“I guess we want you, Jimmie Durkin,” said a grim but genial and altogether commonplace voice to him over his averted shoulder.
Then Durkin turned. It was Doogan’s plain-clothes man, O’Reilly. Beside him stood a second plain-clothes man showing a corner of his Detective Bureau badge.
“Well?” said Durkin, vacuously.
The men drew in closer, sandwiching him compactly between them. It was a commonplace enough movement, but it made suddenly and keenly tangible to his mind the fact that he had lost his freedom.
“For God’s sake, boys, whatever it is, don’t make a scene here!” cried the prisoner, passionately. “I’ll go easy enough, but don’t make a show of me.”
“Come on, then, quick!” said the Central Office plain-clothes man, wheeling him about, and heading for the Old Slip Station.
“Quick as you like,” laughed Durkin, very easily but very warily, as he calculated the time and distance between him and the sergeant’s desk, and told himself a second time admonitively that he was indeed under arrest.
CHAPTER XXV
Durkin, with an officer at either elbow, tried to think far ahead and to think fast. Yet try as he might, his desperate mind could find no crevice in the blind wall of his predicament. Nothing, at any rate, was to be lost by talking.
“What’s this for, boys, anyhow?” he asked them, with sadly forced amiability.