Brett Halliday - Armed… Dangerous…

“If you want to stop it,” Shayne said evenly, “all you have to do is change the law.”

“Mike, I know you think doctors ought to handle the problem instead of cops, and it could be I agree with you. But that’s not in the cards right now and you know it. Personally I don’t like the idea of these creeps thinking they can make monkeys out of the New York police. My God, if anything went wrong no cop anywhere could show his face in public for weeks.”

Shayne thought about it while he finished his drink, balancing inevitable dangers against possible results. It was wild and improbable; common sense told him that the odds against coming to grips with the shadowy banker were very long. But Shayne had always done his best work against the odds, and he found himself calculating how much luck he would need to bring it off.

“I just hope they don’t ask me the way to the Empire State Building,” he said, and reached for the phone. “I’ll see if Tim Rourke can talk his paper into giving him a few days off on speculation. He’s a born ham. Nothing he’d like better than hitting himself in the face with a cackle bladder.”

In the washroom in the eerie Victorian house on Staten Island, Shayne unfastened the wire from his battery case after reporting in to Inspector Power, opened the window and tacked the wire to the outer sill. Then he washed his face in rusty water. Dying his hair and eyebrows had changed his appearance more than he had thought possible. Everything had gone as Power had predicted until the moment when Szigetti said he thought he had seen Shayne somewhere.

Quickly Shayne reviewed what he knew about Szigetti. Power had had little information about the man. His arrest record was short and unimportant. He had been a Marine for four years. He had been court-martialed for selling supplies but acquitted for lack of evidence. His discharge had been honorable.

A transistor radio, tuned to a disc-jockey program, was playing when Shayne entered the living room. Irene danced toward him with thin arms extended. He embraced her. Without a partner, her entire skinny body had been in active motion, but this was not Shayne’s style of dancing at all.

“You’re creaky, Dad,” she said.

Shayne let her go with a disgusted wave. “Where do they keep the liquor?”

She tried to hold him. “I didn’t mean anything. I like to dance that cornball way. It’s a change.”

“I want a drink. Where’s Billy? He’ll dance with you.”

“He had to go back on guard. And who’s going to drive in here in the middle of the night? I mean, it’s nuts.”

“There you are,” Shayne said, spotting a bottle. “I don’t suppose we have ice.”

“Sure we have ice.”

She went to the kitchen. Shayne emptied somebody else’s watery drink out of a jelly glass and filled it from a bottle of blended rye. Irene came back with a handful of ice cubes.

“Where did Michele find you, anyway?” she said, putting one in his glass. “I really thought we were raided when you walked in.”

“I like to see a girl put up a fight,” Shayne said irritably.

She laughed. “It only took five of us to slow you down. You know what I was thinking when I had you around the waist?”

“Don’t tell me.”

She was standing close to him, drinking. She was older than he had thought at first-twenty, perhaps. Her torn blouse was held together with a straight pin. There was a prominent horizontal bone at the top of her ribcage. Her skinniness was charged with vitality, like a naked wire. Her hair was long and messy, and not much face showed. From across the room she had merely looked eccentric, but at a distance of less than a foot she was an arresting and unsettling girl. She idly slid her fingertips inside the waistband of his pants and gave him a small tug.

“Later?” she said.

“Who knows?”

“Not that it matters,” she said, “except to me, but I had an off-Broadway part last year. Just a walk-on. You didn’t see it-it only lasted nineteen performances. That’s the way I look at this-a part. But God, I’m nervous.”

She touched the outside of his jacket, feeling the hard bulge of his. 45. “I had a vague suspicion.”

Across the room, Michele was talking to Szigetti, her eyes on Shayne. Brownie was slumped in a leather-covered Morris chair, his dark face as uncommunicative as a wall. All were holding drinks. Shayne walked over to Michele and asked if there were any cigarettes.

“You have some, Ziggy,” she said.

He unwillingly offered his pack to Shayne. “I was just saying,” he said. “Basically the idea is good, but I got a couple of minor suggestions. The one thing I don’t want to touch is that act of Irene’s. The big black buck and the Greenwich Village beatnik. That’s going over big.”

Shayne looked down bleakly. “Do you and Brownie get the same cut?”

Szigetti’s eyes jumped away from Shayne, not quite reaching the Negro, who regarded them impassively.

“As far as that goes.”

“Then let’s have less of this color crap,” Shayne said.

Szigetti looked at Michele for support. “What did I say wrong?” he asked on a high note.

“We change the subject,” she said firmly. “I have told Frank about your shooting. Perhaps you will show him the gallery.”

“Well,” Szigetti said grudgingly, “I’ve been sopping up booze all day. I could be a little off.”

He finished his drink and started for the kitchen, saying carelessly, “Brownie, let’s do some shooting.”

Without change of expression, the big Negro followed. Only Irene stayed upstairs.

“Exhibitionist,” she said with a look at Szigetti’s back.

The others, waving cobwebs out of their eyes, went single file down a narrow flight of steps to the basement. It was a spooky place, lit only by two dim bulbs. Rust had eaten holes in the furnace, but the bin beyond was still half-filled with dusty coal.

Szigetti faced into the shadows. “What’s the matter with that light down there? See if it’s loose or what, will you, Brownie?”

Brownie sloped off, keeping his head low to avoid the obstructions on the ceiling. A bright light came on, showing a pocked target nailed to a plywood panel. The distance, Shayne judged, was about twenty-five yards.

“Be careful,” Michele told Szigetti.

He squinted at the target, holding a short-barreled. 38 loosely at his side. “I won’t plug anybody.” He risked a quick look at Shayne. “They knew how to build houses in the old days. I had Billy stand halfway to the road while I did some shooting, and he thought it was crickets, for Christ’s sake.”

Brownie called, “OK?”

“OK.”

Brownie was concealed from view behind a hot-water tank. Suddenly a beer can flew into the light. Szigetti fired, sending the can spinning back with a clank against the masonry wall.

“You bastard,” he said, laughing. “You almost tricked me that time.”

Suddenly a rat scuttled across the concrete floor, heading straight at them. Michele screamed and seized Shayne’s arm. A shot from Szigetti’s. 38 checked the rat briefly, knocking it off stride, but it kept coming. Michele tightened her grip convulsively and went on screaming as the rat scuttled up to her feet. It had been put together out of brown cloth and darning thread, and stuffed with cotton. At close range it didn’t look much like a rat. Some of the cotton stuck out through the rip made by the bullet.

“Ziggy, you monster,” she said, her hand to her breast.

“And I don’t know what angle it’s coming from,” Szigetti said, pleased. “That’s the beauty of it. Depends on what string he pulls.”

While he was talking, a cardboard head poked out abruptly from behind the water tank, disappearing the same instant that Szigetti fired.