Literary Interlude: Hardboiled Edition

      A door squeaked behind me. I whirled, but I needn’t have bothered. A hard voice, about as English as Amos and Andy, said: “Put ’em up, bud.”
     The butler, the very English butler, stood there in the doorway, a gun in his hand, tight-lipped. The girl turned her wrist and shot him just kind of casually, in the shoulder or something. He squealed like a stuck pig.
“Go away, you’re intruding.”, she said coldly.
He ran. We heard his steps running.
“He’s going to fall”, she said.
    I was wearing my Luger in my right hand now, a little late in the season as usual. I came around with it. Old man Jeeter was holding on to the table, his face gray as a paving block. His knees were giving. George stood cynically, holding a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist, watching him.
“Let him fall,” I said. “Down is where he belongs.”

• Raymond Chandler, “Trouble is my Business” (1939)