Brett Halliday - Die Like a Dog

He turned the boat at that point, and said cheerfully, “Here we go in for a landfall, Tim. Keep me headed toward it, huh?”

“Sure. Suppose the chauffeur did get suspicious of Lucy this afternoon and is keeping watch?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” grunted Shayne, laying his weight into the oars awkwardly but with enough brute strength to send the boat angling shoreward at good speed. “He’ll have no reason to expect anyone to come by water, so we’ll do all our talking now and go in to the dock as quietly as we can. I’ll go up the stairs first, Tim. You follow behind with the shovel while I locate the grave. Forty-five and a half paces up the path from the top of the stairs. Then right-angles to the left off the path toward a big cypress for fourteen steps. There should be a stick at each end of the grave to mark it.”

In a subdued voice, Rourke said, “Right. When you get in a little closer you better quit rowing and give me an oar. I can scull us in with half the noise those oarlocks make.”

They indulged in no further conversation. There was no moon, but the sky was clear and bright starlight glinted on the surface of the bay. Facing toward Shayne in the stern, Rourke kept his eyes fixed on the third-floor lights of the turreted house and kept the boat roughly on course by lifting one hand or the other. When he judged they were as close to shore as was safe, he held up both hands with his palms upward toward the rower, and leaned forward to take an oar which Shayne lifted from the oarlock. Then kneeling in the bow and using the small dock and boathouse touched lightly by starlight at the base of the bluff.

When it nosed alongside the dock, Shayne was leaning out the stern with a mooring line to catch a stanchion, and he made it fast with a double half-hitch. He stepped easily onto the wooden dock and moved forward into the shadow of the boathouse where he turned to see Rourke stepping out with the spade in his hand.

There was utter night-silence about him as he climbed the wooden steps in rubber-soled shoes, and his alert ears caught no sound from Rourke behind him.

At the top, he could glimpse a faint blur of light through shrubbery from the big house some distance beyond, and there was enough starlight to outline the path he was to follow. He strode along it, counting his steps carefully, and stopped on forty-five. On his left, fifty or sixty feet away, silhouetted against the sky, was a towering cypress tree. Shayne walked toward it confidently, again counting his paces. At the count of ten, the blaze of a strong flashlight struck him suddenly in the face from a point some twenty feet to his right. He stopped in mid-stride as a resonant voice ordered, “Stand still and put your hands in the air.”

Shayne stood still and put his hands in the air. Blinking against the glare of the flashlight he could see nothing except the glint of metal at the point of origin of the light. The glint of metal moved and the voice said triumphantly, “Keep your hands high in the air. This is a double-barrelled shotgun with both triggers cocked. What are you doing on this property?”

Shayne said, “I could say I was waiting for a streetcar, but I doubt if you’d think that was very funny. As a matter of fact I got lost out on the bay in a rowboat in the dark and rowed in to the closest light I could see on shore. I thought I might leave my boat tied up at your dock until daylight tomorrow, and telephone for a taxi to come for me.”

Charles’ voice had a note of feline ferocity in it as he said flatly, “Nuts. You’re that smart private eye, Mike Shayne. I was expecting you after you sent your secretary out to case the layout this afternoon.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shayne protested. “I’m a tourist from up north and I rented a row-boat…”

Behind the unwavering flashlight, Charles spat out an obscene word. “Don’t stand there and lie to me. Keep your hands up and turn to your right, back to the path and up to the house. I’ll be right behind you and this shotgun is hair-triggered.”

Shayne kept his hands high and turned slowly to his right and angled back toward the path. Since leaving the rowboat, he had heard not the semblance of a sound to indicate Timothy Rourke’s presence on the scene. He devoutly hoped that Charles had not heard anything either.

The light followed him, staying on his face as he passed ten feet in front of a stocky, motionless figure. By narrowing his eyes and looking sideways out of the corners, Shayne was able to minimize the full glare of the light and make out the outline of Charles’ figure. The chauffeur held the flashlight in his left hand, with the twin barrels of the shotgun resting across his left wrist following the direction of the light as it followed Shayne. He did not move from his stance until Shayne was well past him, and then the light dipped and wavered, and Shayne heard footsteps stalking his own. He slowed as he reached the pathway leading from boathouse to the garage, but the footsteps also slowed behind him and Charles ordered harshly, “Keep moving toward the house, Shamus. There’s buckshot in these two barrels.”

The voice was not more than ten feet behind him, and the light was steady on the small of his back. Shayne moved on, following the winding path easily by the light of the flash that fell ahead of him on both sides.

The blur of light ahead through the shrubbery grew stronger, and Shayne let his steps drag a trifle, listening intently to see if Charles would unwittingly close the gap between them. It seemed to him that his pursuer moved a couple of feet closer. That would make it eight feet, Shayne calculated, still not close enough to happily come to grips with a shotgun.

But as he approached a thick clump of hibiscus and could discern that the house lights were quite close and bright beyond its shade, he knew it was his last chance to avoid the ignominy of being marched in at the point of a gun like a craven thief. He didn’t know how much of his determination was born of the memory of what Lucy had said about Charles that afternoon (what she had left unsaid, actually), but he did know suddenly that he couldn’t let the Rogell chauffeur take him like this.

He tensed as he reached the thickest shadow of the hibiscus, braced his heels and flung himself backward and down. As he hit the ground full-length with arms still stretched over his head, there was the terrific blast of both barrels of a twelve-gauge directly over his body.

At the same moment his flailing hands fastened on Charles’ ankles and he jerked them from under the man and heard the gun fall to the ground. Then Shayne was on his knees furiously driving a left and then a right fist into the whitish blur that was Charles’ face as he tried to roll away. His left glanced off the chauffeur’s cheekbone, but his right connected solidly with mouth and blunt chin at the precise moment the back of the man’s head was in contact with the ground.

There was a splendid crunching sound and Charles’ head lolled to the side. Otherwise he did not move.

Shayne dragged himself to his feet and exhaled a great shuddering breath, faintly surprised to find that he was still alive. A bright light sprang on at the back of the house beyond the hibiscus, and in the light Shayne stooped to pick up the shotgun by the end of its twin barrels with his left hand. Then he got a firm grip at the back of Charles’ neat, green uniform collar, and straightened up and dragged the gun and the unconscious man around the clump of shrubbery into the full glare of a floodlight mounted above the kitchen door and directed across the parking space in front of the garage.

Two women stood just outside the open back door beneath the floodlight looking at him from a distance of forty feet. One was middle-aged and short and somewhat dumpy, Shayne’s first glance told him. The other was young and slender and beautiful. She was bareheaded and dressed all in white, and white draperies trailed out behind her as she sped toward him across the parking space, crying out in a choked voice, “Charles? Is that you?”