He locked the door, and put the bunch of keys in his pocket. It was comparatively quiet in the house now. A door of one of the lower apartments opened cautiously, but closed instantly again, as Billy Kane, with the gangster beside him, went down the stairs. In another moment they were out on the street, and had turned the first corner.
The gangster was muttering to himself:
“There’s Birdie and me. But Savnak won’t dare let a peep out of him, ’cause he was in on the diamond pinch himself. I’ll get that guy with the mask yet, if I swing for it. Spilled every blasted bean in the bag—that’s me!” His voice took on a sudden, half cringing, half deferential note. “It wasn’t my fault, Bundy—honest! You know that! You ain’t sore, are you, Bundy?”
Billy Kane pushed his hat to the back of his head. The night air was cool, even crisp, but his hatband was wringing wet. He brushed his damp hair back from his forehead. It was strange that he should have murdered Peters, after all!
He answered gruffly.
“Forget it!” said Billy Kane, alias the Rat.
[XVI—TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER]
From above, faintly, through the flooring, came the tap-tap, tap-tap of the old Italian cobbler’s hammer. Billy Kane, from his hands and knees, straightened up, easing his body from the discomfort of his cramped position; and, as he listened, he toyed now with the steel jimmy, commandeered from Whitie Jack, that was in his hand. He had been even more assiduous in his own tapping, at least for the last hour or more, than was the old fellow above there. The old fellow seemed to work all day—and all night. It was night now—or, rather, evening. If there was any sound heard from the street it would be attributed to the old cobbler, of course, which was just as well.
The murky light from the single incandescent across the room threw the sparse furnishings of the Rat’s den into uncouth shadows on the walls, and threw his own shadow into a grotesque, shapeless blotch upon the floor. From the street level, down through the cellar-like stairway to this underground abode, seeping in through the closed door, came the muffled roll of traffic, and a footstep now and then on the pavement like the echo of some sound that was detached, far distant.
He resumed his work, tapping with infinite pains with the butt of his steel jimmy on board after board of the flooring. And now this board or that seemed to give back a more resonant sound than its fellows, and he tapped it again, and still again, only to shake his head finally, and pass on to the next board.