Armed... Dangerous... Read online

  Rourke called to Shayne as he ran to cut her off. She saw him coming. Her face glowed with excitement, which made her look like a girl in her teens.

  “Darling! Get in!”

  “You get out, baby,” Shayne said as he reached the door. “We’re starting over, with new rules.”

  Her eyes widened. She looked up toward the Sanitation truck and gave him a hard push. He went back into the path of a charging taxi. The driver hit his brakes and veered abruptly. A front fender bumped Shayne and knocked him to one knee. In the high squealing of brakes he didn’t hear the shot. There was a look of amazement on Michele’s face. She slumped across the wheel.

  Szigetti, in the high cab, had had another difficult downward shot. This time, seeing Shayne holding the door of Michele’s car, he had been shooting to kill. He had to lean far out, twisting. Michele had pushed Shayne at the exact instant Szigetti squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught her below the left breast.

  Shayne came to his feet, his face a savage mask. Two narcotics agents had closed in on the car, but they stood out of his way as he swung over into the front seat without opening the door. He worked his right arm underneath Michele and laid her back gently against his injured shoulder. Her face and lips had lost their color.

  “Darling, we almost—” she whispered.

  Then Tim Rourke was beside the car. “Was she hit, Mike?” he demanded.

  Her eyes left Shayne and swam toward Rourke. What she saw was the diamond dealer, Jake Melnick, who had apparently been robbed and slugged by Shayne in her presence three nights before. Something jumped in her face, as though she had been lightly flicked. Her eyes came back to Shayne, who returned her look unflinchingly.

  “That’s right,” he said. “The whole time.”

  There was disbelief in her eyes. Then, without words, moving only the corner of her mouth and a fraction of one eyebrow, she contrived to send him a complicated message. It told him that life sometimes played peculiar tricks, but she regretted nothing.

  She moved her head so her cheek was against the back of his hand, and died before he could say anything more.

  CHAPTER 18

  The chief narcotics man, a rangy, outspoken individual named McIntosh, had begun to lose his temper with Shayne.

  They were on the third floor of the huge incinerator at the foot of West Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It was hot in the immense room. Two yellow Sanitation trucks were drawn up at the edge of a rectangular opening in the floor. One of the trucks had a vertical dent in its left front fender. Both front fenders and the grill of the other had been bashed in. The trucks were being unloaded through the side hatches. As each carton was brought out by Sanitation Department workmen, the nine-by-twelve envelopes it contained were shaken onto a folding table. A small army of uniformed cops from the Police Department’s Property Division checked each envelope against duplicate lists before consigning it to the hole in the floor.

  Shayne watched the envelopes flutter down a steep chute into the main incinerator, which occupied the whole of the first two floors. A fire burned there twenty-three hours a day. Each morning the grates were pulled and anything left unconsumed was loaded into scows for eventual dumping far at sea.

  The marks on Shayne’s face were deeply etched. At this point he trusted nobody. The final burning of the narcotics was something he had had to witness with his own eyes. He was holding a fresh bottle of brandy in a paper bag. He drank occasionally, without offering it to any of the men around him.

  “If you want to tell us about it here instead of in an air-conditioned bar, it’s OK with me,” McIntosh said, mopping his face. “You’re calling the shots. But let’s get on with it, Shayne. We’ve got some tidying up to do.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” Shayne said evenly.

  Tim Rourke put in, “I know how you feel, Mike. But it’s all new to these guys. Power kept the whole thing under his hat. They can’t talk to me because I’m an innocent bystander. They can’t talk to Power or Michele or Herman Kraus—they’re all dead. Mr. A., if there actually is anybody called that, is out of the country.”

  “Did you say Mr. A.?” McIntosh said quickly. “Now listen, Shayne. Rourke’s a reporter. This is going to be off the record.”

  Shayne turned on him. “Tim knows what to print and what not to print. He’s no maiden.”

  “I can’t print a story I don’t understand,” Rourke said. “Climb down, will you? That’s not tap water you’re drinking. You’re one of the greatest drinkers I ever saw, but you can’t put away a fifth of cognac in two hours without losing some of your edge. I want to phone this in before the wire services get it.”

