Black Mask (Vol. 22, No. 2 — Mary 1939)

“Nothing much,” Frenchy Peck smirked. “Only did you think I sent Baby Face out to pull that kill, and take them chances, just to help you out of a murder rap? You’ve been dragging down sixty per cent of my take for the last five years, Larry. And this is the first time I ever got a chance to get something on you. So I keep this little pistol with the pearl handle, see? I keep it, and from now on you got to take a cut in wages. Twenty per cent is your cut from now on, Mr. Cleverly. And you’re gonna like it!”

Lawrence Cleverly looked at Frenchy Peck with narrowed eyes. “Be careful, Frenchy. Better men than you have tried to tie me up in a knot. Most of them are dead. Those that aren’t are rotting in jail.”

“I’ll take the chance, Larry,” Peck smirked. “Look at it my way. Not only do I snatch the fat out of the fire by getting this pistol back for you, but now I got to kill this kid here, and the girl. It looks to me like I contribute the big share to this racket, and from now on I draw down the big share!”

That was as far as he got. Paul Tyler had been lying on the floor, his muscles tense, waiting for a chance when every one’s attention would be focussed elsewhere. He decided that he’d never have a better moment.

He came to his feet with a leap, and lunged through the open kitchen door, almost before any of them knew he was on the move.

Frenchy yelled, “Hey, get him!” and Fatty fired a single shot that almost singed his right leg.

Then Paul was in the kitchen, and had kicked the door shut. He slipped the latch over, locking it, and leaped out of the way just as another shot came through the door, splintering the wood. Two more shots followed it, but Paul was already across the kitchen, with both hands fumbling at that shiny new Easy-Way Vacuum Cleaner.

He had memorized reams of words about the Easy-Way Vacuum Cleaner, and they had all come back to him as he lay on the floor with Fatty’s heel in his spine. And he had an idea. It was a desperate idea, and one that he surely would have laughed at in his calmer moments.

This was not one of those moments, however. There were more shots coming through the door, and some of them were coming perilously close to him where he worked at the vacuum cleaner. Helen Hastings was in that other room, and it was a hundred to one that neither he nor Helen would ever get out of this place alive unless he did something — crazy or not.

He could hear Frenchy Peck shouting to his boys above the reverberations of the gunshots. “Never mind, keep on shooting. It’s too late. The cops will be here right away. Get that guy!”

Someone fired four shots into the lock, and the door splintered around the knob and sagged open.

Paul was ready. Desperate, tight-lipped, he stood with the vacuum cleaner at his side, like some knight of old in shining armor with a glittering lance poised. Only his lance was a vacuum cleaner, with ten feet of electric cord. He had stuck the plug into an electric socket, and he had his finger on the switch. He had removed the sliding top from the dust bag, leaving the aperture open. He now held that aperture facing toward the door, spreading it out with the fingers of his left hand, keeping his right on the switch.

The door came open under a kick from the other room, and Gaga appeared in the doorway, gun in hand. He saw Paul and raised the gun for a quick shot.

And Paul clicked the vacuum cleaner switch.

The machine rumbled, whizzed and buzzed. And a great, devastating cloud of dust and dirt poured out of that dust bag in a blinding enveloping spray of blackness that sent Gaga staggering backward, screaming, with both hands at his eyes.

Paul came after him inexorably, deliberately, following him as far as the electric cord would allow, until he stood in the doorway. He had shut off the switch after that first quick spray, and now he flicked it on again, directing the spray at Fatty and Tony, who had been crowding in behind Gaga.

Blinded, they yelled in pain, and leaped backward.

The vacuum cleaner spurted its last bit of dust and dirt, and wheezed on, emptily. Paul let it drop to the floor without even turning off the switch. He swooped down and recovered the gun that Fatty had dropped, and raised it in front of him, with his hand stretched out straight before him, like the pictures he had seen of G-Men, practicing on the target range.

He pulled the trigger again and again, firing blindly into the swirling dust that enveloped the living-room. There was only one thing he was sure of — that Helen Hastings was not in the line of fire, for he saw her, pressing up against the wall alongside the door. Everybody else in that room was an enemy, and he didn’t care whom he hit.