“Besides,” added Billy Kane, “he had sort of queered his own game. He’d hidden the loot somewhere, and he couldn’t make a direct get-away then. He had to get hold of the goods again before he went. All right! What I want to know is who’s got the better chance of grabbing him—us or the police? He isn’t one of us. He’s working on his own. Well, all right! If we nip him, and he’s satisfied with a little rake-off, and is willing to cough up the rest, that’ll be treating him fair. If he isn’t strong on coughing up, we’ll find another way of making him come across that he won’t like so well, and we’ll get the half million, and he’ll get——” Billy Kane completed his sentence with a significant shrug of his shoulder.
An oath, the more callous and brutal for the soft purring way in which it fell from his lips, came from Red Vallon.
“What do you want done, Bundy?” Karlin was terse and to the point. “It looks good to me, if you can pull it off.”
“It’s the biggest haul we’ll ever get our mitts on if we live a hundred years!” Billy Kane’s eyes shifted for an instant from the wall to fix themselves impressively on the two men. “I’ve been lying here all day thinking it out. What do I want done? Well, I’ll tell you! I want every string and every wire we’ve got pulled. Savvy? We’ve got to beat the police to it. We’ve got to get Kane—first. I want all the boys that the bulls think they’ve got sewed up as stool pigeons to stool-pigeon the police and get all the inside dope. And then that fellow Jackson, the footman, looks like a bet we can’t throw down. He’s dead—but he looks like a good bet. He lived all through the night, but the papers don’t say anything about the story he told. Perhaps he knew something that will help, perhaps he didn’t; but he doesn’t go into the discard yet. Find out who he was and all about him, and get next to his family if he’s got one. If he told any story to the police, any of the family that were clustering around the bedside will be wise to it. Get the idea?”
“Birdie Rose is the boy for that!” Red Vallon’s bullet head was thrust forward in vicious earnestness, his red-rimmed black eyes were glittering with a feverish light.
“Let Birdie go to it, then!” said Billy Kane.
“Birdie was slated for the Merxler affair to-night.” Karlin spoke a little dubiously.
“Shift him!” snapped Billy Kane curtly. “Red’s right! Birdie’s the boy for this job.”
“All right!” agreed Karlin, and shrugged his shoulders. He turned to Red Vallon. “Put Bull McCann in Birdie’s place, then. See that he gets to Jerry’s back room before ten.”
“I’ll fix it!” grunted Red Vallon. “What’s next, Bundy? This goes—all the boys’ll fall for it.”