At the Point of a .38 Read online

  He inspected the damage he had done to his car. It was less serious than he had expected—one fender, dents in the hood, a few scratches.

  Fitting himself behind the wheel, he reached across to the glove box for his cognac flask. He shook it, and was sorry to hear that it was nearly empty.

  After emptying it completely, he changed the setting of the seat-belt so it would accommodate his cast. The stick-shift, of course, was on the wrong side, and reaching it would be awkward. But he was in no hurry, and this wouldn’t be the first time he had driven with one hand.

  For the last several months, Shayne’s friend Timothy Rourke, the Miami News crime-and-corruption man, had been emceeing a late-night talk show on WKMW, an FM station trying to build an audience. Rourke had always considered sleeping a waste of time. Now, instead of talking with friends in bars between eleven and one, they talked in a studio. Rourke was a needling, argumentative host, and conversations he started usually continued long after the station went off the air. From time to time he interrupted himself to take a phone call. The station had recently doubled his miniscule salary, so it now covered the cost of the liquor and sandwiches consumed on the show.

  Rourke assembled his panels at the last possible minute, trying to tie them in to the day’s news events. Shayne had half promised to stop on his way home, after his arm was set, and give a first-person account of the violent occurrence at the airstrip. Throughout the evening, the station had been broadcasting ten-second teasers announcing that a major news story would be broken later on the Rourke show. For background, Rourke had brought in a radical professor from the University of Miami, who believed that heroin should be legalized, and Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, another old friend of Shayne’s, who of course believed the opposite. As he drove, Shayne turned on the dashboard radio, which was already set to Rourke’s station. Rourke was talking, in his hoarse, two-pack-a-day smoker’s voice.

  “—tonight. Shayne just called from the hospital, and he sounded O.K. One of the luckiest sons of bitches I ever ran into. He totalled their goddamn airplane, took away their guns, left them tied to a tree and drove himself twenty miles to the hospital with a broken arm. Typical night’s work. He’ll be here in five or ten minutes, and he may have a different version of what happened. With Shayne, you never know.”

  Shayne held the steering wheel with pressure from his knee, and reached across his body to make the shift. He was on Miami Avenue. There was little traffic, and probably the thing to do was to stay in third. Rourke’s quick summary had been reasonably correct, but the two men in the plane, though they had been carrying guns, had been too frightened to use them. They had climbed out in a daze and followed Shayne’s instructions without protest.

  Now Rourke was saying: “And Angie Robustelli said he’ll try and make it a little later. Robustelli—for those who are new in town, that’s Captain Robustelli, head of the Narcotics Division of the MPD, known to romantic reporters on the opposition paper as Mr. Enforcement. He’s been breaking his ass on this drug shtick for the last twenty years, and that’s the point I’ve been trying to make. How many good people has Angie put away? It must be thousands by now. How many stoolies on the confidential payroll? How much junk has he seized and burned? Feed your habit, Will,” he remarked in an aside to Gentry. “Get another beer. I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth, but I think I know what Angie’s going to say because we’ve discussed it often enough. I listen to him with disbelief and dismay. You have to admit, Will, that the way we make our user arrests really stinks. Get their confidence and set them up for the bust. It may not be entrapment legally, but that’s what it is, just the same. Stick the bastard in jail for a few years so we can forget about him. He’ll be back on the needle two hours after he hits the street. O.K.—if it worked, that would be one thing. But we all know it doesn’t work. Robustelli is the world’s toughest cop. A really hard man. Dedicated! Twenty years on the job, and what’s he accomplished, after all the violence and crookedness—”

  “And deaths,” the Miami professor put in.

