Naked and Alone by Lawrence Lariar

Author:Lawrence Lariar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

I came back to earth slowly, dropping from a great height where I had been surrounded by a variety of nightmare figures, all of them black and headless. My brain rocked and reeled, keeping me inside that awful dream, yet registering a humming and a buzzing, a pounding and a thumping that couldn’t be denied. Then I heard a new, external grinding noise, remote at first, but coming closer and closer to my wakening ear. I kept my eyes shut and listened.

The stench of cigar smoke told me that a man was standing near me, talking over my head. He was behind me and I was lying in a white bed, in a white room, with a white-capped nurse somewhere off in the mists. I opened my eyes only a slit to see those things. I didn’t want the man with the cigar in his kisser to know I was awake. That external grinding noise had been McKegnie’s voice.

“How long will this ape be out?” He was asking the nurse the key question. “I can’t stand around here all night.”

“Almost any minute now,” the nurse said, from some distant corner of the room.

There was a knock on the door and I saw Robley walk in. He was mopping his round head and shaking same wearily.

“No dice,” he said. “One of the boys just phoned in, Chief. That Dumarette apartment is empty. The broad must have beat it.”

“Anybody in the place know her?”

“Nobody,” said Robley. “I put a man on her place—a fancy dressmaking dump in a brownstone. We’ll grab her if and when she heads for home.” There was a pause, then Robley came around the bed and stared down at me. “When is this character going to wake up?”

“Nobody knows but God.”

“Is he hurt bad?”

“Nothing serious. Slight concussion.”

“He would have been killed if I hadn’t followed him into that alley,” Robley said. “What he did was pretty dopey for a private eye.”

“He’s no dope,” McKegnie rasped grudgingly. “Sometimes I wonder about Amsterdam. Usually he thinks like a cop. And then again he does crazy things. He walked in and asked for a bump on the head. But that’s because he’s got a good bump of curiosity.”

“He’s sure curious,” Robley admitted. “He watched the Harper dame’s house until she came out with her boy friend. Then he tailed them like an expert. He must like to follow people. The way he went after the two guys who came out of the other place was a work of art. And later on, when he followed the tall guy, it was something to see. A real sweet job.”

“He’s clever,” McKegnie said, puffing a great cloud of stench my way, so that it lay over my head like a minor atomic burst. “He’s so clever he’s going to get his head caught in a wringer one of these days.”

He was killing me with the stink. I went through the motions of waking up.

“Watch,” McKegnie said. “His first words will be ‘Where am I?’”

“What did I have?” I asked.

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