Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“Take a good look at this kid, cops!” Dude yelled. “I’m walking out of here, and the kid with me. My gun will be in her side, and the first wrong move anyone makes — she gets it!”

Now I was halfway to the rifle lying behind Garrity on the graveled tar paper.

“Better give up, Garrity,” said the loud-speaker. “You’ll never make it out of this trap.”

At that moment the short-wave radio on the roof sounded off. “Stall him along,” came Warren Day’s voice. “Moon’s in there somewhere.”

Dude Garrity whirled, and at the same moment I stopped creeping and started charging. Without releasing his grip on the girl, he shot his right hand under his arm.

I reached him just as his hammerless revolver appeared. Before he could swing the muzzle to bear on me, the barrel of my automatic cracked the back of his hand, and his gun skittered across the roof.

Dude swept his left arm forward, flinging the little girl head first into my stomach. We went down in a tangle, and by the time I pushed her out of my lap and rolled clear, Dude had the rifle and was swinging the muzzle toward me.

Possibly there are pistol shots who can place a bullet exactly where they want it while performing gymnastics, but I don’t happen to be one of them. In the back of my mind was the intention to shoot Garrity through the arm and make him drop his rifle, but as I rolled away from the child, his form was nothing to me but a large blur.

I pressed the trigger of my automatic before I stopped rolling, firing blindly at the blur. A fraction of a second later the rifle cracked, and a small hole appeared in the tar paper between me and the child.

Dude Garrity bent over slowly, then just as slowly began to straighten again. A red stain appeared in the center of his dirty white coat. His long, horsy face set in concentration as he forced the drooping rifle barrel up. Now I was seated, and could choose my target with more discrimination. I put a second slug through his right shoulder, and he spun completely around, dropped the rifle, and sat down with a thump.

He stared at me from eyes vacant with shock. His mouth drooped open, and red froth bubbled from one corner. Getting to my feet, I stood over him.

“Who hired you to bump Vance Logan, Dude?”

One hand supported him in his seated position, while the other lay limply in his lap. His voice was one wheeze ahead of a death rattle when he spoke.

“You’re a bright boy, chum. Figure it out.”

Then he died sitting up.

I turned to the little girl, who had stood up and was lifting first one bare foot and then the other from the hot roof. She was sobbing steadily.

“Take it easy, honey,” I said. “He can’t hurt you any more.” Then I raised my voice and yelled, “Hey, cops!”

“Better give up!” boomed back the loud-speaker.

“It’s Moon!” I yelled. “Come on in and sort out the bodies.”

Instead of asking if I was all right, the first words the inspector spoke to me were, “The idea was to take at least one of them alive! I ought to book you for destroying evidence.”

“I would have taken Garrity alive if you hadn’t shot off your face into that walkie-talkie,” I snapped back at him.

The little girl turned out to be named Janet Mueller, and she was the daughter of the woman I had seen hiding under the kitchen table downstairs. The other tenants, two married couples and a total of seven children, we eventually found cowering in the coalbin.

The upper right-hand flat proved to be the gunmen’s hide-out. I went through it with Warren Day, and I have never seen so much armament outside of a government arsenal. Including the guns they had been using, the pair had possessed twelve pistols, two rifles, three carbines, a submachine gun, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. It took three cops just to carry out the ammunition. We also found gas masks and another short-wave radio.

It was at this point I remembered George Chester.

“He’s at the hospital,” Day said. “Had a slight heart attack just before the last barrage started.”

Hannegan stuck his head in the door, and the inspector asked, “You phone the hospital?”

“Yes, sir,” Hannegan said. “He’s okay, but he’s staying overnight.”

Then I started to get mad. “The only reason I came in this hole was to keep the chief out of trouble,” I yelled. “And all the time he was enjoying himself a heart attack!”

“Take it easy,” Day told me. “There are some rewards on these guys, and I’ll see that you get half.”

“And I,” I informed him, “will see that I get the other half.”

We were getting ready to leave when the morgue wagon arrived. As attendants were hauling two long wicker baskets from its rear door, I walked into the lower front room for a final look at Harry Sommerfield.

He no longer looked tough. He seemed smaller, somehow, curiously shrunken, as though even in death he was cowering from his hunters. The barrel of the Tommy gun lay across his left leg, and his bandaged right arm had slipped from its sling and thrust out from his body in a stiff right angle. I noted the tightly wound gauze ran from his shoulder to a point midway between his elbow and wrist, and seemed to cover a splint which held the arm at a rigid right angle, an observation which led me to the conclusion my shot during our previous gun fight had broken the bone.

Then two men came into the room and casually dumped his body into a wicker basket.

It was nearly nine and the sun was beginning to set when we got back to headquarters. Warren Day collapsed behind his desk, looked at Hannegan as though surprised to see him still with us, and said, “Go on home, Lieutenant.”

But as Hannegan turned to leave, Day changed his mind. “Find out what developments there are on the Malone woman first.”

In a few minutes Hannegan was back with a report that Kate’s taxi had been traced, and as the inspector had guessed, she had taken the ferry. Illinois police had been asked to pick her up, but so far had reported nothing.

“All right, Lieutenant,” Day said tiredly. “Now you can go home.”

He sat looking at me glumly for a few moments after Hannegan departed. “Looks like all we got left is the suicide note,” he said finally. “Give the professor a ring.”

In the phone book I found Professor Quisby’s number and dialed it. A woman answered.

“Professor Quisby, please,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but he’s out for the evening. Is this Mr. Moon?”

I told her it was.

“I’m Professor Quisby’s sister,” she said. “He expected you to call earlier. He had a faculty meeting at eight-thirty. He asked you to leave a number and he’ll phone in the morning.”

I gave her my apartment phone number.

After I hung up, the inspector and I employed a few minutes examining each other discouragedly.

“I don’t understand you,” he said suddenly. “You know how to shoot. Why’d you have to knock both those guys off?”

“It happened too fast,” I said shortly.

“But you managed to put a bullet in Garrity’s arm. Couldn’t you leave it at that?”

“That was the second one,” I said. “The first one did the damage.”

“You should have put the first one there,” he said insistently. “Apparently you know how, because Sommerfield had a bullet in his arm, too, from your first encounter.”

“Next time there’s a building full of killers, you can go in,” I said irritably. “As a matter of fact during our original clash, I didn’t aim at Harry’s arm. I meant to puncture his head, not just give him a flesh wound.”

“It was more than a flesh wound by the looks of the bandage,” Day said.

I nodded. “That kind of surprised me. I was almost sure at the time it was a minor wound, because he managed to drive the car away.” Then a thought struck me, and I sat up straight. “Listen, I just had a wild idea.”