Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982

The smile that flashed across Lomack’s face told Shayne a lot. Even though a look of concern replaced the expression a second later. Lomack said, “One beautiful lady, let me tell you, Mike. And the smartest one I ever met, too. She worked for me for nearly seven years before I talked her into marrying me. Went from the steno pool to accounting and right up into management. She was Mitch Lund’s executive assistant when I finally got her to say yes.”

“Lund is your operations manager, right?” Shayne asked, running his memory over what Lomack had told him about the personnel of his company.

“Yeah. Good man. The things that he and Maggie and John Morrall did made the company a whole hell of a lot easier to run. It almost ran itself most of the time.”

Shayne remembered Morrall’s name, too. The man was the drilling coordinator. If Shayne understood the set-up properly, Morrall and Lund were in charge of most of the day to day activities of the company. Lomack might set things in motion, but the other two men kept them going. That meant they would be intimately familiar with the details of the drilling rig, and Shayne meant to talk to them at length as soon as he got a chance.

“You sound like marriage agrees with you, Jack,” Shayne said.

“Best thing that ever happened to me, that’s all.” His fingers knotted together. “That’s why I got so damned worried and decided to come get you. I don’t want anything happening to Maggie, Mike.”

“What precautions have you taken besides coming to see me? Have you hired some kind of security service?”

Lomack nodded. “There’s a man there at the house twenty-four hours a day, armed and ready in case anything starts to happen. I’m praying that it doesn’t, but...”

“It never hurts to be sure,” Shayne told him.

The big detective leaned back in his seat and fished a cigarette out. As he lit it, he looked out the window beside him at the night sliding by outside. There was nothing to see but darkness. Must be what it was like at the bottom of the Gulf, under hundreds of feet of water, he mused. The thought didn’t do anything for his peace of mind.

Lomack had fallen silent again, and Shayne didn’t bother trying to draw him out for a few minutes. Instead, he thought about everything that he had been told, and he didn’t like some of the thoughts he was having.

Earlier, he had believed Lomack implicitly. But now, despite the old friendship between the two of them, Shayne found his investigator’s natural curiosity at work. He had trained himself over the years to keep an open mind, to suspect everyone involved in a case, until he was sure that he held the truth in his hands. And this case, if he was going to investigate it, couldn’t be any different.

Could Lomack have been responsible for the explosion that sent the rig down? Shayne’s gut said no, but at the same time, the man had admitted that his company had been weathering some financial hard times. A big insurance settlement might have gone a long way toward ending that.

But would Lomack have been callous enough to murder so many men, just to collect some money? Again, everything inside Shayne denied it... but he hadn’t seen Lomack in a lot of years. Anyone can change, Shayne thought. It was just a question of how much change was possible in one man.

There were other angles to be considered, though. Someone else could have had a reason to blow up the rig. Lomack had been unable to come up with any likely suspects when Shayne asked him about that, but Shayne knew very well that no one becomes much of a success in the oil business without making some enemies along the way. It could have been someone who wanted to hurt Lomack and his company, and in an even more chilling possibility, it could have been someone with a grudge against just one man working on that rig. Shayne knew that things like that had happened before; trains and planes had been bombed with tremendous loss of life, just to get at one particular person.

Shayne ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and leaned his head back against the seat, closing his gray eyes. Those were all things that would have to be looked into when they arrived, but the answers wouldn’t be found here in this airplane. The answers, if there were any, were waiting in Texas.

It was not quite ten o’clock, local time, when the flight arrived in Corpus Christi. As the plane nosed down over the coastal city, Shayne remembered all the other times he had been in the Lone Star state, riding into Houston on oil tankers as a young man, roughnecking in the oil patches out in West Texas, returning to El Paso as a private detective to solve several murders and clear up a very messy political scandal. The times spent here had been good ones, if a little hectic. Shayne just hoped that this visit turned out as well as the last time he had come to Texas to investigate a murder. That case had ended with him owning a partial interest in a silver mine...

“My car’s in the lot here,” Lomack said a few minutes later as they strode through the terminal after picking up their luggage. “I want you to stay with us, and we’ve got plenty of room, so don’t go giving me an argument about it.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Shayne grinned.

He was struck by the similarities between Corpus Christi and Miami as Lomack wheeled his big car away from the airport and toward the bay. There were the same wide boulevards, lined with palm trees, the same marinas packed with pleasure craft, the same tang of salt in the air from the ocean. Shayne felt right at home.

Lomack turned the car onto Ocean Drive and piloted it past the huge homes there, facing the lapping waves of the Gulf from behind expansive, carefully cared for lawns. He said, “I guess the place is kind of gaudy, but you know how it is. People expect you to keep up a certain kind of image.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Damn, I can’t believe I just said that. Before you go back to Miami, Mike, you and I are going to have to do some real old-fashioned hellraisin’, show these people around here that Mad Jack’s still got some life in him.”

“Nobody would ever think that you didn’t,” Shayne assured him.

Lomack nodded at a house coming up on their right. “There’s the place,” he said. “Like I told you, plenty of room.”

Shayne had to agree with that as he studied the house. There were enough lights on in it for him to tell that it was a sprawling three-story structure, built of stone with a steep, gabled roof. A wrought iron fence ran around the property, with a gate to one side that was standing open. As Lomack turned onto the long driveway that led up to the house, the headlights of his car swept over another vehicle that was parked by the house. Shayne saw the insignia of a private security company on its doors.

“I see the guard’s on duty,” Lomack grunted. “That’s good to know.”

Shayne started to nod in agreement, but something suddenly made him tense and sit forward. His eyes searched for and found the flicker of movement he had seen a second before. It was close to the house, in a section of shadow between two lighted windows.

Of course, it could have been the guard, making his rounds, but there had been a furtiveness about it that made Shayne’s insides clench. He snapped, “Get up there in a hurry, Jack.”

Lomack shot a puzzled glance at him, but he reacted to Shayne’s command. His foot came down harder on the accelerator, and the big car shot forward.

Shayne wished he had his gun in its regular place in his shoulder holster. The whole rig was packed away in his suitcase, though, for the airline’s sake. Maybe a gun wouldn’t be necessary...

Shayne still wished he had it.

He saw the movement again, close to the house, and now he could tell for sure that it was a figure, running away from the driveway. Shayne barked, “Hold it!” and Lomack stomped the brake, rocking the car to a stop. In a flash, Shayne was out the door and running after the fleeing figure in the shadows, but not before he caught a glimpse of Lomack’s suddenly-terrified face.