Fly Paper and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Read Free Book Online

enough, but the lace curtain spoiled my view of details like that. I imagined he wasn’t neglecting either of us, and I didn’t imagine the lace curtain hid much from him. He was closer to the curtain than we, and I had turned on the room’s lights.
    Wales, sitting dead still on the sofa, was looking at McCloor. Wales’s face wore a peculiar, stiffly sullen expression. His eyes were sullen. He wasn’t breathing.
    McCloor flicked the nose of his pistol against the pane, and a triangular piece of glass fell out, tinkling apart on the floor. It didn’t, I was afraid, make enough noise to alarm MacMan in the kitchen. There were two closed doors between here and there.
    Wales looked at the broken pane and closed his eyes. He closed them slowly, little by little, exactly as if he were falling asleep. He kept his stiffly sullen blank face turned straight to the window.
    McCloor shot him three times.
    The bullets knocked Wales down on the sofa, back against the wall. Wales’s eyes popped open, bulging. His lips crawled back over his teeth, leaving them naked to the gums. His tongue came out. Then his head fell down and he didn’t move any more.
    When McCloor jumped away from the window I jumped to it. While I was pushing the curtain aside, unlocking the window and raising it, I heard his feet land on the cement paving below.
    MacMan flung the door open and came in, the girl at his heels.
    â€œTake care of this,” I ordered as I scrambled over the sill. “McCloor shot him.”
    VI
    Wales’s apartment was on the second floor. The fire-escape ended there with a counter-weighted iron ladder that a man’s weight would swing down into a cement-paved court.
    I went down as Babe McCloor had gone, swinging down on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.
    There was only one street exit to the court. I took it.
    A startled looking, smallish man was standing in the middle of the sidewalk close to the court, gaping at me as I dashed out.
    I caught his arm, shook it.
    â€œA big guy running.” Maybe I yelled. “Where?”
    He tried to say something, couldn’t, and waved his arm at billboards standing across the front of a vacant lot on the other side of the street.
    I forgot to say, “Thank you,” in my hurry to get over there.
    I got behind the billboards by crawling under them instead of going to either end, where there were openings. The lot was large enough and weedy enough to give cover to anybody who wanted to lie down and bushwhack a pursuer—even anybody as large as Babe McCloor.
    While I considered that, I heard a dog barking at one corner of the lot. He could have been barking at a man who had run by. I ran to that corner of the lot. The dog was in a board-fenced backyard, at the corner of a narrow alley that ran from the lot to a street.
    I chinned myself on the board fence, saw a wire-haired terrier alone in the yard, and ran down the alley while he was charging my part of the fence.
    I put my gun back into my pocket before I left the alley for the street.
    A small touring car was parked at the curb in front of a cigar store some fifteen feet from the alley. A policeman was talking to a slim dark-faced man in the cigar store doorway.
    â€œThe big fellow that come out of the alley a minute ago,” I said. “Which way did he go?”
    The policeman looked dumb. The slim man nodded his head down the street, said, “Down that way,” and went on with his conversation.
    I said, “Thanks,” and went on down to the corner. There was a taxi phone there and two idle taxis. A block and a half below, a street car was going away.
    â€œDid the big fellow who came down here a minute ago take a taxi or the street car?” I asked the two taxi chauffeurs who were leaning against one of the taxis.
    The rattier looking one said:
    â€œHe didn’t take a taxi.”
    I said:
    â€œI’ll take one. Catch