The Plague of Thieves Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouted as he clambered down the stairs, “Stop him! Stop that man!”
    â€œNo, no, don’t let him catch me!” Lansing cried in return. “He’s a madman, he’s trying to kill me!”
    The workers stood in clustered confusion, looking from one to the other of the running men. Lansing threaded through them, vaulted an intestinal coiling of pipes, and disappeared behind one of the vats. Quincannon might have snagged him before he escaped from the fermenting room if a mustached workman hadn’t stepped into his path, saying, “Here, what’s the idea of— ufff! ” Quincannon bowled him over, but in doing so his foot slipped on the wet floor and he went skidding headfirst into a snakelike tangle of hose. By the time he disengaged himself and regained his feet, fought off clutching hands, and plunged ahead in a limping run, Lansing was nowhere to be seen.
    There was only one way out of this section of the brewery. Still somewhat hobbled, Quincannon went through the boiler room, past the corner room where the vats of rejected beer stood in heavy shadow, then past the freight elevator and down the stairs to the lower floor. An electrically lit passage led into the main tunnel that divided the building in half. He hurried along the tunnel, out onto the Seventh Street loading dock. There was no sign of Lansing anywhere in the vicinity. Half a dozen burly workmen were wrestling filled kegs onto a pair of massive Studebaker wagons; Quincannon called to them. No, they hadn’t seen Lansing come out.
    So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?
    Quincannon’s shin still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There being no exit from the cellars, he hastened the other way. But almost immediately he encountered a clerk headed to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him Lansing hadn’t gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past three or four minutes and would have seen him if he had.
    Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was on his way up.
    â€œMr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.”
    â€œThe storerooms? Are you certain, man?”
    â€œAye. In a great hurry he was.”
    Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool’s game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company’s bottling plant in a separate building adjacent.
    Quincannon made his way down the passage, quickly but watchfully. The temperature dropped by several degrees as he descended. When he reached the artery that led to the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat—though he didn’t do so, for it would have impeded access to the Navy Colt. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.
    The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned late at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Willard would brook no repeat of that criminal business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at the end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.
    It