  “Not to mention the cost in dollars. So there’s just as many addicts as there ever were. Just as much stuff in circulation. Will, I was mugged coming over tonight. I’m not complaining. I know you can’t put a cop on every street corner, that would run into money and you need it for drug buys. I’d say the guy was about two hours into withdrawal, very sick and jittery. He had a knife. I’ve taken knives away from junkies, but not for years. I don’t get enough exercise. I’m told I smoke too much and I drink these bad blends. He was polite with me. He wanted my wallet. I handed him my wallet. He wanted my watch, but they stole that two weeks ago. I carry exactly seventeen bucks. Naturally they’d be glad to lift more, and they might even suspect that I’m carrying a few tens in my shoe. But they don’t press me because seventeen’s enough to get them through until noon tomorrow, and they hurry off to make their connection. We all have different ways to get by. What I do, I have a money-pouch inside my fly, and let’s hope all the H-heads are too zonked out to be listening to the radio this late at night. Seventeen bucks, I’m glad to contribute. I look on it as one citizen’s share of what it costs to maintain the criminal market in heroin. But look, Will. Will, are you listening? I want to see you flounder when you try to contradict me. Mike Shayne knocked off forty K’s tonight. Forty big K’s of unadulterated sh—No, that’s a word they don’t want me to use on the air. Worth millions and millions in street prices, after everybody and his brother, including the beat cop and the desk sergeant, take their cut.”

  Will Gentry growled, “Wait a minute, Tim.”

  Rourke laughed. “I stuck that in to see if you were still with me. All over the world, cops are crooked. But not in Miami. Our brave men in blue would never take a wrong dime, and they’ll all go to heaven when they die; thank you, Jesus. Forty kilograms of happy powder pulled out of the pipeline, thanks to Mike Shayne, which is wonderful news for the good guys. Hallelujah. That cat who mugged me tonight probably heard it on the six o’clock news, and he knows what it means. Higher prices for a few weeks, until the boys get the interruption taken care of. And who’s going to pay the higher prices? The dope-heads? Don’t be silly, they can’t afford the prices they have to pay now. We pay it, Will. They’ll just have to steal more. There’s going to be a sharp rise in street crime, starting tomorrow. Right? I’ll be carrying twenty-three bucks from now on, instead of seventeen.”

  Shayne shook his head ruefully. Rourke was right, of course. Not only that, Shayne had been waiting at the weed-grown airstrip as a result of a roundabout tip originating somewhere in the established heroin network. Someone had wanted these two men removed. They had cheated, perhaps, or had seemed unreliable. Perhaps they were beginners, trying to carve a piece of the market for themselves. It was a complex and dirty business, and Shayne usually let other people worry about it.

  He shifted down for a red light. Seeing no approaching traffic, he jumped the light and came back up into third. Rourke was taking a call from Washington. The caller wanted to speak to Mike Shayne. Rourke explained once more that Shayne had left the hospital and was on his way, and he advised the caller to try again in half an hour.

  Shayne, an eighth of a mile away, was heading northwest along the river. He turned onto 7th Avenue, then, after several more blocks, into a narrower side street. He pulled the wheel too far and had to correct.

  He parked a half block from the rundown one-story building which KMW shared with a travel agency and a record company. He cut the lights and ignition but left the radio on. Will Gentry, over frequent interruptions from Rourke’s other guest, was trying to respond. He defended his department’s use of informers; how the hell else could they enforce the law?

  When Rourke interrupted to take another call, giving Gentry a moment to catch his breath, Shayne turned off the radio and began a series of careful movements that would get him out of the car.

  As he opened the door, he heard a gunshot.

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bsp; Shayne had been shot at too often to take the sound lightly. He jerked back, knocking his injured arm painfully against the wheel. Probably the shot had nothing to do with him, but nevertheless his left hand went instinctively into the door-pocket and came back with a .357 Smith and Wesson. This was an accurate weapon up to a distance of twenty yards, but he had never had to fire it left-handed.

  He listened hard, one foot out of the car.

  There was a second shot, either muffled by something or farther away. Shayne was ready for this one, and recognized it as having been made by a small-caliber handgun, probably a .25. Shayne, or Shayne’s car, was not the target.

  The street and sidewalks were empty. There were parking spaces nearer the lighted WKMW sign; Shayne had chosen this one because he could get into it without backing. He stood up quietly, letting the door close enough to turn off the dome-light inside.

  He was still a long way from normal. The sidewalk seemed to be slipping beneath his feet. He waited, holding the radio antenna, until he came into balance. After releasing the antenna, he waited another few seconds before he moved. He was very much off duty, and unlike off-duty policemen, he felt no obligation to intervene in other people’s quarrels. This was the main reason he was still alive, and reasonably healthy. But it seemed likely that this quarrel was over. One explanation for the two closely-spaced shots, one sharp, the other muffled, was that when the second shot was fired, the gun muzzle had been pressed against a body.

