worked legally. Their hand-luggage was double-lined, and forty kilos of unpackaged heroin were recovered from the wreck. Both passengers survived, and would have fifteen or twenty years to wish they had picked a more difficult way to make money. The heroin trade, of course, would continue.
Shayne’s right arm had been broken in two places, above and below the elbow. The lower break was the bad one, and had been set under traction. The hospital had wanted to keep him overnight, but Shayne disliked hospitals and left them as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in his business it was hard to avoid them entirely.
He inspected the damage he had done to his car. It was less serious than he had expected-one fender, dents in the hood, a few scratches.
Fitting himself behind the wheel, he reached across to the glove box for his cognac flask. He shook it, and was sorry to hear that it was nearly empty.
After emptying it completely, he changed the setting of the seat-belt so it would accommodate his cast. The stick-shift, of course, was on the wrong side, and reaching it would be awkward. But he was in no hurry, and this wouldn’t be the first time he had driven with one hand.
For the last several months, Shayne’s friend Timothy Rourke, the Miami News crime-and-corruption man, had been emceeing a late-night talk show on WKMW, an FM station trying to build an audience. Rourke had always considered sleeping a waste of time. Now, instead of talking with friends in bars between eleven and one, they talked in a studio. Rourke was a needling, argumentative host, and conversations he started usually continued long after the station went off the air. From time to time he interrupted himself to take a phone call. The station had recently doubled his miniscule salary, so it now covered the cost of the liquor and sandwiches consumed on the show.
Rourke assembled his panels at the last possible minute, trying to tie them in to the day’s news events. Shayne had half promised to stop on his way home, after his arm was set, and give a first-person account of the violent occurrence at the airstrip. Throughout the evening, the station had been broadcasting ten-second teasers announcing that a major news story would be broken later on the Rourke show. For background, Rourke had brought in a radical professor from the University of Miami, who believed that heroin should be legalized, and Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, another old friend of Shayne’s, who of course believed the opposite. As he drove, Shayne turned on the dashboard radio, which was already set to Rourke’s station. Rourke was talking, in his hoarse, two-pack-a-day smoker’s voice.
“-tonight. Shayne just called from the hospital, and he sounded O.K. One of the luckiest sons of bitches I ever ran into. He totalled their goddamn airplane, took away their guns, left them tied to a tree and drove himself twenty miles to the hospital with a broken arm. Typical night’s work. He’ll be here in five or ten minutes, and he may have a different version of what happened. With Shayne, you never know.”
Shayne held the steering wheel with pressure from his knee, and reached across his body to make the shift. He was on Miami Avenue. There was little traffic, and probably the thing to do was to stay in third. Rourke’s quick summary had been reasonably correct, but the two men in the plane, though they had been carrying guns, had been too frightened to use them. They had climbed out in a daze and followed Shayne’s instructions without protest.
Now Rourke was saying: “And Angie Robustelli said he’ll try and make it a little later. Robustelli-for those who are new in town, that’s Captain Robustelli, head of the Narcotics Division of the MPD, known to romantic reporters on the opposition paper as Mr. Enforcement. He’s been breaking his ass on this drug shtick for the last twenty years, and that’s the point I’ve been trying to make. How many good people has Angie put away? It must be thousands by now. How many stoolies on the confidential payroll? How much junk has he seized and burned? Feed your habit, Will,” he remarked in an aside to Gentry. “Get another beer. I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth, but I think I know what Angie’s going to say because we’ve discussed it often enough. I listen to him with disbelief and dismay. You have to admit, Will, that the way we make our user arrests really stinks. Get their confidence and set them up for the bust. It may not be entrapment legally, but that’s what it is, just the same. Stick the bastard in jail for a few years so we can forget about him. He’ll be back on the needle two hours after he hits the street. O.K.-if it worked, that would be one thing. But we all know it doesn’t work. Robustelli is the world’s toughest cop. A really hard man. Dedicated! Twenty years on the job, and what’s he accomplished, after all the violence and crookedness-”
“And deaths,” the Miami professor put in.
