“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.
“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”
I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.
It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.
“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”
“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him airtight till then.”