by Isaac Asimov
Pardrilone went over to the body, examined it, then growled at Blinn. “You should have fired at the chest. If you had missed, many of us would have been doomed. It was a stupid chance to take.”
“I didn’t miss — he’s dead, isn’t he?” Blinn replied matter-of-factly.
Pardrilone pondered this logic, accepted it, turned to the other members of the band, and yelled, “Hail Blinn, our new leader!”
The shouts were ear balm for Blinn, who stood the center of an admiring throng, any one of whose members would have shot him out of hand just moments before. He held his arms above his head, hands cupped in the manner of a champion boxer. Outside the circle — forgotten now even by Evelyn, his latest woman, who now turned her hot, fox eyes upon Blinn — lay Bohlmann, his shattered face a jagged O.
After that, Blinn led the band on many daring raids that garnered them much spoils and a number of casualties. They were richer than ever but disgruntled at the chances they had to take. So, one day, they grasped Blinn, tied his hands behind him, and dragged him to an open field. From the moment they had their hands on him to the moment they fired one sure shot into his head, Blinn, a bag of twitching, sagging flesh, cried and begged for his life. He had few thoughts at the end, but one of them was of how well Bohlmann had died. And how well he, Blinn, might have died that same day.
A Deal in Diamonds
by Edward D. Hoch
It was seeing a girl toss a penny into the plaza fountain that gave Pete Hopkins the idea. He was always on the lookout for money-making ideas, and they were getting tougher to find all the time. But as he looked up from the fountain to the open window of the Downtown Diamond Exchange, he thought he had found a good one at last.
He strolled over to the phone booth at the other side of the plaza and called Johnny Stoop. Johnny was the classiest dude Pete knew — a real fashion-plate who could walk into a store and have the clerks falling over themselves to wait on him. Better yet, he had no record here in the east. And it was doubtful if the cops could link him to the long list of felonies he had committed ten years ago in California.
“Johnny? This is Pete. Glad I caught you in.”
“I’m always in during the daytime, Pete boy. In fact, I was just getting up.”
“I got a job for us, Johnny, if you’re interested.”
“What sort?”
“Meet me at the Birchbark Bar and we’ll talk about it.”
“How soon?”
“An hour?”
Johnny Stoop groaned. “Make it two. I gotta shower and eat breakfast.”
“Okay, two. See you.”
The Birchbark Bar was a quiet place in the afternoons — perfect for the sort of meeting Pete wanted. He took a booth near the back and ordered a beer. Johnny was only ten minutes late and he walked into the place as if he were casing it for a robbery or a girl he might pick up. Finally he settled, almost reluctantly, for Pete’s booth.
“So what’s the story?”
The bartender was on the phone yelling at somebody about a delivery, and the rest of the place was empty. Pete started talking. “The Downtown Diamond Exchange. I think we can rip it off for a quick handful of stones. Might be good for fifty grand.”
Johnny Stoop grunted, obviously interested. “How do we do it?”
“You do it. I wait outside.”
“Great! And I’m the one the cops grab!”
“The cops don’t grab anyone. You stroll in, just like Dapper Dan, and ask to see a tray of diamonds. You know where the place is, on the fourth floor. Go at noon, when there’s always a few customers around. I’ll create a commotion in the hall, and you snatch up a handful of stones.”
“What do I do — swallow them like the gypsy kids used to do?”
“Nothing so crude. The cops are wise to that, anyway. You throw them out the window.”
“Like hell I do!”
“I’m serious, Johnny.”
“They don’t even keep their windows open. They got air conditioning, haven’t they?”
“I saw the window open today. You know all this energy-conservation stuff — turn off the air conditioner and open the windows. Well, they’re doing it. They probably figure four flights up nobody’s goin’ to get in that way. But something can get out — the diamonds.”
“It sounds crazy, Pete.”
“Listen, you toss the diamonds through the window from the counter. That’s maybe ten feet away.” He was making a quick pencil sketch of the office as he talked. “See, the window’s behind the counter and you’re in front of it. They never suspect that you threw ’em out the window because you’re never near the window. They search you, they question you, but then they gotta let you go. There are other people in the store, other suspects. And nobody saw you take them.”
“So the diamonds go out the window. But you’re not outside to catch them. You’re in the hall creating a diversion. So what happens to the stones?”
“This is the clever part. Directly beneath the window, four stories down, is the fountain in the plaza. It’s big enough so the diamonds can’t miss it. They fall into the fountain and they’re as safe as in a bank vault, till we decide to get them. Nobody noticed them hit the water because the fountain is splashing. And nobody sees them in the water because they’re clear. They’re like glass.”
“Yeah,” Johnny agreed. “Unless the sun—”
“The sun don’t reach the bottom of the pool. You could look right at ’em and not notice ’em — unless you knew they were there. We’ll know, and we’ll come back for them tomorrow night, or the next.”
Johnny was nodding. “I’m in. When do we pull it off?”
Pete smiled and raised his glass of beer. “Tomorrow.”
