She waited.
The minutes dragged past with leaden slowness, one like another, the next .like the one before. It was cold in the narrow place, but at least the wind was cut off.
From the eaves above, water was dripping into the barrel with maddening steadiness, like a drum pounding. Drip --drip--drip--drip--
Suppose Jorgen had already gone, while she was telephoning? Or suppose he had no intention of leaving the hang-out until morning? Or suppose there were another exit, on some other street?
It was a fool's business, waiting like a cat at an unknown mousehole while the.--
A latch clicked suddenly somewhere in the darkness.
The tiny, metallic sound sent an echoing tremor through the redhead's crouching body. She tensed against the barrel until its nailheads bit into the soft flesh of her shoulder. Slowly--breathlessly--she worked herself erect, her back scraping the damp old wall.
It was Jorgen! His rangy figure was turning away from the fourth door in the row. And he had not locked it behind him!
Grace flattened back between the rotting staves and the cold bricks, like the middle layer of a sandwich. So close that she could have touched him, the proprietor of the curio shop swung down the alley to the intersecting street. His jaw made an ugly line against the lamplight beyond as he turned the corner and disappeared.
She watched the entrance to the alley for a full two minutes--waiting. At the end of that time, a grocery truck bumped past the opening and a fat woman waddled along in its wake. No Jorgen. She could breathe again.
The fourth door in the row. The girl's trim figure flashed across the space between shadows and shadows so quickly that even a watching eye might easily have missed the movement.
But there seemed to be no watching eye. The cellar ahead of her, in which only a dim light flickered, looked empty. And Jorgen had not shown any indication of a belief that he was spied upon.
Now--if she could get into his quarters while he was away--if she could unearth some incriminating evidence, to justify an arrest by Tim when Jerry brought him-- Now, while the place was empty!
The door slid away from her with a rusty groan, at the pressure of her hand. Hugging the wall to keep from falling in the darkness, Grace felt her way forward into a black pit.
Three steps down. Then level flooring was beneath her feet again. In the half-light, as her eyes became used to it, she had little difficulty in seeing what came next.
Solid mortar walls slanted away from her, flanking a narrow hallway. There was no opening in either--no doors, no windows. But between them, a hundred yards farther on, a closed wooden panel showed, dimly. And beneath it a line of white light glittered.
Her fingertips following the wall for guidance, the redhead moved quickly along the passageway. Her steps were unconsciously stealthy, like a stalking panther's. Her body was tense.
At the door she stopped, holding her head flat against the unpainted wood while she listened for the slightest sound from the room beyond. But none came. It had the eerie stillness of an abandoned place.
Slowly, her careful fingers touched the latch beneath them. She could feel it lift. The door gave, easily, silently. She stepped across the threshold--into Ivan Jorgen's hideaway.
The cellar room was lighted solely by a dingy bulb set into the middle of the ceiling. Its walls were only the whitewashed foundations of the rickety building above. There were a few chairs about the place. In one corner stood an iron bed, its covers disordered; in another, beneath a powerful arc light which was not turned on, the wall was flanked by a table covered with a mass of sticks and wires.
Grace, a soft sound of triumph in her throat, started forward,
Etcher's tools, on that table! Knives --bottles of acid--scalpels--copper plates. The counterfeiter's workbench!
The door creaked on its hinges in closing, and a menacing shadow wavered suddenly over the dim white wall before her.
Gasping, the girl from Noonan's whirled.
The man who stood there was little better than a Thing. He had long, hairy arms, a huge chest, powerful shoulders. His head, atop them, seemed unnaturally small.
Much of the flesh of his face had been eaten and scarred beyond recognition, in some long-ago mishap with chemicals. He was horrible to look at; and he was grinning at her with the cunning of a murderous animal.
Swinging inward as she had entered, the door had screened him from sight. But now it had closed again. She was alone with him--trapped in the strange cellar room.
With a low cry of instinctive terror, Grace leaped for the first weapon her eyes lit upon--an ink bottle on the stand beside the iron bed.
But as she moved, the deformed guardian of the doorway hurled himself upon her.
Arms like huge iron bands clamped about her with rib-crushing violence. A force as irresistible as gravity jerked her up into the air.
