“My faithful taxi and I cried Yoicks after them, and they brought us here, going into that house down the street in front of which one of their motors still stands. After half an hour or so I thought I’d better report, so, leaving my taxi around the corner—where it’s still running up expenses—I went up to yon all-night caravansary and phoned Fiske. And when I came back, one of the cars was gone—and I, woe is me!—don’t know who went with it. Am I rotten?”
“Sure! You should have taken their cars along to the phone with you. Watch the one that’s left while I collect a strong-arm squad.”
I went up to the lunchroom and phoned Duff, telling him where I was, and:
“If you bring your gang along maybe there’ll be profit in it. A couple of carloads of folks who were in Fillmore Street and didn’t stay there came here, and part of ’em may still be here, if you make it sudden.”
Duff brought his four detectives and a dozen uniformed men with him. We hit the house front and back. No time was wasted ringing the bell. We simply tore down the doors and went in. Everything inside was black until flashlights lit it up. There was no resistance. Ordinarily the six men we found in there would have damned near ruined us in spite of our outnumbering them. But they were too dead for that.
We looked at one another sort of open-mouthed.
“This is getting monotonous,” Duff complained, biting off a hunk of tobacco. “Everybody’s work is pretty much the same thing over and over, but I’m tired of walking into roomfuls of butchered crooks.”