with These Hands (Ss) (2002) (14 page)

He swung her over hard and put the Grumman into a steep dive. He came down on the tail of the Boeing, both guns firing. The Boeing, seeming to realize he was an enemy for the first time, pulled into a left chandelle.

Madden let it go and swung after the Fiat. For just an instant, he caught the outlaw ship full in his sights and saw a stream of tracers streak into his tail. Then Madden swung up in a tight loop, missing a stream of fire from the Boeing by a split second. He wheeled the Grumman around in a skid, but the Boeing was out of range, and the Fiat was climbing toward him.

He reached for altitude, saw pinkish tracers zip across his port wingtip, and went into a steep dive. Suddenly, he realized the yacht was right below him, her deck scattered with figures and a cluster of them around the gun. He pressed the trips on his guns and saw a man stagger and plunge over on his face.

The others scattered for shelter, and his guns swept the yacht's deck with a flaming blast of machine-gun fire.

Three more of the fleeing gunmen fell headlong. One of them threw up his pistol and fired, then his body jerked, fairly lifted from the deck by the burst of bullets. Madden banked steeply and saw the topmasts of the yacht miss him by inches.

His stomach felt tight and hard. He was in a spot, and knew it. Only a few feet above the water and the Boeing above and slightly behind, closing in fast. There was no chance or room to maneuver. He saw a stream of tracers cross his wing, missing by inches, then he glimpsed the looming hull of the Erradaka dead ahead. He clamped his jaw and flew straight at the huge liner.

His twin motors roaring, he swept down on the big ship, the Boeing right behind him. Then, just as it seemed he must hit, he jerked the Grumman into a quick, climbing turn, saw the starboard davits of the ship slip away beneath him, and he was climbing like a streak.

He glanced around, but the Boeing pilot had lost his nerve and swung off. Now he was desperately trying to close on the Grumman before Madden could get too much altitude. The Fiat suddenly loomed before Turk's sights and he pressed the trips, and saw a stream of tracers pound into the fuselage of the plane. He saw the Fiat's pilot jerk his head back, saw the man's mouth open as from a mighty shout, and then the Fiat swung around and plunged toward the sea, a stream of orange fire behind it!

Turk Madden swung the Grumman around, driving toward the Boeing with all he had. The Boeing held, guns flaming, and steel-jacketed bullets punched holes in the Grumman's wing, cracked the canopy and tore at the rudder.

Then the other plane pulled up abruptly. In that split second the Boeing's belly was exposed. Turk fired a burst past the undercarriage and into the body of the ship. Yet still the Boeing seemed unharmed.

Turk did a chandelle, brought himself alongside her even as he saw the pilot jerk off his goggles and hurl them from him. The ship was wavering drunkenly, and the pilot fell over the edge of the seat, arms dangling. With a long whine that cut across the nerves like a tight board shrieking in an electric saw, the Boeing spun and dropped, a huge pear-shaped flame stretching out and out as the plane fell into the sea.

Turk Madden swung the Grumman and headed toward the yacht. If only he had a bomb now. He shrugged- no use thinking of that. He saw the yacht's gun was ready for another shot at the liner, and even as he went into a shrieking dive, he saw the flame leap from the muzzle of the gun and saw the gunners grab for another round. Then, he was spraying the deck with bullets, and he saw two men fall. Then something happened to the Grumman, or to him, and he jerked back on the stick and lifted the ship into a steep climb. But he felt sick now, and dizzy.

The ship wobbled badly, and he circled, let the ship glide in for a landing. It hit the waves, bucked a little. He cut the motor and tried to get up. The plane pitched in the sea and he slid to the floor.

He forced himself to his knees, startled to see the deck was red where he had rested. But he held himself there and pulled the tommy gun toward him. Even as he waited, he saw he was a little astern of the two ships, and about halfway between them.

Wissler wouldn't sink him. He would need the plane now. His eyes wavered to the liner, and he saw she had a hole through her forepeak and another on the waterline.

