he could see that the far door was gone. Three or four more paces, and he could see something blanket-wrapped in back. Even as this registered, his eyes were finding the awkward turtle-trail scrabbled away from the car. Digging knees and elbows, which meant…
He was spinning and dropping into his firing crouch, but Tokzek had already come up from behind the dune a dozen feet away with the big. 44 revolver speaking at Laverty’s chest. Its voice was merely a series of clicks. The hammer was falling on empty chambers.
With a groan of terror, Tokzek fled into darkness. He made two paces before Dan Laverty shot him in the spine. He went down in a sudden heap, writhing and screaming, as Laverty turned back toward the car and the hastily glimpsed bundle. He shone his flashlight in through the unbroken rear window. Flung up against the glass as if in entreaty was a delicately boned hand. He recoiled savagely.
‘Blessed Virgin, protect us,’ he breathed.
The sprawled girl had been pitched from her blanket shroud by the crash. Even in the flashlight’s wavering rays her nude body was the delicate amber of old ivory. The ebony hair was in wild disarray, the Oriental features contorted with pain and fear. On the flesh were the mottled bruises of a systematic beating.
The policeman went around the car to the other rear window. He could feel the black Irish rage rising, threatening to engulf him again like that other time. When his light again flooded the interior, bile choked his throat.
Blood was streaked across the girl’s lower belly and on the insides of her thighs. The flesh there was roughened and empurpled.
She could not have been over twelve years old.
Dan Laverty turned from the car with his face terrible and his eyes feverish. He trudged back to Tokzek with a sleepwalker’s step.
‘Want me to ease your pain, laddie?’ he asked in his soft Irish tenor.
Grunting with effort, he drove the toe of his boot up into Tokzek’s testicles. Tokzek screamed, bucked with the impact like a man gripped by a naked high-tension line. Again. Again. As if to successive jolts of electric current. Finally, shattered ends of bone severed his spinal column and ended it.
Laverty’s eyes gradually unglazed. When he realized what he had done, he crossed himself and vomited a few yards from the corpse.
3
With sudden impatience, Dashiell Hammett thrust aside the December, 1927, issue of Black Mask. He needed more complication, another scene showing the Op stirring things up in Poisonville, for the four published novelettes to work as a novel. And with the book version, titled Red Harvest, already scheduled for publication, he had to do any insert scenes damned quick.
He began pacing the narrow cramped living room. How about a… no, that wouldn’t work. But…
Yeah. Maybe a fight scene. Good. Set in a fairgrounds casino or something, out on the edge of town. Now, how to make the Op the catalyst in it…
Hammett paused in his pacing to look at his strap watch. Still time to get out to Steiner Street and catch the Friday night fight card at Winterland. Just opened, he hadn’t even seen the inside of the place yet. So why not? He’d be bound to get an idea or two he could work into Red Harvest during his stint at the typewriter that night.
As Hammett emerged into Post Street he almost cannoned into Goodie Osborne, just coming home from work. He caught her by the shoulders.
‘Can you live without food for a few more hours?’
‘Of course, but what-’
‘C’mon.’ He guided her across Post Street without noticing the very big man who was supporting the corner building while relighting his cigar stub. ‘I’m on my way out to Winterland for the fights. Want to come along?’
Goodie’s eyes were sparkling. ‘Try to stop me.’
The big man straightened, tossed aside the newly lit stub, and crossed Post toward their apartment building. His name was Victor Atkinson, and he was a man not easily forgotten: six feet three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, huge restless hands, and a bony icebreaker jaw.
With his work cords and heavy wool lumberjack, he looked like a logger down from Seattle — which is what he wanted to look like.
Atkinson went down the narrow dim hallway beside the elevator to tattoo the manager’s door with heavy knuckles. The bleary-eyed woman who opened it and squinted up at him wore her hair in a wispy bun and had about half a bun on herself; he could smell the bathtub gin from three feet away.
‘Ain’t got no rooms.’ Her face brightened. She added with a simper, ‘Big boy.’
‘Yeah.’ He crowded her back into the littered, close-smelling apartment without seeming to. ‘I want a line on one of your tenants.’
‘That’s privi…’ She hiccuped. ‘Privileged infor-’
‘Hammett. Third floor front, far end. Was up there. Nobody home.’
‘I told you-’
‘Habits. Who he sees. What’s he do for a living. Things like that.’
‘I don’t-’
‘Ain’t got all night, lady.’ His heavily boned face was brutal in its lack of expression. The boredom in his voice somehow had a menace beyond mere bluster. ‘I gotta catch the fight card out to Winterland.’
Hammett and Goodie paused in front of the row Victorians across Steiner from the huge amphitheater.
‘Quite a place,’ he commented.
‘And so many people.’ The blond girl was clinging to his arm with excitement.
Winterland was a massive white stucco structure, four stories high, with spotlights to illuminate the American flags on the poles jutting up past the coping of the red-tiled roof. They let themselves be carried across the street to the open doors under the unadorned sidewalk-width marquee.
‘Who do you like in the main event, Mr Hammett?’
The fresh-faced urchin in knickers, drab moleskin coat, and golfing cap was peddling newspapers and boxing magazines. Hammett bought a Knockout.
‘The Canadian in the fifth or sixth.’
‘I dunno,’ said the boy dubiously. ‘I seen Campbell in a couple a’ workouts and he looked awful strong to me.’
‘So’s a bull, but it can’t match a mastiff,’ said Hammett. ‘The Frenchie’ll cut him to pieces.’
The ticket windows, flanked by ornamental green shutters, were set under little roofed cottagelike facades at either end of the foyer. Hammett got two in the third row ringside, which cleaned him out except for cigarette money.
‘Who was that boy, Sam?’
‘Just a kid hangs around on fight nights. He’s got an uncle makes book out of the candy store at Fillmore and McAllister.’
‘Sam, a candy store?’
‘Next best place to a smokeshop,’ he said piously.
They surrendered their tickets and passed through a thick-walled archway beside the narrow balcony stairway. Open side doors, guarded by uniformed ticket-takers, let in the noise of the Post Street evening traffic that inched through the sporting crowd. Over the heads of seated fight fans they could see the square canvas ring that had been set up on the main arena floor.
‘Sure beats Dreamland,’ said Hammett.
But not, he thought, as a place for him to stage Poisonville’s fights. Until a couple of years before, this had been the site of the Dreamland roller-skating rink where Hammett had seen a lot of Friday-night fights and Tuesday-night wrestling matches. The old echoing wooden building, with its narrow second-floor balconies extending out toward the ring, fitted Poisonville’s grubby atmosphere better than this fancy new place. Unless he picked up something usable from the bouts themselves, he’d wasted his evening.
