Hammett (Crime Masterworks) Read Free

sense pursuit and try to lose him in the avenues running south from . . .
    Another gap. Taillight . . . ah! South it was.
    ‘Two can play at that game, laddie,’ muttered the plain-clothesman through his teeth. He was a grizzled Irishman with a sad, judging face under a thatch of once-carroty hair now ash-gray. His accent was Mission District, more like Canarsie or Baum’s Rush a continent away than a stage Mick’s brogue. Only his eyes suggested the copper.
    Laverty dragged his steering wheel over and switched off the headlights just as the turn was completed. The mist had tattered enough so he could use the lights of the car ahead as a guide.While trying to coax more speed from the Reo, he removed a long-barreled Police Positive from his mackinaw pocket and laid it on the seat against his thigh.
    Fear rode with Egan Tokzek like some obscene Siamese twin. The lights had disappeared from his mirror, but he still had the bundle to dispose of.
    Why’d the little bitch have to die, anyway? None of the others had, down through the years. He snuffled painfully. They’d survived, been shipped back east, and that had been the end of them, every one.
    Until tonight.
    Far enough south to dump her? Had to be at least two miles from the park. The houses that had crowded the first two blocks were gone. He eased off the accelerator. Lug it out into the dunes and dump it. Days, maybe weeks before nosy brats would find whatever the animals had left.
    There’d be no more after tonight. Coasting, he pulled toward the shoulder of the road. No more. One dead was one too many. He glanced in the mirror as he reached for the brake.
    Egan Tokzek screamed. Filling his mirror was a huge black auto, thundering down upon him.
    He slammed the car back into gear, tried to shove his foot through the floorboards, and wrenched over the wheel in the vain hope of cutting the other off. Fenders crumpled. He swung away. The pursuer’s radiator was at his rear door, creeping up. Sudden lights flooded the mirror to claw at his drug-sensitized eyes. His hands jumped and shook on the wheel as if electricity were pouring through them.
    Dan Laverty’s hands were rocks. The cars were shoulder to shoulder. He wanted to do it the easy way if he could. One big hand left the wheel to make violent motions as he pulled up on the left of Tokzek’s car.
    ‘POLICE!’ he bellowed over the roar of powerful engines and the scream of wind. ‘PULL OVER!’
    But Egan Tokzek was already scrabbling for the scarred walnut butt of his huge old Colt .44 rim-fire.
    His first shot passed in front of Laverty’s windshield. The policeman’s teeth gleamed in a wolfish grin. This was what he lived for, this was when he felt really alive.
    The gun roared again. This time Laverty’s window shattered. He felt the warm trickle of blood down his cheek from a hurled splinter of glass. More shots. Still no hits. And still Laverty’s gun remained on the seat beside his thigh.
    Then his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. A hundred yards ahead the road ended at Yorba Street, without going through to Sloat. The grizzled policeman leaned all the way across his seat to rest the fleshy heel of his gun hand on the door frame where Tokzek’s bullets had taken out the glass. He pumped two rounds into the side of the bullnose.
    Tokzek heard the first shot. A terrible fist struck his shoulder with the second. He fought the wheel. Jesus. Left arm dead. And the road was gone. Jesus Jesus!
    The Morris-Cowley rammed headlong into the sand, reared like a stallion, slewed, sheered off two stubby pines while losing a fender and a door. The car canted, almost rolled, butted sideways into a sandhill, and rocked to a halt.
    Tokzek was hurled across the seat by the impact. He lay still, panting, hearing without comprehension the moaning wind and a liquid trickling noise. His gun was still in his hand; directly ahead gaped escape where the door was gone.
    He slithered forward, jackknifed down over the