Free The Paul Cain Omnibus by Paul Cain

and then Neilan. There wasn’t anything else to do. I sat between them, and Neilan said: “Let’s go.”
    We went down the street slowly. The man who had been standing on the sidewalk didn’t get into the car; he stood there looking after us. I turned around a little and looked at him through the rear window; as we turned the corner, he went on back up the street, the other way.
    When we got out of town a ways we went faster. It was very cold.
    I said: “Hurry up.”
    Neilan turned and grinned at me. I could see his face a little as we passed a street light. He said: “Hurry up—what?”
    “Hurry up.” The cold was beginning to get in to the pit of my stomach, and my legs. I wanted to be able to stand up. I wanted it standing up, if I could.
    Neilan glanced out the rear window. He said: “I think our taillight’s out.”
    The car slowed, stopped. We were pretty well out in the country by that time and the road was dark.
    Neilan said: “See if we’ve got a taillight, Mac.”
    McNulty grunted and reached up and opened the door and heaved himself up into the door. He stooped and put one foot out on the running board, and then Neilan reached in front of me very quickly. There was a gun in his hand and he put it close to McNulty’s back and shot him three times. The explosions were very close together. McNulty’s knees crumpled up and he fell out of the car on his face.
    The car started again and the man who sat next to the driver reached back and slammed the door shut hard. Neilan cleared his throat.
    He said: “Frank’s number has been up a long time. He’s been tipping our big deliveries, South; we haven’t got a truck through for two months.” I could feel the blood getting back into my arms and legs. I wasn’t so cold and I could breathe without pain.
    “McNulty was in it with him. McNulty was in the outfit downstate. We found out about that last night.”
    We rode on for a little while and nobody said anything.
    “If the dame sticks to her beef,” Neilan went on, “the scarcer you are, the better. If she doesn’t, Gus’ll stand it. You can’t do yourself any good around here any more anyway.”
    Pretty soon we stopped at a little interurban station where I could get a car in to the city.
    I had to wait a while. I sat in the station where it was warm, and thought about Bella. After a while the car came.

Red 71
    S hane pressed the button beneath the neat red 71. Then he leaned close against the building and tilted his head a little and looked up at the thick yellow-black sky. Rain swept in great uneven and diagonal sheets across the dark street, churned the dark puddle at his feet. The streetlight at the corner swung, creaked in the wind.
    Light came suddenly through a slit in the door, the door was opened. Shane went into a narrow heavily carpeted hallway. He took off his dark soft hat, shook it back and forth, handed it to the man who had opened the door.
    He said: “Hi, Nick. How is it?”
    Nick said: “It is very bad weather—and business is very bad.”
    Nick was short, very broad. It was not fat broadness, but muscled, powerful. His shoulders sloped heavily to long curving arms, big white hands. His neck was thick and white and his face was broad and so white that his long black hair looked like a cap. He hung Shane’s hat on one of a long row of numbered pegs, helped him with his coat, hung it beside the hat.
    He stared at Shane reproachfully. “He has been waiting for you a long time,” he said.
    Shane said: “Uh-huh,” absently, went back along the hallway and up a flight of narrow stairs. At the top he turned into another hallway, crossed it diagonally to an open double doorway.
    The room was large, dimly lighted. Perhaps fifteen or eighteen people, mostly in twos or threes, sat at certain of the little round white covered tables. Three more, a woman and two men, stood at the aluminum bar that ran across one corner.
    Shane stood in the doorway a moment, then crossed the room to