On the following day, Johnny Stoop entered the fourth floor offices of the Downtown Diamond Exchange at exactly 12:15. The uniformed guard who was always at the door gave him no more than a passing glance. Pete watched it all from the busy hallway outside, getting a clear view through the thick glass doors that ran from floor to ceiling.
As soon as he saw the clerk produce a tray of diamonds for Johnny, he glanced across the office at the window. It was open about halfway, as it had been the previous day. Pete started walking toward the door, touched the thick glass handle, and fell over in an apparent faint. The guard inside the door heard him fall and came out to offer assistance.
“What’s the matter, mister? You okay?”
“I... I can’t — breathe...”
He raised his head and asked for a glass of water. Already one of the clerks had come around the counter to see what the trouble was.
Pete sat up and drank the water, putting on a good act. “I just fainted, I guess.”
“Let me get you a chair,” one clerk said.
“No, I think I’d better just go home.” He brushed off his suit and thanked them. “I’ll be back when I’m feeling better.” He hadn’t dared to look at Johnny, and he hoped the diamonds had gone out the window as planned.
He took the elevator downstairs and strolled across the plaza to the fountain. There was always a crowd around it at noon — secretaries eating their lunches out of brown-paper bags, young men casually chatting with them. He mingled unnoticed and worked his way to the edge of the pool. But it was a big area, and through the rippling water he couldn’t be certain he saw anything except the scattering of pennies and nickels at the bottom. Well, he hadn’t expected to see the diamonds anyway, so he wasn’t disappointed.
He waited an hour, then decided the police must still be questioning Johnny. The best thing to do was to head for his apartment and wait for a call.
It came two hours later.
“That was a close one,” Johnny said. “They finally let me go, but they still might be following me.”
“Did you do it?”
“Sure I did it! What do you think they held me for? They were goin’ crazy in there. But I can’t talk now. Let’s meet at the Birchbark in an hour. I’ll make sure I’m not followed.
”
Pete took the same booth at the rear of the Birchbark and ordered his usual beer. When Johnny arrived the dapper man was smiling. “I think we pulled it off, Pete. Damn if we didn’t pull it off!”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That I didn’t see a thing. Sure, I’d asked for the tray of stones, but then when there was the commotion in the hall I went to see what it was along with everyone else. There were four customers in the place and they couldn’t really pin it on any one of us. But they searched us all, and even took us downtown to be X-rayed, to be certain we hadn’t swallowed the stones.”
“I was wondering what took you so long.”
“I was lucky to be out as soon as I was. A couple of the others acted more suspicious than me, and that was a break. One of them even had an arrest record for a stolen car.” He said it in a superior manner. “The dumb cops figure anyone who stole a car would steal diamonds.”
“I hope they didn’t get too good a look at me. I’m the one who caused the commotion, and they just gotta figure I’m involved.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll pick up the diamonds tonight and get out of town for a while.”
“How many stones were there?” Pete asked expectantly.
“Five. And all beauties.”
The evening papers confirmed it. They placed the value of the five missing diamonds at $65,000. And the police had no clue.
They went back to the plaza around midnight, but Pete didn’t like the feel of it. “They might be wise,” he told Johnny. “Let’s wait a night, in case the cops are still snoopin’ around up there. Hell, the stones are safe where they are.”
The following night, when the story had already disappeared from the papers, replaced by a bank robbery, they returned to the plaza once more. This time they waited till three A.M., when even the late crowd from the bars had scattered for home. Johnny carried a flashlight and Pete wore wading boots. He’d already considered the possibility that one or two of the diamonds might not be found, but even so they’d be far ahead of the game.
The fountain was turned off at night, and the calmness of the water made the search easier. Wading in the shallow water, Pete found two of the gems almost at once. It took another ten minutes to find the third one, and he was ready to quit then. “Let’s take what we got, Johnny.”
The flashlight bobbed. “No, no. Keep looking. Find us at least one more.”
Suddenly they were pinned in the glare of a spotlight, and a voice shouted, “Hold it right there! We’re police officers!”
“Damn!” Johnny dropped the flashlight and started to run, but already the two cops were out of their squad car. One of them pulled his gun and Johnny stopped in his tracks. Pete climbed from the pool and stood with his hands up.
“You got us, officer,” he said.
“Damn right we got you,” the cop with the gun growled. “The coins in that fountain go to charity every month. Anybody that would steal them has to be pretty low. I hope the judge gives you both ninety days in the cooler. Now up against the car while we search you!”
The Last Day of Shooting
by Dion Henderson
By nine o’clock the sun was streaming warmly into the blind and Johnny Tennant’s big retriever was asleep on the shooting platform, lying on a hunting coat with his head resting on the rucksack that held the lunch. Blackbirds worked noisily in the bog behind us, their red shoulder patches bright against the dead grass, and once three egrets lumbered whitely down the channel from the rice fields. “Snow geese,” someone said quietly back in the marsh and laughed, and the words came distinctly across the water. The sky was very blue and of course the only birds moving out of the refuge a mile away were impossibly high; it would not have been so bad except that it was the last day. It was the last day of the duck season and the last time, for most of us, that we would hunt together, or even meet, except accidentally.
