The phosphorescent numbers could not be seen from the other side of the door. They faced me. Anybody who came through the door—unless he jumped—must, if only for a split-second, put some part of himself between me and the watch.
On my belly, my gun cocked, its butt steady on the floor, I waited for the faint light to be blotted out.
I waited a time. Pessimism: perhaps he wasn’t coming; perhaps I would have to go after him; perhaps he would run out, and I would lose him after all my trouble.
Inés, beside me, breathed quaveringly in my ear, and shivered.
“Don’t touch me,” I growled at her as she tried to cuddle against me.
She was shaking my arm.
Glass broke in the next room.
Silence.
The luminous patches on the watch burnt my eyes. I couldn’t afford to blink. A foot could pass the dial while I was blinking. I couldn’t afford to blink, but I had to blink. I blinked. I couldn’t tell whether something had passed the watch or not. I had to blink again. Tried to hold my eyes stiffly opened. Failed. I almost shot at the third blink. I could have sworn something had gone between me and the watch.
The Kid, whatever he was up to, made no sound.
The dark woman began to sob beside me. Throat noises that could guide bullets.
I lumped her with my eyes and cursed the lot—not aloud, but from the heart.
My eyes smarted. Moisture filmed them. I blinked it away, losing sight of the watch for precious instants. The butt of my gun was slimy with my hand’s sweat. I was thoroughly uncomfortable, inside and out.
Gunpowder burned at my face.
A screaming maniac of a woman was crawling all over me.
My bullet hit nothing lower than the ceiling.
I flung, maybe kicked, the woman off, and snaked backward. She moaned somewhere to one side. I couldn’t see the Kid—couldn’t hear him. The watch was visible again, farther away. A rustling.
The watch vanished.
I fired at it.
Two points of light near the floor gave out fire and thunder.
My gun-barrel as close to the floor as I could hold it, I fired between those points. Twice.
Twin flames struck at me again.
My right hand went numb. My left took the gun. I sped two more bullets on their way. That left one in my gun.
I don’t know what I did with it. My head filled up with funny notions. There wasn’t any room. There wasn’t any darkness. There wasn’t anything. …
I opened my eyes in dim light. I was on my back. Beside me the dark woman knelt, shivering and sniffling. Her hands were busy—in my clothes.
One of them came out of my vest with the jewel-bag.
Coming to life, I grabbed her arm. She squealed as if I were a stirring corpse. I got the bag again.
“Give them back, Jerry,” she wailed, trying frantically to pull my fingers loose. “They are my things. Give them!”
Sitting up, I looked around.
Beside me lay a shattered bedside lamp, whose fall—caused by carelessness with my feet, or one of the Kid’s bullets—had K.O.’d me. Across the room, face down, arms spread in a crucified posture, the Whosis Kid sprawled. He was dead.
From the front of the apartment—almost indistinguishable from the throbbing in my head—came the pounding of heavy blows. The police were kicking down the unlocked door.
The woman went quiet. I whipped my head around. The knife stung my cheek—put a slit in the lapel of my coat. I took it away from her.
There was no sense to this. The police were already here. I humored her, pretending a sudden coming to full consciousness.
“Oh, it’s you!” I said. “Here they are.”
I handed her the silk bag of jewels just as the first policeman came into the room.
XIII
I didn’t see Inés again before she was taken back East to be hit with a life-sentence in the Massachusetts big house. Neither of the policemen who crashed into her apartment that night knew me. The woman and I were separated before I ran into anyone who did know me, which gave me an opportunity to arrange that she would not be tipped off to my identity. The most difficult part of the performance was to keep myself out of the newspapers, since I had to tell the coroner’s jury about the deaths of Billie, Big Chin, Maurois and the Whosis Kid. But I managed it. So far as I know, the dark woman still thinks I am Jerry Young, the bootlegger.
The Old Man talked to her before she left San Francisco. Fitting together what he got from her and what the Boston branch got, the history runs like this:
A Boston jeweler named Tunnicliffe had a trusted employee named Binder. Binder fell in with a dark woman named Inés Almad. The dark woman, in turn, had a couple of shifty friends—a Frenchman named Maurois, and a native of Boston whose name was either Carey or Cory, but who was better known as the Whosis Kid. Out of that sort of combination almost anything was more than likely to come.
What came was a scheme. The faithful Binder—part of whose duties it was to open the shop in the morning and close it at night—was to pick out the richest of the unset stones bought for the holiday trade, carry them off with him one evening, and turn them over to Inés. She was to turn them into money.
To cover up Binder’s theft, the Whosis Kid and the Frenchman were to rob the jeweler’s shop immediately after the door was opened the following morning. Binder and the porter—who would not notice the absence of the most valuable pieces from the stock—would be the only ones in the shop. The robbers would take whatever they could get. In addition to their pickings, they were to be paid two hundred
