I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find—fifteen feet from the building—to think the situation over.
Crouching there, I heard something.
It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.
I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.
Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:
“Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”
I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.
I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.
You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate score-keeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.
Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.
Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.
Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away. His upper teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip, and he was coughing little stomach coughs as he wriggled.