Brett Halliday - Six Seconds to Kill

“Have fun,” he told the young people, and walked away.

In a ladies’ room in the Beach hotel next to the St. Albans, Camilla Steele shut herself in a booth and opened her shoulder bag. She had left herself plenty of time, but all the clocks she consulted today seemed to be behaving strangely. They would stop for a stretch, stop absolutely dead. Then she would blink, and fifteen minutes would pass.

The gun was inside the bag, wrapped in a black scarf. She touched it lightly, and was reassured by its solidity. Much that had happened in the course of the night had been shadowy and unreal. But the gun was a fact, with definite dimensions and properties, a hard, smooth surface with curves and corners. She couldn’t understand now why she had been so unsure about using it. If a gun hangs on the wall in the opening act, it has to be fired before the end of the third-Chekhov said that, and Camilla entirely agreed. An assassination is impossible without an assassin.

Smiling to herself, she took out the hypodermic syringe.

It was charged with Adrenalin, precisely the thing she needed. She hated needles, as a rule. Her horror of injecting herself was what had kept her from going beyond pills. But of course people gave themselves shots all the time. All it took was courage.

She waved her hand in the air until the blue map appeared on her forearm. Holding her breath, she plunged in the needle, hitting the right spot the first time-perhaps a good omen. Then, like a fool, she forgot to depress the plunger, and she actually pulled the needle out before she noticed. The next time she had trouble finding the vein, and she felt a spurt of panic. But finally she had it. She sighed deeply, and her thumb came down.

Her heart began to rattle violently. She pulled out the needle and put it away.

She had been given a half-tablet to swallow, and she managed to get it down without water. This was Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde medicine, to change her appearance during her first few moments in the St. Albans. It was Antabuse, a drug prescribed for alcoholics, to make the taste of liquor acutely unpleasant.

She put on an unbecoming pair of dime-store glasses with tinted lenses. She had cut her hair the day before, and dyed it in tawny streaks. She was wearing a too-large dress and a padded bra, shoes with thick heels. She left the booth, and with the Adrenalin racing happily through her veins, she was certain for the first time that this was really going to work. A surge of crazy optimism carried her into the hotel bar, where she ordered a bottle of imported beer. She was not only going to shoot the man, she was going to get away with it, and live to a pleasant old age. Everybody deserves to have one major secret. The fact that she had killed an attorney general was going to be hers.

The bartender poured the beer. It looked insipid, and had a noxious smell. Her lip curled as she raised the glass. She was the only customer; the bartender had gone back to preparing mixes at the far end of the bar. She held her nose and drank.

It was vile stuff, but she didn’t set the glass down until it was empty. She saw a dim reflection of herself in the back mirror. Her eyeballs pounded. Blood poured to her head, and she felt her features beginning to coarsen. But the mirror was too dark, and she returned to the one in the rest room.

She found herself unevenly flushed, with patches of color high on each cheekbone. Her eyes did seem to protrude slightly. She wouldn’t be looking her best when she shot Mr. Crowther, but needless to say, that wasn’t the object.

A good-humored crowd had gathered along Collins Avenue. A line of police trestles, backed up by cops, confined the demonstrators to half the street, keeping the other half open. None of this concerned her. She had to show her lunch ticket before she was allowed through the police barrier. She passed clumps of soldiers. At other times she would have drawn admiring stares, but today, a dowdy, squarish middle-aged woman with a distracted air and some kind of skin disease, she was ignored.

A triangle of beach in front of the hotel had been cleared as a landing pad for Crowther’s helicopter. She watched the preparations idly, starting for the entrance only when a taxi arrived with a party of guests. She moved uncertainly, and they overtook her. They all entered the lobby together, two men and three women. Inside, she stumbled against one of the men and caught his arm.

“Sorry. I always seem to trip at that exact spot.”

They both held the same political opinions, or they wouldn’t have been here, and the man’s face showed his concern.

“Are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” she said. “Do you think they’re going to start on time, or will they give us a drink first?”

The man laughed. “More than one, I hope, considering the speeches we have ahead of us.”

They were asked to show their cards again before they were allowed into the elevator. They showed them again at a table in the eighth-floor corridor. After being told her table number, Camilla was issued a tag with a pseudonym on it-Doris Myerson. She exchanged a smile with her new friends, and asked the ladies at the table if they needed any help.

The Jet-Star bringing Eliot Crowther from Washington came down on the number-one landing strip, slowed to taxiing speed, and rolled past the Delta Airlines building toward the International Concourse. The helicopters started their engines.

Michael Shayne, in the lead helicopter, saw the young demonstrators at the edge of the observation deck break out their banner. Soldiers in a loose formation moved out of the ground-level gates. The Jet-Star, now headed directly away from the terminal, continued toward the concrete intersection where the transfer would take place. A cloud of red balloons rose suddenly from the observation deck, and a dozen or so youths burst out of the gates in Concourses 3 and 5 and raced onto the field.

A command was shouted. The soldiers wheeled toward the demonstrators, who were carrying buckets of black paint, which sloshed out as they ran. Only two were able to break through the line of soldiers. They hurled paint at the helicopter Shayne was in. Some of it splashed against the windows. They were seized from behind and manhandled back to the terminal.

Picket signs appeared above the crowd on the deck. They wavered and dipped, then vanished.

A movable ramp was rolled into place against the forward cabin door of the Jet-Star. The soldiers formed a tight corridor connecting the bottom of the ramp with the helicopter.

Abe Berger was the first man out of the plane. He conferred with an army officer and looked around carefully. Two more Secret Service men appeared at the top of the ramp. They were followed by Crowther.

He was bareheaded, as usual, his shock of white hair stirred by the breeze. All the preparations had been directed against an anti-Crowther demonstration, and Shayne was surprised when most of the people on the observation deck began cheering and shaking small American flags. Crowther, too, seemed surprised. He stopped on the top step and broke into a wide grin, raising both hands over his head. His adherents cheered more loudly. Berger, below him, looked pained. Crowther was isolated for a moment, a marvelous target. Berger returned to his side and hustled him down the steps and between the two lines of soldiers to the helicopter.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Berger snapped as he passed Shayne. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out and around, Abe.”

Crowther swung up into the helicopter. The happy politician’s grin was still on his face, but it lost some of its luster when he saw Shayne.

“Mike Shayne,” he said. “I’m told some people wanted to come out in the streets in support of the United States government, in support of my position, and you discouraged them.”