A Gunman Close Behind

by A. A. Glynn

We ran and the cars growled behind us like wild animals.

  We kept running, although we knew we hadn’t a chance. It was a kind of natural reaction, a dogged determination to keep moving until the bitter end, until the relentless pursuers caught up with us. We rounded a slight bend in the highway. There were a number of billboards at the margin of the road and close to them, a lone motorcycle patrolman.

  “A cop,” I panted, “we’re on his territory and those Rollinsville hawks are off theirs.” I grabbed the girl’s arm, trying to pull her along faster. “I’m going to give myself up to him and ask for police protection for you.”

  The two big cars were at our backs, roaring. Up ahead, the state policeman saw us—two people running along the centre of the highway and a pair of powerful cars pursuing them. He gunned his engine and came roaring along in our direction.

  Joanne and I panted to a halt. The two pursuing cars growled to a stop at our backs. The motorcycle cop braked.

  “What goes on?” he bawled. “What’s the big idea, running about the highway—?” He took a long look at me. “Hey, you’re Lantry, the guy we’re looking for! You shot a guy in South Bend!”

  He swung out of the saddle of his machine and came stalking towards me. I was aware of figures emerging from the cars at our back.

  “Yeah, I’m Lantry. Take me in. The girl, too!” I told him.

  “Hold it, officer,” said a well-remembered voice behind me.

  The fat Chief of Police from Rollinsville had stepped out of the police car and was walking towards us, waving a paper. “I’ve got a warrant for these people.”

  “He can’t serve it here,” I objected. “His police are off their jurisdiction; this is state jurisdiction, not Rollinsville.”

  “Shut up,” said Chief Richards.

  “What’s the charge?” asked the patrolman.

  “Three charges. The major one is robbery—they took some of Mr. Shelmerdine’s jewellery from the Shelmerdine house last night.”

  “That’s a damn lie!” I yelled.

  “—then there’s a car stealing charge, and one of assaulting a police officer and stealing his gun,” concluded Richards blandly.

  In the bigger of the two cars, I could see Athelstan Shelmerdine lounging back in the cushions at the rear, smirking. The beefy sergeant of the Rollinsville police outfit and another of Shelmerdine’s partisan flatfoots had emerged from the police car. Both stood in the background, fondling their revolvers.

  “The girl is an accessory in each case,” went on Richards.

  “These lugs can’t take us in,” I howled at the patrolman. “I’m wanted in South Bend in connection with homicide—that’s more serious than the charges he’s talking about—and that story about a jewel robbery is all lies.”

  “You know the rules, officer, a municipal police force can arrest a wanted person on neighbouring jurisdictions when they can produce a warrant for them.”

  “He’s wanted in South Bend,” the officer pointed out.

  “Sure, I’m wanted in South Bend,” I yelled at Richards, “and I’m giving myself up to the state police.”

  “Can you produce a warrant for either of these people?” the chief of Rollinsville police asked the motorcycle cop.

  “Why, no—”

  “I can, and it’s quite in order for me to arrest both of them. You can inform your superiors they’ve been taken into custody by my force. The South Bend police will know where to find them—at Rollinsville.”

  “I guess it’s okay if you say so, sir,” said the state cop. “Anyway, you have better means of arresting them right now.”

  The Rollinsville sergeant and the other leather-jacketed cop advanced from the background.

  “Good,” growled Richards. “Better frisk him—he’s armed.”

  The state cop frisked me and found the automatic and Colt, of course.

  I caught a glimpse of Shelmerdine looking out of the window of his car.

  “If you find a package on him, it contains the jewels taken from the Shelmerdine home, and I’ll take possession of it,” Richards said.

  “No package,” reported the cop.

  He looked quickly towards Joanne.

  “You needn’t frisk her,” I told him. “She isn’t carrying a handbag and if she had anywhere about her it would show, wouldn’t it?”

  The patrolman rubbed a hand over his mouth and surveyed Joanne’s trim figure in the light summer dress.

  “I guess it would,” he agreed.

