A Gunman Close Behind

by A. A. Glynn

  Along the margin of Lake Michigan, the highway was a dark, straight stretch of asphalt, occasionally illuminated by the fugitive moon.

  The distant lights of Gary came into sight.

  I slackened speed, feeling sure that we had put the pursuers well behind us. Joanne struck a listening attitude, her brow clouded suddenly.

  “Mike! I can hear a sound over the engine—I don’t like it—listen!”

  I listened. Over the regular note of the purring motor, I heard a steady, whirring beat.

  Joanne wound her window down quickly. Air, chilled by the nearness of the lake, seeped into the interior of the big auto. The girl leaned out, looking upward anxiously.

  She pulled her head back into the car and turned to me with frightened features.

  “Mike, there’s a helicopter above us!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That numbed me.

  “A helicopter?”

  “Yes, it’s Shelmerdine, Mike. He had a copter at the Rollinsville mansion; Greg Cortines, the chauffeur, pilots it. Could they have caught up with us this soon in the copter?”

  “Yes, easily, when you consider we lost some time by having a meal and in trying to shake off those tails in South Bend.”

  The whirring tune of the flying machine’s blades came through the open window. It sounded like the flapping wings of the angel of death.

  Joanne began to grow pessimistic.

  “We’re sunk, Mike, we can’t shake them off. They can cling to us for miles, even come down low and shoot at us!”

  “They can float close to us in open country, girlie, but they’ll have to take that flying egg-whisk high over a town. That’s Gary right ahead. Watch my smoke!”

  I gave the big car the gun and kept right on raising the speed needle until we passed the Gary limit signs, then I slowed a little and headed for the centre of the town.

  Joanne was leaning from the window.

  “I can still see them,” she reported. “They’re a long way behind, coming after us.”

  I plunged the car into the built-up centre of Gary, like a rabbit making for a warren. Joanne was keeping watch on what small portion of sky was visible between the tops of the buildings as I drove along the central street.

  “Can’t see the helicopter now,” she told me.

  In the driving mirror, I saw what I half-expected to see when we reached Gary. A black saloon slinking out of a side street behind the car I was driving, to fall into a steady pursuit.

  Another tail. Shelmerdine must have been mighty busy since we left him in that field. I had little doubt he had called up his strong-arm contacts in every town on the way to Chicago. Now, we had the two tails from South Bend somewhere at our backs, the helicopter somewhere in the sky and this Johnny-come-lately close behind.

  The odds were thickening, and the Shelmerdine dogs were out with a vengeance.

  I didn’t mention the new bloodhound to Joanne, but she spotted him.

  “Another car following us, Mike,” she said quietly. “It’s like you said, Shelmerdine cat’s-paws waiting to pick up our trail all along the way.”

  We were reaching the outskirts of Gary. I shoved the throttle wide open and streaked for the open road.

  “What are our chances, Mike?” Joanne asked in a quiet, even voice.

  “Great,” I lied, “but check the cylinders of those two Colts in your glove compartment. Two-Gun Katie may have to ride again before tonight’s out.”

  She took the pair of revolvers from the compartment, flipped open the cylinders.

  “Both fully loaded.”

  “Good, keep them close to hand.”

  I took one hand from the wheel, fished the third Army Colt from my pocket, and checked the cylinder. Fully loaded.

  In the mirror, the tailing saloon was still visible, coming along behind us on the wide road with its lights dimmed. Joanne Kilvert took another glance at the sky.

  “The helicopter’s in view again,” she commented. “A long way up, but coming down—and they must have spotted us!”

  I gave the car the gun once again.

  “East Chicago, here we come!” I said without feeling in the least enthusiastic.

  “And I suppose more of Shelmerdine’s men will be waiting there to join the chase,” she remarked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I shoved the accelerator down to the floor, kicked every ounce of power out of the big auto. A coughing note crept into the hum of the motor.

  I watched the gasoline needle, feeling far from happy.

