Brett Halliday: Stranger in Town

Shayne made all his muscles stay limp while his rear-seat companion fumbled for a wrist and found the pulse.

“Yeh. Sure. He’s okay.”

Neither of them said anything else. The car moved forward smoothly at moderate speed. Another half mile! Shayne had very little idea how long he had been unconscious-how long they had been driving. They were out of the city, he knew. There was country silence around them. They met an occasional car speeding in the opposite direction.

So it was all right if he just stayed alive for another half mile! After that it wouldn’t matter.

Why not?

Because he was slated to get it then in any event, of course. Whether he had returned to consciousness in the interim or not.

There was something particularly cold-blooded about that inference.

He was quite sure, now, that he didn’t wish to discuss the matter of a possible mistake in identity with this pair in the car. His instinct told him that the faintest show of returning consciousness would earn him nothing more than another sledge-hammer blow from one of Mule’s big fists.

And that he simply couldn’t take under the circumstances. Crammed down on the floor as he was with only his chest and shoulders resting on the cushion, he was in no condition at all to argue with the man whom he had heard called Mule.

The brakes went on evenly, and the driver’s pleasant voice announced, “This looks just about right. A nice long straight stretch where we can see a car coming from either way.”

The car came to a smooth stop. The door opened on the side away from Shayne and Mule grunted, “You stay put, Gene. I’ll handle this hunk of meat easy.” Shayne stayed a limp hunk of meat while huge hands caught his shoulders and dragged him roughly out of the car. He made his eyes stay shut without screwing up the lids while the strong beam of a flashlight sprayed over his face.

“Good enough,” said the driver approvingly. “Lucky for you you didn’t put any marks on his face back there that wouldn’t fit a hit-run. You remember how I told you we’d handle it?”

“Sure, Gene.” Mule’s voice was placating. “Long’s he’s out cold it’ll be easy. You back off, huh, and come fast? I hold him up here side thuh road like a rag-doll, see, an’ shove him out in front so the bumper hits him square. That’ll do it fine.”

As Mule spoke, he lifted Shayne’s limp body by the shoulders so his feet dangled inches above the ground. He held the detective’s hundred ninety pounds of dead weight like that for a moment as easily, Shayne realized, as a child might, indeed, hold a rag-doll aloft. Then he lowered him again to a crumpled heap as Gene warned him:

“We hold off if a car comes from either direction. Drag him back into the borrow-pit and wait till it’s clear.”

“Sure, Gene. I know. Just like you tol’ me.”

Shayne heard the car go into gear and start backing away. He stayed hunched down and relaxed while the receding headlights fanned out to encompass them on the edge of the pavement.

He doubted that Mule would have a gun. A man like Gene was unlikely to trust him with one. Not on a mission like this. Not when they couldn’t afford to have a bullet-wound found in a body to be left beside the road presumably the victim of a hit-run driver.

The receding lights were some distance away now. Crouched as he was at Mule’s feet, Shayne’s eyes were wide open and shrewdly calculating.

There was silence and darkness about them. They appeared to be on a deserted stretch of two-lane country highway, and the only headlights visible in either direction were those of Gene’s car as he backed away a sufficient distance to get up good speed before he reached them again.

He had stopped now. Some three hundred yards back, Shayne judged. And almost immediately the lights moved again. Coming forward this time. Slowly and then faster.

The swelling drone of the heavy motor became a roar in the night silence as the automobile rushed toward them at ever-increasing speed.

Mule stooped down to pick up the inert body at his feet. The oncoming headlights were bright now, rushing toward them at eighty feet per second.

Mule’s big hands gripped Shayne’s torso beneath the armpits from behind and lifted him easily.

As he came erect, Shayne put everything into one twisting motion that jerked the hands loose and brought him face to face with the big man.

This time his knee found the groin unerringly and Mule gasped and pitched forward off balance into the path of the speeding car.

Brakes screamed as Gene’s headlights lighted the roadside struggle, but it was far too late to avert the collision now.

The heavy car slewed violently, but Shayne’s shove from behind sent the big man directly in front of the bumper and there was a sickening, high-pitched scream of animal terror that was cut off abruptly by a bone-crushing thud of hurtling steel smashing into two hundred pounds of flesh and bone and cartilage.

Shayne whirled away at the instant of impact and leaped into the shallow borrow-pit, clambered up the opposite bank and through a barbed wire fence into an open field without looking back.

He ran swiftly and easily in the faint starlight, taking a course diagonally away from the road and back in the direction from which the car had come.

There was utter silence behind him now, but in his ears there still lingered the inhuman cry of agony that had been wrenched from a man’s throat as he died in the manner Shayne had been supposed to die.

Shayne ran steadily across the fields for fifteen minutes, slowing to a dogged trot after his first burst of speed, then to a walk when he reached another barbed wire fence that bordered a dirt road running approximately parallel to the highway behind him.

Dimly in the distance, some three or four miles, he judged, there was a faint glow on the skyline that marked the city lights of Brockton.

At least, he supposed it would be Brockton. He hadn’t noted the exact time when he stopped at the bar for a quiet drink before dinner, but it hadn’t been quite dark and he imagined it must have been close to seven o’clock.

It was fully dark now, and his watch told him it was a few minutes after eight. He had been in the bar not more than fifteen minutes, he thought, before the girl entered. So he couldn’t have been unconscious long enough to have been carried too far from Brockton. Not far enough, certainly, so he would be this close to another Central Florida town large enough to give off such a glow of light as was ahead.

He had terrific headache, and the neck muscles on the right were so numb and bruised that he was forced to carry his head slightly askew to make the pain bearable, but that was the extent of the physical damage he had suffered as far as he was able to tell.

There were farmhouses dotted along the dusty country road as he strode along toward the lights of the city, but he hesitated about going up to one of the houses and trying to arrange for a ride into town.

He was in no great hurry to get back, he told himself grimly. He had a lot of thinking to do before he reached his parked car again.

If it was still there in front of the bar where he had left it. And walking, any sort of physical exercise, was good for thinking.

There were so many unanswered questions. Who-how- why?

Who was the girl who fingered him in the bar? And the men named Gene and Mule?

Mule was a type he knew well, and who could be dismissed from real consideration. First, because he was obviously a half-witted brute who would happily kill on orders from Gene; and also because Shayne didn’t think Mule was likely to enter into the picture again-not after the sound Shayne had heard of the impact between the bumper of the speeding car and Mule’s body.