His mind was working again, a little too soon for Shayne’s purpose. He broke off.
“You wouldn’t be Mike Shayne, would you, by any possible chance?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s the idea that suddenly hit me. I was listening to the car radio while I was waiting, you know? One of those creep shows. A lot of goddamn chatter. His pal Mike Shayne suffered a broken arm, so on and so forth and this and that. A body in the back of a car. Pretty heavy stuff. I mean-murder. I don’t know a thing. I make a point of not asking. So why don’t you just fuck off, Shayne? I put away nearly a full pint of bourbon whiskey. It’s all been a blur, one big blur in living color.”
“I’ve got a helicopter trailing the Olds. If this thing falls apart, you might be needing a friend.”
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes. I’m taking the Fifth. Why incriminate myself before I have to?”
A car stopped. The two young men in the front seat were wearing civilian clothes, but there were various indications that they were not civilians.
“Sergeant?” one of them called. “What the hell happened to you?”
Tibbett stood up, gauging the situation. He wanted his money back. Shayne eased the gun far enough out of the sling so he could touch the trigger. The sergeant studied him for a moment.
“Talk about petty crime.”
“Don’t desert,” Shayne told him. “I want to know where I can find you.”
“Hey, sarge,” the young man said from the car. “Are you O. K.?”
The sergeant turned. “Snapped the steering linkage or something. Ran the mother right off the road.”
Shayne returned to his Buick and belted himself in, then backed and filled until he was headed back toward the airbase. As he passed the group around the smashed Volvo, Sergeant Tibbett raised one finger.
Back on the expressway, northbound, Shayne built up his speed to over ninety, then brought in his operator.
“I’ve been trying to get you,” she said. “We’ve lost contact with the helicopter.”
“Where did he call in from last?”
“South of Hialeah. He said the Oldsmobile was still on the expressway, travelling north.”
Shayne acknowledged the message, and told her to keep trying.
For the next twenty minutes, he maintained the same pace, and was approaching Miami when the phone clicked beside him.
“Here’s Larry Dietrich. But it’s a ground call.” Dietrich came on, with bad news. Bypassing Miami, the Oldsmobile had continued north to Fort Lauderdale, and left the expressway at the Boca Raton turn-off. At that point Dietrich began having difficulty getting fuel. He stalled out twice, and had to put down on a golf course. As for the Olds, it had been about to enter Boca Raton. But this was a heavily-built up section of the coast. He was sorry to say it could be anywhere.
“I’m really sorry as hell, Mike. Maybe I could have hung on for a couple more miles, but I was running very rough. That golf course looked too damn inviting down there.”
“No, it’s a relief,” Shayne said. “Now I can go home and get some sleep. Not a bad way to tail somebody- we’ll have to do it again sometime. I’ll send you a check.”
Rourke had gone off the air and the station was no longer taking calls. Shayne’s operator tried to locate Gentry, without success. Shayne finally talked to a homicide lieutenant and gave him a description of the Oldsmobile and its driver, and where they had last been seen.
Then he turned off the expressway and headed for home.
4
Rashid Abd El-Din, a dark young man with a pencil-line mustache, wearing a black turtleneck, black slacks and sneakers, had been watching for headlights. When they turned in from the street, he swung over the marble balustrade and dropped lightly to the grass.
He moved on the balls of his feet, soundlessly. He was built like a scimitar-a rather sentimental woman had said that about him once, and he liked the metaphor. The scimitar, with which his people had driven to the Pyrenees and Vienna; forged from Damascus steel (Rashid himself had been born not far from Damascus), and ground to a fine edge that could take the whiskers off a goat or the head off an enemy. Of course at this moment, after two years of starchy prison food and enforced idleness, he was no longer quite as narrow as a scimitar. Never mind; a few weeks of desert marches would bring him back to his usual trim.
The car rustled across the gravel and parked, as arranged, under the single outside light at the end of the six-car garage. Six cars! And all enormous-black, gleaming Cadillacs and Lincolns, none with a mileage reading in five figures. What did they do with cars in this rich country when they travelled 10,000 miles, take them out in a field and abandon them to the crows?
This car, having been stolen off the street earlier in the evening, was considerably less costly. It had once been white. The paint had been patched here and there, with no effort to match shades. One patch on the roof was considerably lighter than the rest.
Rashid focussed his energies on the man at the wheel. He could become a problem, this old man. Rashid had known him six months, had studied him intensely, but he was still a puzzle. His name was Murray Gold, a prominent gangster, a Jew.
Gold came out holding a pistol. At the sight of the drawn weapon Rashid felt a perverse stir of pleasure. There had been little chance for action in prison, until those final minutes.
“Is that truly a gun?” he said in lightly accented English, smiling. “I had begun to believe we were friends.”
“Don’t be dumb.”
At the best of times the Jew looked slightly weary. Now he looked tired enough to fall asleep where he stood. All the vertical lines of his face had lengthened. His glasses had slid down his nose. He had no more flesh than a sparrow. He had stopped shaving in prison, producing a scraggly beard which after their joint escape he had dyed a depressing shade of brown. In his cocky American sporting cap he looked a little disgusting-to tell the truth, more than a little. Unlike some in the movement, Rashid had nothing against Jews except that they had had the poor judgment to designate Palestine as their so-called homeland, on the basis of a dubious reading of history. They were like roaches. You couldn’t reason with them; stamp on them was all you could do.
“I’ve done some driving tonight,” Gold said. “A few things worked out, a few things didn’t. I’ve got the guns. Let’s finish right now.”
“Finish in what way?”
“I give you the guns, you give me the heroin.”
“No,” Rashid said coolly.
“The big rule with that stuff is, get rid of it fast. I’m beginning to feel itchy. This is a bad part of the world for me, I want to get out.”
“The morning after tomorrow morning, in accordance with plans.”
“One of the reasons for having plans is so you can change them.”
“But the gun,” Rashid said gently. “We are working so closely together. Why does a gun appear suddenly between us? There is a saying among Arabs that when you take out a gun, you should be ready to use it.”
The two men, adversaries and co-conspirators, examined each other. The exhausted old man was trying hard to look dangerous. A joke! Rashid was surrounded by sleeping friends. The last thing Gold would do now was shoot anybody-and in spite of the Jew’s reputation, Rashid secretly believed he was incapable of shooting.
With a sigh, Gold put the pistol into the waistband of his disreputable pants.
“I almost fell asleep about six times. Is there any chance of getting some coffee?”
“Of course. But your battered automobile-on this property it seems absurd. I believe you should unload the guns and park on the street.”
“We’ve got some talking to do first.”
“Then come in over the garage. Two of our people have been sleeping here. Will it bother you to be