With savage fury she clawed at the giant who held her imprisoned in his pitiless grasp. Her fingernails dug into the soft mass scar tissue that was his jaw. Her fists, driving furiously, thumped his chest.
But she might have been belaboring the whitewashed stone wall, for all the good her resistance did her. The iron arms tightened. Hot breath fanned her cheek as her captor lifted her higher from the floor. The cellar rumbled with his brutish laughter.
"Let--me--down!"
Her face kicked wildly, but the man held her off as easily, as though she were a rag doll. His whole great body pivoted slowly, like a barber's pole, dragging her with him.
"So--you try put one over on Rocco, eh? You try take away tools from Boss?"
Chuckling ghoulishly, he set her on barren corner of the big room, now. He had selected a position from which he could cut off her approach to the work table, the door, or the bedside stand.
For a silent moment they eyed each other, the disfigured monster shifting his weight easily from one foot to the other. Grace's breath was uneven. The unexpectedness and violence of the attack had shaken her badly.
Mockery glittered in his little eyes. Mockery and hatred and something more vicious, something lethal.
Springing forward quickly, she tried to leap around him to the door. Every nerve in her body strained forward, toward escape. But his huge hand flashed up.
Its open palm caught her alongside the head with a slap which echoed wickedly through the low-ceilinged room. Zigzags of orange light skyrocketed through the air, and suddenly the place began to whirl about her.
Back against the wall she crashed, the force of the impact sending a sickening shudder through her body. She felt herself falling--falling--falling--
She mustn't faint! She must get back on her feet somehow! She must get through that door, before Jorgen returned--while there was only one of them to hold her!
Slowly the room settled. She was on the floor, her knees buckled under her, her head still ringing. Above her, legs spread, Jorgen's henchman stood ready.
With a sick quiver, Grace lifted one hand to her face. It was wet when she moved. Wet and red. A little trickle of blood was cutting down her chin, from one corner of her torn mouth.
"You best not move," Rocco rumbled warningly. "You stay there, safer for Boss."
She knew it was hopeless. His massive frame loomed like a wall between her and the door, or any possible weapon.
Minutes throbbed past, desperate, useless. There wasn't anything to do. No chance of escape.
Suddenly her heart leaped--only to fall again.
There were footsteps stamping in the hall outside. The chance of a rescue by Tim and Jerry had flashed through her mind. But--they wouldn't be approaching an unknown hideout with so little caution. This wouldn't be help coming.
In that moment of realization, a new and heartbreaking truth occurred to her. Tim and Jerry couldn't come! They wouldn't know where she was. The outside of the building, even if they stumbled upon the cul-de-sac, was as hopelessly pocked with entrances as a rabbit warren. They couldn't find her, even if--
The door slammed open.
"What the--"
Rocco, turning, stood aside. In the doorway, Ivan Jorgen paused staring at her. And, behind him in the passageway, two other figures crowded.
Four of them! Four against her, and no chance of help from the outside!
Grace's heart sank heavily as Jorgen stalked toward her across the wide room, a sardonic smile flicking the ends of his thin mouth, his eyes gleaming rock hard beneath their matted black brows.
"So--it is Madame with the fondness for vases, is it not?"
His voice was as cold as a knife blade. At his shoulder, the two others moved into the room. One of them was prematurely gray-haired, and scowling. The other's bald skull looked like the narrow end of an egg.
The egg-head closed the door behind him.
"And Madame has also a liking for copper plates, perhaps?" Jorgen chuckled nastily. "And the time to look around, no?"
He was like a. cat, playing with her. Grace felt weak with dread at the menace lying behind his onyx-black eyes. Slowly, shivering despite herself, she struggled upward to her feet.
"What goes on?"
It was the gray-haired newcomer speaking. His brick-red face was peering over Jorgen's shoulder. It was expressionless.
"Ah, Pete! A lady honors us who was a. customer at my store. Perhaps also you see her at your delicatessen? Or you, Mal, at your dry goods store?"
The egg-head growled: "Nope" and the one called Pete made a similar sound of denial. But it seemed to Grace that the eyes of both had hardened.
Other outlets for Jorgen's counterfeit money. It was easy to tie up Pete and Mal with the business at hand. Running fronts like Ivan's own curio shop, they could pull the same game on others like the ring Boss had played to-day on Maggie Moody and her own red pocketbook.
