but better looking than he had expected from Dodd’s description. She looked more like an ex-Harper’s Bazaar model than an ex-lieutenant in the Israeli army. She had black shoulder-length hair and olive skin, and was so slender the bones of her shoulders showed through the fabric of her black dress. Her earrings might have been diamonds. High-heeled shoes elevated her knees still further. She had a stern look, and the lines of concentration around her eyes were likely to stay there, Shayne thought, even after she stopped concentrating.
“You have a broken arm!” she exclaimed. “Can you drive a car?”
“Not easily,” Shayne said, getting in. “But I put on quite a few miles last night, and I’m getting better at it.”
She opened a shiny purse and put the pistol away. “Am I down far enough? I regret this, Mr. Shayne, and it is possible, of course, that it is all my fancy. One reads so much about violence in America. But these men did seem to have a certain-intentness. I was quite frightened.”
Shayne backed out of the berth and eased the Buick around. He nodded to the attendant, who glanced in and saw the woman on the floor.
“I hope it was all right, letting her use the phone. She showed me her credentials.”
“Sure.”
When they were out on the street the woman said, “I showed him credentials, and I also tipped him five dollars.”
“That’s how we do things here.”
“In Israel too, I’m afraid, more and more.”
He turned north along the Miami River. “Any special place?”
“No, somewhere we can talk.”
She began to change position to come up on the seat. Shayne said quietly, “No, stay down there. We’ve got somebody with us.”
There were two men in the car he had spotted. Both had a charged air, as though when they moved they would go directly from repose into violent action. A third, who had been looking into a show window, crossed the sidewalk, too hurriedly, and joined them.
“A green Pontiac, three men,” Shayne said, still speaking quietly. “They’re new at this. They aren’t being too careful.”
“Oh, God. What do we do now?”
She had been about to put on dark glasses as they came out of the garage. She completed the movement, and her face partially disappeared.
“If they give us a few minutes we can call a cruiser and have them arrested,” Shayne said.
“They won’t wait so long. I really believe they’ve been hired to kill me. Can you keep ahead of them?”
“Probably.”
“I’m so sorry to involve you in this, Mr. Shayne. I had no idea whatsoever that anyone knew-”
He was driving easily in third, keeping the following car centered in the rearview mirror. It moved up but made no attempt to pass.
“They don’t look quite right,” he said after a moment. “The guy jerked getting away, and he’s using too much brake. Who are they?”
“I would like to know! They must realize I am here in the matter of the arch criminal Gold.”
Shayne took a hard right, passed a truck on the wrong side, forced himself into a narrow opening between cars, and turned left.
“I haven’t heard anybody called an arch criminal in years.”
“That’s what he is, however, from the inside out. It makes one ashamed to be a Jew.”
They were approaching 36th Street. Arrows pointed to the airport expressway. Suddenly a second car, a large sedan, moving fast, passed the Pontiac and then passed Shayne, cutting in sharply and forcing him to brake. The change in speed threw the woman forward.
“If they want it this way, then,” she said grimly, opening her purse.
One man was out of the car ahead, waving Shayne over. Again, there was something slightly off about him- he wasn’t one of the arch criminal Gold’s usual people.
“Brace yourself,” Shayne said. “Get all the way down and tighten up.”
She responded instantly, tucking her knees under her chin and rolling. Shayne was trussed up in his seat-belt, but if she hadn’t reacted promptly to his warning, she would have been thrown violently forward against the dashboard when the Buick’s reinforced bumper caved in the rear end of the stopped car, and drove the car ten feet forward, clearing the entrance to the expressway. Shayne reversed-he was becoming more adept at this difficult one-hand movement-and went past on the inside, kissing fenders.
He was leaning forward, using his cast to steady the wheel. The woman, off the floor, extended her arm behind his head and fired out the side window. The unexpected crack of the gun behind Shayne’s ear caused him to pull the wheel. They ran out on the shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, after bringing all four wheels back on the concrete. “We can outrun them.”
In the side mirror, as they carried into the curve, he saw the man in the street bend forward clutching his stomach. The curve took them around so their assailants were now on their right. The woman reversed herself and fired twice more, through the window on her side. Then Shayne was out on the expressway.
She had held the pistol in both hands as she fired. Now, turning, she lowered it between her knees.
“I believe I hit one of them.”
“I believe you did,” Shayne agreed. “Hang on now. We’re going to do some steeplechasing.”
He shifted lanes abruptly without signalling, moving into the middle lane first, then the highspeed lane to the left. Again, using only his speed and judgment, he came all the way back across and left the expressway. If any other cars had been following, they would have been swept past the exit in the stream heading for the airport.
The woman was sitting forward, her knees locked, her mouth a straight line. She didn’t seem to notice that her arm was bleeding.
“Esther,” Shayne said gently. “You can put the gun away now. The fight’s over. You did very well.”
“I did, didn’t I? I always made a good score shooting at a paper target. That was the first time I shot at a living man.”
“I doubt if you killed him. It’s almost impossible at that range with a handgun.”
The gun dropped and she began to shudder lightly. In a moment she was sobbing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what?” He pulled over and stopped. “Everybody takes his chances in a war. The guy signed up to knock you over before you could talk to anybody. You fired first. I’ll repeat-I don’t think you killed him. He took a little stutter step and stayed on his feet. If he was going to die, he would have sat down. So brighten up and we’ll go somewhere and get some breakfast.”
“Yes,” she told herself. “And one more or less of such people hardly matters, does it?” She added, “Except that for some reason it does seem to matter.”
He offered her the cognac. “This sometimes helps.”
“I don’t drink.”
“It’s a good time to start. Go ahead, it’s not that habit-forming.”
Still tense, she took the bottle, looking at Shayne doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
When he nodded, smiling, she put it to her lips and drank deeply. She sputtered, waited and drank again.
“Strong, isn’t it?”
“That’s the whole idea. Now let’s get something to eat and you can tell me what this is all about.”
“Food?” she said faintly. “I really feel extraordinarily-”
A Sanitation Department truck passed, clanking and emitting a smell of garbage and partly-burned diesel fuel. She forced herself to sit erect.
“I’m quite all right,” she said firmly. “It is merely, you see, that I haven’t slept for two days, and the way it is necessary to do now, step in an airplane in one time zone and step out in another, I hardly know what planet I’m on. A doctor gave me some pills to keep from falling asleep. You wish to eat breakfast, I will accompany you. But order nothing for me.”
He crossed beneath the expressway and entered it from the other side, joining the citybound flow. He was