Down in the point blind, Tom Randall stood up suddenly, hooting and thrashing his arms over the sedge and willow that camouflaged the blind, and an alarmed mud hen that had blundered almost into his boat skittered across the channel, peeping wildly. There was subdued laughter from the other three blinds around the point at the familiar performance. It was all very much like other days in other years — with one difference that made it not like any of them at all.
“I wish he had not taken the big gun,” Johnny Tennant said. He was sitting on the platform beside the sleeping dog, with his feet down in the boat. He had not smiled at the mud hen’s alarm.
“Your 20-gauge will be big enough,” I said. “The way the birds are flying.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the shooting. There won’t be any shooting.”
“If it really disturbs you for him to have the big gun, I’ll row down and get it back.”
“If he knew I was disturbed, he wouldn’t give it to you.”
“That’s probably true. He always carried a joke too far.”
“Even when it was not a joke,” Johnny Tennant said, not smiling.
“It was only a joke, taking the gun.”
“No. It wasn’t a joke.”
“Are things really as bad as all that between you and Tom?” I asked.
“Things have always been that bad,” Johnny Tennant said. “But now they are beginning to show, because I do not have much left that he wants.”
I did not say anything. I was sorry that he felt bad, and that this last trip was not turning out well for him. Most of us had come because he wanted us to, because he had planned it for us, and because we were sorry for Johnny Tennant — but there wasn’t anything we could do, really. The Clam Point Chowder, Poker Playing and Duck Hunting Society was something left over from a long time ago, when we were all a lot younger. Things like that are always more important to some members than to others, and with us it was Johnny Tennant who had inspired it, kept it going, and to whom, now that the shooting didn’t amount to much and the members were scattered and the lease had run out, it was important that we get together for one last day of shooting.
I guess that it all became more important to Johnny as it became less important to the rest of us. He took care of the boats, he kept the decoys in repair and spent a good deal of his time in the shack on the point. He was our gunsmith, and reloaded our shotgun shells to a powder-and-shot ratio he had figured out to be most effective for the kind of shooting we had along the channel. Johnny’s troubles probably had some relation to all this. They kept quietly overtaking him, one by one: the business that he started with Tom Randall, which did not do well as long as Johnny was in it; the woman who could not make up her mind between them; and then Johnny giving up both the business and the woman. But he did it carelessly, with a shrug, and the only difference we noticed was that Johnny Tennant spent more time at the shack on the point and more time alone, carving minutely detailed miniature ducks for the rest of us to hang up in our dens at home, and working on the inlays and engraving of his own favorite shotgun.
He had started with very complicated checkering of the stock and forearm, and then he had gone gradually into steel engraving, high-relief chiseling, and gold and ivory inlays. He reproduced a scene of the point itself on one side of the receiver, and the channel blind on the other, with ducks flying and the dog retrieving — until the gun itself was a glittering encyclopedia of our times together on the point. Gun engraving is a highly specialized art in itself, and I do not know how Johnny’s work compared with the real immortals like Rudolph Kornbrath or Arnold Griebel or Joseph Baver, but the gun was very beautiful.
Now the gun was out in the point blind with Tom Randall, and whether it was just because of thoughtlessness or a poor joke, the hunt was not the way Johnny had planned it; the whole thing was spoiled for him.
It began when Tom Randall dropped his own gun into the marsh. We had eaten breakfast in the shack by lantern light with the windows covered: fried bread, heavy with bacon grease, and eggs and potatoes in a mixture that would kill a man at home in
the city, but out here in the marsh would burn just brightly enough in his belly to keep him from freezing to death. Then, bundled up in seaters under the shooting coats, walking clumsily in hip boots, we followed Johnny out into the frosty starlight and down the quarter-mile of trail through the oak scrub to the place where the boats were pulled up under the cypress.
Johnny pushed the skiff out and stepped into it himself. “I’ll take the point blind alone,” he said. “That way maybe I can turn some of the high fliers coming out of the refuge and bring them in so you all get some shooting.”
He uncased his gun and the starlight sparkled on the inlays as he slipped three shells softly and invisibly into the magazine.
“You’d better keep that museum piece covered up,” someone said, “or it’ll scare the ducks in the next county with its reflections.”
“I’ll keep it in the shade,” Johnny said, chuckling. He sounded very happy then. “It’s a pretty thing, though.”
That was when Tom dropped his own gun into the marsh, into a foot of water and another foot of ooze. He was trying to push a boat out, holding the piece under one arm, and his hands slipped on the frost-wet gunwale and he dropped the gun. It was not hard to find, but it would take an hour, and daylight, to clean it up so that it was safe to shoot. Randall stood darkly in the water and swore.
“Never mind,” Johnny Tennant said patiently, pushing the skiff back ashore. “I’ve got another gun up at the shack you can use. It’s only a 20-gauge that I use to keep the squirrels honest, but it’ll do.”
He left the skiff and ran lightly up the trail in the darkness while the rest of us stood around uncomfortably, not talking.
“The light is coming up fast,” Tom Randall said suddenly. “If we’re not in the blinds by first shooting light, we’ll never see a bird within range.”
“What do you suggest?” I said.