  The two uniformed cops from Rollinsville closed in on us, showing us the inside of their gun muzzles.

  The sergeant grabbed me by the arm and began to shove me towards the police car. I whirled around to face the state cop.

  “Listen, O’Flaherty,” I bellowed, “you make sure the South Bend dicks pull us out of Rollinsville pretty damn quick. Make sure of that!”

  “C’mon,” snarled the poor man’s Marlon Brando, yanking at my arm.

  “Lake Michigan,” I thought, “here we come!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  They bundled Joanne and myself into the roomy back compartment of the police car, the sergeant sitting on one side of us, Richards on the other, and the third cop drove.

  Leaving the motorcycle cop to watch our departure, both cars swung about to face the south, and started back for Shelmerdine’s cosy mansion with the police vehicle leading.

  “Where’s the package you took from Mr. Shelmerdine’s house last night?” growled Richards.

  “Find out,” I told him.

  “We will. What did you do with it?”

  “Ask Ike Tescachelli.”

  “Wise guy! Tescachelli isn’t around. We understand the Sheriff’s Department at Stokestown is holding him and his pals for civil disturbance.”

  “Good. I hope they hold ’em for a long, long time.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Your bunch will pull strings, I suppose.”

  “Something like that. What did you do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “The package—don’t act dumb!”

  “I’m not acting. I was born dumb. I must have been or I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

  “What did you do with the package?”

  “This is where I came in. Ask Tescachelli next time you see him. Let’s change the subject, Fatso: what are you going to do when the South Bend cops come looking for the girl and me?”

  “Give ’em two stiffs, you both know too much!”

  I thought about that for a long time.

  Then I said: “I was born dumb, like I said, so you’ll have to explain. The South Bend dicks will ask questions about how we got stiff. Asking questions is an occupational disease of coppers—real coppers, I mean—what will you tell them?”

  “We’ll tell them how two people armed themselves with stolen guns and busted out of the Rollinsville police headquarters. Only one thing policemen can do when they’re dealing with desperate and armed escapees.”

  “And you’ll claim we were shot in self-defence, of course.”

  “In defence of the community and ourselves—always the community before self. We’ll make it look awful good.”

  Richards cast a glance at Joanne Kilvert’s blanched features.

  “It’s a pity about the girl, though,” he added.

  “You want to watch those scruples, Richards,” I told him. “One of these times, you’ll find yourself spending a night hanging over the bathroom bowl spilling your innards because of some everyday thing like shooting an old lady.”

  Inwardly, I was very close to panic.

  I realised I could not tell these Shelmerdine partisans that I had put the package in the mail and that it would be on the way to Chicago by now. Once these strong-arm artists realised the game was nearly up, they would have no hesitation in killing us out of revenge. I was going to have to play it very carefully, for the girl’s sake.

  The police car was still travelling along the highway in front of Athelstan Shelmerd
ine’s plutocrat’s wagon. Suddenly, it turned off the highway on to a smaller branch road that would take us into Shelmerdine’s home territory.

  I was still thinking furiously.

  Richards was talking:

  “You better play smart, Lantry, we’ll find out what you did with the papers sooner or later and we’ll find out the hard way—hard for you, that is. If you dumped them along the way, we’ll get them. We know all your moves since you jumped it from Mr. Shelmerdine’s house, thanks to your own stupidity. That cop you hit legged it to the Whitley farm as soon as he was fit. He made the people there talk and he called me, telling me everything.”

  “He was lucky,” I said. “That big-mouthed Mrs. Kunitz was hogging the wire when I tried.”

  Richards looked at me fish-eyed. He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “We know all about the car you pushed into the pond and the hay truck you took from the farm,” he went on.

  “So that’s how Tescachelli and his mugs tracked us down to Stokestown,” I said. “You found out about those things, Richards, why not try finding out about the package of papers by using your own natural-born acumen.”

  Richards began to lose his temper. He started to make a motion in the direction of the heater in its shoulder-holster under his jacket. On the far side of the seat, the sergeant was rubbing a finger up and down the club fastened at his belt.

