BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN GLASBY
The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos
The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos
The Mystery of the Crater: A Science Fiction Novel
The Johnny Merak Classic Crime Novels
1. Rackets, Inc.
2. The Savage City
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1960 by John Glasby
Special thanks to Heather and Dave Datta
for scanning this book.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To the memory of Janet Hannah Glasby
CHAPTER ONE
THE RED EDGE OF TERROR
The downtown quarter of Los Angeles was no fancy place on that particular November evening. Overhead, there was a thin slice of moon showing above the wavering fog, and somewhere in the distance, coming closer, a siren was wailing like a lost soul in some private hell. Beside me, Dawn Grahame handled the big Mercury easily, slipping in and out of the heavy night traffic, heading into the industrial suburbs. Whatever was storming through her mind at that moment, didn’t show on her face.
She rounded a long curve. The brilliant lights appeared one after the other through the fog, tinged with green haloes. Through the window, I caught a glimpse of a floodlit panorama of neon-embroidered bars, interspersed with the occasional filling station, a blur of figures on the sidewalks, hazed by the swirling fog.
My watch said nine-thirty. Less than twenty minutes since that call from Harry Grenville. It hadn’t told me much, but he was that kind of a guy, saying little over the phone, as if he believed that everyone was tapping it. As a Federal man, he had come up against this too often in the past to forget it altogether.
We slid between a couple of parked trucks into a narrow street. There was another long block ahead of us, filled with darkness, a filling station at the far end where the street opened out into another dingy thoroughfare, but everything was locked up for the night, in darkness.
I wondered why Grenville had sounded so urgent over the phone. A matter of life and death, he had said. It didn’t make sense, but then there were so many things in Los Angeles, or any other big American city for that matter, which didn’t add up.
‘There,’ said Dawn suddenly. She slowed the car, pointed through the windscreen.
I stared ahead. A single light shone halfway along the drab street. Nearby, a couple of tattered ‘For Rent’ signs swung limply in the fog from one of the buildings. The doors and windows hung with peeling strips of paint. In the street itself, three cars were clustered near the edge of the sidewalk where the solitary lamp threw a circle of diffuse yellow light through the murk.
Dawn stopped the car, switched off the ignition, and got out. I followed. A new set of thoughts popped up inside my brain and began nibbling at the edges. I figured there had been an accident of some kind here, but why had Grenville sounded so worried—and more to the point, what had it got to do with me? I started looking for Grenville, and spotted him inside a cluster of cops. They turned as I walked up to them with Dawn on my heels. One of the cops threw me a funny glance. He looked cynical and politely surprised. I could guess that he was puzzled.
Maybe he even knew who I was, and was trying to figure out in his well-organised mind what a guy like Johnny Merak was doing on a job like this.
‘Glad you got here, Johnny.’ A brief smile from Grenville, a tight-lipped smile that scarcely twisted the corners of his mouth. ‘Something I thought you ought to be in on from the beginning. You may be one of the few men who can help us.’
I shrugged my shoulders. I still didn’t see where I fitted in, but it figured that, with a guy like Grenville, who knew all the angles, there had to be a reason for it somewhere, and I was content to bide my time.
‘Something wrong, Harry?’
‘Plenty. It isn’t nice, so if—’ He threw a quick, appraising look at Dawn.
She caught the implication behind it immediately, nodded, and stepped back a couple of paces. Then Harry Grenville moved aside and I saw, for the first time, what lay on the sidewalk behind him.
She lay half across the sidewalk with her head lying in the gutter. It needed only one look to see that she was dead, very dead. I went forward, knelt down on one knee. She was the kind of woman a man would have noticed, would have glanced at for a second time, mostly because of her eyes. The rest of her face wasn’t particularly beautiful, too sharply-angled and aloof, but her eyes had once been dark and deep and full of life and vitality. Eyes which could easily have become kindled into a warmth which might have turned into a fire.
Now they were empty and glazed and fixed, staring at something high over my head, at the moon, or at the fog—or just at death, it was hard to tell. A tall woman with slender legs and slender arms, a simple red-and-white checked dress beneath the belted coat. There was blood on the front of the dress and it didn’t need an expert to tell that there were at least half a dozen .38 slugs in her body, fired from pretty close range.
I got to my feet. My lighter flamed in my hand as I lit the cigarette.
Then I turned to Grenville. There must have been a question on my face, for he said quickly, ‘So a dame gets herself bumped off and you still can’t figure the angle for me bringing you into it.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m merely playing a hunch this time, Johnny. Sure, I know that thousands of dames and guys get themselves killed in Los Angeles every year, and we never hear about most of them. But this one is different.’
‘How different?’
‘That’s what I want to know. It looks like a gang killing to me, but there’s no motive so far.’
‘You know who she is?’
‘We’ve checked. Her name was Lomer, Caroline Lomer. Lived in some place a couple of blocks from here. It would have been easy for anybody who wanted to murder her to get the lowdown on her movements.’
‘Sounds like a thousand other dames,’ I said. ‘I don’t see the connection.’
‘You might as well know everything, Johnny.’ The other sounded tired; as if he had run up against something which was a little beyond him. ‘We had a call from this woman three days ago. At least, the local precinct did. She was scared. Somebody—she didn’t say who—wanted to kill her. She asked for protection.’
‘If she got it, it doesn’t look as if it did her much good,’ I remarked. I saw the tall, burly cop move forward as if to say something, then he obviously thought better of it and kept quiet.
‘We checked on her from the start.’ Grenville even sounded slightly amused. ‘For all we knew, she might have been a screwball. There are plenty of them around here with a persecution mania. Nobody knew much about her. It didn’t figure at all. There was no doubt that she was scared of something. But we found nothing to tie her in with any of the gangs.’
‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t, for at the moment, there were too many loose ends lying around waiting to be tied up. Too many unknowns, one body too many, and six slugs which couldn’t be explained.
‘We want you in on this case because of—well, your background. You know the Underworld, Johnny. You know how it operates, you know its methods, probably better than any other man outside of the Organisation. I’m convinced myself this isn’t just another slaying like the thousands of others we come across. There’s something here that doesn’t fit, and by God, I intend to find out what it is.’
‘O.K. Harry,’