man. I’m not bucking for anything, understand, but if everybody feels-”
McQuade’s lips shaped a savage smile. He slipped away without waiting to hear more.
He had already spotted the telephone wire. He dropped to his hands and found the lead-in box, just above the masonry of the foundation. He pried the box open with a small screwdriver, working by feel. He struck a light, snapping the lighter shut again almost at once. He did something inside the box, closed it carefully and backed away, paying out a thin copper wire. At intervals, he pulled it taut and tacked it against the underside of a clapboard.
He swung back into the washroom, bringing the wire with him. He took out his hearing-aid battery case and opened it. Where the batteries should have been there was a neat arrangement of printed circuits and transistors. He loosened a terminal and tied in the wire. After checking the button in his ear, he closed a gap in one of the printed circuits with the point of his screwdriver. He turned on both faucets in the wash basin and sloshed the water around with one hand. In a low voice, speaking directly into the battery case, he gave a Manhattan number.
He waited impatiently. Then, in the same low urgent tone, he said, “Power? This is Michael Shayne. I’m in.”
CHAPTER 5
It had started two days earlier in Miami, when Michael Shayne, the big, hard-driving, redheaded private detective, received a phone call from his friend Will Gentry, Chief of Miami Police.
Gentry wanted to know if he was busy. Shayne looked across his cognac at his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, who was sitting on the sofa where he had left her. He said yes. Gentry said in that case he would put it another way. Could Shayne, as a small return for all the favors Gentry had done for him over the years, interrupt what he was doing and get his ass over to the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach on the double? Shayne sighed. He told Lucy he was sorry as hell, and put on his shoes.
He met his old friend in a room on the tenth floor of the hotel. A tired-looking man with a square, rugged face shook hands with him and looked at him searchingly.
Gentry said, “This is Inspector Power from New York, Mike. Sanford Power. I’ve known him since he was a pup. The way it is now with these goddam jets, we’re getting to be practically a suburb of New York. If Sandy and I didn’t work together, we’d hardly ever catch anybody.”
Gentry was red-faced and sad-eyed, a courageous, honest cop who was also one of the finest persons the redheaded detective knew. At the moment he was smiling too effusively, like a used-car salesman in bad need of the commission.
“He wants to borrow you for a week, Mike. Sit down and he’ll tell you about it.”
Shayne said dryly, “I don’t think I’m going to like this.” He waved away the chair he was offered, reversed a straight chair and swung a long leg over the seat. “But you put it so nicely, I’ll have to hear about it before I say no.”
Gentry’s too-anxious smile faded. “I was hoping you wouldn’t take your usual hard-nosed attitude, Mike. This could be one of the biggest things in years.”
“For me or for you or for New York?” Shayne inquired. “Go ahead, Inspector. But I have to warn you-there’s a sign on my office door that says, ‘On Vacation.’”
“This wouldn’t be much of a vacation,” Power admitted, rubbing his eyes. “And I hope you’ll call me Sandy instead of Inspector. I’m a long way out of my jurisdiction. Nobody knows that better than I do.”
“Then if this isn’t official,” Shayne said, “offer me a drink.”
“I’m sorry!” Power said. “This thing has been hammering at me. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I’m a beer man myself, but Will told me what you like.”
He opened a bottle of Hennessey’s. There was a brief interruption while the drinks were poured.
He resumed abruptly, “There may be a certain amount of money for you, Mike, somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand. There’s also a certain amount of danger. And there’s one other thing Will tells me not to stress, but from my point of view it looms pretty large. We have a chance here of crippling the international drug traffic, and it isn’t a chance that’s likely to come again.”
“Every time somebody seizes a few hundred pounds of heroin they say they’ve crippled the drug traffic,” Shayne said. “It still seems to go on.”
Power winced. “I’ve been guilty of that kind of statement once or twice myself. But this is different. It isn’t a few crummy pushers or wholesalers. It’s the men who put up the money, and by money I don’t mean a few thousand dollars. I mean approximately two and a half million.”
Shayne looked up sharply. “I’ve never heard of professionals handling a shipment that large.”
“The circumstances are unusual,” Power said in the same dry tone Shayne had used. “Do you want to say no at this point, or listen to some more?”
Shayne drank some cognac and chased it with a sip of chilled water. “You mentioned a certain amount of danger and a fairly sizable fee. I take it the two things go together?”
“That’s correct. The two and a half million is a retail valuation. A cash equivalent on the primary level would be in the neighborhood of half a million. A ten percent payout would be a justifiable figure for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of et cetera. As far as danger goes, with the right kind of preparation I think it can be minimized. This is very much an undercover assignment. I can’t risk using anybody from New York, even if I had anybody who could do it, and quite frankly, I haven’t. I drink a brew or two with Will whenever I’m in town, and I’ve heard about a few of your exploits, Mike. I think you can handle this job. I’ll go further-I think you may be the one man in the country who can handle it.”
“Good God, Will,” Shayne burst out angrily. “I can see you at these beer-drinking sessions. A cop blows in from the big city, and you think you have to impress him with all the crime we have down here.”
“I didn’t exaggerate,” Gentry said. “And you’re not just a local man anymore, Mike, I might point out. You’ve been known to make the New York papers.”
“And since when did you start believing what you read in the papers?” Shayne made a disgusted face. “And where would this undercover work take place, in southern Florida, where I know my way around, or in New York, where I have to ask directions to find the Latin Quarter?”
“In New York,” Power said. “That’s not necessarily a disadvantage. You’re listening, and that’s a start. I’ve been in police work all my life, Mike, a small matter of forty-three years. This is easily the biggest thing I’ve ever come within shouting distance of. Bear that in mind. And I want you to face the fact that if you get out of this room without saying yes, you’ll have to come up with some damned good reasons. Being on vacation is not a good reason.”
“That was mainly my secretary’s idea,” the detective said impatiently. “I suggest we get on with it.”
“Right,” Power said briskly. “Bear with me, Will. There’s going to be some repetition. This is the basic situation.”
He tasted his beer. “It starts in a poppy field in Burma or eastern Turkey, and ends up on West One Hundredth Street in Manhattan. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred we can’t break into the chain any higher than the next to the last link. If not the user, the pusher, the man who supplies him, who’s usually also a user himself. Sometimes the customs people pick up a batch as it comes in, but one of the facts we have to deal with is that most of that information comes anonymously from inside, as a cheap way of getting rid of somebody who’s stepped out of line. Nobody has to tell me none of this does much permanent good. I’m not fooling myself. It’s a war, Mike, and in a war you do what you can. You don’t turn down a shot at an enemy tank because a couple hundred others are over the hill, and what’s one out of a couple of hundred? But I didn’t come down here to sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’”
He reached abstractedly for his beer, and shook it to start the bubbles. “There’s a law against using or peddling, and you do your best to enforce that law. You can’t make an arrest without evidence. You see somebody who’s well known to be a junkie. He’s obviously on the nod, with a fresh needle mark on his arm. That’s not enough. You have to catch him with the needle, with the actual drugs. Sometimes you get lucky, and you’re on the spot when he makes his connection. You put your evidence in a manila envelope, and when you come into court you damn well better bring that envelope or they throw you out on your ear. Well, this happens three or four thousand
