Free Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page B

late. They’re comin’!”
    “Who? What? Why?” Steve snapped. “Talk turkey! I don’t trust you. I’ve got to have reasons.”
    “Reasons, my God!” the wounded man cried. “You’ll get your reasons. You think I’m trying to scare you out o’ town b’fore th’ inquest.” He laughed insanely. “Inquest! You fool! There won’t be any inquest! There won’t be any tomorrow – for Izzard! And you -“
    He pulled himself sharply together and caught one of Steve’s hands in both of his.
    “Listen,” he said. “I’ll give it to you, but we’re wasting time! But if you’ve got to have it – listen.

    “Izzard is a plant! The whole damned town is queer. Booze – that’s the answer. The man I knocked off this afternoon – the one you thought was my father – originated the scheme. You make soda niter by boiling the nitrate in tanks with heated coils. He got the idea that a niter plant would make a good front for a moonshine factory. And he got the idea that if you had a whole town working together it’d be impossible for the game ever to fall down.
    “You can guess how much money there is in this country in the hands of men who’d be glad to invest it in a booze game that was air-tight. Not only crooks, I mean, but men who consider themselves honest. Take your guess, whatever it is, and double it, and you still won’t be within millions of the right answer. There are men with – But anyway, Ormsby took his scheme east and got his backing – a syndicate that could have raised enough money in build a dozen cities.
    “Ormsby, Elder, and Brackett were the boys who managed the game. I was here to see that they didn’t double-cross the syndicate; and then there’s a flock of trusty lieutenants, like Fernie, and MacPhail, and Heman – he’s postmaster – and Harker – another doctor, who got his last week – and leslie, who posed as a minister. There was no trouble to getting the population we wanted. The word went around that the new town was a place where a crook would be safe so long as he did what he was told. The slums of all the cities of America, and half of ‘em out of it, emptied themselves here. Every crook that was less than a step ahead of the police, and had car fare here, came and got cover.
    “Of course, with every thug in the world blowing in here we had a lot of sleuths coming, too; but they weren’t hard to handle, and if worse came to worst, we could let the law take an occasional man; but usually it wasn’t hard to take care of the gumshoes. We have bankers, and ministers, and doctors, and postmasters, and prominent men of all sorts either to tangle the sleuths up with bum leads, or, if necessary, to frame them. You’ll find a flock of men in the state pen who came here – most of them as narcotics agents or prohibition agents – and got themselves tied up before they knew what it was all about.
    “God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop – unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us! There was too much money in it – it went to our heads! At first we played square with the syndicate. We made booze and shipped it out – shipped it in carload lots, in trucks, did everything but pipe it out, and we made money for the syndicate and for ourselves. Then we got the real idea – the big one! We kept on making the hooch; but we got the big idea going for our own profit. The syndicate wasn’t in on that.
    “First, we got the insurance racket under way. Elder managed that, with three or four assistants. Between them they became agents of half the insurance companies in the country, and they began to plaster Izzard with policies. Men who had never lived were examined, insured, and then killed – sometimes they were killed on paper, sometimes a real man who died was substituted, and there were times when a man or two was killed to order. It was soft! We had the insurance agents, the doctors, the coroner, the