The Lizard made no reply as he started to leave the taxi.

“Take them to his attorney,” said the girl, and she gave him the name and address.

The Lizard grunted and entered his own cab.  As he did so a man on a motorcycle drew up on the opposite side and peered through the window.  The driver had started his motor as the newcomer approached.  From her cab the girl saw the Lizard and the man on the motorcycle look into each other’s face for a moment, then she heard the Lizard’s quick admonition to his driver, “Beat it, bo!”

A sharp “Halt!” came from the man on the motorcycle, but the taxicab leaped forward, and, accelerating rapidly, turned to the left into the road toward the city.  The girl had guessed at the first glance that the man on the motorcycle was a police officer.  As the Lizard’s taxi raced away the officer circled quickly and started in pursuit.  “No chance,” thought the girl.  “He’ll get caught sure.”  She could hear the staccato reports from the open exhaust of the motorcycle diminishing rapidly in the distance, indicating the speed of the pursued and the pursuer.

And then from the distance came a shot and then another and another.  She leaned forward and spoke to her own driver.  “Go on to Elmhurst,” she said, “and then come back to the city on the St. Charles Road.”

It was after two o’clock in the morning when the Lizard entered an apartment on Ashland Avenue which he had for several years used as a hiding-place when the police were hot upon his trail.  The people from whom he rented the room were eminently respectable Jews who thought their occasional roomer what he represented himself to be, a special agent for one of the federal departments, a vocation which naturally explained the Lizard’s long absences and unusual hours.

Once within his room the Lizard sank into a chair and wiped the perspiration from his forehead, although it was by no means a warm night.  He drew a folded paper from his inside pocket, which, when opened, revealed a small piece of wrapping paper within.  They were Murray’s letter to Bince and the enclosure.

“Believe me,” muttered the Lizard, “that was the toughest job I ever pulled off and all I gets is two pieces of paper, but I don’t know but what they’re worth it.”

He sat for a long time looking at the papers in his hand, but he did not see them.  He was thinking of other things:  of prison walls that he had eluded so far through years of crime; of O’Donnell, whom he knew to be working on the Compton case and whose boast it had been that sooner or later he would get the Lizard; of what might naturally be expected were the papers in his hands to fall into the possession of Torrance’s attorney.  It would mean that Murray would be immediately placed in jeopardy, and the Lizard knew Murray well enough to know that he would sacrifice his best friend to save himself, and the Lizard was by no means Murray’s best friend.