Horrible Imaginings

THE AUTOMATIC PISTOL

Inky Kozacs never let anyone but himself handle his automatic pistol, or even touch it. It was blue-black and hefty and when you just pressed the trigger once, eight .45 caliber slugs came out of it almost on top of each other.

Inky was something of a mechanic, as far as his automatic went. He would break it down and put it together again, and every once in a while carefully rub a file across the inside trigger catch.

Glasses once told him, “You will make that gun into such a hair-trigger that it will go off in your pocket and blast off all your toes. You will only have to think about it and it will start shooting.”

Inky smiled at that, I remember. He was a little wiry man with a pale face, from which he couldn’t ever shave off the blue-black of his beard, no matter how close he shaved. His hair was black, too. He talked foreign, but I never could figure what country. He got together with Anton Larsen just after prohibition came, in the days when sea-skiffs with converted automobile motors used to play tag with revenue cutters in New York Bay and off the Jersey coast, both omitting to use lights in order to make the game more difficult. Larsen and Inky Kozacs used to get their booze off a steamer and run it in near the Twin Lights in New Jersey.

It was there that Glasses and I started to work for them. Glasses, who looked like a cross between a college professor and an automobile salesman, came from I don’t know where in New York City, and I was a local small-town policeman until I determined to lead a less hypocritical life. We used to ride the stuff back toward Newark in a truck.

Inky always rode in with us; Larsen only occasionally. Neither of them used to talk much; Larsen, because he didn’t see any sense in talking unless to give a guy orders or a girl a proposition; and Inky, well, I guess because he wasn’t any too happy talking American. And there wasn’t a ride Inky took with us but he didn’t slip out his automatic and sort of pet it mutter at it under his breath. Once when we were restfully chugging down the highway Glasses asked him, polite inquiring:

“Just what is it makes you so fond of that gun? After all, the must be thousands identically like it.”

“You think so?” says Inky, giving us a quick stare from his little, glinty black eyes and making a speech for once. “Let me tell you, Glasses” (he made the word sound like ‘Masses’), “nothing is alike in this world. People, guns, bottles of Scotch—nothing. Everything in the world is different. Every man has different fingerprints; and, of all guns made in the same factory as this one, there is not one like mine. I could pick mine out from a hundred. Yes, even if I hadn’t filed the trigger catch, I could do that.”

We didn’t contradict him. It sounded pretty reasonable. He sure loved that gun, all right. He slept with it under his pillow. I don’t think it ever got more than three feet away from him as long as he lived.

Once when Larsen was riding in with us, he remarked! sarcastically, “That is a pretty little gun, Inky, but I am getting very tired of hearing you talk to it so much, especially when no one can understand what you are saying. Doesn’t it ever talk back to you?”

Inky smiled at him. “My gun only knows eight words,” he said, “and they are all alike.”

This was such a good crack that we laughed.

“Let’s have a look at it,” said Larsen reaching out his hand.

But Inky put it back in his pocket and didn’t take it out the rest of the trip.

After that Larsen was always kidding Inky about the gun, trying to get his goat. He was a persistent guy with a very peculiar sense of humor, and he kept it up for a long time after it had stopped being funny. Finally he took to acting as if he wanted to buy it, making Inky crazy offers of one to two hundred dollars.

“Two hundred and seventy-five dollars, Inky,” he said one evening as we were rattling past Bayport with a load of cognac and Irish whiskey. “That’s my last offer, and you better take it.”

Inky shook his head and made a funny noise that was almost like a snarl. Then, to my great surprise (I almost ran the truck off the pavement) Larsen lost his temper.

“Hand over that damn gun!” he bellowed, grabbing Inky’s shoulders and shaking him. I was almost knocked off the seat. Somebody might even have been hurt, if a motorcycle cop hadn’t stopped us just at that moment to ask for his hush-money. By the time he was gone, Larsen and Inky were both cooled down to the freezing point, and there was no more fighting. We got our load safely into the warehouse, nobody saying a word.

