Dan and the Death-Cell Bluff

Grasping the door handle on his own side, Dan threw his shoulder against the door and sprawled headlong into the street. Two more shots crashed, one nicking the asphalt on either side of the car.

Traffic from both directions screamed to a halt, leaving a wide path between Dan and the mouth of an alley across the street. Like a harbor of safety the alley beckoned, but to reach it Dan would have to traverse a wide street while two men with pistols potted at his back. Even as he hit the street on all fours, his mind was racing, and he found time to be amazed at Big Jim’s audacity. Picking the center of town with a hundred witnesses to stage a killed-while-escaping act was a stroke of genius, for even the governor would be impotent in the face of the testimony of so many disinterested witnesses.

That he would never make the mouth of the alley across the street was a certainty. With split-second decision he bounced erect, slammed shut the car door through which he had just tumbled, jerked open the driver’s door and slid under the wheel.

Racing around either side of the car toward the point they expected to find Dan, and not expecting the maneuver, the two detectives were caught off balance. The motor was still running, and when Dan threw the car into low and gunned it, Morgan Hart was behind the car and the thin-nosed man was in front of it. The latter leaped backward in terror as the hood shot toward him, stumbled over the curb and fell flat. Then Dan was racing through a red light and was cut off from possible fire by the stream of traffic which immediately began to flow in the cross-street behind him.

Dan estimated he had at least five minutes before Lieutenant Hart could get a general alarm on the air, and he resolved to make the most of each minute. The shipping dock area along the lake front would be his best bet, he decided, for there he could probably find a cheap hotel which made a point of not asking its guests questions. Opening the siren wide, he headed in the general direction of the dock area at seventy-five miles an hour. At the same time he switched on the radio so that he would know the exact moment his squad car ceased to be a haven and became a target.

His guess was optimistic by two minutes. He had roared a little over three miles across town and was passing through what seemed to be a second-class residential district when the radio suddenly intoned: “Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Be on lookout for squad car number two seventy-six. Repeat car two seventy-six. Last seen at Fourth and Locust heading at high speed toward lake front. This car has been stolen by Daniel Fancy, who is wanted for murder. Fancy may have abandoned car and may now be on foot. He is six feet four inches, two hundred and seventy pounds, suntanned, has blue eyes and iron-gray hair. He is wearing a gray suit and no hat. This man is a cop-killer and may be armed. Take no chances with him.”

That fixed him but good, Dan thought. Labeling him a cop-killer. Every cop in town, even the honest ones, if any, would now shoot first and call “halt” after Dan dropped. He cut his siren, slowed to a crawl and began looking for a parking place, so that he could proceed more inconspicuously on foot.

A quarter-block later he found it, a lone vacancy in front of a neighborhood tavern. Pulling alongside the car in front of the vacancy, he started to back in.

The rear end of his squad car was halfway in when another police car drifted from the side street immediately in front of him, crossed the intersection and stopped with a jerk. As it slammed into reverse, Dan gunned out of his parking place, whipped into a U-turn which made his tires scream in agony, and headed back the way he had come with the accelerator to the floor.

At the first corner he swung left at fifty-five miles an hour. A block farther on he made a dirt-track left turn by skidding around the corner sidewise at sixty. He was two blocks ahead and his speedometer needle wavered at eighty by the time the pursuing car rounded the second turn. When he reached ninety-two, his heart leaping to his throat every time a side street flashed by, he had increased his lead to three blocks.

But by then the radio was chattering his location and sirens began to whine from all directions. Ahead he caught a flashing glimpse of the sun reflected on water, gritted his teeth and roared on. What he would do, or could do, when he reached the lake was something he had to decide within seconds.