  “Let me put it another way,” McIntosh said. “We’ve seized a large sum in currency. I understand you had an agreement with Power which might seem to give you a claim on a certain percentage of that money. Power’s no longer around. We’re not obliged to honor the agreement, and we won’t honor it unless you start cooperating. I have a well-deserved reputation for being very nasty when necessary.”

  Shayne told him what he could do with the percentage and his reputation.

  Rourke exclaimed, “OK! She was a beautiful doll, and it’s a shame she was hit! Do you think she’d rather go to jail for fifteen years? She was a hustler, Mike. She had no more moral sense than a flea. Be reasonable.”

  His friend looked around at him and he said hurriedly, “No, I’m wrong. She was really a victim of circumstances. But I’ve got to write this the way I see it. If you don’t want her to sound like a hustler, you’d better do some talking. Who started it? Did she or did Power?”

  Shayne was beginning to feel himself unclench as the cognac took hold. Slowly and deliberately he took another long pull. Then, looking down the chute, feeling the heat on his face, he began to talk.

  “Kraus started it. But he didn’t know what he was starting. He wanted a certain girl, and he knew she wouldn’t go out with him unless he could take her places she didn’t otherwise go. He began selling drugs from the police stocks. It was a reasonably foolproof swindle. If an envelope says heroin, nobody’s going to take it to the police lab to find out if it’s really heroin. Kraus himself was the one who had to certify the envelopes before they were burned. Then Power found out about it, probably from stoolies. Kraus was an easy man to break, and Power got him to sign an undated confession. Then he broached the big idea. Why not turn this marginal operation into something that would really bring them both some money? Instead of faking just a few envelopes, why not fake them all? Kraus had to agree. He began working overtime. He began drinking and worrying. Meanwhile Power was looking for a buyer. Only somebody important could handle a deal this size. He put out feelers, and the feelers got through. But communication was all one way. The buyer contacted him, and naturally he was careful, because Power was an honest cop.”

  “Honest?” Rourke said.

  “Will Gentry thought so. But Power was getting close to retirement, and he probably figured out long ago that one big coup would make many years of calculated honesty worthwhile. They set up a deal. I think the half-million figure was probably fairly constant all the way through. How much were they paying on this last switch, McIntosh? How much was in Michele’s suitcase?”

  “Half a million,” the narcotics man said.

  “Yeah. And Power didn’t have much in the way of expenses. Then all at once Kraus conked out on him. Maybe cold feet, maybe he couldn’t stand the idea of all that junk going back into circulation.”

  Shayne was beginning to be caught up in the explanation. He didn’t pretend to understand Power, but he knew what the man had done, and that was enough.

  “When I saw Power first, he looked like somebody who hadn’t been getting enough sleep. All that work and planning, all those risky communications through unreliable channels, his last chance at important money—all down the drain because of one unimportant clerk. Kraus was essential. He was the man who had to make the certification. The next time the banker called, Pow
er had to tell him the deal was off. The banker didn’t care too much. He hadn’t spent any of his own money yet. But it made a good story, and somehow it got through to Michele. And she had an idea. Did they need Kraus? Why not organize an old-fashioned stickup? It shouldn’t be hard, with Power giving them the route and the schedule, and putting only two cops on the truck. But now they had to invest some capital and run a few minimum risks, and naturally they wouldn’t pay Power the full five hundred G’s. He’d be lucky to collect a fingerman’s fee. He didn’t like that. He was too adjusted to the idea of half a million. Not to mention the fact that it would be out in the open, and the publicity would be bad for his reputation. That’s where I came in. With his own man in the gang, a man who would do what he told him, it wouldn’t be hard to get possession of the truck after it was stolen, and again he’d have something to sell.”

  “How did he put it to you, Shayne?” McIntosh said.

  “He appealed to my patriotism,” Shayne said wryly. “He also showed me Michele’s picture and offered me a fifty-thousand-buck fee. It was no problem to get in. Rourke can fill you in on all that—he had a part in it. It wasn’t complicated when it was happening, but it gets complicated when you talk about it. The plan for the stickup was a damn good one. We followed it right up to the final step, and then instead of going downtown, I went uptown. I set the ransom at half a million. This was supposed to smoke out the banker, and I think it might have worked, too, if Power hadn’t rung in another variation I didn’t know about. I passed on a set of instructions about how I wanted them to hand over the money. By that time Power had the banker’s phone number—he got it from Michele’s phone. Power told him to pay no attention to my instructions, but to shoot me in the shoulder, being very careful not to kill me. I had to be able-bodied enough to set off a fire bomb and destroy the truck. Of course he’d already switched trucks. At the end of that little episode, the way it looked was that the drugs were burned and the case was closed. But Tim and I got to thinking.”

