Marihuana Read Online Free Page B

before it's too late and———"
     
    The cop that had taken Gordon and Evans out thumped the door, stuck his head in. "One of them two birds just remembered another place he thinks he might go, Lieutenant," he interrupted.
     
    "Let's have it," said the Lieutenant alertly.
     
    Evans' pasty face was thrust in, with the cop's hand guiding it at the back of the neck like a terrier's scruff. "His former wife, he's still crazy about her," he said disconnectedly. "That brought on the whole thing, over at the ranch——— They're separated, and she's living at the Continental, on 49th Street, under her own name, Eleanor Philips———"
     
    The Lieutenant turned back to Spillane. "He's liable to go there, to change his clothes or try to borrow enough money to get out of town on. Try for him there too — and you'd better warn her she's in danger, not to let him in. To communicate with us immediately if he shows up or she hears from him in any way. And whatever you do———"
     
    Spillane hung back for a minute at the threshold, turned his head,
     
    " — see that that guy is overtaken and stopped -before this night's over-, or there's going to be some killing like there never was before!"
     
    He was still coiled there in the unlighted depths of the phone booth. His breathing was a little less harassed now. The only sound had been an occasional crackle as the woman up front turned a page of the paper she was poring over. She must have lost track of him, forgotten that he was still there———
     
    Suddenly a tread on the wooden flooring at the shop entrance, heavy, authoritative, inward-bound. Then a voice, resonant, masculine, ominous: "Ye know who I'm looking for, don't ye? Ye know who it is I'm after?" And a chuckle. But a grim chuckle.
     
    The woman's betrayal was instant, almost indifferent.
     
    "He's back there, where do you suppuz? Go and get him yusself!"
     
    Turner's heart spiraled frantically up, dropped down again where it belonged only because it couldn't burst out of his chest cavity. The gun came out almost by reflex action. He rose cobra-like within the narrow confines of his hiding-place. He edged the slide back a fraction of an inch — they were both out of range of the pane itself — peered laterally out, with two eyes on a vertical axis. One, his own; the other, the gun-bore, six inches lower.
     
    A lowering uniformed cop, a big bull of a man, was standing up there, opposite the soft drink counter that ensconced the woman. But his head was turned down Turner's way, and there was a knowing glint to his slitted eyes.
     
    Turner flung his own head back so violently the other way it struck the inner wall of the booth. He didn't even feel the impact, and his hat, crushed, deadened the sound of it. He dropped down again, to the lower rim of the glass eyes just above it, gun-mouth just above it. If he came toward him, if he came down this way———
     
    A heavy preliminary footfall sounded. Then a second. Then a third. The cop's blue uniform-front impinged on the edge of the glass. Turner sighted the gun, centered it directly over his shield.
     
    He took one more step forward and he stopped right outside the booth, blurring the pane. He didn't seem to be looking in, he craftily kept his profile turned toward it, as if unaware of it. But Turner saw his shoulder shift position, slope downward. That meant his arm was reaching back, that meant he was drawing.
     
    His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.
     
    The cop's profile went down without turning full-face even at the very end, stunned unawareness of what had hit him written on it. Turner slapped back the remaining lower section of the panel, revealed it once more. On the floor, already dead. But still surprised. He took a step