Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

Silence followed, silence so complete and abrupt as to give the uncanny sensation that the clatter of the man’s gun as he fell had been only a queer trick of the mind.

A sibilant whisper from the gateway brought Wylie to her side. Together they moved the body of the dead officer to a little tool shed in a remote corner of the courtyard. Then, after binding and gagging the drugged warder lest he awake before the hour set for the execution, they placed him beside his officer in the shed. The bloodstains on the flagstones would not be noticed, she knew, when Cruz Delgado was marched into the yard. Attention would be concentrated on the prisoner walking to his death.

Then, locking the gate behind them, they slipped out into the silver-blue darkness of the ancient Roman street. Twenty minutes later the two straightened up. Three bricks lay at the foot of the wall, but the outer row had been replaced, and to the casual eye the wall had not been disturbed.

“Now,” Vivian said softly. “Everything is in readiness. In an hour Cruz Delgado will be in our hands again... if there is no hitch. And once we have him I think that he will be glad to show us the hiding place of all his loot.”

Wylie nodded grimly. He had seen the Lady from Hell wring secrets from unwilling men before this, and her methods, unpleasant though they might be to her victims, were uncommonly effective.

The dawn was killing the stars, clear and cold in tint, beneath a sky shifting in color from smoke gray to aquamarine and icy blue, when the sound of a trumpet somewhere in the prison told them that the hour for execution was at hand. The Lady from Hell, crouching with Wylie behind the ruined façade of a house across the narrow street from the execution courtyard, stirred and peered out through a crack in the board nailed across one of the windows.

They waited tensely. The zero hour was approaching. Another few moments would either see the consummation of one of the most brazen and dangerous schemes that the Lady from Hell ever attempted — or find them inside a Spanish prison, locked in—

The clang of the iron door and the sound of marching feet!

The Lady from Hell stiffened, and for a moment Wylie’s eyes were caught by a glittering stare.

The showdown had come. Cruz Delgado, she knew, was being marched to his death. The sound of tramping feet, the officer’s crisp commands, came clearly to her ears through the still morning air.

There was a little silence... eerie... pregnant with meaning. The world seemed to be waiting for a vast event, imminently lurking. The Lady from Hell knew that the bandage was being adjusted over Delgado’s eyes, and on the moment that followed that tiny fragment of silence she knew hung the success or failure of her plot; the decision on whether they might have a chance to dip their fingers in Delgado’s hoarded treasures.

The silence was shattered, and she heard the sharp command of the officer in command of the firing squad.

“Ready... aim...”

It was the instant. A swift movement of her hand pressed the button on a small black box at her feet. The sound of a thunderous explosion filled the air.

Even as the sound of the explosion came, she could see a section of the wall toppling forward into the courtyard. And, the Lady from Hell knew, beneath that section of falling wall would be standing the firing squad. She had calculated it nicely — with ruthless certainty, dooming every man of that firing squad to either death or hideous injury.

Before the dust had settled, the two criminals saw a figure scrambling over the heaped-up bricks... the figure of Cruz Delgado, bandit leader. He had followed the instructions she had passed on to him, hidden in the duster of flowers, and the moment the wall had fallen, had darted for the breach in the wall before the remaining occupants of the courtyard had recovered from their astonishment.

The Lady from Hell opened the door of their hiding place and ran across the narrow street to meet him. There was a smile of grim triumph on her face as Delgado, Wylie and herself ran down the street to where a car was parked in readiness for their flight.

Cruz Delgado was the only man who knew the hiding place of the loot he had gathered during his desperate years of banditry. She had no doubt but there were methods she could utilize to persuade him to divulge that hiding place.

Waterfront Stick-Up by Robert H. Leitfred

Detective Chris Larsen knew there was no use bucking discipline, but he determined to try out his own methods when the huge navy payroll was being snatched.

I

Chris Larsen’s eyes were moody as he stared at the typewritten order transferring him from duty in the port city of San Pedro to the homicide squad in Los Angeles. His eyes turned to those of his superior, Captain of Detectives Judson, in unconscious appeal.