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  Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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  Publisher’s Note

  Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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  MCHUGH

  Jay Flynn

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

  A Gentle Warning 4

  Chapter 1 5

  Chapter 2 16

  Chapter 3 23

  Chapter 4 30

  Chapter 5 35

  Chapter 6 43

  Chapter 7 54

  Chapter 8 60

  Chapter 9 70

  Chapter 10 76

  Chapter 11 84

  Chapter 12 88

  Chapter 13 97

  Chapter 14 106

  REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 109

  A Gentle Warning

  “Take this bastard outside and pound on him,” said Orland savagely. “Then dump him somewhere.”

  McHugh struggled to keep his feet as he was shoved through the door.

  Outside Jug was waiting, slapping the bludgeon against the palm of his hand. “Okay?” he asked eagerly.

  “It’s okay,” said Bulb Nose.

  McHugh tried to dodge, but the blackjack caught him across the forehead. He felt the skin split. It came down again across the side of his neck. He gagged and began to fall.

  The first kick caught him in the kidneys. It was at least ten minutes before he stopped feeling anything.

  Chapter 1

  He had them spotted before he left the plane.

  Caution was a way of life, the way of staying alive, and McHugh had paused momentarily in the cabin of the DC-7 before going down the ramp. The corners of his wide mouth turned up in the suggestion of a smile.

  Two of them were waiting at the ramp between the loading gate and concourse of San Francisco International Airport, the collars of their topcoats turned up against the night-cool fog that hovered in the passageway. With steady, competent eyes they scanned and catalogued the travelers. McHugh saw them exchange glances as he reached the ground.

  He read surprise and irritation in their expressions. The smaller one, with a face as sallow as the fog, tossed his cigarette away. They moved to intercept him, trying to do it in a way that would leave them in a position to scan passengers heading for airliners farther along the apron.

  McHugh, who had slept through most of the flight from New York, prepared to enjoy himself. He was just under six feet tall, a big-boned man who was lean at a hundred ninety-five pounds. The dampness was already curling his short hair, salted with gray at the temples. His face was weathered, with a permanent tan, and the nose had been broken. In the terminal lights his eyes had the color of new maple syrup—the clear, light kind they make in Vermont when the snow is still deep around the trees and wisps of steam rise from the broad rumps of the horses. His only luggage was a travel-worn attaché case that slapped against his left leg as he walked. He headed directly toward the gate, as if he had not seen them.

  He stopped abruptly, grinned and grabbed with strong fingers. The men struggled to keep their feet as their heads cracked together. Their hats fell off and were trampled. The sallow one broke away and retrieved them, slapped his own more or less into shape and jammed it on his balding head. He glared at the big man, who was laughing at them.

  “McHugh, you’re going to…” he began. He stopped and looked at his partner, as if unsure what McHugh was to be threatened with.

  “Get no co-operation from the FBI. Naturally,” the big man finished for him. He shook his head in mock sorrow. “Did the Bureau really send Murrell and Foote out in a cold clammy fog just to tell me that?”

  Nick Foote was tall, lanky, with a big-boned face. His partner Jim Murrell was several inches shorter than McHugh, and he looked up into the pale brown eyes as though he were confronted by an unpleasant memory.

  Foote restored his hat to a suggestion of its former shape and muttered, “You’ll horse us once too often, McHugh.”

  “So? I just got off an airplane. I was minding my own business.”

  Foote turned away to eye a group of departing passengers. Then he said, “So this case isn’t in your department. It’s the Bureau’s baby, and we don’t need any help from the five-sided doghouse.”

  McHugh smiled pleasantly. “Case? Didn’t even know you had one going.” He took their arms, steered them toward a brightly lighted sandwich shop. “Come on, I’ll stand for coffee and you can tell all.”

  Foote and Murrell allowed themselves to be cornered in a booth with a view of the ramp. A waitress brought coffee. McHugh added a lump of sugar to his, leaned back, found a comfortable position and yawned.

  “Why the reception?” He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the small glass ashtray.

  “Just having you show so quick is reason enough,” Murrell said in a sour tone.

  “I live here. Really. I buy my goodies at Blum’s and write letters to editors in defense of cable cars. I have even been to the Top o’ the Mark. I went there to see the tourists. I go away for a little while and find you all shook when I come back.”

  “You live out of that beat-up bag you’re carrying,” Murrell retorted. He lit a cigarette. “Three days ago you were in Jamaica. You went there just because you like good rum. The deal that went thud was a coincidence.”

  McHugh chuckled. “The bag is for getting into better hotels with better ladies. There is a pint of rum in it. Hundred fifty-one proof.”

  “That figures,” Foote said.

  McHugh sipped his coffee. When the waitress wasn’t looking, he opened the bag and produced the bottle. A good portion went into the coffee. He met their eyes and said “Gentlemen?”

  They shook their heads and looked unpleasant.

  The rum vanished. McHugh sipped the drink, smacked his lips and said, “You wouldn’t turn out just for me. What is it this time? Spy? Saboteur? Absconding bank teller?”

