Stranger in Town (19 page)

“And I don’t know what happened in the office,” she went on with a shudder. “The first thing I knew two men came and grabbed me and hustled me out to Randolph’s car and hit me on the head and piled me in the back where he was already lying knocked out. They were Gene and Bill, I know now. I was dazed but not unconscious. I vaguely remember them driving away and stopping and putting us in the front seat and I kept on pretending to be unconscious but held onto the door handle. And they poured gasoline on the car and on Randolph, I guess, and steered it off the road. I fell out as it turned over, and everything went black. And the next thing I knew I was walking down the road and you stopped to pick me up,” she told Mr. Magner.

Shayne said, “That’s it, then, Harris was absolutely right about calling the State Police in to clean up the mess. There’s a station just outside of town.” He got up and lifted the telephone calmly and told the operator: “Get me the State Police barracks, please.” A voice spoke through the receiver into his ear at the precise moment that a key grated faintly in the lock of his door ten feet away. He whirled toward the door and spoke in. a low, terse voice into the phone:

“Hold the line open.” He rammed the instrument back into his hip pocket with the mouthpiece sticking up and clear, and moved in front of the telephone as the door opened and the big muzzle of a .45 preceded the bulk of Chief Ollie Hanger into the room.

Sliding through the opening behind him with sinuous grace was Gene with a faintly pleased smile on his ascetic face and a short-barrelled .38 dangling negligently from his fingers.

SHAYNE SAID LOUDLY, “What the hell you mean walking in with a gun like that? You can’t use it here. This is the Manor Hotel, for God’s sake. In the center of Brockton. Room four-ten of the
Manor Hotel,”
he repeated with emphasis. “You’re finished, Chief Hanger. You and your chief abortionist from the Sanitarium.”

“Yeh?” Hanger stepped aside stolidly with the muzzle of his gun steady on Shayne’s mid-section. “Don’t forget I’m still the law in Brockton, and if I shoot a man resisting arrest it’s nobody’s business. My God, you guessed right, Gene. The girl is here. But what in hell are you doing with these two, Magner? Didn’t know you were in on this. But maybe you’ll come in handy at that, and pick up a little business before the evening’s over.” He chuckled evilly and his big paunch jiggled up and down where it overflowed his belt.

Michael Shayne said, “Mr. Magner has been giving us some interesting information about the way your friend murdered Jeanette Henderson a month ago. Eugene Forbes, I think your name is,” he went on with a slight nod in the direction of the tall man who stood, blank-faced, against the door with the gun still dangling from his fingers. “Of course,” Shayne continued conversationally, “You’re already stuck with the murder of that waitress this afternoon on Main Street, and I watched you run down Mule last night and kill him. So even without Mr. Magner’s cooperation, I had plenty on you.”

“So you finally had to stick your big mouth into it?” said Chief Hanger venomously to the undertaker. “All right, by God. We’ll see just what…”

“Can it, Ollie.” Gene spoke in a voice that sounded unutterably weary. “We’ve got the three of them here where we want them, and all the talking in the world won’t change any of that. You better do the job with
your
gun so it’ll be official.” He inclined his head slightly toward Shayne as he spoke.

“Sure,” snapped Shayne. “You go ahead and blast me, Chief. You don’t see Gene sticking his neck into a noose. You do the job and if there’s any kickback, you’ll get it.”

“What about these others?” asked Ollie helplessly, looking from the girl’s erect figure to Magner who was shrunk back in his chair making himself as inconspicuous as possible. “I don’t mind a-tall gunning this goddamn snoopy shamus right here,” the chief went on. “But how in hell can I explain the others?”

“I’ll take them out with me,” Gene suggested easily. “Another accident won’t be too many, and they got to be shut up. On your feet both of you.” He did not raise his voice as he issued the order. He hardly looked at either of them.

“Don’t be fools,” Shayne said over his shoulder harshly to them. “Stay where you are. They can’t afford to start any shooting up here in a hotel room until you two are safely out of the way where he can finish you off at his leisure. No matter how much either of them wave a gun, don’t move out of your chairs.” He turned back to Ollie and asked, “About how far is it out to State Police barracks?”

“About six miles, but it might as well be six hundred far as you’re concerned.”

“Why, no,” said Shayne easily. “Six miles is just about a nice distance. In about one minute, give or take thirty seconds, they should be knocking on that door behind Gene. I told you you were through, Ollie. But if you’re smart and don’t pull that trigger before they get here, you should be able to beat a murder rap. Gene’s done all the actual killing thus far, the way I see it. Better let it stay that way.”

“Don’t let him kid you, Ollie.” Gene came away from the door slowly and began raising his gun. “We checked at the desk and he hadn’t made any calls. He’s bluffing. He didn’t have time to call ’em before we got up here.”

“How do you like this for a bluff?” Shayne didn’t look at Gene. He turned very slowly and stepped away from in front of the telephone so his back was to Chief Hanger. “That thing sticking up out of my hip pocket is the mouthpiece of a telephone… if you haven’t guessed. And it’s connected right now on a direct line to the State Police. They’ve been listening to every word spoken in this room since you two moved in, and if they’re the boys I think they are you’ve got twenty seconds left to figure what you’re going to tell them when they bust in.”