“Not to mention the cost in dollars. So there’s just as many addicts as there ever were. Just as much stuff in circulation. Will, I was mugged coming over tonight. I’m not complaining. I know you can’t put a cop on every street corner, that would run into money and you need it for drug buys. I’d say the guy was about two hours into withdrawal, very sick and jittery. He had a knife. I’ve taken knives away from junkies, but not for years. I don’t get enough exercise. I’m told I smoke too much and I drink these bad blends. He was polite with me. He wanted my wallet. I handed him my wallet. He wanted my watch, but they stole that two weeks ago. I carry exactly seventeen bucks. Naturally they’d be glad to lift more, and they might even suspect that I’m carrying a few tens in my shoe. But they don’t press me because seventeen’s enough to get them through until noon tomorrow, and they hurry off to make their connection. We all have different ways to get by. What I do, I have a money-pouch inside my fly, and let’s hope all the H-heads are too zonked out to be listening to the radio this late at night. Seventeen bucks, I’m glad to contribute. I look on it as one citizen’s share of what it costs to maintain the criminal market in heroin. But look, Will. Will, are you listening? I want to see you flounder when you try to contradict me. Mike Shayne knocked off forty K’s tonight. Forty big K’s of unadulterated sh-No, that’s a word they don’t want me to use on the air. Worth millions and millions in street prices, after everybody and his brother, including the beat cop and the desk sergeant, take their cut.”
Will Gentry growled, “Wait a minute, Tim.”
Rourke laughed. “I stuck that in to see if you were still with me. All over the world, cops are crooked. But not in Miami. Our brave men in blue would never take a wrong dime, and they’ll all go to heaven when they die; thank you, Jesus. Forty kilograms of happy powder pulled out of the pipeline, thanks to Mike Shayne, which is wonderful news for the good guys. Hallelujah. That cat who mugged me tonight probably heard it on the six o’clock news, and he knows what it means. Higher prices for a few weeks, until the boys get the interruption taken care of. And who’s going to pay the higher prices? The dope-heads? Don’t be silly, they can’t afford the prices they have to pay now. We pay it, Will. They’ll just have to steal more. There’s going to be a sharp rise in street crime, starting tomorrow. Right? I’ll be carrying twenty-three bucks from now on, instead of seventeen.”
Shayne shook his head ruefully. Rourke was right, of course. Not only that, Shayne had been waiting at the weed-grown airstrip as a result of a roundabout tip originating somewhere in the established heroin network. Someone had wanted these two men removed. They had cheated, perhaps, or had seemed unreliable. Perhaps they were beginners, trying to carve a piece of the market for themselves. It was a complex and dirty business, and Shayne usually let other people worry about it.
He shifted down for a red light. Seeing no approaching traffic, he jumped the light and came back up into third. Rourke was taking a call from Washington. The caller wanted to speak to Mike Shayne. Rourke explained once more that Shayne had left the hospital and was on his way, and he advised the caller to try again in half an hour.
Shayne, an eighth of a mile away, was heading northwest along the river. He turned onto 7th Avenue, then, after several more blocks, into a narrower side street. He pulled the wheel too far and had to correct.
He parked a half block from the rundown one-story building which KMW shared with a travel agency and a record company. He cut the lights and ignition but left the radio on. Will Gentry, over frequent interruptions from Rourke’s other guest, was trying to respond. He defended his department’s use of informers; how the hell else could they enforce the law?
When Rourke interrupted to take another call, giving Gentry a moment to catch his breath, Shayne turned off the radio and began a series of careful movements that would get him out of the car.
As he opened the door, he heard a gunshot.
Shayne had been shot at too often to take the sound lightly. He jerked back, knocking his injured arm painfully against the wheel. Probably the shot had nothing to do with him, but nevertheless his left hand went instinctively into the door-pocket and came back with a. 357 Smith and Wesson. This was an accurate weapon up to a distance of twenty yards, but he had never had to fire it left-handed.
He listened hard, one foot out of the car.
There was a second shot, either muffled by something or farther away. Shayne was ready for this one, and