  He moved past the station and on to the corner, keeping to the outside of the parked cars so he could go either way.

  He stopped in the shadow of a parked truck, as near as he could get to the corner without coming out into the light. Diagonally across the intersection was a five-unit shopping center, a chain supermarket flanked by smaller stores. The parking space seemed excessive, and was probably rarely filled. There were two cars in it now, and several abandoned carts. Shayne studied the scene through the truck’s side window and windshield. The two cars were well back, facing the street. The shadows changed, and the rear trunk of one car snapped up.

  It was a black sedan, with a license combination identifying it as part of a rental fleet. Someone was attempting to manhandle a bulky object into the luggage space. The angle was wrong, and the raised hatch concealed what was happening. The object was heavy as well as large; the person doing the lifting had difficulty getting it off the ground.

  Suddenly a woman’s bare arm flopped into view.

  Something fell and rolled. A figure emerged and moved to retrieve it. In the night illumination from the supermarket windows, Shayne saw a small man with a beard, wearing a light-colored fisherman’s cap with a long bill. He was in the open for only a second, stooping. There was something puzzlingly familiar about the slight figure, but he was gone before Shayne could pin it down.

  Headlights were approaching. Shayne moved to the other side of the truck and waited, crouching.

  In the parking lot, the man in the long-billed cap finished what he was doing. The lid slammed down.

  Shayne lifted the pistol into the light, and was disgusted to see that the barrel was trembling slightly. He had already decided that he was too far away for an accurate shot. There was no nearer cover. In the ungainly, disfiguring cast, he was more visible than usual; certainly he felt more visible. The small man in the parking lot, now burrowing in the front seat of the rented car, would know he had been seen stuffing a body into the trunk, and he would hardly stand still and put his hands out meekly for the handcuffs.

  The parking lot exit was within easy range, and ordinarily Shayne would have waited, and shot out a tire. He wished he had more confidence in his accuracy with his left hand. Making up his mind abruptly, he loped back to the Buick. His own luggage hatch was controlled by a release inside the fender. The lid rose soundlessly and a light came on.

  Everything was carefully arranged. Reaching for a grenade, Shayne saw a spray can of luminous paint, and hesitated briefly. In the end he took both, the paint can and the grenade, tucking them into the elbow-bend of his sling.

  He came back to the front seat, where he listened intently for an instant. Hearing nothing, he opened his phone and signalled the mobile operator.

  When she came on he told her in a low voice to call WKMW and insist on being put through to Will Gentry, a guest on the Rourke show.

  “Tell him there’s a black rented Ford in the shopping center on the next corner. If it’s still there, he’ll find a body in the trunk. And hurry.”

  “Right, Mike, underway.”

  Shayne heard a car door slam. He broke the connection and returned to the corner at a half-run, using his left hand to support the cast and the weight of the weapons. He was in time to see the fishing cap duck into the second of the two parked cars. This one, also a sedan but longer and heavier, was an off-white Olds, carrying scars from minor scrapes.

  Shayne was bothered by the feeling that if he could get close enough to see the face under the jaunty cap, he would recognize it. This part of town was nearly deserted at night, and there was a strong possibility that what had just happened here had some connection with Rourke’s radio show, being aired less than a block away, or with Shayne himself. He placed his automatic on the truck fender. Moving quickly now that he had made up his mind, he snapped his cigarette lighter and sprinkled the paint can with the highly inflammable fluid. Using his teeth and his good hand, he tore a handkerchief-sized piece out of the sling, drenched it in fluid and tied it around the can with a shoelace. He left six inches of lace dangling, and soaked that in fluid so it would work as a fuse.

  In the parking lot, the Oldsmobile’s engine took hold with a nice even roar. It moved out fast, grazing one of the derelict shopping carts and sending it careening away.

  Shayne was holding his paint-bomb well back, ready to throw. The Oldsmobile rocked toward the exit. He noted that the front suspension needed some work. As it began to come around, he touched the fuse to the lighter flame, and threw.

  Hissing, the can went up and out in a long arc. The timing was fair. But the Oldsmobile’s driver made his cut sooner than Shayne had expected, and his aim was a bit off. The can exploded ten feet from the ground, five feet to the car’s right and slightly behind it.

