“Any left?” Reno asked as we looked around, enjoying the novelty of not being shot at.
“Here’s the last one,” Fat said, holding out a bomb.
Fire was dancing inside the upper windows of the brick house. Reno looked at it, took the bomb from Fat, and said:
“Back off. They’ll be coming out.”
We moved away from the front of the house.
A voice indoors yelled:
“Reno!”
Reno slipped into the shadow of our car before he called back:
“Well?”
“We’re done,” a heavy voice shouted. “We’re coming out. Don’t shoot.”
Reno asked: “Who’s we’re?”
“This is Pete,” the heavy voice said. “There’s four left of us.”
“You come first,” Reno ordered, “with your mitts on the top of your head. The others come out one at a time, same way, after you. And half a minute apart is close enough. Conic on.”
We waited a moment, and then Pete the Finn appeared in the dynamited doorway, his hands holding the top of his bald head. In the glare from the burning next-door house we could see that his face was cut, his clothes almost all torn off.
Stepping over wreckage, the bootlegger came slowly down tile steps to the sidewalk.
Reno called him a lousy fish-eater and shot him four times in face and body.
Pete went down. A man behind me laughed.
Reno hurled the remaining bomb through the doorway.
We scrambled into our car. Reno took the wheel. The engine was dead. Bullets had got to it.
Reno worked the horn while the rest of us piled out.
The machine that had stopped at the corner came for us. Waiting for it, I looked up and down the street that was bright with the glow of two burning buildings. There were a few faces at windows, but whoever besides us was in the street had taken to cover. Not far away, firebells sounded.
The other machine slowed up for us to climb aboard. It was already full. We packed it in layers, with the overflow hanging on the running boards.
We bumped over dead Hank O’Marra’s legs and headed for home. We covered one block of the distance with safety if not comfort. After that we had neither.
A limousine turned into the street ahead of us, came half a block toward us, put its side to us, and stopped. Out of the side, gun-fire.
Another car came around the limousine and charged us. Out of it, gun-fire.
We did our best, but we were too damned amalgamated for good fighting. You can’t shoot straight holding a man in your lap, another hanging on your shoulder, while a third does his shooting from an inch behind your ear.
Our other car–the one that had been around at the building’s rear– came up and gave us a hand. But by then two more had joined the opposition. Apparently Thaler’s mob’s attack on the jail was over, one way or the other, and Pete’s army, sent to help there, had returned in time to spoil our get-away. It was a sweet mess.
I leaned over a burning gun and yelled in Reno’s ear:
“This is the bunk. Let’s us extras get out and do our wrangling from the street.”
He thought that a good idea, and gave orders:
“Pile out, some of you hombres, and take them from the pavements.”
I was the first man out, with my eye on a dark alley entrance.
Fat followed me to it. In my shelter, I turned on him and growled:
“Don’t pile up on me. Pick your own hole. There’s a cellarway that looks good.”
He agreeably trotted off toward it, and was shot down at his third step.
I explored my alley. It was only twenty feet long, and ended against a high board fence with a locked gate.
A garbage can helped me over the gate into a brick-paved yard. The side fence of that yard let me into another, and from that I got into another, where a fox terrier raised hell at me.
I kicked the pooch out of the way, made the opposite fence, untangled myself from a clothes line, crossed two more yards, got yelled at from a window, had a bottle thrown at me, and dropped into a cobblestoned back street.