.Mal, his naked skull gleaming, walked forward slowly.
"We oughta do something, Jork. We ougtha fix her, huh?"
Their cold eyes bored into her--four pairs of killer eyes, all determined that she should never leave this cellar room alive. A semicircle of death, closing in on her, glittering, wicked.
Suddenly something snapped in Grace's taut brain. Hopeless as it seemed to break through, she hurled herself forward at Jorgen with all the force left in her.
A snarl of rage replaced the mockery on his lips. Thick brows contracting, jaw shut, he lunged for her,
Quick as an arrow, she was past him. His extended fingers, clawing, scraped down the side of her arm as she hurtled across the room. Pete blocked the door. But there were weapons on the work bench--something--there must be something--
Her right hand caught up the first thing it touched--a long, thin scraping knife like a thick knitting needle. She whirled to face the room. Not an instant too soon.
Mal, the egg-head, was upon her. His lips were drawn back from yellow in a grimace of hatred. His paws were up, and in one of them a blunt-tipped blackjack wavered.
Driving hard, in a frenzy of fighting fury, Grace let him have the knife.
It was the force of his own descending blow that saved him. The thin blade ripped him from shoulder to elbow.
Blood spurted through the long gash in his coat sleeve. Screaming, he tottered back.
Before the girl could recover, Rocco was upon her. Those pitiless iron arms clamped around her again, crushing. Her own arms, pinned to her sides, were powerless.
"Bloody devil!" Mal was shrieking. Rocco growled menacingly.
"Maybe you like I slap her around some more, eh. Boss?"
Jorgen strode across the room until he was standing directly in front of her, his face a mask of hatred as he thrust it close to hers.
"No slapping, Rocco! This lady who know so much, too much--she need more than a slapping, no?"
Grace faced him with the blood gone from her cheeks. Her eyes were wide.
"You're--what are you going to do to me?"
The counterfeiter shrugged his wide shoulders expressively,
"When some one is executed--they grant one last wish, no? You have such wish? This is the time, Madame."
Execution!
Grace always had known that Death played tag with her profession. Her own father had gone out that way, fighting, with his boots on. She might have been content to follow him.
But cold-blooded execution, without a chance--
Something flickered in Jorgen's hard eyes. Ugly amusement.
"Maybe you like a nice vase, eh?"
He really meant it, then--that "last wish"! His twisted sense of humor relished the situation. If only she could think of something difficult--something that would give her a little time--
"A vase, Madame?"
She eyed him as calmly as she could, and forced her voice to steadiness.
"No, thanks. I'd--I'd like a double chocolate soda, please."
It was the shortest ten minutes Grace Culver ever had spent. It seemed to her that Jorgen, laughing disagreeably, had no more than sent Rocco out to the drug store on the corner than the disfigured giant was back again.
The prisoner was sitting on the edge of the iron cot when the counterfeiter's henchman came into the room, with the long paper carton gripped in one hand.
Across the small stand, the iron-haired crook called Pete stood watching her. The ink bottle had been moved. There was nothing between them but the gray automatic resting under Pete's fingers on his side of the table--mute warning that there would be no second chance to reach the work bench.
Rocco set down his purchase on the table with a grunt. There it was. Double chocolate soda. Straws. Everything. Her last wish!
The four men stood silent, staring at her. Grace could feel .their eyes again boring, cold, pitiless. When she had finished that soda--what?
"Drink, Madame!"
Her fingers moved stiffly in response to Jorgen's gutteral command.
She ripped, the wrapper from about the straws and wadded it into a hard little ball under her thumb. She thrust the straws into the creamy liquid.
She began to drink.
Pete's fingers, across the level table top, were spread loose on the automatic. He was only a guard. But Jorgen-- there was a gun in his hand, too, now.
A tense hand. And the muzzle was lifting.
Up through the straws slid .the sweet brown drink which was to be her last. It choked in her throat, but somehow she swallowed it. Nothing to do! There wasn't any way out!
A moment, and the double chocolate would be gone. A hot roar, grim and final, would fill the room. And then the--
A hideous din filled her ears, sudden, unexpected. It wasn't the gun. It--
Some one was hammering on the panel which Mal had locked behind Rocco. Some one was shouting.
