Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

When I got up to the crescent drive around in front of the house I couldn’t see a spark of light in any of the rooms. The brass knocker I used made a ludicrously tiny noise against the artillery overhead. After a minute I circled around the side, past a long screened porch, toward the garage. No sign of life. Except something that jumped my pulse beat in a rush!

In a lucky flash of lightning, two huge black dogs showed up like those single frames that are frozen on a screen when the projector is stopped. They were bounding in midair, racing toward me. Only fifty feet away. Pinschers. Doberman pinschers. The only kind of canine that’s absolutely forbidden in the hotel, because they’re so ferocious.

I’ve read all that mahooly about dogs never harming you, if you stand still and aren’t afraid of them. It did me no good whatsoever. If those galloping hellions could tell by a sense of smell whether a person was scared, I was a gone goose.

I made a leap for that screened porch. The door wasn’t hooked or locked. I made it inside by the thickness of my pants seat. The dogs leaped against the door. Their weight sagged the screen so I thought they’d come right through at me.

They were ugly animals. They weren’t playing at being ferocious. Their snarly growling was ample warning to stay where they couldn’t get at me.

If there was anyone in the Millet house, it seemed impossible for them not to hear the uproar those pinschers were making. True, it was coming down in buckets, water spouting off the roof like hydrants. Also, it was dark as a cave; the lightning had pretty well quit; it settled down to rain in a serious way.

I know — every well-equipped Private I is able to whip out a flashlight at a moment like that. I regretted my lack of foresight. I had two packs of paper matches and my lighter.

I knocked on the doors opening off the porch. Not the slightest stir.

I tapped on the glass with my lighter. Still nothing. Those damned dogs were ripping the screen door with their claws.

I tried the French doors. Locked. One of the dogs got his head and forepaws through the wire, set up a demoniac racket at not being able to get at me. But it wouldn’t be long.

Those French doors have two latch handles. I remembered an old trick from my schooldays; sometimes if I pulled both handles together, the doors would give enough to open, even when locked. I gave a good healthy tug. Bingo!

Then I pulled the door wide, snapped on my lighter to get a glimpse of the room inside. What I got a glimpse of was the moving muzzle of a shotgun swiveling toward me about five feet away!

No champion base stealer ever did a fancier fadeaway dive. I hadn’t hit the floor when the room blew up with a blast that made thunder sound like a bowling alley a block away.

When I hit the floor I went over in a shoulder roll, sure I was hit. The side of my face felt as if somebody’d patted it with a red-hot waffle iron.

The muzzle flare blinded me, but I swung a leg to kick up at the shotgun. I had to gamble it wasn’t a pump gun with half a dozen more shells ready to blow me apart.

A sliver of light showed at the bottom of the chair. I’d forgotten the lighter, in my dive. Somehow the flame was still burning, more than it usually did when I needed it. It had the slipcover of a chair on fire. That was nokay. I f the shotgunner got light enough to aim, I was finished.

I made an ungraceful belly-down lunge, caught an ankle. A bare, slim ankle I could get a grip on. Yair. A girl.

It may have showed a deplorable lack of savoir-faire for me to wrestle around with a girl in a nightgown, but my small stock of savoir-faire was at an all time low. She clawed. I butted. She kneed me. I got a body scissors on her, pinned her beneath me.

Click! The lights went on.

Across the room a small boy, about seven, in blue pajamas, held a hatchet in one hand and kept his other on the light switch.

“You let Nikky alone, you! Or I’ll kill you!”

Misplaced humor’s a common reaction to sudden danger. Stick-up victims often get plugged for wisecracking at gunmen. Something like that must have hit me. I had to snigger at the tousle-haired kid with the tomahawk and the terrified, determined eyes.

“All you need’s a fire helmet, Chief. You got your ax with you, I see. How ’bout puttin’ out that blaze? Huh?”

“You get off Nikky.” He lifted the hatchet threateningly.

“Might have a point there, son.” I did shift my position; with bright lights on it was downright embarrassing, the way Nikky’s nightgown’d been torn. Especially since another woman, a few years older than Nikky, clomped hurriedly downstairs in dressing-gown and mules to seize the boy, gasp at the burning chair, and cry out to Nikky;

“Hold him, while I phone the police!”

Nikky said calmly, “Please don’t, Miss Ellen. Just open the door.”

Miss Ellen ran.

I let go of the tornado beneath me, made a grab for the gun. It was a pump gun. I broke it, fast, to make sure there were more shells in it.

The dogs raced into the hall.

“Call ’em off,” I stepped behind a wingback chair, “or I’ll kill ’em off.”

They bounded into the room.

“Don’t you shoot my dogs,” the boy shouted in a frenzy. “Down, Castor! Down! Pollux!”

Miss Ellen hollered, too, when she saw I was ready to use the gun. “Stop it, Pollux! Pollux!”

It was Nikky who sprang up, flung an arm around the neck of the biggest animal, flailed at the other one with her fist.

It took a couple of minutes to get them quieted enough to lie down in front of the Dutch-tiled mantel. Another five to slap out the sparks in the smoldering slipcover, exchange guarded apologies all around.

Nikky wouldn’t have shot at me except she thought I was someone else. They’d been afraid of a visit from Al Gowriss ever since Nikky’d arrived at noon.

“They” were Miss Ellen — Mrs. Ellen Marino, actually, she was Tildy’s widowed sister, Tony’s mother — Tousle Hair was Tony, of course. He was sorry he’d offered to chop my head off, but he’d thought I was hurting Nikky. Since he was the only man in the family he’d tried to protect her.

There were only the three of them in the big house. And the pinschers, of course. Tildy wasn’t home yet, though she was expected any time. The gardener and groom were down at the lodge. The cook lived at the other end of the farm.

I said I wouldn’t have entered the house if the pinschers hadn’t driven me to it. I hoped I hadn’t injured Miss Narian. No? Good. Fortunate none of her shots drilled me, though the powder grains in my face did sting.

My errand? The same as that which had taken me to Little Syria; to help a tired old waiter who’d been arrested for something he hadn’t done.

Nikky slipped out, whistled to the pinschers. They eyed me balefully as they slunk to the kitchen. There was a sound of spoon scraping a pan. She placated them for not having had a morsel of house officer.

I admired the cherry drop-leafs, the antique break-front, the white woodwork, the old-fashioned wallpaper, while Mrs. Marino chivvied Tony upstairs.

“But I don’t want to go to bed, Mamma.” The dimple in his chin deepened as he pouted. “If Aunt Tildy’s coming, I want to stay up.”

I told him, “She won’t be here until morning, son, I promise you.” Might be quite a bit later than that, I told myself.

He stamped upstairs finally, hollering questions at me every third step. “When’d Aunt Tildy leave New York?”

“Was that bad man still bothering her?”

“Had I seen the Stack O’ Jack show last night?”