Free Deadly Joke by Hugh Pentecost

windows, looting furs and jewelry, and clothes. The cops were caught between the two forces. Frightened guests were in the center of a whirlpool of violence. Some of the kids had clubs and baseball bats. They swung at everything in sight—people, chandeliers, furniture. Here and there a cop, snowed under by the raiders, had been able to draw a gun and was firing wildly into a solidly packed mass of people. Above it all was a chanting.
    “We want Maxwell! We want Maxwell!”
    As Chambrun, Hardy, and I came out of the elevators into this madhouse, we were almost trampled to death by kids crowding into the car we had vacated. I heard a girl shouting hysterically.
    “Fourteen B! It’s Fourteen B!”
    They knew where Maxwell was.
    We swung around and got into the next car. Hardy blocked a group of charging kids. He swung his fist like a sledge hammer, knocking one boy back into the group and scattering them like ninepins. I got the elevator door closed and we went up. Chambrun’s face was a study in cold rage.
    We stumbled out at 14. The hallway was packed with kids, yelling and screaming. But they weren’t moving forward. The situation was a little different here. The space was narrow. There was no way to encircle the people outside the door of 14B . I managed to climb up on a radiator cover to have a look. Jerry Dodd and two of his men were there, guns drawn, and with them was Watson Clarke, his clothes torn, his white shirt front smeared with blood. I saw a kid with a club make a rush at them. It was Clarke, a big man, who stopped him, picked him up in the air, and literally threw him back in the crowd.
    Then I heard Jerry Dodd’s voice, clear, and cold. “I’m warning you!” he shouted at the crowd. “Come one step closer and we open fire. There’ll be a dozen of you dead before you can reach us. Add it up!”
    And then, unbelievably, straight through the center of that jammed crowd Chambrun, short and square, forced his way. It took both strength and determination. When he reached Jerry, he turned and faced them. He looked carved out of rock.
    “Listen!” he said. His voice was so low they had to quiet to hear him. Something about him held them back. “Let us examine the facts. There are three men here, each with six bullets in a gun. There are two of us unarmed who will fight you until we are dead.” He glanced at the bloodied Clarke. “These guns will become clubs when they are empty. So the first two dozen of you will die. Behind you is one armed man, a police lieutenant. In seconds there will be a score more. You’re caught both ways. If you overpower us, you’d need a tank to break down this door. At the far end of the hall is a window. Outside it is a fourteen-story drop to the sidewalk. You can’t get Maxwell and you can’t get away. If you overpower us and kill us—because you will have to overpower us—you will all of you spend the rest of your lives in prison. Those are the facts, my friends.”
    A girl just in front of me shouted: “We want Maxwell!” It didn’t sound very bloodthirsty; more like a college cheerleader trying to start a crowd response. I heard elevator doors open behind me. Half a dozen cops with drawn guns piled out. The ball game was over—I hoped.
    Somebody shouted: “There’s a fire exit down the hall.”
    They turned, as though they were one, and tried to stampede. Three or four of them got by the unprepared cops and I saw them get through the fire door to the inside staircase. Then the cops had the hall blocked.
    “Let them go one by one, after you’ve searched them,” Hardy ordered. “Confiscate all weapons, clubs, anything they can use to raise hell.”
    The resistance had cracked. I wedged my way to the front and joined the defenders.
    “I’m always in the nick of time,” I said.
    Chambrun ignored me. I turned to Jerry Dodd. “Would you have fired on them, pal?” I asked.
    “Right through the eye sockets,” he said.
    “I was never so glad to see