Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

The driver, meek as a lamb, took off his brake, glided away without a word.

“What’s new?” O’Dare asked when they were alone.

Keefer jerked his head despondently after the disappearing taillight. “That’s all I ever get. And I hadda get somebody’s pet cat out of a flue for them around at 40 Spring awhile ago. I’d almost be willing to trade places with either of those guys.” Which wasn’t exactly true, and wasn’t meant to be taken as such. O’Dare understood. Blowing off steam, they called it.

“Well, be good, Danny — see you t’morra.”

“Yep.” The footfalls died away. The night-silence descended, unbroken blocks of it, an occasional machine in the distance, a trolley taking a curve in High-C, only adding emphasis to it. The quiet of a sleeping city, that for complete suspension beats any country-quiet hollow.

Danny O’Dare was on duty.

He started down Lincoln, in and out of the store-entryways, testing the locks, peering through the glass fronts. He got to the other end of his beat, turned right, followed that street. A window was thrown up high above him, a window that showed black directly over one that showed orange. A lady of uncertain years thrust her head out, exclaimed with shattering audibility: “There’s one now! Officer, officer — will you come up here please?”

He knew right away it wasn’t going to be important; a cop can tell about those things — sometimes. She wasn’t frightened, just sore. “What’s the trouble, lady?”

“I want those people under me arrested! They keep playing their radio until all hours of the night. It’s an outrage!”

“Sh, quiet, lady!” O’Dare reminded her. “You’re making more noise than any radio yourself right this minute.”

He sighed, went into the building, climbed two flights of stairs, knocked on a door. You could hardly hear it, she probably had a grudge. He liked the people at a glance, screwed up the side of his face good-naturedly. “Just tone it down a little,” he advised. They offered him a drink. “I’ll hold you to that when I’m off duty,” he grinned, went down to the street again. A clock chimed the half-hour and he rang in from the call-box at the next intersection. “O’Dare, 25th and Main, nothing to report.”

And then right away, as though just to give him the lie, there was.

It didn’t seem like anything at first glance, anything at all. Just a car parked half-way down one of the side-streets, lights out. For all the life it showed, it might have been there all night. No violation in that. It wasn’t on the main thoroughfare, wasn’t near a hydrant or anything. If its owner lived in that building, he had a perfect right to leave it out all night instead of bedding it at a garage.

But, somehow, it didn’t blend with its surroundings, with the building it was standing in front of, with the neighborhood as a whole. Even in the dimness, it was too high-class, too expensive a job, to look right hanging around here any length of time. It would have been more in keeping with Heinie Muller’s beat, over around Rivercrest Heights.

I’m not trying to make a swami out of Danny O’Dare, but it’s a fact that a cop has a definite instinct about that sort of thing, maybe even without realizing it. Just as he had known that that lady-crank had had nothing worth hearing to say to him out of the window just now, something about this car struck him as not being quite as guileless as it let on to be.

He had been in full sight of it when he rang the House just now from the corner. Had only spotted it as he finished closing the callbox. Some sort of a tension got to him from it, as he looked down toward it from where he was. As though somebody, either in it or nearby, were holding their breath, metaphorically speaking, waiting to see what his next move would be.

He continued on the way he’d been heading, crossed the mouth of the side-street and passed from view behind the opposite corner. Then he stopped, got up close to it, and stuck about half of one eye out beyond the building-line. He could have been dead wrong. It could have belonged to a swell who had a wren tucked away in this part of town. Its presence could have been explained by any one of a half-a-dozen things that were none of Danny O’Dare’s business. Then, while he hinged like that, a portion of a doorway-shadow detached itself and came further out into the open, became the outline of a man who had been watching O’Dare, himself, from there — and now wanted to make sure he had gone! O’Dare drew that tiny sliver of his head back, paying him out a little more rope as it were.

The silhouette went over to the car; a brief, almost unnoticeable blat of its horn sounded. Pip! like that. Not just a signal of impatience, too short and quick for that — a warning signal, for somebody unseen within that building.

It was O’Dare’s meat now. He had been the cause of that warning, and anyone that’s afraid of a cop must have some reason for being afraid of a cop.

The set-up was a particularly bad one; he realized that as he breasted the corner, came into full sight, and headed down on that car and its look-out. An ordinary man would have thought twice about bucking it, and then not bucked it. Which is why cops wear blue uniforms to distinguish them from ordinary men. He and the car and the street-light across the way formed a triangle. As he advanced, the street-light fell behind him. He had half a block to cover as a looming silhouette, silver radiance behind him, a target that a blind-man could hit. They — the car and its watchers — stayed safely shrouded in gloom. They could stop him long before he got there and he couldn’t do a thing about it, wasn’t even entitled to fire first until he was given the provocation. Tension had switched over to him now, had hold of every nerve. He thought of Molly, waiting at home, alone, helpless, going to present him with a Danny O’Dare Junior one of these fine days real soon now. Thought, but that was all. He didn’t even try to protect himself by feigning casualness as he bore down. He wasn’t using his beat-gait, was coming on at the quick pace of aroused suspicions.

Half-way to it now. The look-out had gotten in the car long ago, when he first revealed himself around the corner. But the door stayed invitingly open — like an invitation to sudden death. Metal glinted momentarily behind the glass above the dash, highlighted by the rays of the street-light far behind O’Dare. You couldn’t even see the guy’s face, just that warning glint of deadly weapon.

O’Dare had partially unlimbered himself, though the act was begging for the death-flash that was to come, closed in with his hand to his hip-bone. The odds, climbing as high against him as they could possibly have gone, now suddenly began to drop down again in his favor. He was in close now where he could do some damage himself; the guy had waited too long to drop him.

The car’s gleaming bumper flashed past behind him, he was up to the door. The guy’s face came into focus — and a little round knob pierced by a hole sighted over the top of that door into the middle of O’Dare’s stomach. He was going to take him the hard way.

“Can it, Detroit!” a commanding voice cried warningly from the doorway, “I’ll handle it, you jerk!”

The round knob with the black hole vanished, the door-top was just a straight line as though it had never been there. The glimmer of white face under the car-ceiling went “S-s-s!” through puckered lips and pinched nostrils like something letting off steam through a safety-valve. That’s very bad for a killer’s nerves, to be at firing-point and then be checked abruptly. Fiction-writers like to say they haven’t any. It’s really just the other way around; they’re all nerves. O’Dare whirled, careless of whether he got it in the back or not.