The man circled, keeping behind the gun, kicked the door shut.

“You’re Edward Harold,” Clane said. “I’m Terry Clane, you may have heard of me.”

“So you’re back.”

“I’m back.”

“How did you trace me here?”

“The same way that the police did,” Clane said, “only I had to leave a back trail.”

“What do you mean, the police did?”

“Just what I say. Take a look out through that curtain and you’ll find the sheriff’s car blocking the road out. He’s probably waiting for an automobile driven by Inspector Malloy of the San Francisco Homicide Squad to make a rendezvous with him.”

“I see. You want me to look out the window so you can jump me.”

Clane said, “What I want you to do is to walk out and give yourself up.”

Harold’s laugh was derisive.

Clane said, “I have a theory on this thing. I think I can help you but I can’t do a thing if you don’t surrender.”

“I know. You want me to surrender. You’d like to have me out of the way. You came back from China at a very opportune time, at a very opportune time, didn’t you? You walked out on Cynthia and now you’d like to have her back. For a while I was in the way, then you heard...”

“Don’t be foolish,” Clane said.

“I’m not being foolish, I’m just telling you facts. If you’re telling the truth and there’s a sheriff’s car out there, I’m not going out of here alive. I’ll fight it out right here. I’ve got the guns and the ammunition. Personally, I think you’re lying to me.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“All right, I’m going to go out feet first and you’re going out the same way. Don’t kid yourself, Clane. The minute the first shot is fired, I’m going to see that you get a dose of lead poisoning.”

Clane said, “You fool, I think you stand a chance. If...”

There were hard pounding steps on the porch, knuckles banged on the door. “Open up,” a gruff voice said.

Harold motioned Clane to silence as he tiptoed stealthily back toward a corner.

“Come on, Harold,” the voice said, “the jig is up. This is the sheriff. I’m taking you into custody as an escapee.”

Harold said nothing.

“Come on, don’t be a fool. We’ve got the place surrounded,” a new voice said, the voice of Inspector James Malloy of San Francisco.

“Come and get me,” Harold shouted as the doorknob rattled and the door bent under the weight of a burly shoulder. “Stay away from that door if you value your life. I’m going to start putting lead through it.”

There was that in his voice that carried conviction. There was a sound of motion outside the door, then sudden silence.

Seconds became minutes. Nothing from the outside disturbed the calm tranquillity of the afternoon. Inside the shabby cabin the curtains were drawn. The afternoon sunlight which turned the curtains into oblongs of gold beat against the western side of the flimsy board cabin and warmed the close air in the place until it seemed stifling.

The cabin contained the usual cheap furniture: an iron bedstead with a thin mattress, a worn carpet, a cheap dressing table, a dark-finished pine rocking chair, two cane-bottomed straight-backed chairs, a cement shower with a faucet which wouldn’t quite shut off.

In the tense, hot silence of the cabin, Clane could hear the drip, drip, drip of water from the leaky shower and the lazy buzz of a big fly which circled around the room, striking against the warmth of the window shades at intervals in an attempet to follow the source of light to a means of egress.

Clane noticed the tenseness of the skin over Harold’s knuckles, saw the sheen of small beads of perspiration across the skin of his forehead.

Clane said evenly, “If you surrender, you stand a chance. The minute you pull the trigger on that gun for the first shot, you’ve sealed your fate. That’s assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder. It’s resisting an officer. They’ll throw the book at you even if you could fight free on the other charge.”

Harold said grimly, his eyes still on the door, “Don’t kid yourself, the first shot isn’t going to be any assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder. It’s going to be a dead-center shot right in the middle of your yellow guts.”

Clane said, “Whoever engineered your escape wasn’t doing you a favor. It was putting your neck in a noose.”

“Keep talking,” Harold said. “If you can talk your way out of this, you’ll be a world’s champion. You...”

A slight scraping sound from the front porch caused him to jerk the gun half toward the door.

Abruptly and without warning the glass of the window crashed explosively. The window shade billowed inward from the force of a solid body which had been hurled through the glass, then snapped upward as the impact released the catch which was holding the shade down.

A tear-gas bomb from which the plug had been pulled rolled free of the broken glass; from the nozzle came a hissing sound as the gas spewed out into the room.

“Don’t reach for it,” Clane yelled as Harold started forward. “They’ll be waiting to machine-gun you.”

The first whiff of the tear gas stung Clane’s nostrils. He saw Harold brace himself for a leap to grab the tear-gas bomb and throw it back out through the window.

At that moment Clane went forward in a football tackle.

He felt his shoulders smash against Harold’s body, heard the rattle of a sub-machine-gun, then a voice yelling, “Hold everything.”

Clane’s eyes and nostrils caught a full undiluted whiff of the tear gas and he went blind, the tears streaming down his face but his hands were busy getting a wrestler’s lock on Harold’s arms.

They were threshing blindly about the floor, Clane holding on with dogged persistence, trying to get a scissors hold on Harold’s legs, Harold kicking and pummeling with his knees, trying to break free.

Clane could hear the sound of Harold’s labored breathing, felt the cold perspiration of Harold’s skin against his cheek, heard the hissing of the tear gas; and then suddenly Harold’s arms were jerked back. The struggling ceased.

From the vague realm of space above him, which he could not see because of his blinded eyes, Clane heard Inspector Jim Malloy’s voice saying in shocked surprise, “Well, I’ll be damned! It’s Terry Clane!”

Clane felt the bite of handcuffs on his wrists. He was guided to a chair out in the open air away from the sting of the tear gas.

Jim Malloy did the talking. “You certainly do get around, Mr. Clane. You certainly do get around.”

“I was trying to get Edward Harold to surrender to the police.”

“And we got here just in time to upset your plans.”

“That’s right.”

“Now ain’t that too bad?” Malloy said sympathetically. “That’s just a lousy, rotten break, because the way It’s going to look to the D.A. is that you had been hiding Harold all along. First you get down to the warehouse where he’s hiding, and then blessed if you don’t take right off in an automobile and pick him up in the auto camp where he’s hiding. I suppose you’d call it sort of an intuition. Maybe you’re like a bird dog and can just locate him by scent.”