Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

I swung my wrist and the leather bag filled with packed, sandy loam crashed down upon the desk light. The bulb crashed and the room was in darkness.

I jumped back toward the door, but didn’t make the mistake of opening it. The hall was lighted, and I would have been filled with lead before I had got over the threshold. However, I’d counted on that sleepy gunfighter who was supposed to be on guard, and I’d counted on the lawyer.

I figured right both times.

The lawyer fired at the chair in which I had been sitting, fired three times. Then there was sudden silence.

“Fool!” exclaimed the man with the eyes of ice.

There came running steps, and the door crashed open. The man with the two guns had burst into the room ready to go into action, and encountered a wall of inky darkness. The momentum of his rush carried him well past the sill, and I was standing by the door, ready, waiting, planning on just such a move.

As the man plunged in I gave him a quick thrust from behind, pushed him farther into the room, and, shielded behind his stumbling body, I darted through the door and down the hall. The lawyer fired again. The mere fact that he might kill his own guard meant nothing to him. He was desperate. What the bullet struck I didn’t find out. I was on my way. It didn’t strike me. It would have taken sheer luck for that bullet to have stopped me as I darted around that doorway with the stumbling guard blocking the view.

The man in the back was still asleep when I went past. I had handed him a pretty solid tap, and I figured he would be good for an hour or more. The dog barked again, but that was all. If the pistol shots had been heard in the neighborhood they had probably been taken for the backfires of an automobile exhaust, for the windows were all dark.

I chuckled to myself as I gained the street. The fat bird with the ice-cold eyes would have to change his headquarters again. Beyond doubt I was annoying him greatly. Also I had this to remember. He appreciated his danger now. It was either he or I. The city was too small for the both of us. One or the other was doomed.

However, there was one thing in my favor. He had gone too far with his jewel exhibit to back down now and that gave me a trail that might be followed.

My first problem was a place to hide out. Every rooming house, every hotel would be watched. Through some means he had set the police on my trail, that my California immunity meant nothing. If he could keep me in jail until after the looting of the jewel exhibit he would be satisfied. However, I didn’t intend to have either the police or the crooks get on my trail. I had money, and one can do much with money.

I purchased a furnished house from a real estate agency, a bungalow out of the way in a quiet neighborhood.

The police and the crooks expected me to try some disguise, to go to a hotel or rooming house; but they hardly expected I would go and buy myself a little bungalow in the respectable residential district. That slipped one over on them, and disposed of that part of the problem.

Shadowing Schwartz was different. They had tipped him off, and he was one cagey bird. I didn’t try to keep him in sight all the time, but tried to cut in on him at certain hours, particularly before he started his jewelry store canvass in the mornings, and after he had knocked off at night.

The more I saw of that jewelry exhibit the more puzzled I became. The newspapers started to play it up big. Day after day they featured the show, mentioned the social distinction of the persons who had received invitations to the opening, wrote of the manner in which Edith Jewett Kemper would be gowned, and handed out a blah-blah of the usual slush.

I sat snugly ensconced in the little bungalow and read the papers, read the frothings of the society editors concerning the importance of the coming show, and took my hat off to the man with the ice-cold eyes.

One thing puzzled me. The newspapers featured the elements of protection which the exhibit was taking to safeguard their patrons from loss, and it was good.

At night the gems were to be parked in a big safe which had been loaned from one of the prominent safe companies as an advertisement. This safe would be set in the middle of the floor, and at least five men would be constantly on duty watching the safe.

If the safe had been placed in one end of the room, so that only its doors were visible to the watchers, that would have been one thing. Putting it in the middle of the floor was another. I’m a handy man with boxes myself, but if there was any way of crashing into that lead-box with all those precautions, then I sure was a back number. I couldn’t figure one out, and that’s where I shine, figuring out ways of springing boxes that are seemingly impossible.

Schwartz was a hard baby to handle, and I didn’t get the line on him I wanted until the day before the exhibit was to open. That afternoon he slipped out to a downtown garage and inspected an armored truck. This truck was plastered with a sign that was painted on cloth and hung clean across both sides, JEWEL EXHIBIT ARMORED TRUCK. It was the real thing, too, that truck. Steel sides, bulletproof glass, railroad iron bumpers protecting it on all four sides, protected radiator and hood and solid rubber tires. It would take a stick of dynamite to faze that truck.

I didn’t dare stick around Schwartz or the garage. Just a quick once-over and I was on my way, stepping on the gas of a car I rented by the week. Automobile shadowing was all I dared to do with the whole gang laying for me, and watching Schwartz in the hope that they’d get track of me through him.

Time was getting short and I was stumped. I could tell that there was something big in the wind, but I couldn’t tell what. The head of that organization wasn’t going to monkey with any small stuff. The eight or ten thousand dollars that might be made from the exhibit wouldn’t prove interesting. What they intended to do was to get the cream of all the fancy jewelry in the city gathered in one place so they could make a regular haul. An organization the size of that wasn’t interested in small profits.

I went back to my bungalow and sat down at the table to do some figuring. For once in my life I was worried. I was going up against a game I couldn’t fathom. The other man was holding all the cards, and he was holding ’em close to his vest. My only hope of dominating him was to bust up this proposed gem robbery; and my only hope of being able to live or to get the papers for Helen was in dominating that man with the icy eyes.

I sat and thought, a pencil in my hand tracing aimless lines along a sheet of paper which I had spread before me, and then, suddenly, the answer came to me, came in a flash, and made me want to kick myself all up and down the main street of the city. It was so absurdly simple that there was nothing to it.

When a magician walks down through the audience, borrows a watch from the man in the center aisle, and then turns his back to walk up to the stage, he has an interval of several seconds during which his hands are concealed from the audience. He can switch that watch a hundred times over, and yet, when he appears on the stage, facing the audience, waving a gold watch in his hand and asking the spectators to keep their eyes fastened upon it, no one thinks of questioning the fact that it is the original watch he is holding; no one wonders if perhaps he has not already performed the trick, if the substitution has not already taken place.

It was the same way with the jewelry exhibit. The precautions for taking care of the gems after they had arrived were featured so elaborately that one always thought of the possibility of a robbery taking place then and at no other time. There was a two-fold reason for that. One reason was that it would tend to make the jewelry stores send but one clerk to act both as clerk and guard, and the other, and main reason, was that no one would pay too much attention to the armored truck that was going to take the jewels there. The words “armored truck” had a potent significance, a lulling sense of absolute security. An “armored truck” was like a bank vault. The very words suggested probity, safety, integrity, and yet, after all, an armored truck was merely an inanimate something. It was the driver of the armored truck who had the power of directing the car as an agency either for good or evil.