Brett Halliday - Mermaid on the Rocks

A door slammed. An instant later a car got away to a wheel-spinning start on the crushed clamshell driveway.

Michael Shayne, sleeping heavily, heard these noises, and as they entered his dream they became transformed into something sinister and ominous. He stirred. Suddenly he was trying to escape on foot through loose clamshells from a squadron of armored helicopters, hovering above him at treetop level, adjusting their speed to his. He threw his head from side to side, weaving evasively while fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets sliced the air around him.

When the back of his head, where he had been slugged in the tree house, struck the unpadded arm of the sofa, the explosion of pain blew him to his feet. At first he was sure he had been hit by one of the gunners in the helicopters, and he was surprised to find himself alive, though tottering, staring blindly at double bullet holes in a picture window. Beyond the window, sunlight danced on water. His arms hung helplessly at his sides.

With the pain still vibrating in his head, he picked up the coffee cup. His lips came back in a snarl and he threw it at the great window. The window came down with a crash, and the noise helped clear his head.

Picking up the cognac bottle as he passed, he lurched onto the terrace. The harsh morning sun hit him like a blow from a plank. His brain could only hold one thought at a time. To get back to Miami he needed a helicopter. To get to the heliport he needed a car. He peered down the driveway.

Its straightness and blinding whiteness nearly hypnotized him.

He fumbled the cork out of the bottle and raised the cognac to his lips. A long swallow helped get him off the terrace and back in the house, mumbling under his breath, “Goose Key heliport, don’t know the number.” He himself knew what he was saying, and he hoped he could make the operator understand.

He knocked the phone over and fumbled at the dial. On the second try he managed to get the “O” all the way around. He picked up the phone and listened, but heard nothing except absolute silence, no hum, no dial tone. He gave the phone a shake, but there was still no response. The wires had been cut. He threw it through the broken front window.

He had his next drink in the open doorway of the empty two-car garage, the one after that in the boathouse. He was out of breath, though he had taken a route giving him the maximum number of objects to lean against. He went to sleep again briefly as he studied the fiberglass sports fisherman. It needed some work to put it back in running condition, but so did he, Shayne thought wryly, so did he.

He climbed into the pilot room and groped about until he found a flashlight. He pulled off the heavy plate covering the twin engines. They had quit on him the night before as soon as they tried to run on air instead of the usual mixture of air and gasoline. Shayne followed the gas line until he came to an open coupling. He forced the flexible copper line into feed-in position, slid the nut into place and tightened it with his fingers. He didn’t waste time looking for a wrench. He wasn’t going far.

The engines hawked, hesitated, then took hold as the gas reached them. Again Shayne went to sleep. His chin jolted against his chest, and the sudden sharp rush of pain brought him back. He engaged the gears and put the throttle all the way down.

The powerful boat surged backward. There was a splintering crash, and it broke through the door into open water.

He came about. Leaving the cove, he circled the southernmost point and headed toward the bridges and causeways of the Overseas Highway. He woke up from another heavy sleep a little later and saw the tumbledown dock at the end of the track where he had left the Volkswagen. He veered to the right, shut off the power and ran aground. The shock carried him out of the wheel room and over the forward deck to the pebbly beach.

He struck off toward the Volkswagen, resisting the impulse to lie down on the pebbles and go to sleep, letting the three remaining Tuttle heirs continue the elimination until only one was left. He saw the Volkswagen. He was glad he had had the foresight to point its stubby nose in the right direction. He fell into it and it seemed to start by itself. He had to hold the steering wheel hard with both hands to keep it in the ruts. It was easier to control on the concrete highway. Shayne himself, however, wavered between being sixty percent asleep and sixty percent awake. The even whine of the motor soothed him. He began shaking his head from one side to the other. Presently the little car picked it up, seeming to shake its blunt front end in the same rhythm.

He leaned into a long sweeping curve on the first causeway. The wheel increased its resistance, and in spite of anything Shayne could do, the little car drifted over the center line. He gave his head a sharp deliberate shake. The wheel’s resistance collapsed and the Volkswagen came back too far, scraping the retaining cable.

Shayne’s common sense took over. He had been hurrying, but he was still too groggy to be driving this fast. He wouldn’t get there any sooner by way of the sea.

The moment he touched the brakes he set off a series of quick jolting events. Apparently some of the strange sensations he had been experiencing had been caused by something more serious than the sleeping pills Eda Lou had put in his coffee.

A rear wheel rolled past him. The little car swung into the lefthand lane, knocked down two retaining posts and swung all the way around, ending up headed the wrong way with the wheelless rear axle on the heavy rock fill at the extreme edge of the causeway.

The door burst open as Shayne hit it, but the Volkswagen was halted an instant later by the retaining cable. The detective sprawled half in and half out of the car, fully awake at last.

Three hours later, a scowling Michael Shayne strode into the Dade County Courthouse on West Flagler Street, near North Miami Avenue.

The first car to come past after Shayne’s Volkswagen lost a wheel was a big semi-trailer, running empty. The driver blinked his directional signals but didn’t stop. The next car stopped. It was driven by a hard-bitten, red-faced trooper who had been operating in Southern Florida for only two months, having learned his trade as a deputy sheriff in farming country in central Mississippi.

He had never heard the name Michael Shayne. He had a strong prejudice against big-city private detectives. Shayne’s makeshift head bandage aroused his suspicions. Detecting the odor of brandy, he forced Shayne to walk a straight line. By this time Shayne was coldly furious. He knew the folly of antagonizing this kind of low-level official, and by biting down hard he suppressed any remarks he would ordinarily have made. His anger took care of the last of his vertigo. He walked the line without wavering.

After that the trooper wanted to know what he was doing in a Volkswagen registered in someone else’s name. Shayne told him evenly that it was a stolen car, and to take him in. The Marathon Chief of Police recognized him at once, and after Shayne explained the nature of his accident, ordered the trooper to drive him to the heliport.

The trooper did so in silence, fuming. Reaching the heliport, Shayne found that Blakey, his pilot, was no longer waiting. He put in an angry phone call to Miami. Blakey, he was told, had brought in a passenger and was on his way back to Goose Key. The helicopter settled down on the strip as Shayne hung up.

He went out to meet it.

“What the hell?” he demanded, throwing the door open. “I told you to wait.”

“Sure, Mike,” the pilot said. “Didn’t you-” One look at Shayne’s face gave him his answer. “Uh-oh. You didn’t.”