made the mistake of asking about the twin double, and Thorne was going to see to it that he didn’t ask any more questions until after the payoffs. That look didn’t mean the kind of friendly punch in the head he had given his wife. It meant a beating.
Rourke took a deep breath and rushed him, butting as hard as he could at the point where his rib cage came together. It was like running into a wall. Rourke reeled back as Thorne’s left fist came around. It connected with, his ear and his head rang like a bell. He snatched up the butcher knife and threw it blindly at Thorne. Whirling, he cleared Win’s unconscious body in one bound and hurled himself at the long window over the stainless steel sink. A row of cactus plants was lined up on the sill, and Rourke carried them with him as he went through in an explosion of shattered glass, his eyes closed, arms up to protect his face. He bounced off a tank of bottled gas and landed in the dirt in a welter of glass and sash and broken pots.
He rolled, came to his feet, and darted away between trailers. The emergency flow of adrenalin that had helped him through the window continued to carry him for a moment, but there was blood in his eyes and he could hardly see. He made a right-hand turn, realizing abruptly as the first wave of pain hit him that he wouldn’t be going much farther under his own steam. His one chance was to lose himself in the jumble of trailers, perhaps crawling underneath one to rest till he felt better. Then he could work his way back to the highway and see if some kindly motorist would take him to a doctor.
He stumbled and went down, his head still ringing from Thorne’s blow. He forced himself to his feet and kept going, at a dogged, shambling half-run.
Then a solid figure loomed in front of him and he collided with Mike Shayne.
CHAPTER 6
Michael Shayne had walked into the lobby of the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach at two o’clock exactly, the time fixed for his appointment with the go-between who had promised to bring him one step closer to the recovery of stolen diamonds worth $100,000. The man was late. Usually this wouldn’t have bothered the detective. People in the go-between’s position often have trouble making up their minds. But today, after waiting only ten minutes, Shayne phoned the insurance company and told Mort Friedman, the man he was dealing with there, that his contact had failed to appear. He would call in, probably, and Shayne asked Friedman to set up another date for the following day.
“Make it later this afternoon, Mike,” Friedman said. “This whole thing is very jumpy.”
“I won’t be available,” Shayne said briefly. Friedman wanted to know why. Shayne replied evenly that something else had come up, Friedman made an acrid comment on that, and before the conversation was over Shayne concluded that he had possibly lost a valuable retainer.
Leaving the Beach, he crossed the bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway and picked up the northbound expressway in Buena Vista. Shifting onto the Sunshine State Parkway at the Golden Glades interchange, he continued north, holding his speedometer needle steady at ten miles over the speed limit. He was swearing to himself. Rourke, he knew, had a special nose for certain kinds of trouble. His way of working up a story was to walk in, ask leading questions, and see what happened; and more often than Shayne liked to remember, what happened was that he ended up flat on his back hollering for help. One of these days, the redhead promised himself, Rourke was going to get into some stupid jam and find that Shayne had packed a bag and taken his secretary to New York to see a few of the new shows, leaving no phone number where he could be reached.
Shayne left the monotonous parkway at the Pompano Beach interchange and began following signs. The turns to Surfside Raceway were well marked. The closer he came to the track, the surer he was that something had gone wrong. He shouldn’t have let Rourke go alone.
The big, sprawling plant was quiet, apparently almost deserted in the hot afternoon. He locked his Buick and left it at the edge of the almost empty parking area, and plunged into the stable compound on foot.
Finding Paul Thorne’s stalls, he awakened a sleeping groom, who told him he had seen Thorne going off toward the trailer park, probably to take a nap, which was the sensible thing to do at this time of the day. Going in among the trailers, Shayne was in time to see the gangling body of his friend come hurtling through the narrow window of a trailer, his arms windmilling. He lurched away. The redhead spat out his cigarette and set off after him at a hard run.
He had left a trail of blood. Catching a glimpse of him as he staggered between two trailers, Shayne sliced into the tangle and cut him off. The reporter, in worse shape than Shayne had ever seen him, floundered a few more steps and collapsed against him. His coat and shirt had been cut to ribbons. He was only wearing one shoe. There were a dozen long slashes on his face and hands, but the blood made it hard for Shayne to tell which ones were serious. His face was a grotesque mask. His breath was loaded with martinis.
“Mike?” he said weakly. “You’re on the Beach somewhere, earning fifteen G’s. You’re not here.”
“What’s going on?” Shayne demanded. A heavy sedan halted at the edge of the trailer park. A burly uniformed figure leaped out and called, “Thorne! Thorne! Come here.”
A powerfully built, man in a sports shirt stepped out of the trailer with the smashed window. Rourke made a plucking gesture at Shayne with one of his bloody hands.
“Mike, it’s true. They’re trying to pull it off. The twin. Everything we thought. That means Joey Dolan was no accident.”
A fat woman in a playsuit, her forearms dredged with flour, opened the door of the nearest trailer and looked at Rourke with horror. The reporter sat down. “I’ve had it,” he said.
Shayne whipped out his bill clip and peeled off a dollar, which he handed to the woman. She took it automatically. “Get him a towel soaked in hot water,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
He returned to the Thorne trailer at a fast walk, approaching it from the kitchen end. Looking up at the broken window, he gave a short awed whistle. The opening couldn’t have measured more than two feet one way and ten inches the other, and he couldn’t believe Rourke had forced himself through it without being greased.
He pulled up in the lee of the trailer, his ragged eyebrows together and his eyes wary.
“Beating up on your wife again, I hear, Thorne,” the cop said. “People can’t take a nap with all the yelling and screaming. Well, you know what we told you, any more trouble of any kind and you’re through here, you’re through and no kidding. This time I’m turning you over to the sheriff’s office.”
“What crap,” Thorne said easily. “Who complained, Pruneface next door? Beating up on Win! Hell, man, we disagree sometimes, but she’s more likely to beat up on me than I am on her. Win, baby!” he called. “Come out here and tell the man.”
“You aren’t going to get out of this,” the cop said with satisfaction. “Look at that goddamn window. What did you do, throw a bottle through it?”
Shayne hesitated only briefly. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew they didn’t want Thorne to be tied up by the sheriff for the rest of the day.
He stepped out and came up to the two men, breathing hard. “I’m afraid he got away. I damn near had my hands on him for a second, but he was too slippery. He had a car waiting. I only got the first two numbers of the license-seven, eight. Christ!” He gave a sudden hoot of laughter. “When I saw him come crashing through that window!”
“You saw somebody jump out the window?” the cop said.
“Yeah, and I thought at first it was a case of the husband walking in at the wrong time, but then why would the guy have a getaway car all set, with the motor running? Did he get away with anything much?”
Thorne looked at him, thinking. “I haven’t had a chance to check,” he said slowly. He turned angrily on the cop. “Honest to God, this is typical of you people. If you hadn’t been so fast to jump to conclusions, I might have caught him.”
A disheveled but very good-looking young woman in a wrapper, barefoot, the side of her jaw swollen, appeared in the doorway of the trailer.
“Win!” Thorne said, alarmed. “Are you OK?”
“I’m-not sure.”
Now that they had their cues, they had no trouble manufacturing a story. A small, vicious-looking hoodlum had forced his way into the trailer waving a gun. He took her purse and then, liking her looks, tried to throw her