  “What’s the difference?” Foote said. “We got a booby prize.”

  McHugh chuckled. “Why do you figure I’m in it?”

  “We know you,” Murrell told him. “Get this through your skull, McHugh. You better be on orders. Freelance it and you’ve, had the route.”

  “I made love to a bear in an iron lung for the FBI and found God.” The strange eyes mocked them. “And sold the story to the Reader’s Digest. Now what shouldn’t I freelance? And why do you think I would?”

  Murrell shut his eyes tight, then said, “We have recently taken an interest in a blonde named Loris Andersen. She plays some piano and does some singing in a side-street gin mill called The Door. Some of The Door’s steady customers are well-covered in our files. Loris is one of the owners. According to the liquor license, you are the other, McHugh.”

  “The small businessman is the backbone of American prosperity,” McHugh said in his Rotarian tone.

  “And Loris Andersen is a neat package,” Murrell continued. “She maintains an apartment
on Nob Hill. Just by coincidence, that pad is listed as your voting address, McHugh. Four days ago Loris phoned you at your hotel in Jamaica.”

  “Didn’t learn much, did you?”

  “Wire tapping is illegal,” Murrell said.

  McHugh ran his tongue around in his cheek.

  “Damn you!” Murrell looked around the restaurant and kept his voice low. “All right. Loris has a sister. Nadine. Five or six years younger, which makes her about twenty-five. Nadine has a great and good friend named Johnny Stover. Stover was last seen thirteen days ago when he bussed Nadine and drove off, supposedly for a week end in Monterey. We don’t think he got there. We can’t turn up anybody who saw him or his car, and it’s one you remember. A Pierce-Arrow phaeton in cherry shape. The guy’s an old-car nut.”

  “You running a missing persons bureau?”

  “When the missing person is an electrical engineer working on classified government projects, we do,” Foote said curtly.

  McHugh yawned. “Interesting. Well, internal security is the responsibility of the FBI. Have fun.”

  He put a dollar on the table and stood. “Call me if you get stuck. I know a good private eye.”

  “You saying you didn’t come back to look for Stover?” Murrell demanded.

  “Yup. Got an idea where you might find him, though.”

  “Oh?” The FBI men got up fast.

  “He’s probably hiking down some country road carrying a big tin can. Those Pierces were real gas hogs.” McHugh laughed and tucked the attaché case under his arm.

  “God almighty…” Murrell’s fists clenched.

  McHugh moved toward the door, pausing long enough to say, “Don’t bother tailing me. I’ll be at The Door. After that I suppose I’ll take Loris home.”

  It was February, and in February the rains come to San Francisco. They are carried by persistent, often violent storms that move down the coast from the north. The grassed slopes of Marui County across the Bay turn from sun-dried brown to brilliant new green almost overnight, and the torrents sluice through the paved hills of the city. The rain blurs the lights of San Francisco and multiplies them on slick pavements. The semaphore traffic signals around Union Square and down on Market Street clang and flap their red and green arms and are widely ignored in the early hours of morning.

  Stinging pellets of rain lanced through the fog as the cab passed a red light and nosed into the curb near The Door. McHugh had watched through the rear window for other cars. There were no headlights in sight as he paid the driver and hurried across the sidewalk. He went down the five granite steps and halted, out of the rain, listening to the muted piano and the woman’s voice. Not great piano, but good for a side-street bar in San Francisco. Not a great voice, but rich and throaty, made for the blues.

  The Door’s door was an immense slab of weathered oak, studded and bound by wrought iron, with strap hinges. McHugh’s fingers closed on the cold, wet handle, and he slipped inside. It was a long, dim tunnel of a room, with a handful of people spaced along the bar. The stools were old with the scars of their years, and the tables and chairs along the opposite wall were equally beat. Travel posters and reproductions of sporting prints fought for space on the dark walls. The air was heavy with the smells of beer and liquor and smoke and dampness and people.

  The piano bar was at the far end, illuminated by a single small spotlight recessed in the ceiling. McHugh listened, knew that Loris was playing for herself rather than for the few customers. The cone of light slanted through shifting layers of smoke, haloed cornsilk-blonde hair and built soft shadows on the fine bone structure of her face. The song was Blueberry Hill, and it was a slow, rocking lament, a stirring of memories.

  The bartender was new. He moved away from the cash register as McHugh put money on the bar.

  “Drambuie, and a goldwasser.” The man reached for a pair of shot glasses. McHugh whistled softly through his teeth, shook his head and said, “Liqueurs should be served in pony glasses. Even here.”

  The barkeep stared hard. He started to shrug, but something in McHugh’s face stopped him. “Yes, sir,” he said. He set up two pony glasses and poured.

  McHugh carried the drinks to the piano. The tiny yellow flecks in the goldwasser caught the light as he eased himself onto a stool. He watched the woman as he lighted a cigarette, saw the flaring match reflected in wideset green eyes. Her fingers missed a chord as he grinned and said, “Hello, Loris.”

