ammunition.
The chief’s car got away first, off with a jump that hammered our teeth together. We missed the garage door by half an inch, chased a couple of pedestrians diagonally across the sidewalk, bounced off the curb into the roadway, missed a truck as narrowly as we had missed the door, and dashed out King Street with our siren wide open.
Panicky automobiles darted right and left, regardless of traffic rules, to let us through. It was a lot of fun.
I looked back, saw another police car following us, a third turning into Broadway. Noonan chewed a cold cigar and told the driver:
“Give her a bit more, Pat.”
Pat twisted us around a frightened woman’s coupé, put us through a slot between street car and laundry wagon—a narrow slot that we couldn’t have slipped through if our car hadn’t been so smoothly enameled—and said:
“All right, but the brakes ain’t no good.”
“That’s nice,” the gray-mustached sleuth on my left said. He didn’t sound sincere.
Out of the center of the city there wasn’t much traffic to bother us, but the paving was rougher. It was a nice half-hour’s ride, with everybody getting a chance to sit in everybody else’s lap. The last ten minutes of it was over an uneven road that had hills enough to keep us from forgetting what Pat had said about the brakes.
We wound up at a gate topped by a shabby electric sign that had said “Cedar Hill Inn” before it lost its globes. The roadhouse, twenty feet behind the gate, was a squat wooden building painted a moldy green and