RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett

He struck another match, sheltered it carefully with his hands as he got up, crossed the room, and lit a candle on a three-legged table.

I followed him, keeping close. My left arm was numb or I would have taken hold of him for safety.

“What are you doing here?” I asked when the candle was burning.

I didn’t need his answer. One end of the room was filled with wooden cases piled six high, branded Perfection Maple Syrup.

While the old man explained that as God was his keeper he didn’t know nothing about it, that all he knew was that a man named Yates had two days ago hired him as night watchman, and if anything was wrong he was as innocent as innocent, I pulled part of the top off one case.

The bottles inside had Canadian Club labels that looked as if they had been printed with a rubber stamp.

I left the cases and, driving the old man in front of me with the candle, searched the building. As I expected, I found nothing to indicate that this was the warehouse Whisper had occupied.

By the time we got back to the room that held the liquor my left arm was strong enough to lift a bottle. I put it in my pocket and gave the old man some advice:

“Better clear out. You were hired to take the place of some of the men Pete the Finn turned into special coppers. But Pete’s dead now and his racket has gone blooey.”

When I climbed out the window the old man was standing in front of the cases, looking at them with greedy eyes while he counted on his fingers.

“Well?” Mickey asked when I returned to him and his coupé.

I took out the bottle of anything but Canadian Club, pulled the cork, passed it to him, and then put a shot into my own system.

He asked, “Well?” again.

I said: “Let’s try to find the old Redman warehouse.”

He said: “You’re going to ruin yourself some time telling people too much,” and started the ear moving.

Three blocks farther up the street we saw a faded sign, Redman Company. The building under the sign was long, low, and narrow, with corrugated iron roof and few windows.

“We’ll leave the boat around the corner,” I said. “And you’ll go with me this time. I didn’t have a whole lot of fun by myself last trip.”

When we climbed out of the coupé, an alley ahead promised a path to the warehouse’s rear. We took it.

A few people were wandering through the streets, but it was still too early for the factories that filled most of this part of town to come to life.

At the rear of our building we found something interesting. The back door was closed. Its edge, and the edge of the frame, close to the lock, were scarred. Somebody had worked there with a jimmy.

Mickey tried the door. It was unlocked. Six inches at a time, with pauses between, lie pushed it far enough back to let us squeeze in.

When we squeezed in we could hear a voice. We couldn’t make out what the voice was saying. All we could hear was the faint rumble of a distant man’s voice, with a suggestion of quarrelsomeness in it.

Mickey pointed a thumb at the door’s scar and whispered.

“Not coppers.”

I took two steps inside, keeping my weight on my rubber heels. Mickey followed, breathing down the back of my neck.

Ted Wright had told me Whisper’s hiding place was in the back, upstairs. The distant rumbling voice could have been coming from there.

I twisted my face around to Mickey and asked:

“Flashlight?”

He put it in my left hand. I had my gun in my right. We crept forward.

The door, still a foot open, let in enough light to show us the way across this room to a doorless doorway. The other side of the doorway was black.

I flicked the light across the blackness, found a door, shut off the light, and went forward. The next squirt of light showed us steps leading up.

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