  “Better come across with the whereabouts of that package, Lantry,” Richards snorted. “Or we’ll get it out of you the hard way.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “You two puppets wouldn’t dare make a move until the puppet-master pulls your strings and he’s riding in the car behind you.”

  “Better give with the information,” blustered Richards.

  “Horseradish!” I told him.

  The car which carried Shelmerdine began to honk its horn behind us.

  I turned about and looked out of the rear window. The chauffeur of the car behind was signalling with his hand. We were travelling along a lonely and obviously little-used dirt road.

  “Slow down, Tonks,” Richards ordered the cop who was driving, “Mr. Shelmerdine’s car is going to overtake.”

  The cop cut speed and pulled into the side of the road. Shelmerdine’s chauffeur gunned the big luxury model and swept past the police vehicle. Tonks pulled the police car behind it and we travelled along in its wake.

  Richards began to get tough again.

  I wondered where the blazes Walt Toland and the Chicago boys were hiding themselves.

  “Where’s the package?” asked Richards.

  “That’s the twenty-eleventh time you’ve squawked that tune, Richards,” I replied. “Why don’t you shut up?”

  Richards growled and the beefy police sergeant glowered at me.

  Up ahead, Shelmerdine’s car slowed down and the driver was signalling again. He began making a turn into a gate giving on to a roadside meadow.

  “Where’s he going?” the driver of the police car wanted to know.

  “Follow him,” rasped Richards curtly. “Mr. Shelmerdine knows best.”

  Tonks, the cop at the wheel, swung the car to follow the chauffeur-driven one through the gate in the fence and along a rugged path that caused the car to jounce heavily.

  The path was little more than a cart-track. The police vehicle kept right after it until the track dwindled away to a mere hairline. High trees swept upwards on all sides, hiding the place from the road. The chauffeur of Shelmerdine’s car braked the vehicle, Tonks followed suit.

  Out of the car came the obese form of Shelmerdine, followed by his chauffeur, a smooth-featured youngster in a black uniform and visored cap.

  Shelmerdine motioned a finger at our car and his puppets inside it jumped into action. Richards handed me a dig in the ribs.

  “Outside—both of you,” he said.

  We got out; so did Richards and his leather-coated cops. I didn’t like the set-up one little bit. The place was quiet and tree-shaded, a long way from anywhere. The sort of location in which you could have your teeth kicked out of your head and nobody would hear you yelling.

  They clustered around us, all of them, the chauffeur, Richards, the sergeant, the cop named Tonks, and Athelstan Shelmerdine, who held the stage.

  Joanne and I were in the centre of them.

  “Where’s the package, Lantry?” Shelmerdine asked.

  The others adopted threatening attitudes.

  “Find out,” I said.

  A reasonable impression of a smile—a shark’s smile—spread over Shelmerdine’s flabby face. He stroked his clipped moustache with the tip of a neatly manicured finger.

  “Your attitude is most foolish, Lantry,” he said. “You can either tell us voluntarily or we’ll find out by—er—somewhat uncivilised methods.”

  “Nuts, Shelmerdine, Richards has been squawking that tune into my ear for the past fifteen minutes.”

  I took a quick look around. The two uniformed cops from Rollinsville had their hands on their king-sized clubs. I didn’t like that.

  There was a cluster of small rocks lying on the ground close to the bole of a tree about five yards from where I stood. I wondered vaguely what my chances were of getting my hands on one of them to use as a weapon.

  “I’m not satisfied that one or the other of you hasn’t got the package hidden about you,” Shelmerdine was saying. “I think a thorough search of Mr. Lantry is called for.”

  “You won’t find any package on me, Shelmerdine,” I told him.

  “Then we’ll search the girl.”

  Off to one side, the young chauffeur inched back the corners of his mouth into a hard grin and said: “Heh, heh.”

  “You’ll keep your grubby mitts off her,” I told Shelmerdine.

  It was Shelmerdine’s turn to say, “Heh, heh,” and he did.

  Then he inclined his head towards me.

