Hanging up, Shayne reached over the announcer’s shoulder and picked the mike out of his hands. “Now for the main event. Give me room.”
He opened the switch. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention. The management regrets to announce that no more wagers will be accepted tonight. Sellers, lock your machines. I repeat, lock your machines.”
Chapter 18
Out on the track, the Irish owner, a bony lady with a fresh Miami sunburn, had completed her trilling remarks and was having her picture taken once more with the lean bitch that had won her $35,000. Mrs. Geary, who clearly wasn’t enjoying the role, stared bravely at the flashbulbs.
“Soupy, this screen and this one,” Shayne said, pointing to the monitors covering the approaches to the kennel. “Look hard. I know those guns are here somewhere.”
“Getting kind of strung-out, man,” Soupy said weakly, passing his hand in front of his eyes. “I looked at nine thousand faces-”
Nothing showed on the kennel monitor but cage doors and shadows. At the mixing console, Dave looked around, and Shayne nodded.
Dave started a tape of dog noises, barks, scratches, whines, recorded earlier when the evening’s dogs had begun to arrive, and looped onto a second tape recorder so it would play continuously. He plugged in a videotape cassette. He and Shayne had made this in the empty kennel, early that morning, using the regular kennel camera before it was disconnected. He fed the sound into the public address system, the picture out to the thirty-five small screens and the big screen in the theater. The barking was too loud, and he brought it down so Shayne’s voice could be heard more clearly.
“I’m Michael Shayne, talking from the Surfside kennel. You’re all dog-lovers. That’s why you’re here. So I know you’ll be interested in what I’m about to show you. We’re going to do some back-and-forth cutting, and it may look a little ragged. Don’t expect a network production. We’ll cut now to a shot taken on this spot earlier this evening.”
The screen went blank. Dave had the kennel tape on the screening monitor. Coming to the segment he wanted, he cut it to half speed and fed it into the outgoing circuit. The master screen on the console, and all the screens scattered about the track, showed Ricardo Sanchez’s lopsided figure walking between the three-high tiers of cages.
“Stop it right there,” Shayne said into the public address mike.
The action froze. Sanchez had taken his fist out of his side pocket and was checking the syringe level. The needle-point caught the light. Sanchez was hunched slightly. In real life a slim, athletic youth, he was turned by the distorting lens into a misshapen dwarf. It was a sinister picture, the embodiment of every dog bettor’s secret fear. The vast crowd had formed in clusters beneath each screen, motionless, staring. Shayne watched at the outside window. Anyone moving from one cluster to the next would be isolated, easy to spot from above. The security man at the kennel entrance left his post to look at one of the hanging screens in the ground-floor cafeteria.
“This man’s name is Ricardo Sanchez,” Shayne said. “He is in charge of the lockup kennel because of the death of the regular kennelmaster. Mrs. Charlotte Geary is paying the rent on Ricardo’s new apartment in the Fanchon Towers. I’ll have more to say about that later. When this scene was taped, he was about to check one of the dogs entered in the International Classic, the favorite, I think, who got off fast and died in the backstretch. Don’t expect a refund on your losing tickets, anybody. If you’ll think about it a minute, you’ll see it’s impossible.”
A rumble began to rise from the crowd, like a dog’s growl. Shayne signaled to Dave.
The taped action resumed, at half speed. Sanchez reached into the cage, smiling slightly. To every bettor except the fortunate few who had backed the winning bitch, it was a wicked smile. Dave cut back to the prepared tape of Shayne in the kennel, talking into a hand mike.
In the flesh, Shayne was still at the side window, shading his eyes from the overhead light. On the screen, he was saying: “A few nights ago we had a memorial service for Max Geary, who took this track away from the gangsters and built it to the point where tonight they were hoping for the first million-dollar handle. Too bad they won’t get it. Maybe next year, if the dogs are still running. For years, Max tried to run an honest swindle. The State of Florida ripped off its usual five percent of every dollar bill-and I hope everybody here understands that if you bet twelve races a night, you’re paying that five percent twelve times. You all have pencils-do your own multiplying. Max had to pay an under-the-table tax for his racing dates. He had to pay to keep the inspectors off his back. When the plant began to deteriorate and he wanted to clean it up, nobody would loan him any money. So he went to a man named Tony Castle, which is short for Castagnoli. One of those bad people who used to hang around racing in the old days. Castle already had a piece of the Surfside concessions-”
And suddenly, while his own voice continued to boom through the PA outlets, Shayne understood how Castle and his men had got by Soupy without being seen.
“Soupy,” he said urgently. “Look at the bars, the sandwich guys.”
Soupy gave him a surprised glance, and began to study the interior monitors. Now that he knew what to look for, Shayne immediately saw a cream-colored panel truck parked at the end of the line of kennel vans and station wagons. He put the binoculars on it. The company name-J. T. Thomas-was written on its side in the same script used on the workers’ uniforms. One of these workers was coming off the ramp now, pushing a delivery dolly piled with cartons. He was heavily bearded, with glasses. The uniform was of dirty white with orange piping, a cocked orange-and-white hat. Shayne lost him for a moment. He came into view again at the glassed-in end of the kennel. The crowd there was all looking one way-up at Shayne’s face on the hanging screen.
His arm moved, in a hard sideward throwing motion. An instant later, there was an explosion in the kennel.
Shayne came around fast and punched the cutoff.
“Pick up the kennel camera,” he told Dave.
On the closed-circuit screen, nothing showed but billowing dark smoke. Dave put it into the feed.
“I see one,” Soupy said excitedly, pointing at a screen showing the long sandwich counter under the projection booth in the Hall of the Greyhound. “You owe me a hundred bucks. At the beer pulls.”
Shayne took the public address mike. “Painter. Pick up the phone at the kennel.”
When he saw the chief of detectives beginning to move, Shayne dialed that number again. It was ringing by the time Painter got there. Shayne handed the phone to Soupy.
“Give him the guy’s description and tell him to pick him up. Then keep looking. There are two more.”
“Giving directions to Painter,” Soupy said. “I’ll love that.”
A lick of flame appeared in the cloud of smoke pouring out through the kennel’s smashed wall. On the closed-circuit screen, dogs were leaping down from the broken cages. The concessionaire’s dolly had been turned over by the force of the blast, and the big cartons were scattered. The man who had been pushing it came out of the crowd. Shayne grabbed Rourke’s shoulder and pointed to the white-and-orange cap.
“Going into the cafeteria, see him?”
They picked him up on the cafeteria monitor. Instead of turning toward the betting hall and the theater, he went toward a side door that would take him back to the loading dock and the service entrance.
Using his elbow, Shayne opened a path to the door. Lou Liebler jumped in front of him. Shayne knocked him aside.
He ran down the moving escalator. The crowd was still magnetized in clusters beneath the screens, and he was able to move quickly to the next escalator, getting a glimpse of Painter’s men closing in on the theater sandwich counter. The wide ground-floor corridors were completely deserted. He saw Linda coming out of an unmarked door. She looked startled. He hit a closed exit gate with his shoulder and burst through.
He looked one way, then the other. Two Surfside workers were running toward the foam truck, parked in its own bay to the right of the entrance. Shayne was there first, and it started for him at once. He backed it out and wheeled.
The kennel and service entrance were at the extreme end of the long structure. He depressed the gas pedal
