O’Brien joined him.
“Maurer’s mob,” Conrad said, and groped in his hip pocket for his gun. “There’s a telephone somewhere around, Tom. Better get some boys up here.”
O’Brien grunted and closed the door.
“Watch out how you use the light,” Conrad went on. “I think I spotted the telephone standing on a table to your left.”
O’Brien snapped on his flash-light and located the telephone. Out in the darkness a riot gun started up. The black of the night was split by yellow flashes. Lead smashed a window and scattered a shower of glass that whizzed over Conrad’s and O’Brien’s ducking heads. Plaster came down from the opposite wall, filling the room with dust.
“Hell!” O’Brien muttered, flattened out and began a slow crawl across the room to the telephone.
Conrad aimed at where the flashes had come from and fired a probing shot into the darkness.
Automatics cracked; pencil points of flame appeared in a semicircle, bullets hummed through the smashed window and thudded into the opposite walls.
“There’s quite a bunch of them out there,” Conrad said. “Get moving, Tom!”
O’Brien had got the telephone down on the floor. Conrad could hear him dialling.