"Culver! Red!"
It couldn't be Tim's voice, of course. She must be mad. Those staring eyes had driven her mad. It couldn't be Tim.
"Tim! Tim!"
As Grace screamed the word, she saw Jorgen whirl--Mal leap away from the door--Rocco tense for a spring--and Pete--
Whipping into action as sudden as the stupor which had frozen her, the redhead caught up the carton in which half the soda still remained.
Into Pete's granite face she hurled the container with all her strength. The liquid, bursting from the open end of the tube, struck him with an audible slap. He fell backward, sputtering, digging raw knuckles into his eyes.
She was around the stand in no time. Out of his still clawing fingers she wrenched the snub-nosed automatic. His fist closed--too late--over air.
Crash!
The shot had not been fired inside the cellar, but it was so close at hand that the walls echoed with it. The door shivered.
Crash!
Into the quivering instant which followed the second explosion, the small sound of metal striking stone intruded. Tim had blasted the lock loose from its moorings. The door slammed in.
Jorgen was waiting for it. His gun was trained on the opening. His finger was tensing with deadly precision.
"Look out, Tim!"
And as she screamed the warning, Grace's own arm snapped up. Pete's automatic, steady in her hand, belched a thin line of hot fire. Ivan Jorgen, screaming while he caught at his gun arm, budded and fell to his knees.
Tim Noonan was over the threshold now--familiar face set in a grim mask, gun barking from his fist as he came.
Rocco, to Grace's left, had caught up a light chair and swung it high above his head. Through the air the bulky thing hurtled viciously. Tim ducked.
As wood splintered against stone, the veteran detective's gun snapped up once more. Its ugly snarl spat out on a tongue of flame. Rocco cried out once --in infantile terror.
The slug had ripped between his pig-like little eyes. Blood poured in a fountain down his shapeless face. His throat contracted. Onto the stone floor he crashed, his huge body sprawling.
Mal was leaping on Tim from the rear, now--screaming with rage. He held a wicked knife in his raised hand.
But before he could reach the seasoned ex-inspector, interference from a new source intervened. A lithe young body hurtled from the dark passageway and caught him with such force that both figures tottered. The knife dropped.
"Good work, Jerry!"
The cry of triumph was still on Grace's lips when she saw Jorgen whipping up his gun once more--in his left hand, this time. She swung to stop him, automatic ready. But Tim was ahead of her.
"Drop that gun, louse!"
There were two muzzles fixed on him. The game was up, and Jorgen knew it.
His gun clattered to the floor. His arms lifted slowly. There was a sullen light of surrender in the eyes beneath those matted brows.
"All right, Culver--line 'em up. No funny business, crooks. We've got some boys in a car outside that are gonna take you to an art school you never been in before. Free scholarships for all of you!"
Grace watched the patrol wagon starting up the street, with Noonan's powerful bulk in the rear end of it. He was one who believed in personally finishing a job to the last detail, was Timothy Noonan.
"There goes the toughest spot I ever was in," she observed, in an almost matter-of-fact voice, to "Jerry Riker, who stood beside her. "Never believe 'em, my lad, when they tell you that the condemned man ate a hearty meal!"
Riker was a good hand at action. But he was afraid of the redhead. His face colored now, just because he was alone with her outside office.
"Gee, I was scared we weren't gonna get to you in time, Redsie!"
The sherry-colored eyes sparkled suddenly.
"Say! That reminds me! How did you happen to stumble into that particular cellarway out of the lot--like a movie hero in the seventh reel?"
"The double chocolate soda," he said instantly.
"What?"
"The soda. Tim and I knew something was sour when we couldn't find you. So we split to search the neighborhood. I'm in that corner drug store --I knew you'd been there when you called--and this mug walks in. When he orders a double chocolate to take out, and you're in the neighborhood, well, even a dumb dick would of followed him!"
Grace tucked her arm comfortably through the crook of Jerry's, oblivious to his instantly reddening ears.
"And you and Noonan are pretty smart, if your old Aunt Grace does say! A double chocolate soda! Mm-m --how I love 'em! You could buy me one for my birthday right now, mister, if you felt inclined."
