Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper’s car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ashcan to another.
What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody’s legs had a bowed look.
A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.
I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.
If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.
Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow—a man going pell-mell away from me.
“Stop!” I bawled, pounding my feet after him. “Stop, or I’ll plug you, MacSwain.”
He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.
“Yeah,” I confessed. “What are all you people doing wandering around loose?”
“I don’t know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the