Brett Halliday - Violence Is Golden

Ward edged behind one of the men with the tommy guns and looked at Shayne. Again Shayne shook his head.

Nikko, without the beard and the dark glasses, proved to be a man of about thirty, with bronzed skin and dark, curly hair. In a jovial mood, he filled the glasses with a colorless liquor and handed them around, making a point of skipping Ward. They toasted each other and drank.

While the crewmen began manhandling the luggage containers out of the hydrofoil, Shayne moved to a spot where he wouldn’t be observed and smoothed out the slip of paper Naomi Savage had pressed into his hand.

It said: “Mike, she told Sanchez to kill you.”

Shayne wadded it up and flipped it into the sea. Again there was a swift reshuffling of friends and enemies. Christa had given Sanchez his orders in Portuguese. But could Shayne be sure that Naomi was telling the truth?

Nikko shouted angrily. His men had opened several suitcases pulled at random from each luggage container. Shayne lumbered toward him, loosening his shoulders. “Anything wrong?”

“Indeed something is wrong. Where are the gold bars?”

“How should I know, for Christ’s sake? I thought it was some nutty political thing, the way everybody was shouting and giving away pamphlets. Don’t look at me! I’m getting a thousand bucks and some free transportation. I needed the transportation more than the cash.”

“Moss,” Nikko said.

“Hey? What’s bothering you, buddy?”

“Wait a minute,” Shayne said suddenly. “Where was this gold? In one of these luggage things?”

One of the sailors pulled out another piece of luggage and ripped it open with a knife. Plunging both hands into the gash, he pulled out a double handful of women’s underclothing and scattered it about the deck.

“Nothing.”

Shayne went on, “There was an explosion in one of the luggage compartments right after we left. Remember that, Moss? And then later they did some tricky flying when they came in over the coast. They rocked the plane-back and forth. And I’ll be damned if I don’t think-look out!”

Jaime Sanchez, the Brazilian, snatched up the knife the sailor had put down and took two dancing steps across the deck, screaming in Portuguese. But he was confused about his orders. Instead of going for Shayne, who had his forty-five out and was ready for him, he drove his knife at Ward’s stomach.

Shayne shot him in the head.

The knife passed under the Negro’s arm. Momentum carried Sanchez another step. He struck the rail and went overboard.

The action was over in an instant. Shayne came around with the recoil, but Nikko was equally fast. His tommy gun was already up, covering Shayne. Another tommy gun was pointed at Shayne from behind.

“Goofed up on something,” Shayne said in disgust. “I thought so. Now, is anybody going to tell me what this is all about?”

Nikko stepped closer and took the forty-five. Another sailor disarmed Ward. “Get inside,” Nikko said.

Moss said amiably, “Anything I can do for anybody?”

“Get inside,” Nikko repeated. “All of you.”

Herded by tommy guns, the three men from the plane were driven into the salon.

Ward remarked casually, “Any of those needles left, Mike?”

Nikko snapped, “No talking! I want three separate stories.”

He gave quick orders. Moss was locked in the head. Ward, with an armed sailor, was put in a bedroom. Shayne remained in the main salon with Nikko and another of his men. The room was furnished like a movie set, with a white llama-skin carpet, a Picasso, a well-stocked bar.

Slinging his tommy gun, Nikko touched Shayne in several places until he located his wallet. He flipped through the identification cards. He muttered under his breath and slammed the wallet down on a glass-topped table.

“Private detective. Private detective! And now I want to know what happened on the plane. No lies! No lies, Mr. Shayne!”

Breathing hard, he filled a small cup with coffee from a silver urn.

“No lies,” he repeated. “Tell me the truth about the gold and we may not kill you.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t know a Goddamn thing,” Shayne said, dropping onto the arm of an upholstered chair. “I had a fight with Thompson outside the St. Albans casino. He lost. In fact, he’s dead. That left the operation one man short. I didn’t want to hang around and stand trial for manslaughter. The lady asked me if I could use a thousand bucks.”

“What lady?”

“Let’s not quibble about things you already know,” Shayne said impatiently. “You’ll want to know why I was in St. Albans. I was tailing Moss. I picked up a tip that he was involved in that gold job at LaGuardia. That puts me at the wrong end of the gun, I realize, but don’t tell your boy to blast me yet. There really was an explosion on the plane. You’ll want to check that with your own people, or maybe you won’t, I don’t know. Somebody’s trying to pull a switch here. Until you find out who it is, it might be a good idea to watch your step. The plan was-am I going too fast for you?”

“Go faster. The plan was-”

“To blow the door, then tip the airplane and dump the container where they could find it later. So I have something to sell you. I know exactly where it went in, give or take a couple of hundred yards. It’s between a wooded point and the mouth of a river. In a certain light, you might be able to spot it from the air.”

Nikko muddled his coffee vigorously with a little spoon. “Who was flying the plane?”

“Joe Lassiter. Pan American fired him for drinking and gambling and getting in trouble with too many women. All he had to do was heel over hard at a certain time. He’d do it for whiskey money, without asking questions.”

Nikko considered, his handsome dark face screwed up uncomfortably. Suddenly he cocked his head.

“Helicopter!”

He snapped a command to the sailor and ran on deck. The other sailors collected quickly and began pulling the luggage containers undercover. When the helicopter came over, the deck was empty.

Shayne, in the salon, indicated by gestures that he wanted a drink. The sailor warned him away from the bar with a shake of his head. Shayne waited a moment. Without asking permission, he helped himself to coffee.

The helicopter went over, hesitated, and came back. It was possible, though not likely, that Tim Rourke, at Maiquetia airport, had persuaded the Venezuelan police to send this helicopter, but Rourke had no way of knowing about Adam’s yacht or that it had anything to do with the DC-8’s unscheduled landing in the oilfields. And yet it was clear that the people in the helicopter were curious about the Paladin. As the yacht changed course, the helicopter followed, hanging several hundred feet above the stern, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.

Shayne began wandering about the room, trying to think of some way to call attention to the fact that the Paladin had prisoners aboard. Seeing his wallet on the table where Nikko had dropped it, an idea hit him. Ward’s remark about the needles had been picking at the edge of his consciousness, but Clancy had given him only two and he had used them both. As he arranged the identification cards that Nikko had scattered, his mind jumped back thirty-six hours.

Two nights before, an unknown person had planted a square of blotting paper in LeFevre’s wallet, with the obvious aim of implicating Shayne in a hallucination murder. To complete the picture, to make it totally convincing to the police, there also ought to be-

He ruffled quickly through the cards without finding anything. He checked the other compartments in the wallet: nothing. Finally, ready to conclude that the idea was more wishful then realistic, he pulled his Florida driver’s license out of its transparent plastic cover. A scrap of blotting paper fluttered to the floor.