Afterward, when Glasses and I were having a cup of coffee at a little open-all-night restaurant, I said, “Those two guys are crazy, and I don’t like it a bit. Why the devil do they act that way, now that the business is going so swell? I haven’t got the brains Larsen has, but you won’t ever find me fighting about a gun as if I was a kid.”

Glasses only smiled as he poured a precise half-spoonful of sugar into his cup.

“And Inky’s as bad as he is,” I went on. “I tell you, Glasses, it ain’t natural or normal for a man to feel that way about a piece of metal. I can understand him being fond of it and feeling lost without it. I feel the same way about my lucky half-dollar. It’s the way he pets it and makes love to it that gets on my nerves. And now Larsen’s acting the same way.”

Glasses shrugged. “We’re all getting a little jittery, although we won’t admit it,” he said. “Too many hijackers. And so we start getting on each other’s nerves and fighting about trifles—such as automatic pistols.”

“You may have something there.”

Glasses winked at me. “Why, certainly, No Nose,” he said, referring to what had once been done to me with a baseball bat, “I even have another explanation of tonight’s events.”

“What?”

He leaned over and whispered in a mock-mysterious way, “Maybe there’s something queer about the gun itself.”

I told him in impolite language to go chase himself.

From that night, however, things were changed, Larsen and Inky Kozacs never spoke to each other any more except in the line of business. And there was no more talk, kidding or serious, about the gun. Inky only brought it out when Larsen wasn’t along.

Well, the years kept passing and the bootlegging business stayed good except that the hijackers became more numerous and Inky got a couple of chances to show us what a nice noise his automatic made. Then, too, we got into a row with some competitors bossed by an Irishman named Luke Dugan, and had to watch our step very carefully and change our route every other trip.

Still, business was good. I continued to support almost all my relatives, and Glasses put away a few dollars every month for what he called his Persian Cat Fund. Larsen, I believe, spent about everything he got on women and all that goes with them. He was the kind of guy who would take all the pleasures of life without cracking a smile, but who lived for them just the same.

As for Inky Kozacs, we never knew what happened to the money he made. We never heard of him spending much, so we finally figured he must be saving it—probably in bills in a safety deposit box. Maybe he was planning to go back to the Old Country, wherever that was, and be somebody. At any rate he never told us. By the time Congress took our profession away from us, he must have had a whale of a lot of dough. We hadn’t had a big racket, but we’d been very careful.

Finally we ran our last load. We’d have had to quit the business pretty soon anyway, because the big syndicates were demanding more protection money each week. There was no chance left for a small independent operator, even if he was as clever as Larsen. So Glasses and I took a couple of months off for vacation before thinking what to do next for his Persian cats and my shiftless relatives. For the time being we stuck together.

Then one morning I read in the paper that Inky Kozacs had been taken for a ride. He’d been found shot dead on a dump heap near Elizabeth, New Jersey.

“I guess Luke Dugan finally got him,” said Glasses.

“A nasty break,” I said, “especially figuring all that money he hadn’t got any fun out of. I am glad that you and I, Glasses, aren’t important enough for Dugan to bother about, I hope.”

“Yeah. Say, No Nose, does it say if they found Inky’s gun on him?”

I said it told that the dead man was unarmed and that no weapon was found on the scene.

Glasses remarked that it was queer to think of Inky’s gun being in anyone else’s pocket. I agreed, and we spent some time wondering whether Inky had had a chance to defend himself.

About two hours later Larsen called and told us to meet him at the hide-out. He said Luke Dugan was gunning for him too.

The hide-out is a three-room frame bungalow with a big corrugated iron garage next to it. The garage was for the truck, and sometimes we would store a load of booze there when we heard that the police were going to make some arrests for the sake of variety. It is near Bayport, about a mile and a half from the cement highway and about a quarter of a mile from the bay and the little inlet in which we used to hide our boat. Stiff, knife-edged sea-grass taller than a man, comes up near to the house on the bay side, which is north, and on the west too. Under the sea-grass the ground is marshy, though in hot weather and when the tides aren’t high, it gets dry and caked; here and there creeks of tidewater go through it. Even a little breeze will make the blades of sea-grass scrape each other with a funny dry sound.

