Continental Op: Later Years 01 Creeping Siamese and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Author:Dashiell Hammett [Hammett, Dashiell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2016-04-05T16:27:26+00:00

XI

“We’d better get out of here if we can,” I said. “You’ve made too much rumpus for it to be safe.”

“Don’t get it up in your neck, little man,” he told me. “Hold on to my coat-tails and I’ll pull you out.”

The big tramp. If it hadn’t been for Jack and me he wouldn’t have had any coat-tail by now.

We moved to the door, listened there, heard nothing.

“The stairs to the third floor must be up front,” I whispered. “We’ll try for them now.”

We opened the door carefully. Enough light went past us into the hall to show a promise of emptiness. We crept down the hall, Red and I each holding one of the girl’s hands. I hoped Jack would come out all right, but he had put himself to sleep, and I had troubles of my own.

I hadn’t known that Larrouy’s was large enough to have two miles of hallway. It did. It was an even mile in the darkness to the head of the stairs we had come up. We didn’t pause there to listen to the voices below. At the end of the next mile O’Leary’s foot found the bottom step of the flight leading up.

Just then a yell broke out at the head of the other flight.

“All up—they’re up here!”

A white light beamed up on the yeller, and a brogue addressed him from below: “Come on down, ye windbag.” “The police,” Nancy Regan whispered, and we hustled up our new-found steps to the third floor.

More darkness, just like that we’d left. We stood still at the top of the stairs. We didn’t seem to have any company.

“The roof,” I said. “We’ll risk matches.”

Back in a corner our feeble match-light found us a ladder nailed to the wall, leading to a trap in the ceiling. As little later as possible we were on Larrouy’s roof, the trap closed behind us.

“All silk so far,” said O’Leary, “and if Vance’s rats and the bulls will play a couple of seconds longer—bingavast.”

I led the way across the roofs. We dropped ten feet to the next building, climbed a bit to the next, and found on the other side of it a fire-escape that ran down to a narrow court with an opening into the back street.

“This ought to do it,” I said, and went down.

The girl came behind me, and then Red. The court into which we dropped was empty—a narrow cement passage between buildings. The bottom of the fire-escape creaked as it hinged down under my weight, but the noise didn’t stir anything. It was dark in the court, but not black.

“When we hit the street, we split,” O’Leary told me, without a word of gratitude for my help—the help he didn’t seem to know he had needed. “You roll your hoop, we’ll roll ours.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed, chasing my brains around in my skull. “I’ll scout the alley first.”

Carefully I picked my way down to the end of the court and risked the top of my hatless head to peep into the back street.

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