Brett Halliday - Armed… Dangerous…

“You’re in bad shape, pal,” Shayne observed as the smaller man swayed and reached for the doorway.

“I’ll make it,” Szigetti declared thickly, “Don’t anybody go anyplace. Just get a drink.”

“All the bottles are empty,” Michele put in quickly. “You go back to bed, Ziggy. We handle this.”

Szigetti glared at everyone in turn, ending with Brownie. “And as for you, my shiny black friend-”

Compared to some of his earlier remarks this was nothing, but the Negro’s composure finally snapped. He brought the shotgun barrels around and cracked Szigetti hard above the ear. Szigetti rocked. The glint in his eyes went out. Shayne caught him.

“Put him to bed, Billy. Anywhere.”

Billy backed into the house with the unconscious gunman. Shayne jerked his head toward the lawn.

“Want me to cut out, Michele?” Brownie said.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “Stay here and keep the gun ready.”

She followed Shayne down the steps.

“Now take it easy,” he told her when they were out of hearing distance of the porch. “I tried to tell Irene, but she had other things she wanted to do besides listen. I had a last-minute errand. Remember those rocks I’ve been carrying around? I thought I better get rid of them.”

“Get rid of them how?”

“What do you want me to do, draw a treasure map? I like you, baby. In fact I’m beginning to swing for you in a big way. But this is going to be my secret.”

“Are you trying to tell me you buried them? You did nothing of the kind.”

He said patiently, “Those stones are hot. If I get picked up tomorrow and the cops find anything like that on me I’ll get the full treatment, and no last-minute reprieve.”

She continued to look puzzled. “You left them in Grand Central with the money.”

“I didn’t leave anything in Grand Central,” he said, still patient, “except an empty dispatch case. I know you think everybody ought to trust you, but look at it my way for a minute. A Grand Central locker, fine. Tomorrow, on the way to the plane, if there is any plane, all I have to do is detour a few blocks and pick it up.”

“Of course there is a plane!”

“All right, there’s a plane and we’ll both be on it. So why did you get out of the car in front of Grand Central and follow me?”

“I was afraid,” she said simply. “I did not think you saw me.”

“You stick out in a crowd, baby. The back of my neck began to itch, and when that happens I always stop and think. These are nice friendly people you’ve got here, but there’s one thing about them-they’re all thieves. I’ll be outnumbered tomorrow. I don’t want to be jumped for that key. I couldn’t carry it anyway, the cops would just match numbers and open the box. I’d have to stash it, so why not stash the dough and the stones instead? I brought it all back in the sack with the liquor.”

“I think I do not believe you,” she said with a sign of uncertainty. “Why climb out on the roof instead of just walking out by the back door?”

“I had the bureau in front of the door. Billy wanted to have a cigarette with me. I didn’t want to have a cigarette with Billy.” He took out the locker key and dangled it in front of her eyes. “The only way I can get in that locker without a key is to go to the office and describe my property. One cowhide dispatch case filled with cash, so much in hundreds, so much in fifties. Four unset diamonds in tissue paper. They used to belong to a character who got slapped on the head last night with a. 45. Just before an ex-cop took two slugs in the body.”

He went into a windup and sent the key spinning off into a tangle of alder and briers. He listened, but didn’t hear it come down.

“It may be hanging from a twig where I can pick it up in the morning,” he said. “And maybe not, too.”

“I am sorry, darling,” she said in a small voice. “This means we must come back here tomorrow?”

“If we’re rushed we can leave it. It’s in a safe place.”

She gave a low laugh. “Why I was so angry was because of Irene. You are mine, dear, for the present. Please remember that.”

He looked down at her for a moment. Then they turned and walked back to the house, arms touching.

The Sanitation truck was scheduled to leave the police warehouse at ten-thirty. Because of the rechecking made necessary by the death of Herman Kraus, its departure was held up for an hour and three quarters.

Power had not been able to warn Shayne of the delay. The truck was due at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue at eleven-ten. To be safe, Shayne’s group had been in place fifteen minutes earlier. Except for Shayne himself, they became more and more conspicuous as the minutes passed. As for Shayne, he was wearing the uniform of the Sanitation Department, a little too tight, with an inspector’s badge on his cap. He stood on the corner of Twenty-sixth with a clipboard, observing the traffic. He had a paper bag under one arm, containing, among other things, a. 45 automatic. Occasionally, when a bus or a larger-than-usual truck went by on its way uptown, he made a small mark on a ruled pad that was clipped to the board. In the two hours he stood there, moving south to the corner of Twenty-fifth from time to time to break the strain, only one person paid any attention to him. This was a Puerto Rican boy, who watched for a time and then asked what he was doing.

“Making a survey,” Shayne growled. “Beat it.” Szigetti was in a bar on the other side of the street, nursing a beer. A morning paper lay unopened beside him; he couldn’t focus on anything smaller than a major headline. But he claimed to be ready for action in spite of his hangover, and to prove it, before leaving the house on Staten Island, he had gone down to his basement shooting gallery and put four out of six shots into the bull’s-eye.

Irene, in a sliver of a luncheonette around the corner, was letting her sixth or seventh cup of coffee grow cold in front of her while she read the paper. That was all right; Shayne didn’t think the name Herman Kraus would mean anything to her. Brownie was a short way up Twenty-sixth, at the wheel of a waiting car. On Twenty-seventh, his dress rack parked in the doorway of the nearest loft building, Billy was straddling a fire hydrant watching three or four neighborhood kids play stoopball.

At twelve-thirty Shayne used the glassed-in booth on the corner of Twenty-sixth to dial the number of one of the public phones in the Northwest terminal at LaGuardia. Michele answered.

“Still hasn’t showed up,” he said, rolling an unlighted cigar between his fingers. “How much longer do we wait?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “There is a thing in the paper I don’t like. Another few minutes.”

“Baby,” Shayne said softly, “we’re out in the open here. What thing in what paper?”

He was able to imagine the expression on her face as she tried to decide how much to tell him. “A suicide. It frightened me at first, but it has no connection with us. It is because of a girl. It will make no difference.”

“It better not make a difference,” Shayne said roughly. “Because if somebody’s blown this-”

“I’m sure it hasn’t happened,” she said quickly. “The story would be written in quite a different way.”

“Baby-” Shayne began. He broke off, seeing Rourke’s black Ford cruising slowly past. The left-turn blinkers were working, a signal that the garbage truck was four blocks away. “Here it is!”

He slammed down the phone. Coming out of the booth, he lit his cigar. He had been smoking cigarettes up to now. Brownie, seeing the lighted cigar, switched off the motor of the car he was in and came out onto the street. In the luncheonette, Irene got up hastily with a nervous yawn, giving her bangs a pat. As Shayne came abreast of the bar, Szigetti appeared in the doorway, blinking and loosening his shoulders, seeming to be fighting off a wave of nausea.