Brett Halliday - Guilty as Hell

The carburetor cleared and the motor took hold with a roar. Black smoke billowed from the exhaust. Shayne gave up the attempt to free Teddy and crawled in with him, pulling open his jacket. His hand fastened on the butt of the. 38 in the shoulder holster.

The gun resisted. The Plymouth wheeled over the opposite curb and moved away, accelerating. Shayne fought the. 38. Apparently the holster had a security spring to keep the gun from being drawn by anyone else but the wearer.

He changed his grip. The gun jumped into his hand and he fired without aiming.

The Plymouth was rounding the corner into 16th Street. Shayne’s snap shot blew out a rear tire. The back end careered through a ninety-degree arc and smashed against a utility pole.

Shayne fired again, aiming carefully, and drilled a hole through the safety glass in front of the driver. Whitey understood the message, and stayed where he was.

Shayne propped the gun on the large man’s buttocks, holding the front sight steady on the thug’s unnaturally white hair. He was in the same position when the police arrived. He still had the gun in an iron grip, and pressure on the trigger would have sent a slug through Whitey’s head. But Shayne was unconscious.

The casualties were taken to Jackson Memorial, across the river on 12th Avenue.

The doctor on emergency duty when Shayne was carried in was an old-timer named Hugo Baumgartner, who had worked on him before. In addition to a lacerated ear and various contusions, Shayne’s main problem was his smashed left wrist. Baumgartner set the bones. After studying his work in hastily developed X rays, he rebroke them and did it again. When Shayne fought his way out of the anesthetic, Baumgartner was tidying up after putting on a light fingertip-length cast.

He looked at the detective solemnly. His face had long ago congealed in this expression; Shayne had never seen him smile.

“They hit you with a car this time, I’m sorry to see.”

“Where’s Sparrow?”

“Upstairs asleep. Kind of funny thing happened. Want to hear it?”

“I need a laugh.”

“He got out of bed when the nurse wasn’t looking. He didn’t know it was a hospital bed. He broke an ankle. Kind of complicated. His right leg’s in traction.”

“Yeah, that’s funny,” Shayne agreed, deadpan.

“I thought so. His speech and vision are O.K., but we have to wait till tomorrow to see about brain damage from the beating. Of course somebody who knows Sparrow tells me not to worry-you couldn’t tell the difference. Mike, I didn’t want to put on the final before I conferred with you. You’ve got a tricky fracture. If you want to regain the use of that wrist you have to be careful with it.”

“I’m always careful.”

“Yes-s,” Baumgartner said skeptically. “I know that telling a bank clerk to be careful isn’t the same thing as telling Mike Shayne to be careful. I was wondering. How would you like the same kind of cast I gave you the last time? As I remember, I put a sash-weight in the plaster and you broke a guy’s jaw with it.”

“Yeah,” Shayne said faintly; the pain in his wrist was very bad.

The doctor went on, “Not that you have to worry about catching the three guys who jumped you. They’re caught. I’ve got two of them here, and they won’t go anywhere under their own power for a few days. I had to go to the saw to get the brass knuckles off without taking the boy’s fingers. The third one’s in jail. He was driving a stolen car, to begin with.”

He mixed plaster as he talked. “I gave you a shot and you’ll be with us at least till tomorrow noon. We want to do a set of spine X rays to see if you’ve got any nerve injury. And after that you’re under orders to stay off your feet for a full twenty-four hours. Will you do that, Mike?”

He waited, but the detective didn’t answer.

“You don’t seem to be enunciating too well, so I’ll answer my own question. No, you won’t, not if you’re on a case, and I assume you are. So the first thing we’re going to do is build an armature around the wrist and pack it with foam rubber. Anchor it on both sides of the break.”

He worked in silence for a time. Shayne, already half asleep, no longer felt any pain. When Baumgartner spoke again, the words drifted down to him from a great distance.

“I was going to use a sash weight again, but here’s an idea. How about the brass knuckles? They’re lightweight. They’re lethal. I sawed them in two, and I’ll point one half one way and the other half the other. Under a sixteenth of an inch of plaster you’ll have a dangerous left hand. You can’t use your fingers, so why don’t I close the cast at the end and put on a hook? And a scalpel, Mike. I’ll lay it on top and slap on enough plaster to hold it. Bang it against something and you’ll have yourself an edged weapon. This cast is going down in the annals of medical science.”

He was still working when Shayne fell asleep.

It was daylight when Shayne awoke. He tried to lift his left arm to look at his watch. He thought at first someone had strapped that hand to the bed. Then the pain hit him and he blacked out briefly. When he came to, he raised his head from the pillow and looked around.

“And the top of the morning to you, too,” Sparrow said sourly from the next bed.

Shayne rolled over. The mountainous private detective was sitting up, his right leg attached to a rig that was attached to a hook in the ceiling. His head was swathed in bandages. Nothing showed but his little eyes, a nose with a large scab on it, and a long cigar.

“A simple little follow job,” he commented, the cigar still in his mouth. “A hundred-and-ten-pound blonde. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“You’ll get combat pay,” Shayne grated. “Medical expenses plus five bills. How did it happen?”

“Why, that sexy blonde in the low dress suckered me, Mike. That’s what happened. Before she came out of Larue’s, she did some phoning. Having no bug on the line, I can’t quote it to you, but the gist I think I can give you.” He tapped cigar ashes into a vase of cut flowers on the table between the beds. “She called a certain small-time rat named Whitey Grabowski.”

“The name’s familiar.”

“She told him to pick up a couple of pugs and meet her in the park across from Woodlawn. Then she got in a cab and rode around till they got themselves organized. When she paid off the cab at that park, something told me. But it was either follow her or lose her, and you told me not to lose her.”

“What was wrong with your gun?”

“They hit me before I could get it out. A cop was telling me this morning about finding me in the phone booth, but I don’t remember putting in that call to you, Mike. I didn’t even know I knew your number without looking it up, and I sure as hell didn’t look it up. I think they dialed it for me and left me just about three percent conscious. You were the one they were mainly after.”

“Somebody mentioned the name Jake. Does that mean anything?”

“Jake Fitch! When you come right down to it, this ain’t a too-big town. Whitey and Jake Fitch, they’re a twosome. They take these kinds of assignments. Low-level stuff.” He gave a hoarse laugh. “The one thing I regret, I wasn’t awake to see it. They tell me you couldn’t get in the phone booth so you pushed it over.”

“You ought to lose a little weight, Teddy.”

“Don’t I know it. And look at that.” He pointed to a two-pound box of chocolates beside the flowers. “My nutty girl friend. Skinny as a pencil, and she eats more than I do.”

Shayne reached for the button to call the nurse. She came in before he pressed it, a dark, pretty girl in the usual semitransparent uniform.