  Shayne fired twice. Probably neither bullet hit the rapidly moving car.

  He raced back to the Buick and jackknifed himself in. Hurrying, he knocked his elbow, and the pain was so bad for a moment that he wasn’t really conscious of starting the car. He left the seat-belt hanging and shot away from the curb, lights off, accelerating hard. He missed the moment for the first upward shift, and the Buick responded with a loss of momentum. Shayne bit down hard, to keep the pain at a manageable level. This would be a difficult pursuit.

  The Oldsmobile had a three block lead, and was moving dangerously fast. The explosion and the shots must have startled the driver, and he would be startled even more when he picked up Shayne’s lights in his mirror. Hampered by the necessary changes in his driving rhythm, Shayne lost another half block. On a fast skidding turn into Biscayne Park and through it into Biscayne Boulevard, he came close to losing control. After that he let up slightly. It was much too soon to spend any more time in the hospital.

  The driver of the Olds seemed to know his way around town nearly as well as Shayne himself did. He was heading for the Northwest-Northeast interchange, probably hoping that once he was out in the open he could run away, using nothing but speed. This was a mistake. Shayne’s Buick, in spite of its shabby exterior—it was never washed or polished, or withdrawn from service for cosmetic repairs—was powered by a Mercedes 4.5 liter V-8 engine with overhead cams, and cruised easily at 125. Shayne was at more of a disadvantage here, with the constant cornering and changes of speed.

  He noticed that he was low on gas.

  Coming up from a shift, he knocked the phone off its bracket, opening the connection. After shifting again he managed to retrieve the phone and hang it from the dashboard. His operat
or was calling him.

  “I’m kind of occupied here,” Shayne said, his teeth set. “A call to Watson Park heliport. Either Larry Dietrich or a guy named Norman. If there’s no answer try the Yacht Club bar. It’s urgent.”

  He went into the interchange ramp too fast. For a moment the heavy car seemed to want to leave the pavement in an attempt to fly. He came back with wheels locked and skidding, and nearly left the ramp on the opposite side. Less than a foot from the edge, the skid reversed. Shayne fought the wheel, trying to keep away from the brake. He missed a Yield sign by inches. Tonight it was the traffic already on the expressway that would have to yield for him. An oncoming car hurtled sideward. Shayne shifted up into fourth with the pedal on the floor. There were taillights ahead. The car they belonged to had a splotch of luminous paint on its roof. After making this identification, Shayne dropped back and held steady.

  “Mr. Shayne?” the operator said. “Ringing the heliport. I gave Chief Gentry your message. The switchboard picked it up and it went out on the air. Is that bad or not?”

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  He felt for a cigarette, but gave up after deciding that lighting it would be too much of a problem. He kept his interval, the needle holding steady at a tick higher than 90. They headed north toward Hollywood, through light traffic. The operator tried another number. This ring was answered almost immediately, and he heard her asking for Larry Dietrich. He punched the radio on. Rourke’s show still had an hour to run, but the call from Shayne had emptied the studio. A record was playing.

  Shayne’s gas indicator came to rest on the E. Now he had seventeen miles. After another five, he would close with the Olds and see if he could scare the driver into making a costly mistake.

  Rourke’s voice interrupted the music.

  “All right,” he said. “Out of breath. Give me a minute. This is Tim Rourke. It’s a first for this show, and my editor at the News won’t like it one bit. He wants me to save the hot stories for the paper. All right,” he repeated. “We thought that phone call might be a put-on, but definitely not. There is a black Ford. There is a body in the trunk. A woman, shot twice through the head. Description—somewhere in her mid-twenties, black hair, kind of low center of gravity, hair on her legs and under her arms, an arm vaccination. No purse, no identification. Cheap silver ring on her right hand. Wearing a white blouse, lavender skirt. Clothes look O.K., but not expensive. Good teeth. Now for anybody who’s just joined us, I’ll repeat what happened here. Mike Shayne, that’s the private detective, was just pulling up outside the station. He heard shots. We don’t know where he is now, but his mobile operator called in here for Will Gentry, who needless to say is Miami Chief of Police—”