# Red Harvest (1929)/Chapter 25

CHAPTER XXV
Whiskeytown
At half-past one Reno turned from answering a phone call to say:
"Let's take a ride."
He went upstairs. When he came down he carried a black valise. Most of the men had gone out the kitchen door by then.
Reno gave me the black valise, saying:
"Don't wrastle it around too much."
It was heavy.
The seven of us left in the house went out the front door and got into a curtained touring car that O'Marra had just driven up to the curb. Reno sat beside O'Marra. I was squeezed in between men in the back seat, with the valise squeezed between my legs.
Another car came out of the first cross street to run ahead of us. A third followed us. Our speed hung around forty, fast enough to get us somewhere, not fast enough to get us a lot of attention.
We had nearly finished the trip before we were bothered.
The action started in a block of one-story houses of the shack type, down in the southern end of the city.
​A man put his head out of a door, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrilly.
Somebody in the car behind us shot him down.
At the next corner we ran through a volley of pis­tol bullets.
Reno turned around to tell me:
"If they pop the bag, we'll all of us hit the moon. Get it open. We got to work fast when we get there."
I had the fasteners unsnapped by the time we came to rest at the curb in front of a dark three-story brick building.
Men crawled all over me, opening the valise, help­ing themselves to the contents, bombs made of short sections of two-inch pipe, packed in sawdust in the bag. Bullets bit chunks out of the car's curtains.
Reno reached back for one of the bombs, hopped out to the sidewalk, paid no attention to a streak of blood that suddenly appeared in the middle of his left cheek, and heaved his piece of stuffed pipe at the brick building's door.
A sheet of flame was followed by deafening noise. Hunks of things pelted us while we tried to keep from being knocked over by the concussion. Then there was no door to keep anybody out of the red brick building.
A man ran forward, swung his arm, let a pipeful of hell go through the doorway. The shutters came off the downstairs windows, fire and glass flying behind them.
The car that had followed us was stationary up ​the street, trading shots with the neighborhood. The car that had gone ahead of us had turned into a side street. Pistol shots from behind the red brick build­ing, between the explosions of our cargo, told us that our advance car was covering the back door.
O'Marra, out in the middle of the street, bent far over, tossed a bomb to the brick building's roof. It didn't explode. O'Marra put one foot high in the air, clawed at his throat, and fell solidly backward.
Another of our party went down under the slugs that were cutting at us from a wooden building next to the brick one.
Reno cursed stolidly and said:
"Burn them out. Fat."
Fat spit on a bomb, ran around the back of our car, and swung his arm.
We picked ourselves up off the sidewalk, dodged flying things, and saw that the frame house was all out of whack, with flames climbing its torn edges.
"Any left?" Reno asked as we looked around, en­joying the novelty of not being shot at.
"Here's the last one," Fat said, holding out a bomb.
Fire was dancing inside the upper windows of the brick house. Reno looked at it, took the bomb from Fat, and said:
"Back off. They'll be coming out."
We moved away from the front of the house.
A voice indoors yelled:
"Reno!"
​Reno slipped into the shadow of our car before he called back:
"Well?"
"We're done," a heavy voice shouted. "We're coming out. Don't shoot."
Reno asked: "Who's we're?"
"This is Pete," the heavy voice said. "There's four left of us."
"You come first," Reno ordered, "with your mitts on the top of your head. The others come out one at a time, same way, after you. And half a minute apart is close enough. Come on."
We waited a moment, and then Pete the Finn appeared in the dynamited doorway, his hands holding the top of his bald head. In the glare from the burning next-door house we could see that his face was cut, his clothes almost all torn off.
Stepping over wreckage, the bootlegger came slowly down the steps to the sidewalk.
Reno called him a lousy fish-eater and shot him four times in face and body.
Pete went down. A man behind me laughed.
Reno hurled the remaining bomb through the doorway.
We scrambled into our car. Reno took the wheel. The engine was dead. Bullets had got to it.
Reno worked the horn while the rest of us piled out.
The machine that had stopped at the corner came for us. Waiting for it, I looked up and down the ​street that was bright with the glow of two burning buildings. There were a few faces at windows, but whoever besides us was in the street had taken to cover. Not far away, firebells sounded.
The other machine slowed up for us to climb aboard. It was already full. We packed it in layers, with the overflow hanging on the running boards.
We bumped over dead Hank O'Marra's legs and headed for home. We covered one block of the distance with safety if not comfort. After that we had neither.
A limousine turned into the street ahead of us, came half a block toward us, put its side to us, and stopped. Out of the side, gun-fire.
Another car came around the limousine and charged us. Out of it, gun-fire.
We did our best, but we were too damned amalgamated for good fighting. You can't shoot straight holding a man in your lap, another hanging on your shoulder, while a third does his shooting from an inch behind your ear.
Our other car—the one that had been around at the building's rear—came up and gave us a hand. But by then two more had joined the opposition. Apparently Thaler's mob's attack on the jail was over, one way or the other, and Pete's army, sent to help there, had returned in time to spoil our get-away. It was a sweet mess.
I leaned over a burning gun and yelled in Reno's ear:
​"This is the bunk. Let's us extras get out and do our wrangling from the street."
He thought that a good idea, and gave orders:
"Pile out, some of you hombres, and take them from the pavements."
I was the first man out, with my eye on a dark alley entrance.
Fat followed me to it. In my shelter, I turned on him and growled:
"Don't pile up on me. Pick your own hole. There's a cellarway that looks good."
He agreeably trotted off toward it, and was shot down at his third step.
I explored my alley. It was only twenty feet long, and ended against a high board fence with a locked gate.
A garbage can helped me over the gate into a brick-paved yard. The side fence of that yard let me into another, and from that I got into another, where a fox terrior raised hell at me.
I kicked the pooch out of the way, made the opposite fence, untangled myself from a clothes line, crossed two more yards, got yelled at from a window, had a bottle thrown at me, and dropped into a cobblestoned back street.
The shooting was behind me, but not far enough. I did all I could to remedy that. I must have walked as many streets as I did in my dreams the night Dinah was killed.
My watch said it was three-thirty a. m. when I looked at it on Elihu Willsson's front steps.