Brett Halliday - Armed… Dangerous…

“Seven-fifteen,” Rourke said in surprise, looking at his watch. “As late as that. Maybe it’s somebody coming to work early.”

“When did you know an auto mechanic to come to work early?”

“I guess I went to sleep,” Rourke said sheepishly. “Where is everybody?”

“Around. Let’s see if they’re all awake.”

He turned off the music and picked up the police transmitter.

“Shayne,” he said. “It’s been a long night, but we’re about to roll. The guy’s inside now. It shouldn’t take him more than two minutes to put on the wheel. Everybody check in, please.”

Three other cars responded.

“Good,” Shayne said. “He’s going to be easy to follow, and let’s not lose him.”

Rourke slurped down the coffee, his eyes on the Motor Shop door. Then the taste of the stuff hit him.

“You call that lukewarm? I call it cold.”

The overhead doors slid up. A big Sanitation truck with a dent in its left front fender rolled through and stopped while the driver got out and closed the door. Shayne described what was happening to the other cars. The Sanitation man climbed back into the cab and the truck turned east. Rourke started the motor. Shayne made him wait a full minute before letting him follow. By then they had a report from another car that the truck was approaching Tenth, apparently intending to continue across.

The four cars maintained a loose net around the big truck as it went downtown on Broadway. At Seventeenth Street, the driver jumped a light, skirted Union Square and headed back uptown on Fourth Avenue. Rourke’s Ford was now a block ahead of him. Another stock Ford was a block behind. The two other cars were moving on parallel avenues, one on Madison, the other on Third. At Thirty-third Street, the car behind them reported, “He didn’t take the underpass. Watch it.”

Rourke slowed until the gap between the truck and the Ford was only half a block. Shayne adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see the truck without turning around. Its left-hand blinker was flashing.

“Left, Tim.”

At Forty-second, where Grand Central and the Pan Am Building interrupt the uptown flow, Rourke turned. The light was green at Vanderbilt, and he went through. The truck had time to follow but instead it swung toward the curb in front of Grand Central. A steady flow of passengers from the early commuting trains was pouring through the main entrance.

Shayne said, “The one place in town where you can carry a suitcase and nobody sees you. Not bad.”

The truck’s faulty brakes failed to halt it in time, and it drifted up to kiss bumpers with a police car standing there. The cops in the front seat were from the Traffic Division and had nothing to do with Shayne. One of them yelled at the Sanitation driver before moving on.

“Leave the motor running?” Rourke asked.

“No, shut it off. This is as far as we go.”

They got out. The Sanitation driver had shifted in his front seat to unlatch the door on the inner side. A woman came through the crowd and handed a suitcase up to him.

“Michele!” Rourke exclaimed. “If she went to Portugal, she had a fast trip.”

“She didn’t go to Portugal,” Shayne said bleakly. “She should have, but she didn’t.”

They had a minute while the truck driver, alone in the high cab, opened the suitcase to see how much he was being paid. The Walk sign flashed, and Shayne and Rourke crossed Vanderbilt. Shayne was wishing he didn’t have an arm in a sling. The other three cars had closed in and he had plenty of assistance for a change, but there were things he preferred to do himself.

The truck driver came out of the cab, bringing the suitcase with him. Another man in the same uniform took his place, to drive the truck away as soon as the transaction was completed. It was Szigetti, Shayne saw, finally getting his chance to show how well he could handle a heavy truck. He craned over in the seat to get the sign from Michele. She was standing at the curb, apparently waiting for the light to change so she could cross Forty-second-easily the loveliest girl in an area which has a high concentration of good-looking girls.

“And here’s where it hits the fan,” Rourke said in a low voice.

The Sanitation workman in the dark glasses opened the side hatch. Michele looked in. Frowning suddenly, she reached past the driver to move a carton, revealing the worthless trash behind it. Her lips moved. Shayne couldn’t hear the words, but from the way she shaped them he thought she was probably speaking in French.

The man’s dark glasses glinted. He pushed her aside and moved several more cartons. His back stiffened. He held that position for perhaps three seconds, during which he must have made a painful adjustment. Then he snatched up the suitcase and raced toward the entrance to Grand Central, running in the gutter, in the narrow space between the pedestrians and the moving cars. A man stepped out of the crowd, carrying the commuter’s badge, a dispatch case and a copy of the Times. He held out an arm toward the running man as if to stop him with the folded newspaper, and fired twice.

The runner went down as though he had been tripped by a wire. His glasses flew off.

“It’s Power!” Rourke exclaimed.

“Sure it’s Power,” Shayne snarled. “Who’d you expect?”

Michele grabbed the suitcase. With her usual deftness and grace she darted through the moving cars to her waiting convertible, parked on the other side of the street with the top down, the motor running. She flung the suitcase into the back seat.

Rourke called to Shayne as he ran to cut her off. She saw him coming. Her face glowed with excitement, which made her look like a girl in her teens.

“Darling! Get in!”

“You get out, baby,” Shayne said as he reached the door. “We’re starting over, with new rules.”

Her eyes widened. She looked up toward the Sanitation truck and gave him a hard push. He went back into the path of a charging taxi. The driver hit his brakes and veered abruptly. A front fender bumped Shayne and knocked him to one knee. In the high squealing of brakes he didn’t hear the shot. There was a look of amazement on Michele’s face. She slumped across the wheel.

Szigetti, in the high cab, had had another difficult downward shot. This time, seeing Shayne holding the door of Michele’s car, he had been shooting to kill. He had to lean far out, twisting. Michele had pushed Shayne at the exact instant Szigetti squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught her below the left breast.

Shayne came to his feet, his face a savage mask. Two narcotics agents had closed in on the car, but they stood out of his way as he swung over into the front seat without opening the door. He worked his right arm underneath Michele and laid her back gently against his injured shoulder. Her face and lips had lost their color.

“Darling, we almost-” she whispered.

Then Tim Rourke was beside the car. “Was she hit, Mike?” he demanded.

Her eyes left Shayne and swam toward Rourke. What she saw was the diamond dealer, Jake Melnick, who had apparently been robbed and slugged by Shayne in her presence three nights before. Something jumped in her face, as though she had been lightly flicked. Her eyes came back to Shayne, who returned her look unflinchingly.

“That’s right,” he said. “The whole time.”

There was disbelief in her eyes. Then, without words, moving only the corner of her mouth and a fraction of one eyebrow, she contrived to send him a complicated message. It told him that life sometimes played peculiar tricks, but she regretted nothing.

She moved her head so her cheek was against the back of his hand, and died before he could say anything more.