Looking back on it carefully, he couldn’t doubt that. Those fleeting impressions he had received from her face as she approached him. She had known what she was doing.
But why? In the name of God, why?
Even granting that somehow, someone had divined that he would be seated in that particular bar at that time, and granting also that somehow the girl had recognized him-still, why?
He wasn’t working on any case. He had just completed a lazy week of vacationing with congenial friends in Mobile, and he didn’t know a reason in the world why anyone should want to waylay him. Sure, he’d made plenty of enemies among criminals during the past ten or fifteen years-but that was in the past. Anyone who had a killing grudge against him had had many, many much better opportunities to bump him off in Miami than this crazy set-up tonight.
Twice he stepped to the side of the dirt road and concealed himself in the bushes to allow a car to pass. One in each direction. One of them could have been Gene still looking for him-and he didn’t want to meet Gene again quite yet. Not until he had oriented himself a little and gotten a gun out of the glove compartment of his car. Also, he was nearing the outskirts of Brockton now, and he still had more thinking to do before deciding how to play the queer hand of cards that had been dealt to him.
There was one faint possibility, he decided. Could be something had come up in Miami after he left Mobile that morning. Some new client whom Lucy had told that he was driving back from Mobile and wouldn’t be back until late. Some case so important that someone had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to stop him in Brockton before he reached Miami to handle it.
A telephone call to Lucy would settle that, of course. Even if it did prove true-there was still the riddle of the Girl.
The dirt road turned into macadam, and then into a city street with small houses dotted along either side. Shayne turned off on the first side street he reached, which seemed better lighted and more thickly populated, and before he had walked two blocks was lucky enough to flag down a cab that had just dropped a fare at a house ahead.
Shayne climbed in the back and gratefully relaxed against the cushions as the cab pulled away. The driver turned his head to ask, “Where to, Mister?”
The question brought Shayne up with a jerk. Where to, indeed! How could he describe the bar-room where he had parked his car? He hadn’t noticed the name of the place, nor even the street it was on.
He hesitated a moment, and then explained, “You’ll have to try and help me find it, I guess. I drove in this afternoon from Tallahassee… on the main highway.”
The driver said, “Yeh?”
“I don’t know the town at all,” Shayne told him. “I hit pretty heavy traffic and one or two stop-lights. I was looking for a bar to stop for a drink, and came to one on the right-hand side where I parked and went in. My car is still there… I hope.”
The driver chuckled and said, “With a parking ticket if it’s been standing more’n an hour.” But he didn’t ask any questions except, “You want I should hit the highway about the center of town and take it slow till you see the place? Lotsa bars along there. Think you’ll know the one?”
“I’ll know my car at least. A black Hudson sedan. Miami license plates.”
He settled back and made his aching head as comfortable as possible until they reached the center of town and the cab swung into the highway leading through from Tallahassee.
“I remember passing here,” Shayne told him. “Eight or ten blocks ahead, I guess.”
The taxi driver spotted the sedan with Miami license plates first. “That it, Mister?”
Shayne peered out as he slowed and saw his familiar tag on the rear. “That’s it.”
The driver chuckled as he pulled in to the curb in front. “Got you a ticket under the windshield wiper awright. If there ain’t no cops hangin’ around, whyn’t you pull on out to Miami and forget it?”
Shayne said, “Maybe I will.” He got out stiffly and gave the man a generous tip. Then he walked back to his car, unable to repress a wry grin at sight of the big, square parking summons under the wiper.
Cops! he thought disgustedly. Right around on the dot to check up on overtime parkers, but let a man get slugged in a public place and dragged out on a murder ride, and where in hell are they?
He stopped beside his car and opened the right-hand door. The flat. 45 automatic was where he had placed it that morning. He lifted it out and slid it inside his waistband and belt, snugly against his inner right thigh, then slammed the door shut and strode across the sidewalk to open the door of the bar-room he didn’t remember leaving more than an hour before.
3
Michael Shayne stopped just inside the door to look the joint over exactly, as the girl had done when she entered. Business had picked up considerably since he had been kicked into unconsciousness and dragged out. It was now crowded with fifteen or twenty customers. A jukebox in the rear was grinding out dance music, and a two-bit slot machine just to the right of the door, which Shayne hadn’t noticed before, was getting heavy play from three juvenile delinquents clustered in front of it.
The two elderly men in leather jackets were still seated in the first booth, with beer mugs in front of them, but the bookie they’d been talking to was no longer there.
Among the half dozen or more men seated at the bar, Shayne recognized one of the pair who had been there previously and witnessed the assault on him. He stood unmoving just inside the door for a long moment, studying all the faces he could see, then strolled back to the rear to get a close look at all those seated in the booths.
When he moved back to the bar again, he was positive that only three customers and the bartender remained out of the seven who had seen the thing happen.
Shayne pushed up to the rear end of the bar, and the fat man behind the mahogany recognized him as he came back to get his order.
He stopped dead still with his mouth sagging open in the same ludicrous astonishment he had manifested on first sight of the girl in the doorway. His eyes narrowed and a distinct quiver of fear rippled over the folds of fat that made up his face.
Then he stepped a pace forward and his right hand groped underneath the bar while slitted eyes remained fixed on Shayne’s face.
He said hoarsely, “Better go on quiet, Mister. We don’t want no trouble here.”
As though on signal, the jukebox chose to stop at the precise moment that the bartender began speaking. He had pitched his voice loud to carry over the noise, and consequently his words rang out clearly above the hum of talk.
Everyone craned their heads to look at the tall redhead at the end of the bar, and all conversation ceased.
Shayne was turned half to the front, his right forearm resting negligently on the bar with his hand inches from the butt of his gun. He still held his head slightly askew to relieve the pain of bruised neck muscles, and, although he wasn’t aware of it (not having yet encountered a mirror), a livid bruise showed on the right side of his face where he had taken Mule’s first unannounced blow, and his right eye was puffed and beginning to blacken.
He said bleakly, so that every man in the room heard him: “That’s fine, Fatso. Neither do I want trouble. So bring your hand out from under the bar… empty.”
For the space of ten seconds, Fatso hesitated. This was his bar and these were mostly his regular customers watching him and waiting to see how he would back up his warning. He had a certain reputation to maintain in Brockton and it wouldn’t do that reputation any good to back down before a man who’d been dragged out of the place unconscious an hour before.
But Fatso did back down. Shayne’s negligent attitude didn’t fool him at all. There was something terrifying about that voice, about the faint hollows in the redhead’s cheeks and the quiet set of the jaw that brought the bartender’s hand out empty and put a false joviality on his face and in his voice.
“Hell, Mister. That’s jus’ fine. Thought maybe you come back figgering to blame me for what happened while ago. This here’s a respectable place, see, an’ I don’t want no part of such doings.”
