Brett Halliday - Violence Is Golden

Shayne paid him and got out. “Come back in an hour.”

Again the driver apologized; this had to be his last fare of the night.

“There is a telephone at the inn at the foot of the mountain. And of course,” he added slyly, “there is always the Pontiac.”

“Yeah.”

“The road goes straight to the site. There is a big hole, where the man planned to build a swimming pool. A person might fall into it if he hadn’t been told it was there.”

He came down into low gear and roared away.

Shayne waited for his eyes to adjust to the change of light. The noise of the Checker’s motor dwindled away beneath him. There was no moon, but the sky was brilliantly sprinkled with stars.

He started up the road, which was rutted and unpaved. In places it had washed badly. There was dense foliage on either side. As he rounded a bend, the sound of the waterfall became suddenly louder. Seeing a light ahead, he went more carefully, stopping every few steps. Soon he was able to make out the white bulk of the Pontiac, parked just off the road. As the foliage fell away on either side, a building took shape against the stars.

The light he was following proved to come from a battery-powered lantern inside the building. He heard voices, and a figure crossed in front of the light. Standing absolutely still, he let his eyes range slowly along the front of the building. It was long and low, on a single level. The framework was finished and the roof had been closed in, but construction had been interrupted with the sheathing barely begun. There was only one room with walls. Space had been left for two large picture windows looking north. At that end of the house a still-unpaved terrace stretched almost to the edge of the waterfall.

The ground was open, dotted with piles of building material. Off to the right, Shayne saw the irregular outlines of a big piece of earth-moving equipment, a bulldozer-backhoe combination.

Crouching, he moved closer to the house, his gun in his hand.

A man’s voice said complainingly, “What a bunch of bushers. How much planning went into this, I’d like to know? Very damn little. I thought I was going to be working with pros.”

Another voice, with a trace of a Japanese accent, answered stiffly, “There is nothing to talk about. We have to kill her at once. Forget about Savage.”

“Chop chop,” the first voice said with a sneer. “That’s all you know.”

Mary Ocain said brightly, “Am I allowed to say something?”

Her voice was thin and shaky, but she seemed in an odd way to be enjoying herself. Shayne reached the building line. There was a rough scaffolding still in place. Maneuvering around a low pile of cinder blocks, he moved cautiously toward the nearest opening in the plyscore sheathing.

The Japanese said sarcastically, “You don’t wish to be killed? Think of that.”

“Does anybody?” Mary said. “I don’t know what happens to murderers down here, but they’re probably executed, and I should think you’d be willing to talk about an alternative.”

The first man broke in. “Don’t let Yami scare you. He’s not going to kill anybody-we’ve got enough headaches as it is.”

“That’s good,” she said, “because I told Mike Shayne about those phony suitcases, and maybe I told other people. You can’t be sure, can you? I’ve been chattering away to various people all day. Don’t you want to avoid trouble?”

“The thing we absolutely want to avoid is trouble.”

The Japanese said, “Dead people don’t bother anybody.” A thin beam of light slanted through a hole drilled in the plyscore to admit an electrical cable. Shayne saw Mary Ocain, her ankles and her wrists bound, lying in the middle of the long room near the lantern. The Japanese, the same man who had tried to kill Shayne in the Orange Bowl, was wearing a short-sleeved pullover, flowered shorts, and sandals. His legs were knotted and muscular. The second man was sitting on a nail keg, smoking a cigar. His name on the passenger list had been given as Samuel Thompson. He was conservatively dressed and looked like a businessman.

“But why do you think we shouldn’t kill her?” the Japanese demanded. “It worries me, all this changing around. When I make up my mind to do a thing, I like to do it.”

“If we do it,” Thompson said, “if we do it, it has to be right. This is an island, don’t forget. The police here were trained by the British.”

The Japanese cut the air with his hand. “We have to decide fast and get away. We need more than just twelve hours. They can come after us in naval vessels and catch us at sea. She knows everything, about the helicopter, the name of the ship.”

Mary declared indignantly, “How can you say that? I know nothing of the kind.”

“You heard everything said in the cabana,” Thompson pointed out, “and you won’t gain anything by lying about it.”

“All I could hear was a lot of profanity. Haven’t you got any sense at all? If you’re so worried about what I heard, change your plans! Use some other ship or bury the darn gold. Dig it up when everybody’s forgotten about it.”

“How do you know it’s gold?” Thompson asked quietly.

“All right, maybe I did catch a few words!”

The Japanese swung around. “Thompson,” he pleaded, “we don’t have time. There was a car behind us coming out of St. Albans. I have a bad feeling. Something will happen unless we finish this up fast and go. No one will come up here for days or weeks. I can use a rock and we can throw her off the cliff. It will seem that she fell.”

Shayne, ready to move, saw a glitter of light against the black building-paper on the floor behind the woman-a sliver of broken glass. She had another piece of the broken pane in her hands and was working it back and forth across the cord binding her wrists.

She said hurriedly, “I have a wild idea. All this is my own fault! I have a bump of curiosity as big as a hen’s egg, and it’s been getting me in trouble all my life. I had to sneak behind that cabana. I don’t know why.”

The Japanese growled under his breath. Shayne slipped along the wall to the unglazed window.

Mary went on, “I can see you’re working yourself up to kill me. I’ll tell you what you ought to do first. You ought to rape me! Don’t laugh! Why on earth would anybody believe I fell down a mountain? What would I be doing wandering around out here in the middle of the night? Dozens of people saw me go up to bed.”

“I don’t get it,” Thompson said in a puzzled voice. “Rape you?”

“Don’t you want to make it look convincing? You don’t want the police to think it has any connection with this stupid smuggling. What happened-I decided to go out for a walk and a couple of drunken natives picked me up. They brought me up here, and after they-abused me, they were so scared I’d have them arrested-”

The Japanese gave a grating laugh.

“All right,” Mary said desperately, “so I’m not a sexpot like some people. I’m a woman! I have quite a nice-looking figure-”

Thompson said thickly, “Cut her ankles loose.’”

“Thompson-”

“It’s got to be the real thing,” Thompson insisted. “They’ll examine the body. There was a case like it last year, an American college girl.”

“All this is, she’s playing for time. Can’t you see that?”

“Maybe. But nobody followed us, Yami. You were seeing lights that weren’t there. You’re still skittery because of what happened in Miami.”

“You weren’t there,” the Japanese said sullenly. “You didn’t see it. That Shayne-”

“I am partly playing for time,” Mary put in eagerly, continuing to work away with the sliver of glass. “But there’s something else. I’m”-she hesitated-“well, it’s ridiculous, but I’m a virgin. I’ve read all the books, but I can’t imagine what the sensation is really like. You’d be giving me my last wish, don’t you see? Don’t think you have to be gentle with me just because it’s the first time.”