  “Do you believe in old sayings like ‘Trouble never comes alone’?” I asked Joanne.

  “Can’t say I’ve paid much attention to them.”

  “Nor did I, until now, but I’ll make them my life’s study if we ever get out of this fix, girlie. We’re running out of gas.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes! It’s not so surprising. I’ve been gunning this big heap like an Indianapolis track driver.”

  Joanne cast her eyes upwards. Both of us could hear the mounting whirr of the copter’s vanes. And the black saloon became a little larger in the driving mirror.

  There must have been plenty of guys feeling happier than me right then. I had to think fast, and thinking can hurt when your head has more or less got used to being a target for crooked cops’ clubs the way mine had of late.

  The car that was tailing us grew a little bigger in the mirror; the tune of the helicopter’s prop grew a little louder; the motor of the big car began to splutter again.

  Up ahead, the lights of East Chicago glittered in the night.

  “Listen,” I told Joanne, “East Chicago is only a little way ahead and there’s just enough gas to make it, I guess. I’m going to jump from the car just before we come to that cluster of trees, up ahead and to the left. I’ll run for the trees and try to attract attention to myself. You give the car everything it’s got and use that last drop of gas to reach East Chicago. When you make it, find a telephone. Ask for Chicago and get World Wide Investigations. O’Toole will be off duty by now, but tell whoever answers to get into radio contact with Walt Toland and his boys, and tell them I tried to draw the Shelmerdine bloodhounds into the woods between Gary and East Chicago. They’re supposed to be headed for Chicago out of Indiana. Tell World Wide to instruct them to come out here fast and looking for trouble.”

  “But, you can’t fight alone!” she protested.

  “No, but I can give them a run for their money, and hold off the chase while you run for East Chicago and the telephone. Now, change seats with me, slow down until I jump clear, then gun it for those lights ahead. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed reluctantly.

  We changed seats. It was easy to do so in a car just a shade less than the size of Carnegie Hall.

  I grabbed one of the Colts from the glove compartment, leaving her the other.

  “It’s Two-Gun Mike’s night to ride,” I told her. “Slacken speed until I jump.”

  I took a last look in the mirror and saw the saloon, very much bigger. The flying egg-whisk was whirring loudly above us.

  Cold air, touched with the smell of smoke, drifting over from the smokestacks of East Chicago’s heavy industrial plants, seeped into the car as I opened the door. I held one Colt in my hand, the second was in my pocket.

  Joanne dropped speed. The engine was rasping nastily.

  “Good luck!” she shouted.

  “Give ’er the gun!” I yelled.

  And I jumped.

  I hit the road with a jolt that jarred every bone in my body, but managed to keep upright. I had a brief impression of something floating in the night air with a whirring airscrew spinning above it; the black saloon was closer than I thought, roaring up the highway towards me.

  At my back, Joanne speeded the erratic motor of the big car and I heard it go zooming away. Over to the far side of the road, was a grass slope, topped by the stand of dark trees that I intended to make for.

&nbs
p; I turned, half-crouched in the roadway, and fired at the oncoming car, shooting low at the front wheels. The vehicle veered crazily across the highway, broadside on and with a screaming of brakes.

  I started running in a zigzag for the rising grassland and the trees, vaguely aware of the whirring helicopter swinging off course and dropping lower. As I ran, I took a quick look over my shoulder, saw that Joanne was streaking away into the distance.

  The saloon had stopped, and dark figures were spilling out; the flying-machine was coming lower. My shooting at the car had resulted in precisely the effect I had played for—attention had been diverted from the girl. I decided to keep it that way and pegged a shot up at the flying egg-whisk. Then, I was on the grass of the slope, running hard, feeling springy turf under the soles of my Oxfords.

  I wasn’t prepared for the way in which the men in the helicopter answered my shot. A repetitive crackle of machine-gun fire sounded from the sky.

  I doubled almost in two and kept running upwards to the trees. I guess I was a poor target from the air, running against the black mass of the grassy slope, but I heard the bullets thumping into the earth only a matter of feet behind my heels.

