The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

“Bad night, Mr. Tracy.”

Jerry said, “Yeah,” and made quick puddles towards the cloak room. Suddenly he stopped short in the center of the foyer. He was staring at a familiar white-gray topcoat. The coat was being handed across to Nita, the checkroom girl, by a thickset, muscular man of medium height, with bushy black hair and a neck almost as big as Butch’s.

Tracy began backing quietly towards a convenient Spanish arch, but Nita’s face had lifted and her pert red lips were smiling at the columnist.

“Hey, hey, Jerry mío! Lousy night, no?”

The muscular man whirled like a cat. His dark eyes focused on Tracy. Jerry advanced smilingly, fumbling casually for his cigarette case, taking in the guy’s details with one slant-eyed flash. Didn’t know the mug from Adam. The fleshy cheeks, blunt nose, shaggy black eyebrows made a brand-new tintype for Tracy’s mental rogues’ gallery. But the topcoat was an old friend!

The stranger grabbed the coat from Nita with a brusque snatch. “Forgot something,” he muttered, and with his face averted from Tracy, barged through the lobby and butted out into the rain.

Tracy waited for ten hesitant seconds. The hard-boiled bubble dancer could wait, he decided. This was a guy to check on in a hurry.

There was no sign of him on the gleaming black lacquer of the rain-drenched sidewalk. A taxi was moving from the curb and Jerry said swiftly to the doorman: “A guy just came out. Did he take that cab?”

“Was he a sorta short, heavy mug in a light coat?”

“Yeah.”

“He walked. Pretty fast, too. Went around the corner.”

“Thanks.”

Jerry caromed off a bobbing umbrella and made it to the corner without delay. His eyes narrowed with elation. That car parked at the curb down the street looked a hell of a lot like Light Coat’s tin wheelbarrow. Might swish by and give it a look.

A hand clutched him as he passed a pitch-dark doorway. The clutch lifted Jerry off his feet, yanked him headlong into the narrow entry.

His fist swung instinctively and skidded off a wet ear. The force of his hasty blow threw him off balance but it saved him a fractured skull. A pistol butt hit Jerry’s falling shoulder and laced it with numbing pain. Before it could hit again Jerry’s left hand closed desperately on a thick ankle and toppled his antagonist.

Neither of them made a sound. The hiss of the rain on the black sidewalk and the scuffling of their entangled legs on the tiled pavement of the doorway was the only noise audible.

The clubbed gun swung backward for a bone-smashing blow.

Jerry butted his head against the man’s nose. He bit his way through the hand that crushed his mouth and chin. The killer yelped shrilly and they rolled apart for an instant. Tracy staggered to his feet, slipped, went down jarringly on hands and knees. He managed to throw one arm upward and he took the savage gun smash on the wincing tendons of his forearm.

His assailant turned, chin and mouth crimson from his butted nose, and ran head-downward through the rain. He darted along the sidewalk and slammed headlong into his parked car. As the gears meshed Jerry leaped to the running-board, clutched at the wheel, tried to throw the automobile towards the sidewalk.

A straight-arm blow to the mouth tore him loose and sent him reeling backward. The pavement came up dizzily and socked the back of his skull with a force that bounced his teeth together. It took him a dazed minute to remember where he was and to sway dizzily upward from the cold puddle he was blotting with his aching back.

The car was in high, roaring towards Sixth Avenue. Its stop light flared crimson; the car skidded around the corner and vanished.

Tracy sat down on the uncomfortable spiked top of a hydrant and tried to pull himself together. His head still felt like an overstuffed chair. A man with a dripping umbrella came down from Seventh, stopped hesitantly.

“S’matter, buddy? Sick?”

“Nope. I’m all right.”

Except for an arm that felt like boiled spaghetti and a lump on the back of his head where he had kissed the sidewalk, Jerry was beginning to feel normal. The man with the umbrella handed the columnist his hat and walked off. Didn’t even look back.

“If I’d been jumped like this in Peoria,” Tracy reflected grimly, “there’d have been six cops with notebooks, a hook and ladder company, and a thousand nosy gazabos. Get half killed in Manhattan and a lone guy with an umbrella hands you back your hat — and goes right on to the drug-store to buy his aspirin!”

The thought made him grin cheerfully. He went back to the Club Español with almost a jaunty stride.

He asked for an inconspicuous table and got it. Garcia, the swarthy and affable headwaiter, bubbled with friendliness for the Daily Planet’s expensive little hireling. Tracy had helped many a good show, had rescued many a lousy one, by a good-humored boost salted away in a pert paragraph.

Garcia rubbed swarthy hands together. “Señorita Lois goes on in about wan hour. You weel like her, I’m sure.”