“I—I think so.” He spoke slowly, screwing up his forehead. “I’m to act as if I was going along on the same business as you, but that outside of that we weren’t friends. As if I wasn’t willing to trust you. That it?”
“Very much. Watch yourself. You’ll be swimming in nitroglycerine all the way.”
“What is up? Be a good chap and give me some idea.”
I grinned up at him. He was a lot taller than I.
“I could,” I admitted, “but I’m afraid it would scare you off. So I’d better tell you nothing. Be happy while you can. Eat a good dinner. Lots of condemned folks seem to eat hearty breakfasts of ham and eggs just before they parade out to the rope. Maybe you wouldn’t want ’em for dinner, but—”
At five minutes to eleven that night, Tom-Tom Carey brought a black touring car to the corner where Jack and I stood waiting in a fog that was like a damp fur coat.
“Climb in,” he ordered as we came to the curb.
I opened the front door and motioned Jack in. He rang up the curtain on his little act, looking coldly at me and opening the rear door.
“I’m going to sit back here,” he said bluntly.
“Not a bad idea,” and I climbed in beside him.
Carey twisted around in his seat and he and Jack stared at each other for a while. I said nothing, did not introduce them. When the swarthy man had finished sizing the youngster up, he looked from the boy’s collar and tie—all of his evening clothes not hidden by his overcoat—to me, grinned, and drawled:
“Your friend’s a waiter, huh?”
I laughed, because the indignation that darkened the boy’s face and popped his mouth open was natural, not part of his acting. I pushed my foot against his. He closed his mouth, said nothing, looked at Tom-Tom Carey and me as if we were specimens of some lower form of animal life.
I grinned back at Carey and asked, “Are we waiting for anything?”
He said we weren’t, left off staring at Jack, and put the machine in motion. He drove us out through the park, down the boulevard. Traffic going our way and the other loomed out of and faded into the fog-thick night. Presently we left the city behind, and ran out of the fog into clear moonlight. I didn’t look at any of the machines running behind us, but I knew that in one of them Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan should be riding.
Tom-Tom Carey swung our car off the boulevard, into a road that was smooth and well made, but not much traveled.
“Wasn’t a man killed down along here somewhere last night?” I asked.
Carey nodded his head without turning it, and, when we had gone another quarter-mile, said: “Right here.”
We rode a little slower now, and Carey turned off his lights. In the road that was half moon-silver, half shadow-gray, the machine barely crept along for perhaps a mile. We stopped in the shade of tall shrubs that darkened a spot of the road.
“All ashore that’s going ashore,” Tom-Tom Carey said, and got out of the car.
Jack and I followed him. Carey took off his overcoat and threw it into the machine.
“The place is just around the bend, back from the road,” he told us. “Damn this moon! I was counting on fog.”
I said nothing, nor did Jack. The boy’s face was white and excited.
“We’ll beeline it,” Carey said, leading the way across the road to a high wire fence.
He went over the fence first, then Jack, then—the sound of someone coming along the road from ahead stopped me. Signalling silence to the two men on the other side of the fence, I made myself small beside a bush. The coming steps were light, quick, feminine.
A girl came into the moonlight just ahead. She was a girl of twenty-something, neither tall nor short, thin nor plump. She was short-skirted, bare-haired, sweatered. Terror was in her white face, in the carriage of her hurrying figure—but something else was there too—more beauty than a middle-aged sleuth was used to seeing.
When she saw Carey’s automobile bulking in the shadow, she stopped abruptly, with a gasp that was almost a cry.
I walked forward, saying:
“Hello, Nancy Regan.”
This time the gasp was a cry.
“Oh! Oh!” Then, unless the moonlight was playing tricks, she recognized me and terror began to go away from her. She put both hands out to me, with relief in the gesture.
“Well?” A bearish grumble came from the big boulder of a man who had appeared out of the darkness behind her. “What’s all this?”
“Hello, Andy,” I greeted the boulder.
“Hullo,” MacElroy echoed and stood still.
Andy always did what he was told to do. He had been told to take care of Miss Newhall. I looked at the girl and then at him again.
“Is this Miss Newhall?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he rumbled. “I came down like you said, but she told me she didn’t want me—wouldn’t let me in the house. But you hadn’t said anything about coming back. So I just camped outside, moseying around, keeping my eyes on things. And when I seen her shinnying out a window a little while ago, I just went on along behind her to take care of her, like you said I was to do.”
Tom-Tom Carey and Jack Counihan came back into the road, crossed it to us. The swarthy man had an automatic in one hand. The girl’s eyes were glued on mine. She paid no attention to the others.
“What is it all about?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she babbled, her hands holding on to mine, her face close to mine. “Yes, I’m Ann Newhall. I didn’t know. I thought it was fun. And
