We start off our session with Tom “Fat Tom” Gilhooey, Helena “Hello Nurse!” Proschenko and John Redman aka Billy Tiger. Along with their trusty allies, Frank and Craig. Their receptionist and mechanic are both off with pay during the current crisis.
They’ve gone home after retreating from the sanitarium where they uncovered such horrific deeds [and I completely forgot to have them roll for a Guts check]. Tom after taking care of his breakfast order has sent out feelers to try and track down the license plates of the panel truck they saw fleeing the sanitarium and those of the car they acquired.
Tom had Frank swap the plates between his sedan and the stolen one and then discard his sedan (bullet riddled) on the edge of town.
Tom gets a phone call from a Contact on the police force that his name is being thrown around and there are a couple of G-Men sniffing around. He thanks the guy but before he can get a name the guy hangs up although the voice is familiar.
The paper has a sensationalist headline, “Assistant Medical Examiner found Brutally Slain!” and the story offers a lot of adjectives but not a lot information and the group note it in passing.
After hearing back that the panel truck apparently belongs to a truck rental place John heads off that way to see what he can find out. After a slow bus trip across town he arrives at a large lot occupied with a few trucks all appearing similar to the one they saw at the sanitarium. Although it’s evening the lights are on and he sees shadows through the closed blinds, the shadows make him think that there are at least a few people inside searching for something. He also by some mystic indian (feather not dot) senses picks up a extremely well hidden shadow in an alleyway that’s watching the rental place.
He mosies on around the block trying to come up behind the shadow only to step on a tiny fragment of glass and then has to smoothly slip into a shadow of his own as the figure at the mouth of the alleyway whirls around and searches the darkness behind him. As he’s pressed up against the brick the dark figure is distracted by men coming out of the truck rental building and John sees the flickering yellow of fire leaping swiftly behind them. The men slip into a waiting car as did the figure that John was trying to sneak up on. The dark figure is cloaked in black from a high collar trenchcoat to pants to gloves and John isn’t able to get a good look at him before they drive off although he grabs the license plate.
He’s also struck with a sense of Deja Vu and believes after some thought that the man (or woman) at the mouth of the alley way is the same one he saw, and shot, at the OTooles hideout when they rescued the girls, the same one who’s knife he now owns.
They meet back up and then head home to meet again at the office the next day. This days papers have pictures of the M.E.’s corpse along with detailed descriptions that it appeared to have been slain by a dog or dogs based on the bites and claw marks. The three investigators immediately make a link between the savage dogs that they ran into at the sanitarium.
Two G-Men show up and question Tom about the sanitarium and end up taking him downtown where he’s questioned for several hours. Tom knows their tricks though and gives up nothing. The lead Special Agent Carson finds something familiar about John Redman and questions him.
Helena heads off to research books at the library on the occult and uncovers that the good M.E. had been doing the same thing and had most of the restricted books on it checked out.
When they hear about this Tom sends John and Helena off to the M.E.’s house, uncovering that he lives in an apartment in a upper middle class area of town. John easily gets into the building and then into the doctor’s room where they don’t find much other than the books on the occult although Helena notices a penciled note used as a bookmark in one with the words “Translation? Professor Krager Univ Chi”.
They link the name with the one they got from the guard and doctor at the sanitarium.
At Tom’s request she researches the name and finds that a Professor Krager came to the Univeristy of Chicago about a year ago from Germany to head the History and LInguistics departments.
Tom gets a visit from Weasel O’Brian, Mick O’Toole’s current right hand man. Mick wants to hire Tom to protect him and take care of the problem he has with his ‘buyer’ who’s apparently trying to clean up loose ends a this point and kill O’Toole. Tom laughs in Weasel’s face and sends him on his way telling him to tell Mick to come see him when he wants to talk.
At the University she finds where Krager is teaching and finds a middle aged woman at the head of the class leading to some puzzlement as the Krager they’d had described to them by the mad doctor in the sanitarium was a man and the newspaper notices also described him as a man.
They meet again to share information and this time John goes back with Helena to cover her back as she digs out more information. She finds out that no one likes the professor, that he’s failing a high percentage of his classes and the ones that get passing grades are typically all blonde.
