Brett Halliday - Last Seen Hitchhiking

Seminole Beach, a whistle stop on the Florida East Coast Railway, was mapped out as a real estate speculation during the last days of the great 1920s boom. Canals were dug, street signs were erected. Then everything collapsed. When the boom resumed a generation later, proving title to the tiny lots, and putting them together into large enough parcels to meet the requirements of modern zoning, proved to be difficult. Patches of heavy development were separated by weed-grown gaps. Most of the canals had silted up and were almost too shallow to accept a surfboard. Maxine Holloway’s back lawn ended at one of these sluggish green ditches. The house had been hastily built, and sagged under the weight of an enormous television mast. Most of the gray trim needed to be refreshed.

Shayne was in second as he approached the house, but instead of slowing further to look for a curbside opening, he continued past.

“Mike,” Frieda said.

“Don’t look around.” He turned the next corner before explaining: “The front door is wide open. These houses are all air-conditioned. Why leave the door open and lose that expensive cold air?”

He told her to slide over and take the wheel. “I’ll see what’s happening, if anything. Give me three minutes, and come back around. Use the blinkers and the siren. When you don’t know what questions to ask, it’s a good idea to show up making some noise.”

She touched him under his left arm. “Are you taking a gun?”

He stopped halfway out of the car. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“It’s just the way everybody’s acting. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You’re more likely to get hurt when you go in with a gun in your hand. It encourages everybody else to start shooting.”

“Wait, Mike. How do you turn on the siren?”

He showed her, and walked away.

Children were roller-skating along the sidewalk. He stepped around and walked past the house with the open door. The third car beyond was a dark sedan, a Chrysler, with a twisted aerial. A man slumped behind the wheel, his seat-belt on. A tennis cap was pulled low over a pair of wraparound dark glasses. He was smoking a small cigar.

When Shayne picked the cigar out of his mouth, he sat up abruptly. He was dark-skinned, with long sideburns ending in a point.

Shayne pitched the cigar away. “Let’s see your driver’s license.”

The man’s hand started for his hip pocket, and his jacket tightened. Shayne added, “And your permit to carry that hand gun.”

Alert now, the man demanded, “What am I doing? What’s the hassle?”

“People don’t sit in cars around here. They get out and go in the house. Where have you got the heroin?”

“Heroin! Heroin! You’re crazy, man,”

“That’s what I get the citations for. Would anybody normal do this kind of work?”

The man stabbed at the horn button, but in this model the horn didn’t work with the ignition turned off. Shayne’s hand darted in and released the seat-belt. He unlatched the door, yanked, and the man spilled out in the street. It was done very fast.

Shayne disarmed him and pulled him erect, holding his right arm stiff in both hands.

“Now, don’t yell. If you do I’ll break your arm. This can’t be that important to you. How many in the house?”

“Three.”

“We can handle three. I’m getting reinforcements in a minute.”

A venerable, once-red VW stood in the driveway. Shayne took his captive to the side door in the attached garage and told him to open it quietly. Maxine’s friend, the sculptor, had changed the garage into a studio. There was a workbench along one wall, and the floorspace was cluttered with scrap metal and fabricating equipment, as well as a few pieces the sculptor probably considered finished. They picked their way through.

“You’re doing nicely,” Shayne said.

Following instructions, the man opened a door into the kitchen. Two people had been having breakfast They had finished their eggs, but there was still coffee in the cups, and a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. Shayne checked the time and kept moving.

In the living room, a man in a knitted ski mask was pulling books off a two-shelf bookcase. His back was toward Shayne. He had thin shoulders, a forward tilt. He was wearing orange work-gloves. There was what seemed to be a bundle of laundry at one end of the sofa. A pair of bare feet protruded from beneath a dirty sheet.

“García!” the man in Shayne’s hands shouted.

The siren sounded, and a tall man in the same kind of ski mask burst out of a bedroom. He was easily six feet three, but the extra height was almost entirely in his neck and torso, as though those sections had been artificially stretched. He took out a Luger, the long barrel and short butt seeming as misproportioned as his own body.

The siren, at full wail, turned the corner. Another man appeared. All four were shouting excitedly at each other in Spanish. When the tall man swung around toward Shayne, lifting the gun, Shayne pushed the driver at him. A consensus quickly emerged; it was time to leave. The driver was the first out the door, the tall man the last.

“Run,” Shayne told them. “You can make it.” Strangled noises came from the bundle on the sofa. From the front doorway, Shayne watched the black Chrysler zoom away. His own Buick pulled up, and Frieda leaned across to see what Shayne wanted her to do next. He signaled. She parked in the open slot, the siren dying.

Shayne returned to the sofa and unveiled a furious woman with her hands tied and a gag in her mouth. She was a little too plump, in shorts and a halter, with all the exposed surfaces nicely tanned. She was wriggling and gobbling, using body language to order Shayne not to stand there calmly lighting a cigarette but to rush after the intruders and apprehend them.

When Frieda came in, Shayne said, “Is this the professor’s ex-wife?”

“I’ve never seen her, but she’s the right age and this is the right address.”

“What do you think about all this?”

“Four men. It bears out my guess that there’s quite a bit of money involved. Shouldn’t we take that thing out of her mouth and ask her some questions?”

“Look around first. We don’t have a search warrant, and she might object.”

The woman made a strong objection, muffled but unmistakable, as Shayne began a slow search of the house, having to move sideways between jagged constructions of rusty steel, meaningless shapes a little too big to stand comfortably under a ceiling. The household was clearly in need of money. The carpet was threadbare where walked upon, frayed at the edges. Cigarette burns on the furniture had been left unrepaired. There were several Mayan and Mexican objects, a framed photograph of a Mayan temple.

“Am I warm?” Shayne asked her.

The woman had stopped wriggling. She watched without moving her head.

There were two bedrooms, only one of which had been used the previous night. In the bathroom, a man in a bath towel was sitting on the closed toilet, hands on his knees. The masked intruders hadn’t considered it necessary to bind or gag him. He didn’t seem surprised to see Shayne. He had a full black beard, which had been allowed to grow as it pleased.

“Can I come out now?”

“Not yet,” Shayne told him. “I’ll let you know.”

He looked through the medicine cabinet. Somebody in the house suffered from ulcers. Somebody else used anti-depressants. The woman, not the man, took the necessary measures to prevent conception.

Shayne spent a few minutes at the desk in the larger bedroom. Several of Mrs. Holloway’s recent personal checks had bounced, and her bank had fined her severely so she would remember not to do it again. More than one unpaid bill had the notation: “Please!” The Holloway textbook was out on the desk. When Shayne picked it up, it opened to a place marked with a Kleenex: a tipped-in four-color insert showing various Toltec funerary articles, including masks. A name was written on a memo pad by the phone: “Eliot Tree, St. Albans, until Tuesday” — the St. Albans being one of the Beach hotels.