Shayne heard a sibilant gasp from Ollie behind him as the chief saw the telephone in his pocket. Gene was four feet on Shayne’s right with his gun coming up fast and his face twisted in vengeful rage.

As he spoke his last word of warning to the chief, Shayne dropped his body in a driving tackle toward Gene’s legs that put him beneath the bullet that slammed toward him the instant he moved.

Shayne laughed exultantly as his shoulder hit the gunman’s knees and drove him backward. The gun exploded again before he got a grip on Gene’s wrist and twisted it.

The .38 slid across the floor and Shayne drove his right fist into Gene’s face as a thunderous knocking sounded on the door.

Shayne got to his feet, dragging Gene up with him. He shot a look at the bewildered and frightened fat face of Chief Ollie Hanger who was hesitating while he tried to figure out the best move he could make under the circumstances, and who hesitantly started toward the door when a gruff voice barked outside, “Open up in there. State Police.”

“Not yet,” Shayne snarled at him, lunging forward to drive the chief away from the door. His left hand gripped Gene’s shoulder and held him erect like a rag doll while his right fist slammed as monotonously as a piston into the bloody and smashed features that were no longer distinguishably human.

He didn’t stop until two brawny state troopers smashed the door down and hurtled into the room. Then he dropped the blood-smeared mess of flesh on the floor at their feet and told them quietly, “I’ll go along with you peacefully, boys, and it’ll be a pleasure to plead guilty to assault and battery in any damned degree you want.”

IT WAS NEARING MIDNIGHT when Shayne finally approached Miami on the wide and well-lighted boulevard leading into the city from the north.

There was still brisk traffic in both directions at this hour, and the lights of downtown Miami glowed a welcome for him ahead.

“My
town,” he found himself thinking with a queer sort of warmth he had never felt before. A nice town to come back to, by God. Particularly after Brockton. His neck still pained him when he forgot and turned his head too far or too abruptly, and the bullet creases in shoulder and thigh burned a little, but he felt good nevertheless.

He was just about twenty-four hours late, he reminded himself. Twenty-four hours since Lucy Hamilton had sat in her apartment with a bottle of cognac on the center table waiting for his return.

As he neared the street that turned off Biscayne Boulevard toward her apartment, he wondered if she would be sitting up waiting for him again tonight.

He hadn’t called to say he was on his way—hadn’t spoken with her since the morning telephone call when she’d told him about the man waiting in his office.

After the wind-up in the hotel room in Brockton, he felt he couldn’t get out of the town fast enough. There had been a lot of questions and a long statement to be given to the State Police, and then all he’d thought of was getting away.

He didn’t consciously plan to turn onto Lucy’s street as he approached it, but his thoughts of her induced an instinctive reflex action that swung the wheel hard to the left at the intersection when he reached it.

He slowed at the second block on the side street, and a wide, pleased grin lighted his rugged face when he saw light shining from the front windows of her second-floor apartment.

He pulled into the curb directly opposite, cut the motor and got out stiffly. Inside a small, neat foyer, he put a blunt forefinger on her button and pressed it, then turned and waited with his hand on the knob of the inner door for her to release the catch.

There was a buzz and the knob turned. He stepped inside and slowly began climbing the stairs, trying not to limp but wincing each time he pulled his wounded leg up another step.

He heard the sound of a door opening above, and quick, light footsteps approaching the landing. He paused with his left hand holding the railing and looked up to see Lucy poised on the top step above him. She wore a pleated hostess gown of stiff silk that swirled about her ankles and clearly outlined her slender figure in the light from beyond.

He grinned and lifted his right hand in a casual greeting and said, “Hi,” and began climbing toward her, taking great care now that he shouldn’t limp.

She drew back silently and waited for him, her brown eyes enormous and questioning in the strained tenseness of her face, brown hair drawn back smoothly and knotted at the back as she wore it in bed.

Michael Shayne’s face was even with hers when he stood on next-to-the-top step. He stopped there and his grin widened, and then it went away as he saw her hands were clenched tightly into fists at her sides, and that a tear was rolling down each unrouged cheek.

He said gruffly, “Don’t look like that, angel. I’m all in one piece. Kiss me.”

He moved up the last step and she flung herself into his arms, sobbing.

He held her tightly with his good arm and tipped her face up and carefully kissed the tears from her cheeks and the hollows of her eyes and said wonderingly, “Damned if I don’t believe you’ve been worried.”

She drew back from him and swallowed hard and said wretchedly, “I called that hotel in Brockton an hour ago. They refused to tell me
anything.
Except there’d been shooting in your room and you’d been taken off by the State Police and you were badly wounded and… and I didn’t know
what
had happened.”

His grin came back as he turned her toward the rectangle of light that was the open door leading into her apartment.

“Well, you know I told you there was this girl in the bar last night…”

“I know you did and I’ve been hating her ever since. Did
she
do that to your face?”

“Not with her own hands, but…”

Shayne stopped on the threshold and looked approvingly at the neat room with a low coffee table drawn up in front of the long sofa with a bottle of cognac, an ice-bucket, a pitcher of water and two glasses standing on it.

His arm tightened about Lucy’s slim waist and he turned her slowly to face him.

“She wanted me to stay over another night, angel, but I told her you’d be waiting here with a bottle of cognac in the window to light my way for me.”

He kissed her lips gently and they went toward the sofa together.