No one was around in the parking lot and no sounds emanated from behind the twin closed doors of the double-bay garage. I moved quietly to the big picture window. The switchboard where a good-looking dye-job redhead had been seated on my previous visit was just her empty chair now. At left, however, that burly natural blond dispatcher was sitting at his microphone like a disc jockey waiting for a song to be over; his big wall-mounted map loomed before him, with only a small scattering of magnetic pins dotting it in these wee-small skeleton-crew hours.

He was snoozing in his tilt-back chair, or anyway loafing, arms folded. I hadn’t been able to place him in the alley—the one time I’d seen him was five years ago, after all—but that glimpse of the shooter behind the cab’s wheel who leaned over to fire a round into Sandy’s head finally sealed it.

If the EMPLOYEES ONLY door was locked, I would have to shatter that picture-window glass with a gunshot; but it opened just fine.

As I went in, the blond turned in the swivel chair and his eyes got big and his mouth, too. He was in a white shirt with a black bow tie and navy slacks and his cabbie cap was on the desk. Here’s the cute part: a revolver was angled in it, a small .32 Remington, pre-war I thought. Didn’t figure this for the gun he’d used at Musial’s.

But he’d brought a pistol to work, so he must have known the coming hours might not just be another day at the office. His fingers were almost on the gun when I slapped him with the nine mil barrel, hard, along the right side of his face. It bloodied the ear and ripped the cheek like a red Christmas package a kid was getting into, and then he slid from the chair, hitting his head on the edge of his desk, and folded up like a big stillborn fetus on the wooden floor.

He’d made just enough noise going down for me to pause a few seconds with the nine mil in hand, ready for anything. Beyond his dispatcher’s workstation were double doors open onto the adjacent repair garages, one big room despite the overhead door above each of two bays. No one seemed to be in this area, its lights off, though a mid-’50s Chevy sedan with Ace Cab markings was on the nearest of two lowered hydraulic lifts.

Nothing but silence followed. From the cabbie cap, I collected the revolver, a .32, and emptied the cylinder of bullets onto the floor and tossed the little gun out the door into the parking lot, where it skittered away on the cement. I knelt and checked the blond—he wasn’t dead, because the red juice in him was still flowing, making a puddle actually; but he was out colder than Jersey Joe after Marciano finished him.

In the recess between the dispatcher’s area and the switchboard, between men’s and ladies’ rooms, an edge of light ran along the bottom of the closed unmarked door. I went into the little office and found the proprietor of the Ace Cab Company indeed hunkered over a ledger book. But also on the beat-up old desk was a .38 long-barreled revolver, a Smith & Wesson Police Special. I crossed the short distance, plucked the gun from his desk and dropped it into his metal wastebasket. The metal-on-metal made a satisfying clunk.