  Down on the highway, the dark figures from the car that had tailed us out of Gary were giving chase. Somebody blasted a shot at me, but the slug went whining above my head.

  I kept running, zigzagging, slithering on the dew-wet grass, making for the stand of shadowed trees at the crest of the rise.

  My heart was pounding like a trip hammer.

  Feet thumped on the grass behind me; the spinning vanes of the copter’s propeller sounded closer. Another splutter of automatic fire raked down, but they missed again. I gained the top of the rise, crashed through some clinging undergrowth and hared into the dark corridors formed by the night-shrouded trees.

  I could still hear the hoodlums from the car running up the slope. The note of the flying-machine’s engine changed to an angry buzz. I glanced upwards and caught a glimpse of it, gaining altitude above the opening in the leafy arches above my head.

  The wood was as black as the inside of a shoe-black’s gullet, but I kept on running, sometimes blundering into the boles of trees, stumbling over roots and becoming entangled in underbrush.

  The helicopter was still flying somewhere above the trees. The sound of its spinning vanes seemed to fill the whole atmosphere.

  Voices sounded louder against the whirring from the dark sky, the voices of men who crashed through the undergrowth beneath the trees. I gripped the comforting hardness of the Colt’s butt and tried to move quickly through the trees and the tangles of underbrush without making a sound. I felt like a hunted animal in that wood, with the exception that an animal would be armed with its natural cunning, whereas I was lost in an alien element.

  The voices of the pursuing hoodlums sounded off to one side.

  They seemed to have split up into groups.

  A raspy baritone shouted: “Hey, Al, can you see him?”

  Al retorted with an unprintable, then: “Naw. I can’t even see my own nose!”

  I kept moving stealthily, heading away from the direction of the voices. At least, I wasn’t the only one out of his element in this chase. The mugs who were combing the wood were as much sidewalk-pounders as myself.

  But the odds were stacked with them.

  I did my best to cat-foot among the trees, trying to suppress even my heavy breathing. I reached the margin of the stand of trees and crouched into some thickly grown bushes.

  Deep in the wood, I could hear the searchers crashing through the shrubbery. One of them swore loudly as he fell over something or blundered into a tree.

  I hoped he hurt himself.

  From where I squatted in the bush, I could see the dark sweep of the highway angling away down below the knoll. Away in the distance were the lights of East Chicago. Men were working the night shift over there, and the red and yellow flares of the blast furnaces were reflected as brightly flimmering stabs of light on the surface of Lake Michigan.

  A scene not without a certain beauty. If you had time to absorb it.

  Which I hadn’t, right at that moment.

  The Shelmerdine bloodhounds crashed about in the heart of the wood.

  The helicopter hovered and whirred somewhere above the trees like an enraged hornet.

  And I regained my breath, crouching in the bush.

  Along the road, with headlamps flashing, came three cars from the southerly direction. I recognised them. The boys who had tailed me from South Bend.

  They braked to a stop down there where the first car was parked. Distance-diminished figures began to issue from the three vehicles. The droning copter came creeping over the treetops, very low, and passed right over my head. I saw it go whirling down towards the roadway where the figures stood spread-legged, looking up at it.

  The flying egg-whisk swooped low over their heads, hanging by its spinning air-screw.

  Over the noise of the threshing blades, I heard a wheezy voice shout: “Lantry’s up in the wood somewhere. He’s the guy that killed Kornes. Go help find him!”

  Shelmerdine’s voice.

  Some of the visiting firemen from South Bend started up the slope. I could see objects in their hands. The coy moon came out from behind a cloud to put a metallic sheen on the object.

  Now, the odds were more than stacked against me.

  Shelmerdine’s voice was raised again.

  “The girl took my car towards East Chicago. Go see if you can locate her!”

  The remaining figures climbed into one of the cars and it went speeding off towards the points of light that marked the town.

