Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask Read Online Free PDF

bell clanged petulantly, a lot of motor horns blew. Then a police traffic whistle shrilled, and bell and horns stopped.
    A girl appeared in the door that connected Stein’s private office with the outer office.
    She said, “Mr. Donahue.”
    Stein looked up at her, looked down at his finger nails. He threw the paper knife on the desk and sat erect, picked up some papers and bent his brows over them. He looked annoyed.
    But he said, “All right.”
    The girl disappeared.
    Donahue appeared. He came in strolling, hands in jacket pockets, stiff straw hat clamped between left side and left arm. He was smoking a long, thin panatela of a very light brown color. He was strolling, but the expression on his face was not a strolling expression.
    He stopped midway between the door he had entered and the desk at which Stein sat looking very absorbed in the papers before him. But Stein looked up, nodded curtly, said, “Hello, Donahue,” and went on reading.
    Donahue said nothing. He rolled the light brown panatela from one corner of his mouth to the other and stared with dark, hard brown eyes at the bald pate of Stein. Stein went on reading with an amazing show of intense concentration. He turned sheet after sheet in a brusque, businesslike manner. He made quick notations with a pencil.
    Donahue stood motionless, feet planted a little apart, hands idle in pockets, smoke rising in a thin gray column between his eyes. His long, lean face looked very brown, very mask-like. The muted noise of traffic in the street below rose and fell in waves of varying sound. The electric fan in the office droned with the hot monotony of a bee. The typewriter in the outer office began clicking spasmodically.
    Stein shifted his horn-rimmed spectacles, twitched his eyebrows. The spectacles seemed to annoy him. He took them off, took the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, polished the glasses, held them up and looked at them and beyond them, at Donahue.
    “Little cooler, Donahue?”
    “I didn’t come here to talk about the weather.”
    “One talks about the weather from force of habit.”
    “One two-times from force of habit, too.”
    Stein put on his glasses, was very fussy about the way they fitted. He took pains to fold the silk handkerchief before returning it to his breast pocket. He coughed behind a small white well-kept hand. He motioned to the chair at the opposite side of his desk.
    “Won’t you sit down?”
    “You don’t have to be polite.”
    “I’m not. I want to talk to you.”
    “Talk.”
    Stein picked up the paper knife, leaned back in his chair, poked idly at the desk blotter with the point of the paper knife. He pricked six holes in a row, then pricked six more at right angles, and then threw down the paper knife.
    “Well, Donahue, business is business, you know,” he said airily.
    Donahue nodded very slowly. “Yeah, two-timing is two-timing. You call it what you like. It’s still two-timing.”
    “Don’t be an ass.”
    Donahue ripped his hand from his pocket and slashed it shortly away from his stomach. “I’m no ass! But you’re a——damned double-crossing kike!”
    Stein remained calm, casual. “Now, Donahue, please—”
    Donahue took three hard steps that brought him to the desk. The hand that he had ripped from his pocket became a fist and the fist landed dully on the desk and remained there at the end of a rigid arm. His wiry brows almost met above his nose, and dark fury burned in his eyes, his lips thinned against his teeth.
    His voice rapped out swiftly, deep-toned, rough-shod—“I know I’m in a rotten game, Stein. I’m not defending it. I don’t know why I’m in—but I’m in it. It keeps me in butts and I see the country and I don’t have to slave over a desk. I get places. It’s not a pretty game, and no guy ever wrote a poem about it. But it’s the only hole I fit in.”
    He stopped. He turned, strode to the connecting door and closed it. He came back to the desk, put his palms flat down