“If his friends try to crack the hoosegow again, thinking he’s in it, that’ll give the department, including Pete’s specials, something to do. While they’re doing it, you could try your luck in Whiskeytown.”
“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe we’ll try just that thing.”
“It ought to work,” I encouraged him, standing up. “I’ll see you–”
“Stick around. This is as good a spot as any while there’s a reader out for you. And we’ll need a good guy like you on the party.”
I didn’t like that so much. I knew enough not to say so. I sat down again.
Reno got busy arranging the rumor. The telephone was worked overtime. The kitchen door was worked as hard, letting men in and out. More came in than went out. The house filled with men, smoke, tension.
XXV. Whiskeytown
AT half-past one Reno turned from answering a phone call to say:
“Let’s take a ride.”
He went upstairs. When lie came down he carried a black valise. Most of the men had gone out the kitchen door by then.
Reno gave me the black valise, saying:
“Don’t wrastle it around too much.”
It was heavy.
The seven of us left in the house went out the front door and got into a curtained touring car that O’Marra had just driven up to the curb. Reno sat beside O’Marra. I was squeezed in between men in the back seat, with the valise squeezed between my legs.
Another car came out of the first cross street to run ahead of us. A third followed us. Our speed hung around forty, fast enough to get us somewhere, not fast enough to get us a lot of attention.
We had nearly finished the trip before we were bothered.
The action started in a block of one-story houses of the shack type, down in the southern end of the city.
A man put his head out of a door, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrilly.
Somebody in the car behind us shot him down.
At the next corner we ran through a volley of pistol bullets.
Reno turned around to tell me:
“If they pop the bag, we’ll all of us hit the moon. Get it open. We got to work fast when we get there.”
I had the fasteners unsnapped by the time we came to rest at the curb in front of a dark three-story brick building.
Men crawled all over me, opening the valise, helping themselves to the contents, bombs made of short sections of two-inch pipe, packed in sawdust in the bag. Bullets bit chunks out of the car’s curtains.
Reno reached back for one of the bombs, hopped out to the sidewalk, paid no attention to a streak of blood that suddenly appeared in tile middle of his left cheek, and heaved his piece of stuffed pipe at the brick building’s door.
A sheet of flame was followed by deafening noise. Hunks of things pelted us while we tried to keep from being knocked over by the concussion. Then there was no door to keep anybody out of the red brick building.
A man ran forward, swung his arm, let a pipeful of hell go through the doorway. The shutters came off the downstairs windows, fire and glass flying behind them.
The car that had followed us was stationary up the street, trading shots with the neighborhood. The car that had gone ahead of us had turned into a side street. Pistol shots from behind the red brick building, between the explosions of our cargo, told us that our advance car was covering the back door.
O’Marra, out in the middle of the street, bent far over, tossed a bomb to the brick building’s roof. It didn’t explode. O’Marra put one foot high in the air, clawed at his throat, and fell solidly backward.
Another of our party went down under the slugs that were cutting at us from a wooden building next to the brick one.
Reno cursed stolidly and said:
“Burn them out, Fat.”
Fat spit on a bomb, ran around the back of our car, and swung his arm.
We picked ourselves up off the sidewalk, dodged flying things, and saw that the frame house was all out of whack, with flames climbing its torn edges.