To the east are some fields, and beyond them, Bayport. Bayport is a kind of summer resort town and some of the houses are built up on poles because of the tides and storms. It has a little lagoon for the boats of the fishermen who go out after crabs.

To the south of the hide-out is the dirt road leading to the cement highway. The nearest house is about half a mile away.

It was late in the afternoon when Glasses and I got there. We brought groceries for a couple of days, figuring Larsen might want to stay. Then, along about sunset, we heard Larsen’s coupe turning in, and I went out to put it in the big empty garage and carry in his suitcase. When I got back Larsen was talking to Glasses. He was a big man and his shoulders were broad both ways, like a wrestler’s. His head was almost bald and what was left of his hair was a dirty yellow. His eyes were little and his face wasn’t given much to expression. And that was the way it was when he said, “Yeah, Inky got it.”

“Luke Dugan’s crazy gunmen sure hold a grudge,” I observed.

Larsen nodded his head and scowled.

“Inky got it,” he repeated, taking up his suitcase and starting for the bedroom. “And I’m planning to stay here for a few days, just in case they’re after me too. I want you and Glasses to stay here with me.”

Glasses gave me a funny wink and began throwing a meal together. I turned on the lights and pulled down the blinds, taking a worried glance down the road, which was empty. This waiting around in a lonely house for a bunch of gunmen to catch up with you didn’t appeal to me. Nor to Glasses either, I guessed. It seemed to me that it would have been a lot more sensible for Larsen to put a couple of thousand miles between him and New York. But, knowing Larsen, I had sense enough not to make any comments.

After canned corned-beef hash and beans and beer, we sat around the table drinking coffee.

Larsen took an automatic out of his pocket and began fooling with it, and right away I saw it was Inky’s. For about five minutes nobody said a word. Glasses played with his coffee, pouring in the cream one drop at a time. I wadded a piece of bread into little pellets which kept looking less and less appetizing.

Finally Larsen looked up at us and said, “Too bad Inky didn’t have this with him when he was taken for a ride. He gave it to me just before he planned sailing for the Old Country. He didn’t want it with him any more, now that the racket’s over.”

“I’m glad the guy that killed him hasn’t got it now,” said Glasses quickly. He talked nervously and in his worst college professor style. I could tell he didn’t want the silence to settle down again. “It’s a funny thing. Inky giving up his gun—but I can understand his feeling; he mentally associated the gun with our racket; when the one was over he didn’t care about the other.”

Larsen grunted, which meant for Glasses to shut up.

“What’s going to happen to Inky’s dough?” I asked.

Larsen shrugged his shoulders and went on fooling with the automatic, throwing a shell into the chamber, cocking it, and so forth. It reminded me so much of the way Inky used to handle it that I got fidgetting and began to imagine I heard Luke Dugan’s gunmen creeping up through the sea-grass. Finally I got up and started to walk around.

It was then that the accident happened. Larsen, after cocking the gun, was bringing up his thumb to let the hammer down easy, when it slipped out of his hand. As it hit the floor it went off with a flash and a bang, sending a slug gouging the floor too near my foot for comfort.

As soon as I realized I wasn’t hit, I yelled without thinking, “I always told Inky he was putting too much of a hair trigger on his gun! The crazy fool!”

Larsen sat with his pig eyes staring down at the gun where it lay between his feet. Then he gave a funny little snort, picked it up and put it on the table.

“That gun ought to be thrown away. It’s too dangerous to handle. It’s bad luck,” I said to Larsen—and then wished I hadn’t, for he gave me the benefit of a dirty look and some fancy Swedish swearing.

“Shut up, No Nose,” he finished, “and don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t, I can take care of you, and I can take care of Inky’s gun. Right now I’m going to bed.”

He shut the bedroom door behind him, leaving it up to me and Glasses to guess that we were supposed to take out our blankets and sleep on the floor.

But we didn’t want to go to sleep right away, if only because we were still thinking about Luke Dugan. So we got out a deck of cards and started a game of stud poker, speaking very low. Stud poker is like the ordinary kind, except that four of the five cards are dealt face up and one at a time.