He wondered why she wasn't moving, then looked aft and could see the steam steering-engine room was blasted.

The splutter of a motor drew his attention and as the hull of the Grumman pitched up in the mild swell he saw a motorboat speeding toward him from the yacht.

He let the door swing open in case he fell and couldn't lift himself to see, and then leaned against the edge. Below him the water was stained with a little red. He didn't know where he was shot, and didn't even believe he was.

Yet there was blood.

This was going to be close. If Wissler wasn't in that boat-but he would be. Leave it to Wissler to be there to kill the man who had hit so hard and fast. If he could cook Wissler,'and maybe Karchel, there wouldn't be any raiding of peaceful ships, nor any attacking of plantations. The others would scatter without leadership.

The speedboat swung in alongside and cut the motor. Just beyond the plane. They'd ease her in slowly now. Maybe.

Turk Madden grinned. Puccini tried to get tough with him back in the States, and Puccini was a big shot. All right. Now let Wissler see what it meant to cut himself a piece of this cake. He felt sick, but he lifted the machine gun. Then Steve Karchel saw him and yelled, his face dead white and his gun coining up. As the body of the plane slid upwards and the boat sank a foot or two into the trough of a wave, Turk grinned.

There was the roar of the gun, and suddenly Steve Karchel's chest blossomed with crimson. The man sagged at the knees and sat down, his chest half shot away.

Madden turned the gun and swept the boat. Flame leaped from somewhere, and there was a shocking explosion.

Madden felt himself getting sicker, and he clung to the door. When he opened his eyes, the motorboat was drifting just beyond the Grumman's wing, and all aflame.

Then he saw Harry Wissler. He was standing in the stern, and his face was white and horribly red on one side from the scorching of the flames that were so close. The man's lips were bared in a snarl of hatred, and he was lifting his six-gun carefully.

Funny, what a fellow remembered at a time like this.

That Wissler always stuck with a revolver. No automatics for him. Well, okay. Maybe he'd like this one.

The tommy gun was gone somewhere. Slipped out the door, maybe. But not the Luger. Turk lifted it. The gun felt terribly heavy.

He heard a report, and something smashed into the doorjamb. Then he began firing. From somewhere another boat was approaching, but he kept shooting until the gun was empty.

Slowly, the hulk of the speedboat tipped, and with it all that was left of Harry Wissler slid into the sea.

When Turk opened his eyes, he was lying in a clean white bunk and a couple of men were standing over him.

"Live?" one man was saying. "Sure, he'll live. He was shot, but it was mostly loss of blood from these glass cuts in his head." The doctor shook his head admiringly. "He certainly made a grand cleanup on that bunch of wouldbe pirates."

Turk smiled.

" 'Has-been' pirates, now," he murmured as he passed out again.

*

When Jake Brusa got out of the car, he spotted me waiting for him and his eyes went hard. Jake and I never cared for each other.

"Hi, Copper!" he said. "Loafing again, or are you here on business?"

"Would I come to see you for fun?" I asked. "It's a question or two; like where were you last night?"

"At the Roadside Club. In fact," he said, grinning at me, "I ran into your boss out there. Even talked with him for a while."

"Just asking," I told him. "But you'll need an alibi. Somebody knocked off the Moffit Storage and Transit Company for fifty grand in furs."

"Nice haul. Luck to 'em!" Jake grinned again and, sided by Al Huber and Frank Lincoff, went on into the Sporting Center.

The place was a combination bowling alley and billiard parlor. It was Jake Brusa's front for a lot of illegal activities.

Jake had been operating, ever since his release from Joliet, but nobody was able to put a finger on him.

If James Briggs, my boss, had been with him the night before, then Jake might be in the clear, but in my own mind, I was positive this had been a Brusa job.

Old Man Moffit had been plenty sore when I'd showed up at his office earlier that morning. His little blue eyes glinted angrily in his fat red face.