Tom spotting the local diner heads that way and finds what he expects a campus cop having some pie. Tom buys them both some pie and chats him up, telling him about detective work and gets some information about Professor Krager as well as a potential employee.
Having already gotten the Professor’s address they head to his house finding it in a typical faculty neighborhood which is mostly deserted at this time of day. John is, once again, through some lucky moves, able to pick the highly sophisticated european lock on the door and they search the house. John fails to notice movement in the shadows of a dark room and as he turns to leave he’s slammed to a knee as the weight of an attack dog lands on his back and savage jaws clap down on his neck trying to sever his spine. Already having both his 45′s out he points them both over a shoulder and unloads on the beast on him, knocking it free.
The dog gather’s itself up for another go at John as he continues firing it. Tom and Helena come running as they hear the noise and the dog is put down for the count. John’s wounds turn out to be more bloody than critical and they vacate the house after spending a few more precious minutes searching and finding nothing. So much nothing that they believe the house to be window dressing rather than someplace that someone lived.
They left the neighborhood ahead of the cops showing up and Helena used her ever present medical kit to patch John up, putting a couple of sutures into the bite marks on his neck.
Frank and Helena go to the corner diner for some dinner and John is also out of the office [For some reason I can't remember where John was at this time] when Mick O’Toole shows up. Frank spots him from their booth at the diner and after seeing Mick and the Weasel head up leaving a few thugs down with their cars he and Helena head up as well using the parking garage to avoid the front door.
Upstairs Mick finds Tom, Frank and Craig discussing their next moves and after shushing the sidekicks out into the main reception room, Tom and Mick have a discussion that ends up with Tom agreeing to help him for a $500 up front retainer. He also finds out that Mick claims to have been sending whores to the ‘buyer’ for entertainment purposes on long term contract and that he got himself in trouble for sending bottle blondes instead of real ones and one thing lead to another and here he was.
John is returning down on the streets below when he sees a panel truck screech to a halt in front of their building. Two guys dressed in black pants and turtlenecks leap out and gun down the O’Toole boys. The back of the truck opens up and several men come piling out although a little clumsily and all of them rush inside the building.
John dithers for a minute, realizing there’s still someone in the truck cab keeping it running and then says to hell with it and charges into the building. He skids to a halt as a man armed with one of those strange looking machine guns levels it at him and at the same time behind him he can hear the truck door creak open.
Bullets and stone fragments cut him up a bit and he slides to the side trying to get some cover using the wall that leads toward the hall. The man rushing up from the truck runs right past him down the hall. Somehow through the miracles of luck, even as the wall is chewed up all around him John emerges without dying and kills the two bad guys. [Bad rolling on the bad guys part along with the playing of an Action Card that required the bad guy to soliloquy and cost himself a -2 multi-action penalty helped keep John alive when by all rights he should have died.]
Rather than risk the elevator he scooped up the machine gun and hit the stairs.
Upstairs the many thugs bust down the door and charge into the room, slamming their fists into the nearest targets. They seem to ignore the pain as bullets punch holes through them but with Officer Howard, Craig, Frank, Tom, Helena, Mick and The Weasel all blazing away the bad guys were put down. As the second machine gunner stepped through the door and sprayed it down, John also came gasping out into the hallway and slipped up behind the man and blew him away.
The offices are ruined, blood and gore everywhere, bullet holes lining the walls, the group waits for the cops to arrive which aren’t long in coming. In the aftermath it turns out that Howard was badly hurt but is expected to make it, John’s wounds once again weren’t as bad as they seemed, Craig’s though were every bit as bad as they appeared, one blow of the thugs had snapped his neck like a twig.
The G-Men showed up and took statements, again Agent Carson wondering where he’d seen Redman before. They also arrested Mick and Weasel and hauled them off.
Tom arranged for a cleaning crew and sent the rest out to find flophouses to stay out for their own protection.
The next day he paid Craig’s widow a visit, telling her of her loss and that he would continue to send Craig’s pay over until she re-married. Tom has a white knight complex.
We end our day there, everyone bruised or battered, John with more sutures and bullet wounds.