You bet each time a card is dealt, and so considerable money is apt to change hands, even when you’re playing with a ten-cent limit, like we were. It’s a pretty good game for taking money away from suckers, and Glasses and I used to play it by the hour when we had nothing better to do. But since we were both equally smart, neither one of us won consistently.

It was very quiet, except for Larsen’s snoring and the rustling of the sea-grass and the occasional chink of a dime.

After about an hour, Glasses happened to look down at Inky’s automatic lying on the other side of the table, and something about the way his body twisted around sudden made me look too. Right away I felt something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what; it gave me a funny feeling in the back of the neck. Then Glasses put out two thin fingers and turned the gun halfway around, and I realized what had been wrong—or what I thought had been wrong. When Larsen had put the gun down, I thought it had been pointing at the outside door; but when Glasses and I looked at it, it was pointing more in the direction of the bedroom door. When you have the fidgets your memory gets tricky.

A half-hour later we noticed the gun again pointing toward the bedroom door. This time Glasses spun it around quick, and I got the fidgets for fair. Glasses gave a low whistle and got up, and tried putting the gun on different parts of the table and jiggling the table to see if the gun would move.

“I see what happened now,” he whispered finally. “When the gun is lying on its side, it sort of balances on its safety catch.

“Now this little table has got a wobble to it and when we are playing cards the wobble is persistent enough to edge the gun slowly around in a circle.”

“I don’t care about that,” I whispered back. “I don’t want to be shot in my sleep just because the table has a persistent wobble. I think the rumble of a train two miles away would be enough to set off that crazy hair-trigger. Give me it.”

Glasses handed it over and, taking care always to point it at the floor, I unloaded it, put it back on the table, and put the bullets in my coat pocket. Then we tried to go on with our card game.

“My red bullet bets ten cents,” I said, referring to my ace of hearts.

“My king raises you ten cents,” responded Glasses.

But it was no use. Between Inky’s automatic and Luke Dugan I couldn’t concentrate on my cards.

“Do you remember, Glasses,” I said, “the evening you said there was maybe something queer about Inky’s gun?”

“I do a lot of talking, No Nose, and not much of it is worth remembering. We’d better stick to our cards. My pair of sevens bets a nickel.”

I followed his advice, but didn’t have much luck, and lost five or six dollars. By two o’clock we were both pretty tired and not feeling quite so jittery; so we got the blankets and wrapped up in them and tried to grab a little sleep. I listened to the sea-grass and the tooting of a locomotive about two miles away, and worried some over the possible activities of Luke Dugan, but finally dropped off.

It must have been about sunrise that the clicking noise woke me up. There was a faint, greenish light coming in through the shades. I lay still, not knowing exactly what I was listening for, but so on edge that it didn’t occur to me how prickly hot I was from sleeping without sheets, or how itchy my face and hands were from mosquito bites. Then I heard it again, and it sounded like nothing but the sharp click the hammer of a gun makes when it snaps down on an empty chamber. Twice I heard it. It seemed to be coming from the inside of the room. I slid out of my blankets and rustled Glasses awake.

“It’s that damned automatic of Inky’s,” I whispered shakily. “It’s trying to shoot itself.”

When a person wakes up sudden and before he should, he’s apt to feel just like I did and say crazy things without thinking. Glasses looked at me for a moment, then he rubbed his eyes and smiled. I could hardly see the smile in the dim light, but I could feel it in his voice when he said, “No Nose, you are getting positively psychic.”

“I tell you I’d swear to it,” I insisted. “It was the click of the hammer of a gun.”

Glasses yawned. “Next you will be telling me that the gun was Inky’s familiar.”

“Familiar what?” I asked him, scratching my head and beginning to get mad. There are times when Glasses’ college professor stuff gets me down.

“No Nose,” he continued, “have you ever heard of witches?”

I was walking around to the windows and glancing out from behind the blinds to make sure there was no one around. I didn’t see anyone. For that matter, I didn’t really expect to.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Sure I have. Why, I knew a guy, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and he told me about witches putting what he called hexes on people. He said his uncle had a hex put on him and he died afterward. He was a traveling salesman—the Dutchman that told me, I mean.”