"About time you got here!" he snapped at me. "What does Briggs think he's running, anyway? We pay your firm for security and this is the third time in five months we've taken a loss from thieves or holdup men."

"Take it easy," I said. "Let me have a look around first."

I dug into my pocket for chewing gum and peeled three sticks. He had reason to complain. The robberies were covered by insurance, but his contracts to handle merchandise would never be renewed if he couldn't deliver the goods. Not that he was the only one suffering from burglary or stickups. The two rival firms in town had suffered a couple of losses each, and the police had failed to pin anything on anybody. All three of the companies had been clients of my boss's detective agency.

Moffit's face purpled. "I lose fifty thousand dollars' worth of furs and you tell me to take it easy!" he shouted.

"I've got a good mind to call-"

"It wouldn't do you any good," I said. "Briggs only told me somebody knocked over the joint. Suppose you give me the details."

Moffit toned down, but his jaw jutted, and it was obvious that Briggs stood to lose a valuable client unless we recovered those furs or pinned this on somebody.

"My night watchman, a man investigated by your firm and pronounced reliable, is missing," Moffit told me.

"With him went one of our armored trucks and the furs."

That watchman was Pete Burgeson and I'd investigated him myself. "And then what?" I asked. "Give me the whole setup."

"The furs were stored in the vault last night," he continued a little more mildly, "but when we opened it this morning, it was empty. The burglar alarm on the vault door failed to go off. The vault door and the door to the outer room were both locked this morning. So was the warehouse door.

"Our schedule called for the furs to be delivered to Pentecost and Martin the first thing this morning. The furs are gone and the truck is gone and Burgeson is gone too!"

Naturally, after I'd heard Moffit's story, I thought of Brusa and went down to see him. In his youth there had been no tougher mobster; he had a record as long as your arm in the Midwest and East. After his release from Joliet, he had come west to Lucaston and opened the Sporting Center.

Supposedly, he had been following a straight path since then, but I had my own ideas about that. Years ago, he had been a highly skilled loft burglar. Huber had been arrested several times on the same charge. Lincoff had been up for armed robbery and assault. The Sporting Center was the hangout for at least three other men with records.

Lucaston, while not a great metropolis, was a thriving and busy city near the coast and we had several select residential areas loaded with money. Such a place is sure to be a target for crooks, and I don't believe it was any accident that Jake Brusa had located there.

Well, I had seen Brusa and heard his alibi, and when I called my boss, Briggs told me that Brusa was right. He had talked with Briggs at the Roadside Club, and not only he but Huber and Lincoff had been there all evening.

Their alibi was rockbound. But if they hadn't done it, who had?...

The warehouse itself offered little. It was a concrete structure, built like a blockhouse and almost as impregnable.

A glance at it would defeat an amateur burglar, and the place was fairly loaded with alarms that we had installed ourselves and checked regularly. The fact that they hadn't gone off seemed to imply an inside job, but I knew that a skillful burglar can always manage to locate such alarms and put them out of action. Two doors and the vault had been opened, however, and there was no evidence of violence and no unidentified fingerprints.

During the war, an annex of sheet metal had been added to the warehouse. In this annex was the loading platform and the garage for the ten trucks employed by Moffit's firm. Two of these trucks were armored. This annex also housed the small office used by the night watchman.

In one corner of the annex a window had been found broken, a window that opened on the alley.

Glass lay on the floor below the window, and a few fragments lay on a workbench that was partly under the window. The dust on the sill was disturbed, indicating that someone had entered by that means, and the glass on the floor implied the window had been broken from the outside. On the head of a nail on the edge of the window, I found a few threads of material resembling sharkskin. I put them in an envelope in my pocket.

Under the bench were a couple of folded tarps and some sacks. I flashed my light over them. At one end, those at the bottom of the pile were somewhat damp, yet there was no way for rain to have reached them despite the heavy fall the previous night. The outer door through which the truck would have to be driven was undamaged.