  The song tapered to nothing as she stood. She tapped a switch and the baby shot faded as she came to sit beside him, a tall woman with high, small breasts, flat stomach and long, tapering legs. She wore an electric-blue cocktail gown, and she moved with an easy, natural grace. She raised the goldwasser in a toast.

  “McHugh—this do make it nice on a rainy night.”

  He nodded, smiling, as he took her other hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed the saltiness of her palm and drew a circle with the tip of his tongue. He felt her leg tremble where it pressed against him, and her nails dug lightly into his cheek.

  “It do. Can we enjoy our rainy night, or won’t the deeds of derring-do wait for morning?”

  She drew her hand away and took a cigarette from his case. As McHugh held a light she said, “I’m for the night. But would you mind talking to Nadine first?”

  “Sure. You know what I’ll tell her.”

  “Please—just say you’ll see what you can do.”

  “Face it, honey. Little sister has lumps coming. The sooner she gets them, the sooner the bruises will go away.” McHugh’s face was grim as he sipped the Scotch liqueur.. He considered the way so many fine women tracked down and attached themselves to men he classified as being no God-damned good. “So she’s involved with a guy who all of a sudden isn’t around any more. The best thing I could tell her is to write him off. Loris, I know the Johnny Stover type—he’s not right for Nadine. You should know this, too.”

  “I don’t know it. Neither does Nadine.”

  “You will.” McHugh finished his drink and ran his fingers through his still-damp hair. “You think he took off for Monterey to look at sea otters? Hah!”

  “No more than I think the señorita I heard singing in the shower when I called your hotel was the chambermaid, McHugh.” Her voice was husky, and her fingers tightened on his hand. “Lover, a lot of my friends don’t approve of you. It’s been a long, long time since I had an invitation to a Pebble Beach house party. That’s the way the rules are. I don’t mind.”

  McHugh went to the bar for refills. When he was on his stool again he said, “Comparing me to Johnny gets you no points at all.”

  “Damn it, I wish you’d stay off airplanes. They make you about as reasonable as a wild boar.” She crushed her cigarette on the floor. “I wasn’t making comparisons.”

  “No?” McHugh raised an eyebrow, let it drop.

  “No. I couldn’t.” She took another cigarette. “It’s been nine years, and I think I know less about you now than I did in the beginning. You’re with me for a week or a month or maybe two. Then you get a call on that phone with the scrambler gadget or someone I’ve never seen before shows up, says a few words to you and you walk out from behind the bar in the middle of a shift. I know one thing about your job—it’s offbeat, and there’s enough brass behind it to make four-star generals bow and tug their forelocks.

  “But when you’re not working at it you’ll take whatever kind of horsing our rumdum customers feel like handing out.” She puffed on her cigarette and brought her face close to his. “I’m certain of just one thing about you, McHugh. I love you. That’s enough.”

  “Good.” McHugh hoped Loris would never become aware that the rumdum customers were, for the most part, agents of an assortment of nations, friendly and otherwise. They made The Door a no man’s land, a club of sorts where opposite numbers could and often did drink together and practice telling lies and picking each other’s brains.

  “Can you understand it’s the same with Nadine? You look a
t Johnny or into him or whatever and decide he’s a worthless son of something. To her he’s charming and considerate and possibly brilliant. Whether he is or isn’t doesn’t matter. Nothing does except she’s in love with him.”

  “Women,” McHugh said. “He’s a competent engineer. But he’s not charming; he’s what us country boys call a city slicker. He’s calculating, not considerate. He knows what he wants from a woman and has the intelligence and patience to work her around until she’ll crawl on her knees to give it to him.”

  “The truth,” Loris said slowly, “is probably somewhere in between.”

  “Probably.” McHugh considered Johnny Stover, tried to understand how a woman would see him. Tall, reasonably good-looking without being handsome. Sharp, knowing gray eyes and blond hair and a way of being a boy and a man at the same time; a man who could say the right things in an easy way, a man who danced well, knew the good places to eat and how to hold his liquor. He had a modern, discreet bachelor apartment in the city and a small farm down the coast near Half Moon Bay. There he had a well-equipped machine shop and laboratory of sorts, where he did much of his engineering work, and a barn full of old cars rescued from junk heaps and restored to showroom shape. McHugh would concede that Johnny Stover was an excellent craftsman.

  “I don’t know how much the FBI has, but they must figure he’s still around town. At least, a couple of the boys were keeping an eye on the airport.” McHugh told her of meeting Murrell and Foote. “Think of any reason for him to skip out?”

  “No. The last time he was in with Nadine he didn’t act as if anything was bothering him.”

  “When was that? What did he have to say?”

  The bottom of Loris’ glass was wet, and she made interlocking circles on the dark surface of the piano. “Two or three nights before he disappeared. Two, I think. I was at the piano and they sat there, but I didn’t hear much of what was said. I wasn’t really listening.”

  “Try to remember.”