Glasses nodded his head, and then went on, sleepy-like, from the floor, “Well, No Nose, the Devil used to give each witch a pet black cat or dog or maybe a toad to follow it around and protect it and revenge injuries. Those little creatures were called familiars—stooges sent out by the Big Boy to watch over his chosen, you might say. The witches used to talk to them in a language no one else could understand. Now this is what I’m getting at. Times change and styles change—and the style in familiars along with them. Inky’s gun is black, isn’t it? And he used to mutter at it in a language we couldn’t understand, didn’t he? And—”

“You’re crazy,” I told him, not wanting to be kidded.

“Why, No Nose,” he said, “you were telling me yourself just now that you thought the gun had a life of its own, that it could cock itself and shoot itself without any human assistance. Weren’t you?”

“You’re crazy,” I repeated, feeling like an awful fool and wishing I hadn’t waked Glasses up. “See, the gun’s here where I left it on the table, and the bullets are still in my pocket.”

“Luckily,” he said in a stagy voice he tried to make sound like an undertaker’s. “Well, now that you’ve called me early, I shall wander off and avail us of our neighbor’s newspaper. Meanwhile you may run my bath.”

I waited until I was sure he was gone, because I didn’t want him to make a fool of me again. Then I went over and examined the gun. First I looked for the trade mark or the name of the maker. I found a place which had been filed down, where it might have been once, but that was all. Before this I would have sworn I could have told the make, but now I couldn’t. Not that in general it didn’t look like an ordinary automatic; it was the details—the grip, the trigger guard, the safety catch—that were unfamiliar. I figured it was some foreign make I’d never happened to see before.

After I’d been handling it for about two minutes I began to notice something queer about the feel of the metal. As far as I could see it was just ordinary blued steel, but somehow it was too smooth and slick and made me want to keep stroking the barrel back and forth. I can’t explain it any better; the metal just didn’t seem right to me. Finally I realized the gun was getting on my nerves and making me imagine things; so I put it down on the mantel.

When Glasses got back, the sun was up and he wasn’t smiling any more. He shoved a newspaper on my lap and pointed. It was open to page five. I read:

I looked up to see Larsen standing in the bedroom door. He was in his pajama trousers and looked yellow and seedy, his eyelids puffed and his pig eyes staring at us.

“Good morning, boss,” said Glasses slowly. “We just noticed in the paper that they are trying to do you a dirty trick. They’re claiming you, not Dugan, had Inky shot.”

Larsen grunted, came over and took the paper, looked at it quickly, grunted again, and went to the sink to splash some cold water on his face.

“So,” he said, turning to us. “All the better we are here at the hideout.”

That day was the longest and most nervous I’ve ever gone through. Somehow Larsen didn’t seem to be completely waked up. If he’d been a stranger I’d have diagnosed it as a laudanum jag. He sat around in his pajama trousers, so that by noon he still looked as if he’d only that minute rolled out of bed. The worst thing was that he wouldn’t talk or tell us anything about his plans. Of course he never did much talking, but this time there was a difference. His funny pig eyes began to give me the jim-jams; no matter how still he sat they were always moving—like a guy having a laudanum nightmare and about to run amuck.

Finally it started to get on Glasses’ nerves, which surprised me, for Glasses usually knows how to take things quietly. He began by making little suggestions—that we should get a later paper, that we should call up a certain lawyer in New York, that I should get my cousin Jake to mosey around the police station at Bayport and see if anything was up, and so on. Each time Larsen shut him up quick.

Once I thought he was going to take a crack at Glasses. And Glasses, like a fool, kept on pestering. I could see a blow-up coming, plain as the absence of my nose. I couldn’t figure what was making Glasses do it. I guess when the college professor type gets the jim-jams they get them worse than a dummy like me. They’ve got trained brains which they can’t stop from pecking away at ideas, and that’s a disadvantage.

As for me, I tried to keep hold of my nerves. I kept saying to myself, “Larsen is O.K. He’s just a little on edge. We all are. Why, I’ve known him ten years. He’s O.K.” I only half realized I was saying those things because I was beginning to believe that Larsen wasn’t O.K.

