Brett Halliday - At the Point of a. 38

Gold got into the limousine and moved the seat forward a notch. After checking the gas and working his way through the shifting system, he gave Artie the signal to move out.

He went first. Their destination was a parking garage between Dade Boulevard and Collins-a many-tiered concrete structure with a spiralling outside ramp. They picked up their tickets and began the climb. Ignoring open spaces along the way, they went all the way to the top, and found the Arabs waiting.

At this hour-it was 10:42-the tide of parked cars hadn’t risen this high, and they had the level to themselves. Artie parked at a slant, blocking the ramp. Bringing the keys with him, Gold got out of the limousine.

He counted Rashid Abd El-Din, the leader, and three others. Three more were somewhere out of sight. Unlike Artie, the Arabs were dressed for their role as undertaker’s helpers, in jackets and ties. It was only when they were clumped together that it could be seen how much they resembled each other. They were all in the same age bracket, mustached, equally dark and lean. Gold knew, however, that they were not all equally foolhardy or equally anxious to die.

But God, they looked serious.

Rashid gave him a tight smile and went to the rear of the hearse. “One limousine, one hearse. As ordered, Murray.”

“Something wrong with the doors. You’ll have to hold them shut from inside. You’ll find the guns in the coffin.”

Rashid stepped inside. Artie had drifted over to the elevators and leaned back, his hands deep in his side pockets. The outline of the guns showed clearly. After all Gold’s worrying, he couldn’t have been better. His eyelids were partly down. His demeanor showed that whatever he was called upon to do here, his conscience would give him no trouble later, because he didn’t possess one. He looked like the one thing he was not, a professional killer. He was the one the Arabs watched, not Gold, who had killed someone as recently as the previous evening.

The Arabs had come in a rented Pinto. Looking into the back seat, Gold saw the suitcase. The young Sayyid was beside it, forcing himself to smile.

“A warm morning, Mr. Gold! Here it is, heroin, from the other side of the ocean, successfully.”

Gold got in and moved the suitcase to his lap. It was locked, but it was his own suitcase, bought in Beirut, and he had the key. He opened it. Moving shirts and pajamas aside, he saw the four tightly packed bags.

“Now that’s a beautiful sight.”

“The keys to the other cars, Mr. Gold. We must separate now, and good luck.”

“This is going to take about thirty seconds.”

He had a 200-tablet aspirin bottle, containing a colorless, slightly oily liquid. He slit the tape on one bag with the limousine’s key, and pinched out an approximate double-dose.

Sayyid murmured, “We didn’t expect any delay. We should move.”

“Don’t rush me.”

He unscrewed the cap with one hand. Heroin dropped into this bottle would turn the liquid deep blue. It was the same crude test used by narcotics agents, not for heroin’s purity but for its presence in a mixture after a cut. Rashid jumped down from the hearse.

“Sayyid,” he said sharply, and added something in Arabic.

“We can’t wait here, it’s dangerous,” Sayyid announced, and snatched the car key from Gold.

Gold was trying to do too much at one time with only two hands, and he dropped the damn bottle. As he went down to retrieve it before the liquid could gurgle out, Sayyid gave him a push.

And the door opened.

From a cramped position partly on the seat, partly on the floor, Gold looked into the hole at the end of a pistol barrel. The pistol was no larger than normal, but the hole looked huge. Gold had already begun to wonder if it had been smart to trust these enemies of the Jewish homeland. His pleasure at seeing the suitcase again had caused him to slack off, and his reactions were slow. He blinked up at a face he vaguely recognized. This was one of those people who do the small, dirty, high-risk jobs, and as a result spend most of their lives in jail. His face said that he had stopped caring. Gold had never had much contact with these men, and here he was, at the age of sixty-four, being stared at by one from the other side of a cocked pistol.

A second man of the same type got into the driver’s seat. No new car had arrived. They had been waiting for him, and it was apparent that they had known where to wait as a result of being tipped by the Arabs. The unnatural alliance was definitely over.

Sayyid said nervously, “All right? All right?”

He slipped away. The gunman came in and slammed the door.

“Barney’s going to scream when he sees that suitcase. Junk, Murray? And you were always such a big man.”

The name Barney explained something. Barney was head of a loosely-organized group of investors who wrote most of the organization bonds. Sale of the confiscated heroin would go a long way toward covering the losses they had incurred when Gold absconded to Israel.

The limousine and the hearse, with the Arabs inside, moved toward the exit ramp and disappeared. Artie Constable, as Gold could have predicted, had faded from view.

“In fact,” Gold said, “Barney’s going to be so glad he’ll give me a big hug and a kiss and put me on an airplane.”

The man seemed to doubt this. “But everybody’s been so pissed off at you, Murray.”

Artie, approaching the car from behind, didn’t try anything fancy. He fired through the window, hitting the gunman in the head and killing him instantly. Gold grabbed the pistol. The driver gave one backward glance, and his hands went up as though trying to catch a fly ball. Artie opened the door for him and he got out, his hands still high. Artie disarmed him, and Gold dumped the dead man at his feet. Artie contorted himself into the narrow space behind the wheel and they drove away, winding down to the exit, where they had to pay to return to the street.

Shayne had no trouble finding the Homestead Beach address. It was the upper half of a two-family house, three blocks from the ocean. Like many of the houses on the block, the For Sale sign was up; Homestead Beach had been hit hard by the cutbacks at the nearby airbase. The windows were curtainless. Shayne drove past. It was a street of nearly identical houses, most of which needed paint or other forms of attention. In a few more years, the only thing to do with the place would be to burn it down and begin again.

He parked and came back across-lots, approaching the house from the rear. The two-car garage was empty. He went quietly up the back stairs. The door was unlocked.

He turned the knob, and entered a kitchen. Like her mother, Helen felt no obligation to keep abreast of the dishes. The fare here was TV dinners, sardines and crackers, store pie, instant Sanka. Much beer had been drunk, many cigarettes had been smoked. The remains were everywhere.

He heard a belch. A girl walked in with a beer in one hand. When she saw Shayne she screeched and the can went flying. She had just come from the bathroom and her jeans were open. This was clearly Helen. She had her mother’s hips and thighs, from which she would probably have been glad to shed a few pounds. Her hair was in curlers. Without them, and with a new expression on her face, she might have been almost pretty.

“How are you making out down here?” Shayne said. “I’m Michael Shayne. A couple of questions to ask you.”

She grabbed her jeans as they started to slide. “Goddamn you, goddamn you. Two minutes later I would have been on the road. How did you find me?”

“You left footprints.”

She took a step forward. “What do people have to do to get a break in this world? Please, please! Don’t take me back.”