Brett Halliday - Counterfeit Wife

He heard them coming down the stairs. Just a faint sound beyond the concrete walls, but they were coming to him in the dark.

Shayne sat with his naked shoulders hunched, his long, hard body tense and ready to spring.

A thin ray of light crept through the crack under the door-the moving beam of a flashlight. Then Perry’s voice was startlingly loud in the utter stillness, “Shayne, you know what put the lights out?”

“Sure. I shorted them. The wires will be getting red hot and starting a fire in about five minutes.”

This wasn’t true, of course, but he hoped to God they didn’t know it.

Perry’s response was frightened and vengeful. “You lousy bastard. You’ll wish you’d left the wiring alone.”

“So’ll you after the joint burns down,” Shayne told him cheerfully.

There was a short silence outside the door. Then a motor roared. Shayne stood up with the jagged glass bottle in his right hand and his left hand against the door.

It didn’t give any, though he sensed that a car was being moved in the garage. Then light seeped in all around the edges of the door, and he realized they had swung another car around to throw the headlights directly on the door.

Shayne tensed himself and waited. If Perry continued to use his head, Shayne wouldn’t have a chance. All Perry had to do was stand back with his gun ready while Getchie drove the car away from the door and then let him have it when he leaped out into the glare of the headlights.

The palm of his hand was still on the door. He felt it quiver and knew that the bumper was being withdrawn.

He waited, the jagged bottle held belly-high and ready. Let them wonder what he was doing. Let them come in after him. This was his only chance-less than one in a thousand now.

A minute passed. Half of another minute. He could hear nothing except the subdued sound of an idling motor.

He felt a telltale quiver of the door as a hand touched the knob. He was ready and he hit it with his lame left shoulder the instant the knob turned.

The door flew open; Shayne collided with a bulky body just outside. The headlights blinded him, but he smelled the sweat of Getchie’s body and saw the dazzling gleam of a razor raised in a swift arc.

Shayne’s right arm was already driving the broken bottle forward and upward. It ripped through the corded muscles of the Negro’s arm and into the black face. An inhuman screech rattled in the Negro’s throat as he reeled backward and down.

A gun roared again and again in the confines of the underground garage. Shayne had leaped over the falling body and outside the circle of illumination where Getchie lay horribly twisted with his hands pressed to his face.

Shayne crouched beside the rear wheel of the car that had blocked the door of his prison and waited for Perry’s next move.

Perry had fired three times from somewhere back along the wall near the stairway where the headlights didn’t reach, and now he was waiting for Shayne to show himself. Shayne had the wild hope that the man carried no extra ammunition. Perhaps he could, by strategy, inveigle him into firing enough wild shots to empty the. 38.

Shayne moved along on hands and knees to the front of the car, keeping it between him and what he guessed to be Perry’s position, studying the situation carefully and trying to decide his next move.

The motor in the car that had been backed around to throw light on the doorway was still idling. It stood a few feet beyond the car Shayne was hiding behind, and he saw that if he could get to it and turn off the headlights, his chances of coming out of the cellar alive would be much improved.

Reflected light lay on the concrete floor between the two cars, and Shayne dared not risk crossing between them. He crouched silently for a time, closing his mind to Getchie’s moaning and to everything except his next move.

He finally began to inch cautiously back toward the far wall of the garage where other cars were parked, taking an angling course. His shoeless foot stubbed against a hard object, and he swore under his breath. He felt for it, grasped it, and threw it hard toward the dark wall beyond him.

Perry’s. 38 roared twice in quick succession. Then there was utter silence except for the slackening tempo of Getchie’s moans. Shayne guessed that the Negro was dying.

Shayne reached the wall of the garage, slid along it behind the parked cars until he reached a point which he calculated placed the car with burning lights and idling motor between Perry and himself.

Still inching forward in a half-crouch, alert for some sound of movement from Perry and hearing nothing, he decided the man was playing it smart, waiting Shayne out, close enough to the stairway and the street door to prevent the detective from getting past him. Shayne had the hope, too, that Perry was holding his fire after those five shots.

Shayne reached the rear of the car with the idling motor and felt his way cautiously along the side of it. The front door stood open. He had only to reach inside and switch off the headlights. He hesitated, his mind wary and active. Perry would still be guarding the exits with gun and flashlight. Things wouldn’t be much different with the car lights off.

He made one last survey of the dimly lighted garage before reaching in for the light switch. The door leading in from the street was ahead and to the left, out of the direct beams of light, but close enough for the side glow to light it clearly. It was a ramshackle wooden door hanging on rollers from an iron girder.

If it were open, Shayne thought despairingly, it would be a good bet to leap behind the wheel at the same moment that he turned off the lights and put the idling motor into action.

The hanging door swayed slightly at the bottom as he considered this. His body muscles tightened. Somewhere off to the right in the darkness Perry was crouched, waiting quietly for him to make a break for freedom.

Shayne studied the position of the front wheels in relation to the car exit. A slight swing of the steering wheel to the left would head the car directly toward it.

He drew in a deep, silent breath and got one foot on the running board. The dash light was on, illuminating the instrument panel. He picked out the headlight switch, lunged forward into the seat and pushed the switch while his left foot found the accelerator.

The blackness was absolute when the lights went out. Shayne gunned the idling motor and jerked the shift lever into low, swung the steering wheel slightly to the left, crouched low over the wheel, and drove the heavy car directly at what he hoped was a flimsy, swinging door.

He was conscious of a flashlight gleaming on his right and of a pistol thundering in the room, but there was no time to think of such things in the few seconds before the car struck the door with a splintering crash.

He was through at the same instant, and surging up the concrete incline to the street. He straightened behind the wheel and eased up on the gas, swung to the right on the deserted street, passing directly in front of the two-story frame structure above the cellar garage.

Street signs on the next corner located the spot perfectly for him. He heard another car roaring up the incline behind him. Perry was in pursuit.

For the first time since his prison door opened, Shayne became fully conscious of the fact that he was stark naked, behind the wheel of a strange car, and in a strange part of town.

There was enough moonlight for driving without headlights, yet not quite enough, Shayne believed, to enable Perry to see the unlighted car a block and a half ahead.

Just as Perry’s headlights swung into the street behind him, Shayne took his foot from the accelerator and turned into a driveway leading to a vine-covered porte-cochere by the side of a small bungalow. He shut off the motor and let the car roll silently along the drive, braking it gently to a stop beneath the porte-cochere.