As the taxicab pulled away from the café, the Cadillac went after it. I ran in the Cadillac’s wake.
It was a short chase.
The taxicab turned into a dark block on the edge of Chinatown. The Cadillac jumped to its side, bearing it over to the curb.
A noise of brakes, shouting voices, broken glass. A woman’s scream. Figures moving in the scant space between touring car and taxicab. Both cars rocking. Grunts. Thuds. Oaths.
A man’s voice: “Hey! You can’t do that! Nix! Nix!”
It was a stupid voice.
I had slowed down until the coupe was barely moving toward this tussle ahead. Peering through the rain and darkness, I tried to pick out a detail or so as I approached, but I could see little.
I was within twenty feet when the curbward door of the taxicab banged open. A woman bounced out. She landed on her knees on the sidewalk, jumped to her feet, and darted up the street.
Putting the coupe closer to the curb, I let the door swing open. My side windows were spattered with rain. I wanted to get a look at the woman when she passed. If she should take the open door for an invitation, I didn’t mind talking to her.
She accepted the invitation, hurrying as directly to the car as if she had expected me to be waiting for her. Her face was a small oval above a fur collar.
“Help me!” she gasped. “Take me from here—quickly.”
There was a suggestion of foreignness too slight to be called an accent.
“How about—?”
I shut my mouth. The thing she was jabbing me in the body with was a snub-nosed automatic.
“Sure! Get in,” I urged her.
She bent her head to enter. I looped an arm over her neck, throwing her down across my lap. She squirmed and twisted—a small-boned, hard-fleshed body with strength in it.
I wrenched the gun out of her hand and pushed her back on the seat beside me.
Her fingers dug into my arms.
“Quick! Quick! Ah, please, quickly! Take me—”
“What about your friend?” I asked.
“Not him! He is of the others! Please, quickly!”
A man filled the open coupe door—the big-chinned man who had driven the Cadillac.
His hand seized the fur at the woman’s throat.
She tried to scream—made the gurgling sound of a man with a slit throat. I smacked his chin with the gun I had taken from her.
He tried to fall into the coupe. I pushed him out.
Before his head had hit the sidewalk, I had the door closed, and was twisting the coupe around in the street.
We rode away. Two shots sounded just as we turned the first corner. I don’t know whether they were fired at us or not. I turned other corners. The Cadillac did not appear again.
So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was. I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.
“Where to?” I asked presently.
“To home,” she said, and gave me an address.
I pointed the coupe at it with no reluctance at all. It was the McAllister Street apartments the Whosis Kid had visited earlier in the evening.
We didn’t waste any time getting there. My companion might know it or might not, but I knew that all the other players in this game knew that address. I wanted to get there before the Frenchman and Big Chin.
Neither of us said anything during the ride. She crouched close to me, shivering. I was looking ahead, planning how I was to land an invitation into her apartment. I was sorry I hadn’t held on to her gun. I had let it fall when I pushed Big Chin out of the car. It would have been an excuse for a later call if she didn’t invite me in.
I needn’t have worried. She didn’t invite me. She insisted that I go in with her. She was scared stiff.
“You will not leave me?” she pleaded as we drove up McAllister Street. “I am in complete terror. You cannot go from me! If you will not come in, I will stay with you.”
I was willing enough to go in, but I didn’t want to leave the coupe where it would advertise me.
“We’ll ride around the corner and park the car,” I told her, “and then I’ll go in with you.”
I drove around the block, with an eye in each direction for the Cadillac. Neither eye found it. I left the coupe on Franklin Street and we returned to the McAllister Street building.
She had me almost running through the rain that had lightened now to a drizzle.
The hand with which she tried to fit a key to the front door was a shaky, inaccurate hand. I took the key and opened the door. We rode to the third floor in an automatic elevator, seeing no one. I unlocked the door to which she led me, near the rear of the building.
Holding my arm, with one hand, she reached inside and snapped on the lights in the passageway.
I didn’t know what she was waiting for, until she cried:
“Frana! Frana! Ah, Frana!”
The muffled yapping of a small dog replied. The dog did not appear.
She grabbed me with both arms, trying to crawl up my damp coat-front.
“They are here!” she cried in the thin dry voice of utter terror. “They are here!”
V
“Is anybody supposed to be here?” I asked, putting her around to one side, where she wouldn’t be between me and the two doors across the passageway.
“No! Just my little dog Frana, but—”
I slid my gun half out of my pocket and back again, to make sure it wouldn’t catch if I needed it, and used my other hand to get rid of the woman’s arms.
“You stay here. I’ll see if you’ve got company.”
Moving to the nearest door, I heard a seven-year-old voice—Lew Maher’s—saying: “He can shoot and he’s plain crazy. He