The blow-up came at about two o’clock. Larsen’s eyes opened wide, as if he’d just remembered something, and he jumped up so quick that I started to look around for Luke Dugan’s firing-squad—or the police. But it wasn’t either of those. Larsen had spotted the automatic on the mantel. Right away as he began fingering it, he noticed it was unloaded.

“Who monkeyed with this?” he asked in a very nasty, thick voice. “And why?”

Glasses couldn’t keep quiet.

“I thought you might hurt yourself with it,” he said.

Larsen walked over to him and slapped him on the side of the face, knocking him down. I took firm hold of the chair I had been sitting on, ready to use it like a club. Glasses twisted on the floor for a moment, until he got control of the pain. Then he looked up, tears beginning to drip out of his left eye where he had been hit. He had sense enough not to say anything, or to smile. Some fools would have smiled in such a situation, thinking it showed courage. It would have showed courage, I admit, but not good sense.

After about twenty seconds Larsen decided not to kick him in the face.

“Well, are you going to keep your mouth shut?” he asked.

Glasses nodded. I let go my grip on the chair.

“Where’s the load?” asked Larsen.

I took the bullets out of my pocket and put them on the table, moving deliberately.

Larsen reloaded the gun. It made me sick to see his big hands sliding along the blue-black metal, because I remembered the feel of it.

“Nobody touches this but me, see?” he said.

And with that he walked into the bedroom and closed the door.

All I could think of was, “Glasses was right when he said that Larsen was crazy on the subject of Inky’s automatic. And it’s just the same as it was with Inky. He has to have the gun close to him. That’s what was bothering him all morning, only he didn’t know.”

Then I kneeled down by Glasses, who was still lying on the floor, propped up on his elbows looking at the bedroom door. The mark of Larsen’s hand was brick-red on the side of his face, with a little trickle of blood on the cheekbone, where the skin was broken.

I whispered, very low, just what I thought of Larsen. “Let’s beat it first chance and get the police on him,” I finished.

Glasses shook his head a little. He kept staring at the door, his left eye blinking spasmodically. Then he shivered, and gave a funny grunt deep down in his throat.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“He killed Inky,” I whispered in his ear. “I’m almost sure of it. And he was within an inch of killing you.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Glasses.

“What do you mean then?”

Glasses shook his head, as if he were trying to change the subject of his thoughts.

“Something I saw,” he said, “or, rather, something I realized.”

“The gun?” I questioned. My lips were dry and it was hard for me to say the word.

He gave me a funny look and got up.

“We’d better both be sensible from now on,” he said, and then added in a whisper. “We can’t do anything now. Maybe we’ll get a chance tonight.”

After a long while Larsen called to me to heat some water so he could shave. I brought it to him, and by the time I was frying hash he came out and sat down at the table. He was all washed and shaved, and the straggling patches of hair around his bald head were brushed smooth. He was dressed and had his hat on. But in spite of everything he still had that yellow, seedy, laudanum-jag look. We ate our hash and beans and drank our beer, no one talking. It was dark now, and a tiny wind was making the blades of sea-grass whine.

Finally Larsen got up and walked around the table once and said, “Let’s have a game of stud poker.”

While I was clearing off the dishes he brought out his suitcase and planked it down on the side table. He took Inky’s automatic out of his pocket and looked at it a second. Then he laid the automatic in the suitcase, and shut it up and strapped it tight.

“We’re leaving after the game,” he said.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to feel relieved or not.

We played with a ten-cent limit, and right from the start Larsen began to win. It was a queer game, what with me feeling so jittery, and Glasses sitting there with the left side of his face all swollen, squinting through the right lens of his spectacles because the left lens had been cracked when Larsen hit him, and Larsen all dressed up as if he were sitting in a station waiting for a train. The shades were all down and the hanging light bulb, which was shaded with a foolscap of newspaper, threw a bright circle of light on the table, but left the rest of the room too dark to please me.

It was after Larsen had won about five dollars from each of us that I began hearing the noise. At first I couldn’t be sure, because it was very low and because of the dry whining of the sea-grass, but right from the first it bothered me.

