Free Creeping Siamese and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page B

detectives and a dozen uniformed men with him. We hit the house front and back. No time was wasted ringing the bell. We simply tore down the doors and went in. Everything inside was black until flashlights lit it up. There was no resistance. Ordinarily the six men we found in there would have damned near ruined us in spite of our outnumbering them. But they were too dead for that.
    We looked at one another sort of open-mouthed.
    â€œThis is getting monotonous,” Duff complained, biting off a hunk of tobacco. “Everybody’s work is pretty much the same thing over and over, but I’m tired of walking into roomfuls of butchered crooks.”
    The catalog here had fewer names than the other, but they were bigger names. The Shivering Kid was here—nobody would collect all the reward money piled up on him now; Darby M’Laughlin, his horn-rimmed glasses crooked on his nose, ten thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds on fingers and tie; Happy Jim Hacker; Donkey Marr, the last of the bow-legged Marrs, killers all, father and five sons; Toots Salda, the strongest man in crookdom, who had once picked up and run away with two Savannah coppers to whom he was handcuffed; and Rumdum Smith, who killed Lefty Read in Chi in 1916—a rosary wrapped around his left wrist.
    No gentlemanly poisoning here—these boys had been mowed down with a .30-30 rifle fitted with a clumsy but effective home-made silencer. The rifle lay on the kitchen table. A door connected the kitchen with the dining-room. Directly opposite that door, double doors—wide open—opened into the room in which the dead thieves lay. They were all close to the front wall, lying as if they had been lined up against the wall to be knocked off.
    The gray-papered wall was spattered with blood, punctured with holes where a couple of bullets had gone all the way through. Jack Counihan’s young eyes picked out a stain on the paper that wasn’t accidental. It was close to the floor, beside the Shivering Kid, and the Kid’s right hand was stained with blood. He had written on the wall before he died—with fingers dipped in his own and Toots Salda’s blood. The letters in the words showed breaks and gaps where his fingers had run dry, and the letters were crooked and straggly, because he must have written them in the dark.
    By filling in the gaps, allowing for the kinks, and guessing where there weren’t any indications to guide us, we got two words: Big Flora .
    â€œThey don’t mean anything to me,” Duff said, “but it’s a name and most of the names we have belong to dead men now, so it’s time we were adding to our list.”
    â€œWhat do you make of it?” asked bullet-headed O’Gar, detective-sergeant in the Homicide Detail, looking at the bodies. “Their pals got the drop on them, lined them against the wall, and the sharpshooter in the kitchen shot ’em down—bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing?”
    â€œIt reads that way,” the rest of us agreed.
    â€œTen of ’em came here from Fillmore Street,” I said. “Six stayed here. Four went to another house—where part of ’em are now cutting down the other part. All that’s necessary is to trail the corpses from house to house until there’s only one man left—and he’s bound to play it through by croaking himself, leaving the loot to be recovered in the original packages. I hope you folks don’t have to stay up all night to find the remains of that last thug. Come on, Jack, let’s go home for some sleep.”
    VII
    It was exactly 5 a.m. when I separated the sheets and crawled into my bed. I was asleep before the last draw of smoke from my good-night Fatima was out of my lungs. The telephone woke me at 5:15.
    Fiske was talking: “Mickey Linehan just phoned that your Red O’Leary came home to roost half an hour ago.”
    â€œHave him booked,” I said, and was asleep