"Now, don't blame the girl," Jenkins said. "She was just the last step in my trail. The guy who really talked was Bud Griffin. There's a character who'll never stop talkin'. If you hadn't talked to the bartender in that joint on the waterfront, I'd have never found out about Myrtle. But he knew Myrtle and the kind of girl she was; he knew she only went for the hoods who had dough, and no guy who drinks beer like you do and leaves no tips ought to have dough. So when Myrtle walks in with a platina fox jacket and says you bought it, he gets mighty suspicious. "It was a cinch then, Bud. All I had to do was tell the girl she was going to be named as an accessory after the fact, and she spilled her load." * * * * * Pin points of flame suddenly danced in Griffin's eyes. His hands, lying quiescent on his lap, curled into balls of bone and muscle. Griffin had many weaknesses; of them all, anger was his greatest. For in the heat of anger he would do anything, and not care about the consequences. It had proved his undoing many times. His last surge of anger had resulted in murder during a robbery. The victim had resisted Griffin and had been shot in cold blood. As always, that anger showed in visible signs: there came the pin points of flame to the eyes, the clenching of fists, and an odd curling of the mouth. But Jenkins, either because he did not know of these signs, or because he was so wrapped in his own glory, did not notice the other's shifting movement. When Griffin struck, it was with electric speed. Certainly, he had nothing to gain by his attack on Jenkins. For had he thought it out logically, he would have realized there was no way of escape. Even a fool would have realized that there was no way of getting out of a plane which was flying at ten thousand feet, and coming down alive, unless one had a chute. So it was sheer berserk anger which prompted the attack. Griffin's right elbow shot up and sideways, and landed with telling force against Jenkins' jaw. At almost the same instant, he slipped loose of his safety belt, whirled on his companion and struck him two savage blows with his fists. Those blows stunned the detective. And like a snake in movement, Griffin's hand reached for the pistol in Jenkins' holster and drew it. Dazed as Jenkins was, he tried to stop Griffin. The barrel of the gun slashed a furrow in his cheek for the try. The blow rocked the detective's head back, and allowed him to get out of his seat. In an instant he was in the aisle, leaping for the pilot's compartment. He had no plan; he wasn't even thinking. In the background of his mind he knew the panic he had created; he could see it reflected in the face of the woman in the front seat, in the wide, suddenly terror-stricken eyes of the man at her side. But what he was going to do when he reached the closed door that was his goal, he did not know.