She scowled at him, shrugging her silken shoulders.
“Make it quick,” she said. “It’ll be light in another half-hour.”
I felt too much like crying to laugh at them. Was I supposed to think this woman would let the rabbit change her plans? I suppose I must have put some value on the old gink’s help, or I wouldn’t have been so disappointed when this little comedy told me it was a frame-up. But any hole they worked me into couldn’t be any worse than the one I was in.
So I went ahead of the old man into the hall, opened the door he indicated, switched on the basement light, and went down the rough steps.
Close behind me he was whispering, “I’ll first show you the moneys, and then I will give to you those devils. And you will not forget your promise? I and that girl shall go out through the police?”
“Oh, yes,” I assured the old joker.
He came up beside me, sticking a gun butt in my hand.
“Hide it,” he hissed, and, when I had pocketed that one, gave me another, producing them with his free hand from under his coat.
Then he actually showed me the loot. It was still in the boxes and bags in which it had been carried from the banks. He insisted on opening some of them to show me the money—green bundles belted with the bank’s yellow wrappers. The boxes and bags were stacked in a small brick cell that was fitted with a padlocked door, to which he had the key.
He closed the door when we were through looking, but he did not lock it, and he led me back part of the way we had come.
“That, as you see, is the money,” he said. “Now for those. You will stand here, hiding behind these boxes.”
A partition divided the cellar in half. It was pierced by a doorway that had no door. The place the old man told me to hide was close beside this doorway, between the partition and four packing-cases. Hiding there, I would be to the right of, and a little behind, anyone who came downstairs and walked through the cellar toward the cell that held the money. That is, I would be in that position when they went to go through the doorway in the partition.
The old man was fumbling beneath one of the boxes. He brought out an eighteen-inch length of lead pipe stuffed in a similar length of black garden hose. He gave this to me as he explained everything.
“They will come down here one at a time. When they are about to go through this door, you will know what to do with this. And then you will have them, and I will have your promise. Is it not so?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, all up in the air.
He went upstairs. I crouched behind the boxes, examining the guns he had given me—and I’m damned if I could find anything wrong with them. They were loaded and they seemed to be in working order. That finishing touch completely balled me up. I didn’t know whether I was in a cellar or a balloon.
When Red O’Leary, still naked except for pants and bandage, came into the cellar, I had to shake my head violently to clear it in time to bat him across the back of the noodle as his first bare foot stepped through the doorway. He sprawled down on his face.
The old man scurried down the steps, full of grins.
“Hurry! Hurry!” he panted, helping me drag the redhead back into the money cell. Then he produced two pieces of cord and tied the giant hand and foot.
“Hurry!” he panted again as he left me to run upstairs, while I went back to my hiding-place and hefted the lead-pipe, wondering if Flora had shot me and I was now enjoying the rewards of my virtue—in a heaven where I could enjoy myself forever and ever socking folks who had been rough with me down below.
The ape-built skull-cracker came down, reached the door. I cracked his skull. The little man came scurrying. We dragged Pogy to the cell, tied him up.
“Hurry!” panted the old gink, dancing up and down in his excitement. “That she-devil next—and strike hard!”
He scrambled upstairs and I could hear his feet pattering overhead.
I got rid of some of my bewilderment, making room for a little intelligence in my skull. This foolishness we were up to wasn’t so. It couldn’t be happening. Nothing ever worked out just that way. You didn’t stand in corners and knock down people one after the other like a machine, while a scrawny little bozo up at the other end fed them to you. It was too damned silly! I had enough!
I passed up my hiding place, put down the pipe and found another spot to crouch in, under some shelves, near the steps. I hunkered down there with a gun in each fist. This game I was playing in was—it had to be—gummy around the edges. I wasn’t going to stay put any longer.
Flora came down the steps. Two steps behind her the little man trotted.
Flora had a gun in each hand. Her gray eyes were everywhere. Her head was down like an animal’s coming to a fight. Her nostrils quivered. Her body, coming down neither slowly nor swiftly, was balanced like a dancer’s. If I live to a million I’ll never forget the picture this handsome brutal woman made coming down those unplaned cellar stairs. She was a beautiful fight-bred animal going to a fight.
She saw me as I straightened.
“Drop ’em!” I said, but I knew she wouldn’t.
The little man flicked a limp brown blackjack out of his sleeve and knocked her behind the ear just as she swung her left gun on me.
I jumped over and caught her before she hit the cement.
“Now, you see!” the old man said gleefully. “You have the money and you have them. And now you
