With a roar from its exhaust, the automobile lunged forward. He heard the mayor curse as he shifted the gears fiercely, each move of his hand giving the car accelerated speed.
"Duck your heads," Brennan yelled.
An automatic pistol cracked out its sharp reports and a bullet tore through the top of the car and shattered the windshield glass to splinters as the automobile lurched out of the alley.
* * * * *
Murphy sat tilted back in a chair, his feet braced against the sill of the only window of his room. Cigarette butts were heaped in a tarnished brass souvenir ash tray on a table at his side. The Sunday newspapers, from which he had extracted the sporting sections to peruse every line, were scattered on the floor around his chair.
His scraggy hair tousled on his head, a growth of black, wiry beard covering his face, coatless and collarless, he was a picture of coarse self-indulgence. Returning to his room at three o'clock in the morning after separating from the mayor, Brennan, John and Smith following their escape from "Gink" Cummings' pistol shots, he had slept until noon. He went to the cheap dairy lunch near his rooming house for a heavy breakfast of ham and eggs, purchased the Sunday papers and came back to smoke and read.
The room with its disordered bed, drab walls dotted with sporting prints, dusty, rickety furnishings, threadbare carpet and grimy lace curtains, was a dreary, prison-like place. But to Murphy it was the place of his content, as much of a home as he had ever had. He had slept in alleys and deserted shacks and basements. So to him the room brought no discomfort and was as luxurious in his unimaginative mind as a suite at the Ambassador or the Alexandria. No invitation to the restful mountains or the sparkling ocean, its beaches lined with gay Sunday crowds, floated to him on the breeze that drifted in through the open window. He was enjoying a roustabout's day of rest.
After a while, perhaps, when dusk falling over the city heralded brooding night, he would emerge from his room to visit his favorite pool room, where, in an atmosphere blue with smoke, he would lounge in a chair at a wall and exchange gossip of sport and sporting things with other hangers-on. From there he might wander in upon a friendly "crap" or card game behind the locked door of an unventilated room of a Spring street "social club." Or he might go to one of the stuffy, over-heated gymnasiums to watch some industrious and ambitious boxer in training. That was his life and he was happy in it, a hand-to-mouth sort of existence in which he was satisfied.
At intervals a thrill of the excitement of the adventure of the night before, when he had played an important part in the trapping of "Gink" Cummings and Gibson, returned to him. It was difficult for him to realize that the mayor of Los Angeles had taken him by the hand, like a brother, and thanked him and promised him the best job at his disposal if he was re-elected. He remembered having told the mayor he could drive like "Jimmy" Murphy, the racer, when they had sped out of the downtown district and away from possible pursuit. He remembered how he had patched a cut over the mayor's eye, a laceration caused by a piece of the shattered windshield, with the skill of facial repair that he had learned as a second at the Vernon ring.
The "Gallant kid" and Brennan, they were "regular guys," all right. Brennan was a "wisecracker," all right, all right. Some day he'd tell them why he was helping them. They thought he was doing it for the money they gave him. He wouldn't "double-cross" the "Gink" or anyone else for money, see? What kind of a "bird" did they take him for, anyway? A "stool-pigeon"? He'd tell them why some day and they'd know that Tim Murphy wasn't no "stool-pigeon." He'd tell them——