  The small figures were still coming up the knoll. The crashing and raised voices still sounded from the depths of the trees.

  I began to angle back along the top of the rise, moving along the margin of the cluster of trees.

  I wondered what was happening to Joanne.

  Just inside the margin of the high trees, I cat-footed back along the crest of the knoll. Somebody came trudging through crackling undergrowth and I heard a flat nasal voice say: “He must have given us the slip somehow.”

  The voice was too close for comfort and I froze against the bark of a tree. The crashing feet sounded nearer and I saw a pair of vague shadows go walking past, within a yard of the tree against which I was standing.

  One shadow said: “This is the edge of the wood. My guess is he’s somewhere in the middle. Let’s move back into the centre again.”

  “Okay,” agreed the second shadow, stopping his progression. “First, I’m gonna light a cigarette.”

  The other made a noise of disgust.

  “Don’t be a lunkhead! Ain’t you got any sense? That shamus has a gun; suppose he sees the light: he can pick you off in the darkness!”

  Quite a woodsman, that guy. Maybe he was a Boy Scout who embarked on a life of crime by running away with the troop funds.

  “Yeah,” said the second shadow, as though he had been suddenly enlightened as to all the mysteries of the universe. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

  They crashed away into the middle of the trees and I breathed again.

  After a while, I started my stealthy progression along the rim of the trees again.

  The persistent whirring of the copter sounded above the trees once more. Somebody, somewhere in the wood, was shouting: “Go look over that direction. We’ll keep looking over this way.”

  Somebody instructing the South Bend hoodlums, who had evidently just arrived at the top of the rise.

  I kept right on moving along the margin of the trees, saw that the knoll swept down, at its rear side, to a miniature valley. There was a building of some kind down there, it looked like a crumbling old house.

  The dawn started stretching itself lazily up in the sky that seemed full of the sound of the helicopter. The clouds began to flush with a gentle rosiness.

  Cautiously, I looked upwards. The tune of the helicopter still whirred in the raw m
orning air, but the machine was out of sight. I decided to make a run for the old building down the slope, broke out of the trees and went haring off, half doubled, trying to merge with the dark ground.

  I made good going, too.

  Until I was spotted.

  There was a yell from up on the tree-crested slope at my back.

  A gun barked; a slug whined by my head.

  Up above sounded the flying-machine’s engine. I looked backwards and up as I ran and saw the helicopter come over the top of the mass of trees, moving against the red-flushed sky like a great, bloated fish swimming out of a clump of seaweed.

  I remembered the submachine gun that either Shelmerdine or his pilot had raked the knoll with earlier, and put on a spurt of speed as the copter came bearing down.

  The tumbledown old building was perhaps fifty yards away. I had a glimpse of naked rafters outlined against the rose and gold sweep of the sky.

  I kept on running.

  Another single shot sounded and I felt a hot stab driving into my left leg at the fleshy part of the calf. It burned as if a white hot knife had been thrust into the flesh.

  But I kept on running.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I made it to the old building.

  It had been a house once, a timbered two-storey house that had been burnt out at some time or another. It must have been a long time ago, for the fire-punished timbers were moss-grown now and had a musty, rotten smell about them.

  There was enough of the structure left to afford cover from the bullets of the Shelmerdine hoods, though, so I scuttled into what had once been the main door. Inside, there was tumbled, fungus-grown debris. The whole of the upper floor had collapsed inwards and the flame-chamfered rafters slanted brokenly against the dawn.

  I pitched myself down behind a pile of musty rubble. I could see out of the doorless main entrance. Dark figures ran down the side of the knoll. The helicopter, with Athelstan Shelmerdine in it, hovered close.

  The wound in my leg throbbed in persistent pangs. I could feel a sluggish trickle of wetness inching down into my sock.

  I huddled close to the dark pile of rubble, realising that the black chauffeur’s outfit I wore would make me almost invisible against it. I cocked the Army Colt, fumbled in my pants pocket and pulled out the spare revolver.