Brett Halliday - Nice Fillies Finish Last

“Ten minutes. Five.”

He kissed her and began to move away. She held on.

“Mike, I’ll try to do what you told me, but it’s going to be so scarey. Even without any bullets in the gun. Everything’s changed. I was so blithe about it this afternoon-I thought all I had to do was show the gun to him and he’d start being sensible.” She let him go, her hand sliding along his arm. “Six hours ago I thought I could take care of myself. Up to that point I always had. One kiss from you, and I turn into the kind of female who throws herself at men to get them to take over her problems.”

Shayne smiled in the darkness. “We came pretty close there for a minute.”

“Didn’t we? It crossed my mind that there was really only one way to get the after-lovemaking look, and that was to make love. The next thing I knew I’d stopped thinking. You do everything so well. I knew this would be no exception.”

She pulled him down and kissed him lightly. “God, my life’s a mess.”

“I think it may be less of a mess after the dust settles,” he said. Reaching out, he turned on the bedside lamp. “How much of your lipstick do I have on?”

She looked him over critically. “Mike, none!”

Rolling over, she took out her lipstick and used it on herself, then kissed him carefully. The result satisfied her.

“Now you look like a satyr. You’ve been kissing a married woman in a motel, you scoundrel.”

She stood up, brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt “Well?” she said, pivoting. “Have we been using the Golden Crest Motel for immoral purposes, or not?”

“You look as elegant as always,” he said with a grin. “Even your hair doesn’t need combing. Be combing it anyway when we go out. We’ve suddenly realized how late it is, and we had to throw our clothes on in a rush.”

He pulled off his necktie and waited for her by the light switch. She touched his face quickly.

“You’re a comfort, Mike. I feel enormously better. I meant everything I said on the bed, but at the same time naturally I’m glad I didn’t succeed in taking advantage of you. I would have worried afterward. I don’t know anything about you! Except that you’re quite a guy.”

He snapped off the light, then took her hand and walked quickly to the outside stairs. The Yellow Cab hadn’t moved. Claire was laughing, taking rapid steps in her tight skirt, trying to comb her hair with her free hand.

“Whoa! Not so fast, darling. If I break a leg, we will be in trouble.”

“Damn it,” Shayne said between his teeth, but loudly enough to be heard in the gas station. “They’ll be sending out search parties in another few minutes.”

“Relax,” she told him laughingly. “Everything’s under control. Nobody’s that interested. Mike, baby, do something about camouflaging that lipstick.”

“Oh, God.”

When he reached the Cadillac he turned the fender mirror so he could see what had to be done. She passed him a Kleenex from the front seat, and he scrubbed at the reddish smears on his cheeks and chin.

“What kind of lipstick do you use, for God’s sake? This just makes it worse. I’ll hit the men’s room after we get back.” He added soberly, “We shouldn’t have done this, Claire.”

“Why, darling! Who suggested it, after all?”

He started the motor and came back fast. He cramped the wheel, bent forward angrily, and didn’t glance at the cab on the way out.

Shayne dropped Claire at the clubhouse entrance and put the Cadillac in its old place in the parking lot. When he came out of the men’s room after washing off the lipstick, the crowd was roaring and the public-address announcer was calling the order in which a field of trotters was rounding into the stretch. This was the eighth race, Shayne discovered from the board as he came out on the ramp. He was back just in time. He waited till the horses completed their stretch run, turned, and came jogging back toward the paddock, blowing. Then, as the crowd patterns changed, he began looking for Rourke’s head bandage.

“Mike, I was afraid you wouldn’t get here,” Rourke said, as Shayne came up to him. “I saw you and the Domaine dame take off in that big Cad. Sandra tells me Mrs. Domaine’s the one who put sleeping pills in my soup-and I didn’t want to drink that soup, you may recall,” he told the nurse. “You made me. Mike, what have you been doing? Putting on pressure?”

“I put on a little. How’s the twin-double investment?”

“Going according to plan, according to plan. Things are getting tense.”

The nurse was on the edge of her seat, clutching her bag. “I had no idea harness racing was so interesting, Mr. Shayne. The picture the horses make coming around that turn!”

“And especially when it’s your horse that’s out in front,” Rourke said.

“I see you’ve got binoculars,” Shayne said, taking them. “You had a ticket on all the horses in the eighth?”

“That’s what we decided. Thorne’s trotter took the sixth, very well behaved, didn’t work up a sweat. Paid us lucky bettors $54 for two. I had ten bucks on the nose, besides all the twin tickets on him. I cashed that $10 ticket for $270, and that gives us our capital.”

“Who do you mean by us?”

“Me and Sandra. You didn’t want in, and I’m not cutting you in when we’re three-quarters of the way home. I had Thorne’s trotter wheeled in the first half, and that brought us out of the seventh with sixteen live tickets.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it?” Miss Mallinson said.

“It’s not complicated at all!” Rourke insisted. “What the hell, I’ll explain it again. Thorne’s trotter was Number Three. We combined Number Three with every horse in the seventh-eight separate tickets at two bucks apiece. But that would only give us one live ticket at the end of the half, to turn in for our pick, in the eighth and ninth. So we bet that same combination sixteen times. Cost $256. What’s hard to understand about that? The Number Two horse won the seventh. All right, we had sixteen tickets that said Number Three and Number Two, and we traded those in for two sets of tickets combining My Treat, the Domaine horse in the ninth, with all the horses in the eighth. The Number One horse just won the eighth. So now we have two tickets that are still live-Number One in the eighth and Number Four in the ninth, and if Number Four comes in, baby, we’ve cracked the twin double!”

“I’ll believe it when it happens, Tim. You know it isn’t good for you to get excited.”

“One ticket is yours and one’s mine. How can you be so calm?”

Shayne swung the binoculars toward the clubhouse, thumbing the focusing knob as he hunted for the Domaines.

“Too bad I couldn’t bring you up to date before you spent all that money, Tim,” he remarked. “One or two things have changed.”

“I knew it!” Rourke exclaimed after a stunned silence. “My Treat isn’t going to win.”

“Let’s say I wouldn’t bet any money on it.”

“But I already have!”

The nurse stroked his shoulder, as though gentling an excited horse. “It’s only money, Tim.”

“Only!” he said, outraged.

Shayne picked up Larry Domaine’s table. The crowd shifted and he saw Claire, as lovely as ever, her face composed and self-assured, showing nothing but pleasure in her youth and good looks and good fortune. She didn’t look like the same person who had been on the bed with Shayne at the motel. Shayne’s arm was joggled and he lost her briefly. She was smiling at her husband when he picked her up again. Domaine turned his head. Shayne might have missed it if he had been half a dozen tables away, but through the binoculars there was no mistaking the fact that Domaine was angry. The painful little line over the bridge of his nose gave him away, and there was a sparkle in his mild pale eyes.