Brett Halliday - Violence Is Golden

“You?”

“Quite right. I needed to find out who stole a million and a half dollars from me last summer, and who has been betraying me to Interpol. You found out for me.”

“Is that why you had LeFevre killed?”

“Did I do that? I don’t want to take the credit for everything. Let’s just say that I succeeded, by whatever means, in getting you out of Miami and aboard the plane. And I must say you lived up to my expectations, in every way but one. You didn’t locate the gold.”

“It’s somewhere on this boat.”

Adam repeated flatly, “Somewhere on this boat. The gold from last summer?”

“Yeah. In the bilge, probably. You didn’t hear what Nikko was telling me. LeFevre made the arrangements and supplied the props. Mary Ocain and George Savage were the ones who handled the actual switch and Nikko took care of the transportation.”

“Did you say Mary Ocain?”

“That’s right. She’s like you, she’s tired of living in the ordinary way. I just checked her passport. It has visas for all the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Nobody’s more invisible in Europe or the Middle East in the summer than an American schoolteacher with a camera. They’re part of the scenery.”

“Do you know for a fact that the Paladin-”

“I suppose you checked the canal records. LeFevre invested some money and took care of that. Since then, the boat’s been stuck in the Mediterranean. But they were in no hurry to get rid of the gold. They’d have to feed it into the market a little at a time.”

“I’ve been watching for it, and it hasn’t showed up. But this is really a bit nervy! Using my own yacht! So you’ve carried out your full assignment, after all. Magnificent. It’s been a pleasure watching you work. I can say that now that it’s over. I’m nearly fifty, you know. A little excitement, properly controlled, slows down the aging process. And now,” he said, his voice hardening, “we come to the question of your fee.”

Shayne said quickly, “The excitement isn’t over yet. Look out the window.”

The boat swerved, overcorrected, and came back too far. The helicopter, clacking loudly, had overtaken them again and was hovering directly overhead. One of the sailors yelled exuberantly. The Paladin was moving at maximum speed, executing maneuvers that would have been excessive in a twenty-foot speedboat.

Holding Shayne’s eyes, Adam came slowly to his feet. Shayne was studying his face. Under the artificial pigment, he could see the added age lines. The cheeks had been padded.

Adam raised the gun. “I think I’ll say goodbye now, Shayne.”

Shayne dived, flipping the cognac glass with a quick underhand snap. The gun was silent. Adam swore viciously. But he adjusted quickly, and as Shayne came to his feet, charging, he was met with a hard slap of the gun barrel.

That delayed him long enough for Adam to switch guns. He flipped open the safety flap and backed away, his face working.

The boat swerved violently, nearly sending him off his feet. He fired a quick burst. Through the big portside window, Shayne saw that they were heading at full speed for a crowded bathing beach.

Another sailor dashed past the window, waving his arms like a happy madman. The helmsman threw the wheel over hard and the bottom of the boat scraped on sand.

In the salon, bottles crashed from the shelves and Adam made a complete pivot and slammed back against the wall. Shayne was on one knee, surrounded by records that had cascaded out of the cabinet below the record player. He scooped up several of these and sailed them at Adam. If the boat held steady on its course for only a few seconds, he knew that a burst from the submachine gun would catch him at the door. He kept throwing, bottles, records, a small chair.

The Paladin was now headed for a long jetty at the entrance to a small harbor. The helicopter noise was overpowering.

Something crashed through the big window behind Adam. It gave Shayne another instant. The drawer had shot out of the big table. Loose forty-five rounds were rolling about the floor. Shayne skidded and fell. A hammering burst from Adam’s gun went into the wall. Shayne lunged for the empty submachine gun. He had never moved faster. Snatching it up, he slammed a round into the chamber and fired.

The bullet went into Adam’s left shoulder. The helmsman, after a series of crazy swings, finally brought the hallucination to an end by smashing the Paladin into the jetty at full speed.

There was an explosion. Shayne, deafened, reeling, saw Adam fly backward. Then a beam came down. Shayne blacked out briefly.

His return to consciousness was slow and painful, a difficult climb up a steep slope in total darkness. He smelled smoke. The helicopter rotor seemed to be flailing at him. The facing wall was gone. Uniformed men with rifles were running along the jetty. He saw Adam crawl along the littered deck, his left arm hanging limp. Something was wrong with one leg.

A man swarmed down a cable dangling from the helicopter. He slung Adam onto a T bar. Adam yelled, pointing at Shayne in the wreckage of the deckhouse.

“Kill him!”

Shayne was pinned to the white rug by the heavy beam. One of the soldiers leaped aboard, unslinging his rifle. Adam’s man picked up a submachine gun, checked quickly with Adam, and took careful aim at Shayne. Nothing happened, and after working the slide desperately, he threw the gun down.

Now there were a half dozen Venezuelans on board. Adam tried to get off the T bar, but at that moment the helicopter swooped up and away.

The soldier with the rifle was too confused to fire. Shayne’s last glimpse of Adam was a blackened face contorted with fury. Then the winch in the helicopter whined insanely and the two men were hoisted aboard.

No one thought of lifting the beam until Tim Rourke and the others arrived from Maiquetia. By that time Shayne was unconscious again.

A bright light burned through his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, the light dispersed and changed into the white walls of a hospital room. His head and left arm were bandaged. A tube connected his right arm with a bottle hanging beside the bed.

Rourke swam into view. “I tried to persuade them to add cognac to the mixture, Mike, but it’s against the rules.”

“What about the chopper?” Shayne said weakly.

“Far, far away. You know you hit about twenty-five yards from a gendarmerie barracks? Let’s say everybody was a little taken aback, in Spanish. By the time I heard about the helicopter, it was too late to do anything. We’ve alerted the main airfields, but nobody thinks there’s much chance. Do you feel well enough to talk? Painter’s here.”

“If Painter’s here, I don’t feel well enough to talk.”

“I thought you might say that. There’s also a Treasury guy named Carmody. What do I tell him? That you’ll give him a buzz as soon as you feel better?”

Shayne hitched up in bed.

“Easy,” Rourke said.

“Do they have a guard on the yacht?”

“All taken care of. It went down in five feet of water, but the tide’s out now so it’s just sitting there. If you’re thinking about the gold that was under the floorboards-”

“That’s the gold I’m thinking about.”

“The hull split open and it spilled out. When the water went down, there it was, giving off a nice soft glow.”

“Get the doctor in here. I want this thing out of my arm.”

Ten minutes later, a hard-eyed Michael Shayne was sitting up in bed, supported by three pillows, confronting a tough little Irishman named Hugh Carmody. Shayne had insisted on calling a man he knew in Washington to verify Carmody’s credentials. Painter, too, was present. The dapper little chief of Miami Beach detectives gave Shayne a hostile look when he came in.