RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett

A man leaned far out a front second-story window, a black gun in his hand.

Dinah blew her breath out sharply.

From a hedge by the road, a flash of orange pointed briefly up at the man in the window. His gun flashed downward. He leaned farther out. No second flash came from the hedge.

The man in the window put a leg over the sill, bent, hung by his hands, dropped.

Our car jerked forward. Dinah’s lower lip was between her teeth.

The man who had dropped from the window was gathering himself up on hands and knees.

Dinah put her face in front of mine and screamed:

“Reno!”

The man jumped up, his face to us. He made the road in three leaps, as we got to him.

Dinah had the little Marmon wide open before Reno’s feet were on the running board beside me. I wrapped my arms around him, and damned near dislocated them holding him on. He made it as tough as he could for me by leaning out to try for a shot at the guns that were tossing lead all around us.

Then it was all over. We were out of range, sight and sound of the Silver Arrow, speeding away from Personville.

Reno turned around and did his own holding on. I took my arms in and found that all the joints still worked. Dinah was busy with the car.

Reno said:

“Thanks, kid. I needed pulling out.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “So that’s the kind of parties you throw?”

“We had guests that wasn’t invited. You know the Tanner Road?”

“Yes.”

“Take it. It’ll put us over to Mountain Boulevard, and we can get back to town that-a-way.”

The girl nodded, slowed up a little, and asked:

“Who were the uninvited guests?”

“Some plugs that don’t know enough to leave me alone.”

“Do I know them?” she asked, too casually, as she turned the car into a narrower and rougher road.

“Let it alone, kid,” Reno said. “Better get as much out of the heap as it’s got.”

She prodded another fifteen miles an hour out of the Marmon. She had plenty to do now holding the car to the road, and Reno had plenty holding himself to the car. Neither of them made any more conversation until the road brought us into one that had more and better paving.

Then he asked:

“So you paid Whisper off?”

“Um-hmm.”

“They’re saying you turned rat on him.”

“They would. What do you think?”

“Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me.”

He looked at me while he said it. He was a man of thirty-four or -five, fairly tall, broad and heavy without fat. His eyes were large, brown, dull, and set far apart in a long, slightly sallow horse face. It was a humorless face, stolid, but somehow not unpleasant. I looked at him and said nothing.

The girl said: “If that’s the way you feel about it, you can–”

“Look out,” Reno grunted.

We had swung around a curve. A long black car was straight across the road ahead of us–a barricade.

Bullets flew around us. Reno and I threw bullets around while the girl made a polo pony of the little Marmon.

She shoved it over to the left of the road, let the left wheels ride the bank high, crossed the road again with Reno’s and my weight on the inside, got the right bank under the left wheels just as our side of the car began to lift in spite of our weight, slid us down in the road with our backs to the enemy, and took us out of the neighborhood by the time we had emptied our guns.

A lot of people had done a lot of shooting, but so far as we could tell nobody’s bullets had hurt anybody.

Reno, holding to the door with his elbows while he pushed another clip into his automatic, said:

“Nice work, kid. You handle the bus like you meant it.”

Dinah asked: “Where now?”

“Far away first. Just follow the road. We’ll have to figure it out. Looks like they got the burg closed up on us. Keep your dog on it.”

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