Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

Two men were hurrying out of the doorway, across the sidewalk to the pulsing car. O’Dare drew first, looked second to see if there was menace coming from that direction. There wasn’t, at least not on the surface. The one in advance was stocky, short, matched the car. Sleek like it, glossy, important-looking. Fleecy vicuna coat with big headlight pearl-buttons flapping open as he strove to get there before anything regrettable happened. Furious, apparently, that it so very nearly had. Or maybe for other reasons that O’Dare hadn’t divined as yet, having to do with his own happening along just when he had. At any rate — this sleek pudge — had his brakes off for a moment, spoke without thinking — as though O’Dare weren’t present.

“Never one of them!” he barked hoarsely. “Don’t you know any better than that? Never one of them!” He reached the running-board, swung a short right hook in under the low-slung roof of the car. The impact sounded as it hit the dim face lurking below. Whock! “There’s never anything that can’t be straightened out if you use your head!” he raged on. A dark line was bisecting the chin of the face he had hit.

It was now O’Dare’s turn. He saw no one else was coining out of the doorway. Neither of the two new arrivals made the slightest threat toward him. The second man, less conspicuously-dressed than the shorter one, stayed in the background, lighting a cigarette with four hands — the way they shook he seemed to have at least that many. But O’Dare wasn’t forgetting that surreptitious gleam of metal behind the windshield, that bored knob atop the door. “Put up your hands!” he rasped into the car. “Step out here where I can get a look at you, and identify yourself! What was that you had sighted on me just now when I was coming up? Where is it?” His own gun was in the open now; not exactly pointed, but just there, ready.

The man in the vicuna coat spoke, as though that were a short-cut out of an unpleasant misunderstanding. “He’s my driver, brother, that’s all,” he explained blandly. “His name is Emmons, we call him Detroit because he comes from—”

O’Dare cut him short like a knife with: “I didn’t ask you, I asked him!” The man had stepped out, palms up like somebody carrying a cafeteria-tray. The blood down the cleft of his chin had widened but was drying. He glanced at Vicuna-Coat quizzically, as though asking: “Why don’t you stop this cop’s foolishness?”

Vicuna-Coat seemed to think it was about time to. “I’m Benny Benuto,” he said softly, and waited for that to get its work in.

It didn’t seem to. O’Dare didn’t even flick his eyes over at him, kept them on the driver. “Where is it?” he growled. He missed seeing the brief pantomime. The second man gave Benuto a brief, inquiring look, hand idly fingering the lapel of his coat within grabbing distance of his own left shoulder. The look might have meant: “Want me to give it to him? He’s holding us up.” Benuto answered with a negative shake of the head, a contemptuous curl of the lip, as though: “What, this harness cop? Leave him to me!”

He said aloud to O’Dare, “You don’t seem to understand, brother. I said I’m Benny Benuto.”

Again O’Dare didn’t hear, apparently. The driver had handed over the gun, a brutal-looking thing all steel and a yard wide. O’Dare pocketed it. “License?” he snapped.

Benuto cut in reassuringly, “He’s got one, brother. I wouldn’t let him carry it if he—”

“He better have!”

He did. O’Dare scanned it by the light of the dash, which he had ordered cut on. All Jake, nothing phony about it. He jabbed it back to him reluctantly.

Benuto was soaping him, “You see, he’s a sort of bodyguard of mine as well as driver; a little fidgety like all such guys are. Must have mistook you for some kind of footpad in the dark and—”

O’Dare at long last gave him his undivided attention. If he’d placed him by now, you wouldn’t have known it by any change in his voice or manner, any creeping-in of deference. “The corner-light was on me the whole way up,” he said tersely. “He saw me at the call-box even before that! I take it you don’t live here, Mr. Benuto? You can explain your presence in this building at this hour, can you?”

Benuto seemed to be trying hard to control himself. “Would you mind giving me your name, officer?”

“Answer my question!” O’Dare yelled loudly in his face. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re the biggest big-shot in town!”

“Oh, then you do know who I am.” Benuto smiled a little dangerously. “That should make it much simpler. Sure, glad to answer your question, Officer 4432.” He repeated the numerals on O’Dare’s shield aloud. The other man in the background was scribbling them down. “I just dropped in to visit an old friend. Well, I found out he doesn’t live here any more—”

O’Dare’s eyes involuntarily went up the face of the house. It was changing right while he looked. A whole half-floor went suddenly orange, or rather the windows did. A minute later the other half followed suit. Then the one below. It was waking up from top to bottom. One of the sashes went up and a frightened-looking young woman peered down at the group by the car. She seemed to be about to say something, when abruptly a man standing behind her in the room clasped his hand to her mouth, pulled her in again. His voice carried down to the sidewalk just before he slapped the sash down again: “Stay out of it! What’s matter wit’ yuh? Wanna get in trouble?”

A woman suddenly appeared in the street-doorway, distracted, dazed, staggering, clad only in her night-dress, blood down the front of it. “Johnny!” she was groaning, hands pressed to her forehead. “Johnny! What’ve they done to you?”

O’Dare took a step toward her. A steely-grip suddenly shot out, held him fast by the upper arm. “I wanna talk to you!” All the suavity was gone from Benuto. He meant business.

The woman had sat down on the top doorstep just as she was, huddled there clasping her knees, rocking back and forth like some lost soul. “Johnny! I knew this would happen to you! You wouldn’t listen to me! Johnny!”

Benuto’s voice was a harsh whisper in his ear. “Now, before you get any ideas in your head, listen to me, brother! Use the old bean. We heard some trouble going on in one of the flats up there — somebody getting his from somebody. That’s why we got out in a hurry. We didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I still don’t — do you get me? And here’s how much I don’t — step down this way.” He led O’Dare a step or two to the rear of the car, just out of the line of vision of his two henchmen. “Tact” is what Benny Benuto would have called that if asked for a definition.

Danny O’Dare had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. He saw five of them now, as they went into his uniform-pocket one by one. Benuto took good care that he should, let each one focus without blurring, yet without being too blatant about it. “Just a token of good-will,” he said. “You know where you can find me, drop around tomorrow or next day, and I’ll match them for you. All you gotta do is just forget I happened to drop around here at the same time this was happening. Everybody else is getting theirs. Get yours, brother. Be up-to-date. Your looey is a pretty good pal of mine. Maybe I can do you some good, 4432.”

He thought of Molly and the kid they were expecting, for the second time that night. What a lot of difference ten-grand can make in this world! Get his, everybody else was— Through the blur of his thoughts he heard himself saying: “There’s blood on your shirtfront, Benuto. There’s blood on that other guy’s hand too, I saw it when he lit a butt—”