and tie one on. I have a tentative date with Terry Fox, and she can probably dig up a friend.” He added, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
He grinned, but there was no answering grin from Shayne. The detective worked his injured arm into his shirt sleeve.
“Christ, Mike!” Rourke burst out. “That bullet could have landed six inches away from where it did, and you’d be dead! What’s wrong with you? You ought to be celebrating!”
Shayne turned a burning look on his friend. Rourke said warily, “All right, forget I said it.”
“By God, Tim, you’ve put your finger on it!”
“On what?” the reporter said suspiciously.
Shayne told the doctor impatiently, “Finish it up, will you, doc?” And to Rourke: “Don’t you see? Power said everything had to synchronize. That was true for us, but it was true for them, too. Their timing had to be perfect. One guy walked up to me with the suitcase. A car turned the corner. I reached for the suitcase, the gun went off. Another guy jumped from the car into the cab of the truck. And it worked. There was only one thing wrong. They didn’t kill me.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Mike.”
Shayne laughed happily. “The shooter was six inches off. A little better aim, and I couldn’t have pushed that plunger, right? Right!”
“I’m surprised at you, Mike. It’s easy to miss even at point-blank range with a handgun. That was a downward shot, the hardest there is.”
Shayne pushed off the table. Pain stabbed him in the shoulder. He stood still to let the doctor fasten a sling around his neck.
“No, I didn’t tell you about this guy,” he said, his eyes alive. “He wouldn’t miss unless somebody told him to miss. Szigetti-he’s one of the best shots I’ve ever seen.”
“On a range,” Rourke said skeptically. “This was in combat.”
“Tim, at that distance he could have put a slug through my skull with both eyes shut, in the last stage of Parkinson’s disease. They wanted me to push that plunger. They wanted that truck to burn.”
“Mike, make sense.”
The doctor knotted the sling at the back of Shayne’s neck. “OK?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Shayne said impatiently. “The truck was loaded with envelopes. They certainly looked real. I opened one of them, and the stuff inside certainly looked like heroin. But I didn’t give myself a shot to see what effect it would have on me. For all I know, it could have been sugar or cornstarch. Let’s go.”
“Mike, you didn’t notice the way that truck was burning. If you think you’re going to rake around in the ashes and find anything, let me tell you-”
Shayne stuck a cigarette in his mouth and Rourke lit it for him. “I wish I knew Turkish. I’d like to tell the doctor I feel better.”
“Funny,” Rourke said. “I feel worse. Maybe you’ll tell me what this is all about if I stay out from underfoot and keep feeding you drinks.”
Shayne grinned at him. “You’ll have to do more than that, Tim, if I’m right. You just saved me from making a very bad mistake. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I wonder myself,” the reporter said glumly. “Not often, though.”
Rourke still had the use of the police Ford with the phone in the back seat. When they arrived in front of the Motor Shop, a heavy wrecker was pulling out with the great charred hulk of the Sanitation truck. Only one piece of fire apparatus was still there, a small traffic-control truck with a revolving beacon.
“Want me to tell them to wait so we can look it over for burned cornstarch?” Rourke said.
“We’re not looking for cornstarch. We’re looking for heroin.”
“Why, obviously,” Rourke said sarcastically. “A couple of tons, wasn’t it? It must be around somewhere.”
They found a place to park on Eleventh and waited till the wreck was gone and traffic on the block had been allowed to return to normal. Shayne got out.
“I have to pick a lock, Tim. I’ll need more than one hand.”
“I don’t know anything about picking locks.”
“Then it’s time you learned.”
In front of the small door into the Motor Shop, Shayne handed the reporter his wallet and told him where to find his collection of picking equipment. Together, not without difficulty, they managed to force the lock. Inside, Rourke located the light switches and turned everything on.
“Let’s see, two tons of heroin,” he reminded himself. “Where would be a good place to start?”
“First we find a truck with a dented fender.”
They started along the line of disabled vehicles. When they reached the end Rourke suggested, “Maybe they hammered it out?”
“There wasn’t time,” Shayne said. “Well, it’s not the first hunch I ever had that didn’t pay off. As Power says, we really have achieved quite a lot, about as much as you could stick in a bug’s eye-Wait a minute.”
One of the five-ton monsters had been pulled out on the floor. The front end was up on jacks and one of the wheels was off. The hood was up. A pad was thrown over the fender so the mechanic could lie on it while working on the motor. Shayne strode toward the truck and jerked off the pad.
There was a deep vertical dent underneath.
“Here it is, by God!”
Rourke helped him open the side hatch. “Yeah,” Shayne said with satisfaction, seeing the cardboard cartons and the bundles of nine-by-twelve envelopes.
“I’m a genius!” Rourke exclaimed, performing a jerky little dance. “I thought I was saying you were lucky to be hit in the shoulder, not the head. What I really was saying was that we ought to hurry down here and look for a truck with a dented fender.”
He reached in to pull out an envelope. Shayne said sharply, “Leave it alone, Tim. Close the hatch. We’ve got to hurry.”
His tone was urgent. Rourke gave him a single quick glance, then slammed the hatch and fastened the toggle bolts.
“Now I know what we do,” he said. “We get a few dozen cops and wait for somebody to show up. Mike, I believe we’re going to pull this out of the fire!”
Shayne’s mind was racing. It was more of a steeplechase than a race on the flat-jumps, quick turns, hazards, then finally a hard fast run on level ground to the finish. He snapped his fingers.
“Didn’t you say we’re in a hurry?” Rourke asked.
“Damn right we’re in a hurry. A lot to do. Can you start one of these trucks?”
“Yes-s,” the reporter said without conviction, looking along the impressive lineup. “Maybe.”
“OK, the first thing to do is find one that runs.”
He started at one end while Rourke started at the other. The hardest part for Shayne was getting up in the cab. On his first try the door swung closed and dealt him a bad blow on his injured shoulder. Inside the cab, one arm was all he needed. The first truck failed to start at all. The second kept stalling. The third took hold at once, sounding healthy enough when he raced it in neutral. There was too much play in the brake pedal, which was probably the ailment that had brought it in.
Rourke was still trying to find the starting mechanism of the last truck in line. Shayne tapped the horn and his friend came running.
“Open the hatch,” Shayne called down. “See what’s inside.”
In a moment Rourke called back, “Junk. I don’t mean that kind of junk. Cans, broken bottles.”
“Full?”
“Right to the top.”
“OK. Here we go.”
He put the truck in low and eased out of line, applying his brakes at the end of the arc. They were very soft. He shifted into reverse and backed toward the grease pit at the far end of the shop.
“Give me some help,” he called to Rourke. “I want to get right to the edge of the pit.”
Rourke ran past and began waving. Shayne allowed plenty of time to stop.
