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A hard-boiled detective arrives at a small mining town only to find his client murdered and the inhabitants embroiled in complex webs of corruption.

Page 236 of 263
Table of Contents

XXV

Whiskeytown

At half-past one Reno turned from answering a phone call to say:

“Let’s take a ride.”

He went upstairs. When he came down he carried a black valise. Most of the men had gone out the kitchen door by then.

Reno gave me the black valise, saying:

“Don’t wrastle it around too much.”

It was heavy.

The seven of us left in the house went out the front door and got into a curtained touring car that O’Marra had just driven up to the curb. Reno sat beside O’Marra. I was squeezed in between men in the back seat, with the valise squeezed between my legs.

Another car came out of the first cross street to run ahead of us. A third followed us. Our speed hung around forty, fast enough to get us somewhere, not fast enough to get us a lot of attention.

We had nearly finished the trip before we were bothered.

The action started in a block of one-story houses of the shack type, down in the southern end of the city.

A man put his head out of a door, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrilly.

Somebody in the car behind us shot him down.

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