Free Fly Paper and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.
    I followed him to the car.
    Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.
    The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.
    Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.
    Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dulness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.
    The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.
    He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.
    We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.
    The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:
    â€œA-a-a-a-a-a!”
    It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.
    I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.
    The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.
    Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.
    I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.
    I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.
    By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.
    â€œStop,” I called to the flat-faced man.
    He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.
    His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.
    I reached past him and shut off the engine.
    He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.
    I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.
    Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.
    I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:
    â€œWhat the hell’s the matter with you?”
    He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.
    â€œTurn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”
    He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.
    â€œYou know who that was?” I asked.
    He shook his head.
    â€œYou do,” I growled.
    He shook his head.
    By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only head-shakes out of him.
    I said:
    â€œGet away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”
    He opened the door and scrambled out.
    â€œCome back here,” I called.
    He backed away, shaking his head.
    I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.
    He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.
    I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.
    I