“Yeah,” I agreed. “And you be damned careful you don’t get between them. If they split, I’ll shadow the skull-cracker, you keep the goose.”
We separated and moved after our game. They took us to all the hangouts in San Francisco, to cabarets, grease-joints, poolrooms, saloons, flophouses, hook-shops, gambling-joints and what have you. Everywhere the kid found men to speak his dozen words to, and between calls, he found them on street-corners.
I would have liked to get behind some of these birds, but I didn’t want to leave Jack alone with the boy and his bodyguard—they seemed to mean too much. And I couldn’t stick Jack on one of the others, because it wasn’t safe for me to hang too close to the Armenian boy. So we played the game as we had started it, shadowing our pair from hole to hole, while night got on toward morning.
It was a few minutes past midnight when they came out of a small hotel up on Kearny Street, and for the first time since we had seen them they walked together, side by side, up to Green Street, where they turned east along the side of Telegraph Hill. Half a block of this, and they climbed the front steps of a ramshackle furnished-room house and disappeared inside. I joined Jack Counihan on the corner where he had stopped.
“The greetings have all been delivered,” I guessed, “or he wouldn’t have called in his bodyguard. If there’s nothing stirring within the next half hour I’m going to beat it. You’ll have to take a plant on the joint till morning.”
Twenty minutes later the skull-cracker came out of the house and walked down the street.
“I’ll take him,” I said. “You stick to the other baby.”
The skull-cracker took ten or twelve steps from the house and stopped. He looked back at the house, raising his face to look at the upper stories.