  “I got to thinking?” Rourke protested. “You got to thinking.”

  “Whoa,” McIntosh said. “You can’t expect me to believe that Power, all by himself—”

  “It was set up long in advance,” Shayne said. “This was the original switch, which he had had to drop when Kraus stopped cooperating. The envelopes were all prepared. He conned me into checking the cargo, so if there was any question, I could testify that the real truck had burned. I pulled out an envelope at random, and it really had to be at random. Whoever faked those envelopes had to be somebody with access to police files and materials, over a long period of time. It couldn’t be done in a couple of hours or even a couple of days. Kraus had already been killed. That left Power as the only possibility. Switching the trucks was simple. Those trucks all look absolutely alike except for the serial number, and I had no reason to notice that. He may even have changed the number, I don’t know. He had a key to the shop. I’d guess he slipped in the phony truck a couple of nights ago. There wouldn’t be a worksheet on it, and anyway the mechanics take those jobs in rotation and they’re way behind. Yesterday at four, when the shop closed, I was in a midtown motel waiting for a phone call. Power let himself in, switched trucks, put on a wheel and took off a wheel, switched spark plugs and put a dent in the fender. About a minute’s work in all. I didn’t get there till about twenty after.”

  McIntosh whistled softly. “Now tell me about the switch last night.”

  “It’s just the old army game, McIntosh,” Shayne said, “except that instead of using three walnut shells and a dried pea, we used five-ton Sanitation trucks. We took the real truck off the floor and put it in line. We took a fake truck out of line and put it on the floor.”

  Rourke said, “Do you mind if I say ‘Yes but’ at this point? I can see why Power switched trucks, so we’d think the real truck was burned. But why did we switch trucks? Why didn’t we just let him pick up the real truck and drive it to Grand Central? We still would have had him just as cold.”

  “Put your mind on it,” Shayne told him.

  “I already have, and it baffles me. I think we went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  “Do you?” Shayne said bleakly. “We could have had him cold for selling heroin. We couldn’t have touched him on Kraus’s murder. He had to kill Kraus. Even if everything went off the way Power planned, there would have to be an investigation, and Kraus would be sure to talk. An experienced cop like Power could make a point-blank shooting look like a suicide. And who else had that confession to leave as a suicide note? Of course it had to be Power, but could we nail him for it? Not a prayer.”

  Some of the puzzlement had cleared out of Rourke’s face. “Mike, you’re a marvel. They looked in the hatch, and thought he was trying to sell them a load of nothing. And he’d been through too much for that money, so he picked it up and ran. Did you get the guy who shot him?” he asked McIntosh.

  “We got him,” the narcotics agent said.

  “And this’ll give you a lever,” Shayne said. “People always talk more freely when they’re trying to argue their way out of a murder rap.”

  “Thanks,” McIntosh said, studying Shayne.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Rourke put in, “And what about this Mr. Adam or Adamowski or whatever his name is? Are you sure there is such a person?”

  McIntosh’s manner became more cautious. “We’re not entirely sure. We’ve heard rumors.”

  “What about that Jetstar?” the reporter persisted. “I don’t suppose he was on it?”

  “Officially,” McIntosh said, “I don’t know what Jetstar you’re talking about. Unofficially, because you and Shayne have done us a certain service, I might as well tell you that the Jetstar which cleared from LaGuardia yesterday afternoon made an emergency landing at Gibraltar before continuing to Lisbon. Needless to say, this is being followed up with the Gibraltar police, and something may come of it. Meanwhile, as long as he’s still at large, I probably ought to warn you, Shayne, that you’ve made a dangerous enemy.”

  “So has he,” Shayne said softly, and dropped the empty bottle into the chute that carried it down to the incinerator. “Tim, let’s get back to Miami.”