  “Frisk him,” he ordered.

  They closed in on me, all of them, Richards, the two uniformed policemen, and the chauffeur. I kept my eyes on the clutter of handy-sized rocks.

  A hand grabbed me by the shoulder but I jumped forward and broke free of the grip. I saw a face before me, that of Tonks, the Rollinsville cop. I figured I could at least lessen the odds by one, so I swung out at him, hitting his jaw hard, and got a kind of brief and detached satisfaction out of watching him crumple down. Then I was grabbed again, I started to struggle, somebody hit me a hard swipe across the back of the neck. This sent me staggering forward, half-blinded, to hit the ground on my stomach.

  Dimly, I was aware that I was now lying close to the clutter of rocks, I made a grab for one, rolled over on to my back, clutching the rock.

  I had a crazy, whirling impression of Richards, the sergeant, and the chauffeur bearing down on me. Shelmerdine was standing off to one side yelling something, but I couldn’t appreciate what it was.

  The Shelmerdine hoodlums piled on to me. The police sergeant had his club drawn and he handed a hefty smack across my shoulders. I felt the combined weight of the three men pressing me down to the hard ground. Through a streaky haze of salt tears I could hear Shelmerdine yipping. I gathered he was telling the others to keep me conscious. Of course he wanted me conscious. Unconscious, I could not tell him what had happened to that all-important bundle of papers.

  They pounded and pummelled and pinned me down, but I kept a grip on the rock. I managed to hang on to it as I slithered into a dizzying haze. It was like a solid anchorage and I kept hanging on to it as they rolled me on the ground and threw their fists at me.

  They started to hoist me up to my feet. I guess they figured I was through offering resistance and they could search me without any further trouble. But I still had the rock clutched in my hand, a comforting lump of hardness between my fingers.

  I couldn’t see properly, but their hands were beginning to pluck at my clothing. I shook my head, focussed my vision, and wobbled like a drunk.

  They were starting in to search me, all three
of them, going at it as if they didn’t care if they ripped every stitch of clothing off my back. I guess they didn’t, at that.

  But I still had my rock.

  I waited just long enough to get a breath of air into my lungs.

  Then I swung out with the rock.

  I gave it to Chief Richards first, right above the ear. I don’t like crooked cops, so I put all the beef I could swing into the blow.

  Richards went down without a sound.

  The big sergeant said: “Why, you—”

  Then I saw his club, coming up before my eyes. I ducked, swung out a feeble blow with the rock. The chauffeur was trying to claw at me. He was near enough for me to kick him, so I did, hard on the shin. He yelled and loosened his grip.

  The Rollinsville police sergeant swung out a blow with his club, swiping me on the side of the head. I reeled, recovered my balance, saw him coming for me again and pitched the rock at him. It hit him in the chest, slowed him down, but did not stop his progression towards me. The broad face was set in determined lines, and his knuckles showed white on the grip of the club. The youthful chauffeur had recovered from his kicked shin, and he was advancing on me, too.

  I was half-dazed. I had lost my rock and had only my bare hands to fight them off with. The cop hit me a crack with his club, a hard blow this time, very much in the tradition of the hammering he and his pals gave me on the road outside Rollinsville.

  A muzzy haze began to close in on me. I figured I’d had my run of luck, but I fought hard to keep conscious.

  Then I saw a flurry of brightly flowered material behind the cop, just as he raised the club for another blow. I heard Shelmerdine’s wheezy voice shout something. He sounded so far away he could have been somewhere in the middle of Arkansas.

  I was so stupid as a result of the recent clubbing, I only half appreciated what happened next. All I knew was that the police sergeant went down like a pole-axed bull and the blow he had raised his club for never landed.

  That gave me the fillip I needed to rise above the waves of unconsciousness that were threatening to engulf me. I shook my head and brought my vision into something close to correct focus.

  I was aware of the big carcass of the cop lying at my feet. The slim form of the black-uniformed chauffeur was sprawled close to him, twitching slightly like a fly that had been swatted hard enough to knock the buzz, but not the life, out of him.