The slender man stiffened perceptibly. He stretched out his left hand to drop the smouldering cigar butt in an ashtray, and very carefully set the highball glass down on a table beside him. His eyes were very cold, and his mouth tight-lipped.
“I don’t believe you, Shayne.”
Shayne said, “That’s your privilege.” He settled back comfortably and grinned. “Why don’t you go to the police and protest? They’d be delighted to hear all the details about your arrangement to collect twenty grand from Doc Ambrose tonight.”
His host was leaning toward him stiffly, breathing sibilantly through flared nostrils. “I think you’re lying. I think you got your big hands on that money, Shayne, by some sort of hocuspocus… if you didn’t gun him down yourself and lift it off him. I want it.”
Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders. “Sue me.”
Without shifting his gaze from Shayne’s, he said, “Sap him, Jud.”
Shayne sensed motion behind his chair… too late. The roof fell in on him. He rocked forward in his chair, and then slid laxly to the floor. His eyes became glazed and he fought back successive waves of unconsciousness, and then he pushed himself up to his knees and began laughing up into the face of the seated man.
He nodded his head, and Phil kicked the redhead in the ribs. There was searing pain as though all the bones had given way under the shattering impact, and he pitched heavily to his side.
Dimly and from a vast distance, he heard the incisive voice say, “Put him out cold, Jud.”
Jud was, as Shayne had realized the first moment he saw him, a professional. He carried out the boss’s order swiftly and efficiently. Shayne felt numbing pain, and then he heard no more and was conscious of nothing more for a long time.
He came back from blackness very slowly into darkness. Queer images wavered back and forth haphazardly in his mind, and it required certain periods of recurring consciousness for him to realize where he was and how he had got there. Slowly, lying on his back on the hotel carpet and blinking upward into the darkness, it came back to him. The meeting of the two men in his hotel lobby, the ride to the Bay front hotel, and his encounter with the boss.
Shayne gritted his teeth against the dull, grinding pain in his head, and sat up. He reached up gingerly and encountered two egg-shaped and egg-sized lumps on his head. His left side was a solid mass of hurt, and he suspected that several ribs were cracked. He rolled over on his hands and knees, and then stood upright, staggering as he did so and encountering a floor lamp which fell onto the carpet beside him. He knelt by it, and groped for the switch and turned it.
Light came from the bulb, and he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked around in a dazed way.
It was the hotel sitting room as he remembered it. Empty, now, of everyone except himself. He looked around slowly, blinking his eyes open and shut, and they settled on the highball glass still sitting on the table where the boss had placed it. The ice in the glass had long since melted, but there remained a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom which looked damned enticing to Shayne in his present condition.
He dragged himself forward on the floor, crawling on his hands and knees, until he could reach up and get the glass in a firm grasp. He lifted it to his mouth and drank avidly. It was good Scotch, and he knew it must have been at least a double shot in the glass to leave the dregs so strong.
He dropped the empty glass on the floor and got to his feet, located the bathroom door and stumbled in on rubbery legs to run cold water in the wash-bowl and duck his head into it repeatedly.
He toweled his face carefully, wincing when he touched either of the lumps on his head, and finally knew that he was going to live.
Back in the sitting room, he glanced around carefully, turned on the overhead light, and could see no sign of occupancy except the empty highball glass on the floor and two cigar butts in the ashtray by the chair where the slender man had been sitting.
Shayne went to the bedroom door and turned on the light. Twin beds were neatly made, and there was no luggage or any evidence that the room had been used.
His watch told him it was 12:48.
He left all the lights on, and went out the door and down the corridor to the elevator. His hat remained behind him in the empty apartment because he knew it wasn’t going to fit those two lumps on his head.
The elevator man regarded him dubiously as he rode down, but Shayne didn’t look at him. In the lobby, he stood for a moment looking around, and then made his way to an alcove beyond the desk where a long-legged, bald-headed man was relaxed in a leather chair with his head back and his eyes closed, snoring as blissfully as a small child.
Shayne poked a thumb in his ribs, and he jerked erect, blinking his eyes indignantly and making mewling sounds. When he recognized the redhead, he muttered, “Mike Shayne? What the hell you think you’re doing?”
“Hell of a Security Officer you are. Here I get clobbered in your goddamn hostelry and you sleep peacefully through it all.”
“I wasn’t asleep. Just catching forty winks. Hey, Mike!” He sat up aghast with his eyes wide open finally. “You look like the devil.”
“Which is exactly how I feel. Got a drink in your office?”
“Sure, Mike.” He got up fast and took Shayne solicitously by the arm, leading him back behind the desk. “You got clobbered? How come?”
“That… I don’t know… yet.” Shayne went into a small office with him and sank wearily into a chair while the hotel detective got a bottle out of a desk drawer and offered it to him with the top unscrewed. It was cheap, blended rye whiskey, but Shayne took a long pull out of the bottle and nodded his gratitude. “Suite Four-Thirty, Hank. Got anything on it?”
“Nothing I know about.” Hank’s face was worried, his eyes alert. He pressed a button on the desk and spoke into an intercom, “What’s with Four-Thirty? I got a complaint.” While he waited, Shayne said, “I think they’ve skipped, Hank. I went up with two guns on me and got sapped. At least an hour ago.” He paused as a voice came from the intercom:
“Suite Four-Thirty was rented at eight o’clock for overnight by Robert Jenson, Number Two-Three-Eight East Eighteenth Street, New York City. No luggage, cash paid in advance with statement he needed the suite for a business conference. No checkout.”
“Mr. Jenson checked out all right,” Shayne said grimly, after Hank pressed the button. “Call the cops, Hank, and have them go over the suite for fingerprints. They’ll find some of mine. I’ll check with Will Gentry in the morning, and sign a complaint, but right now I’m passed out on my feet.” He got up and swayed a little, and Hank hurried around the desk to help him out the door and flag a cab for him at the entrance. Shayne gave the driver the name of his hotel and sank back, fighting off nausea until they arrived.
He got out a dollar bill and made it through the lobby, shaking his head wearily at Pete as he stumbled past the desk.
In his own apartment, he went straight through to the bedroom where he collapsed on the bed fully clothed, and sank dazedly into dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
The telephone awakened Michael Shayne from his deep and dreamless sleep. He lay with his eyes closed for a long time listening to it. Vaguely, he knew, ’way down deep in his subconscious mind, that it was the private line beside his bed that was ringing. That meant, in all probability, either Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, Lucy Hamilton, his secretary, or Timothy Rourke. A few other people had this unlisted number, but not very many. And, none… thought Shayne… who would have the audacity to call him at this ungodly hour of the night.
He opened his eyes for a moment, and then closed them quickly. Hell! It was broad daylight. The rays of the morning sun were streaming in through his window. There was a dull, continuing ache that permeated his head, and his left side felt as though it shouldn’t be there.
He reached out for the offending phone and lifted it and pulled it over across his chest. Into the mouthpiece, he grated, “Go away, Tim, for God’s sake. It’s still the middle of the night, and I…”
