Trouble Shooter (Musaicum Vintage Western). Ernest Haycox

said: "You lookin' for Ed Tarrant?"

      "No," said Peace.

      The little man said gustily: "He's up to Straight-Edge Annie's place, in trouble."

      Peace said, "What—" But the current had caught the little man securely in its undertow, dragging him away.

      On the street again, Peace looked around and saw neither Morgan nor Overmile. He got out his pipe and filled it, and dragged a few long breaths of smoke into his lungs, his thinking at once critically alert. The Club's orchestra was again hard at work; somewhere down the street two shots made flat, detonating echoes against the wind. Across the street an engine backed away from the station house, its bell insistently clanging. Peace let the crowd carry him toward the next corner; and here he slid out of the tide into the comparative quiet of a short side street. Down this way a few lights glowed through tent flaps and a few flashes came down from the second-story windows of a pine-boarded building sitting thirty feet further on, which was Straight-Edge Annie's place.

      That way he drifted. There was a stairway leading up the outside wall of the place; he stopped at the foot of it, studying the surrounding shadows with his insistent eyes. Afterward he climbed the stairs and put his hand to the knob of the door. It let him into a hall illumined by one lamp bracketed against the boards. There was a murmuring and a burst of nervous laughter from a far room, and then that sound died completely and the uneasy stillness of the place rubbed against him like a damp fog. A little ahead of him, on the left side of the hall, he noticed a door standing ajar, through the opening of which crept a thin slice of light.

      He said casually: "Straight-Edge."

      Silence flowed around him. But he had the smell of something on his nostrils—the slimmest taint of powder smoke trapped in this dead air. It moved him against the door. He laid the flat of his hand against it, shoving it open. What he saw then jerked him straight.

      There was a lamp on the table, its sallow glow staining the shadows of this room the color of mud. Ed Tarrant lay on his chest on the floor, his face twisted to one side. A round, dully shining pool of blood slowly gathered beneath him.

      Somewhere along the hall a board squealed and, small as that sound was, it was like a dynamite explosion to Frank Peace. He wheeled in his tracks, ramming his fist into his coat pocket to grip the revolver he carried there. A doorway across the hall swung quietly back on its hinges. He saw somebody moving in the depths of that room's blackness, and immediately he swayed aside. At the same moment a round bloom of ragged light burst through the doorway. The breath of the bullet licked across his face and the whole building swelled and shook with the detonation. The slug struck into the wall behind Peace with a small, snoring report.

      Peace dropped to the floor, his long, loose body flattened against the boards; the marksman across the way let out a windy sigh and began to rake the room with a rapid, plunging fire.