Larsen turned up a king and raked in another pot.

“You can’t lose tonight,” observed Glasses, smiling—and winced because the smile hurt his cheek.

Larsen scowled. He didn’t seem pleased at his luck, or at Glasses’ remark. His pig eyes were moving in the same way that had given us the jim-jams earlier in the day. And I kept thinking, “Maybe he killed Inky Kozacs. Glasses and me are just small fry to him. Maybe he’s trying to figure out whether to kill us too. Or maybe he’s got a use for us, and he’s wondering how much to tell us. If he starts anything I’ll shove the table over on him; that is, if I get the chance.” He was beginning to look like a stranger to me, although I’d known him for ten years and he’d been my boss and paid me good money.

Then I heard the noise again, a little plainer this time. It was very peculiar and hard to describe—something like the noise a rat would make if it were tied up in a lot of blankets and trying to work its way out. I looked up and saw that the bruise on Glasses’ left cheek stood out plainer.

“My black bullet bets ten cents,” said Larsen, pushing a dime into the pot.

“I’m with you,” I answered, shoving in two nickels. My voice sounded so dry and choked it startled me.

Glasses put in his money and dealt another card to each of us.

Then I felt my face going pale, for it seemed to me that the noise was coming from Larsen’s suitcase, and I remembered that he had put Inky’s automatic into the suitcase with its muzzle pointing away from us.

The noise was louder now. Glasses couldn’t bear to sit still without saying anything. He pushed back his chair and started to whisper, “I think I hear—”

Then he saw the crazy, murderous look that came into Larsen’s eyes, and he had sense enough to finish, “I think I hear the eleven o’clock train.”

“Sit still,” said Larsen, “very still. It’s only ten forty-five. My ace bets another ten cents.”

“I’ll raise you,” I croaked.

I wanted to jump up. I wanted to throw Larsen’s suitcase out the door. I wanted to run out myself. Yet I sat tight. We all sat tight. We didn’t dare make a move, for if we had, it would have shown that we believed the impossible was happening. And if a man does that he’s crazy. I kept rubbing my tongue against my lips, without wetting them.

I stared at the cards, trying to shut out everything else. The hand was all dealt now. I had a jack and some little ones, and I knew my face-down card was a jack. Glasses had a king showing. Larsen’s ace of clubs was the highest card on the board.

And still the sound kept coming. Something twisting, straining, heaving. A muffled sound.

“And I raise you ten cents,” said Glasses loudly. I got the idea he did it just to make a noise, not because he thought his cards were especially good.

I turned to Larsen, trying to pretend I was interested in whether he would raise or stop betting. His eyes had stopped moving and were staring straight ahead at the suitcase. His mouth was twisted in a funny, set way. After a while his lips began to move. His voice was so low I could barely catch the words.

“Ten cents more. I killed Inky you know. What does your jack say, No Nose?”

“It raises you,” I said automatically.

His reply came in the same almost inaudible voice. “You haven’t a chance of winning, No Nose. He didn’t bring the money with him, like he said he would. But I made him tell me where he hid it in his room. I can’t pull the job myself; the cops would recognize me. But you two ought to be able to do it for me. That’s why we’re going to New York tonight. I raise you ten cents more.”

“I’ll see you,” I heard myself saying.

The noise stopped, not gradually but all of a sudden. Right away I wanted ten times worse to jump up and do something. But I was stuck to my chair.

Larsen turned up the ace of spades.

“Two aces. Inky’s little gun didn’t protect him, you know. He didn’t have a chance to use it. Clubs and spades. Black bullets. I win.”

Then it happened.

I don’t need to tell you much about what we did afterward. We buried the body in the sea-grass. We cleaned everything up and drove the coupe a couple of miles inland before abandoning it. We carried the gun away with us and took it apart and hammered it out of shape and threw it into the bay part by part. We never found out anything more about Inky’s money or tried to. The police never bothered us. We counted ourselves lucky that we had enough sense left to get away safely, after what happened.

For, with smoke and flame squirting through the little round holes, and the whole suitcase jerking and shaking with the recoils, eight slugs drummed out and almost cut Anton Larsen in two.