Бретт Холлидей - Count Backwards to Zero

She left him standing alone, his hands going. Shayne followed her as she made her way through the crowd.

Suddenly she began waving. Shayne lost her for a moment. When he picked her up again she was being greeted by a man and a woman. She hugged them both, laughing excitedly. The man was dark, tall, hatless, with thick, tightly curled hair. The woman was a head shorter, and Shayne caught only fragmentary glimpses of her as the crowd shifted. She was plain-faced, with a grudging smile. He switched back to Anne, who was chattering happily, her face showing her relief at being back with normal, well-dressed, self-assured people, after the strains and odd excitements of the voyage.

Shayne lost them. He picked up the phone.

“OK, Tim. Do you want to pull around on the boulevard and double-park? Keep the phone open.”

He saw Rourke’s battered Chevy emerge a moment or two later. It crossed on a green light and stopped pointing south.

“I’ve got my hands full,” Shayne said. “If you’ll do a simple little follow-job for me I think I may be able to repay you with a major story. A green Olds is going to be coming off in a minute. It’s a four-door, two years old, Florida plates with a GB tag. It’s registered to a man who lives in Coral Gables, and I want to be sure that’s where he goes. We absolutely can’t lose track of that car. Keep on his tail, and if he tries anything tricky, ram him. I mean that, Tim.”

“Ram him, I see,” Rourke said. “That’s not the way I make my living, though, is it? Why don’t you ram him? You do that sort of thing so well.”

“There’s another car I’m more interested in. It’s going in a different direction.”

“Then here’s another suggestion. Let’s get a couple of police cars with a two-way radio, and do it right.”

“There’s no time to set that up. Nothing’s going to happen. If he doesn’t go straight home he’ll stop off for dinner somewhere.”

“Isn’t there a small explanation that goes with this?” Rourke said. “The name of that 1949 public law gave me a jolt. There’s an old saying. You’ll live longer if you don’t fool around with dynamite. And I understand these atomic things are even stronger.”

“I’ll believe it’s actually a bomb when I see it go off. It smells like a con to me, an old-fashioned gypsy handkerchief switch. My guess is narcotics.”

“So why did you ask for that Washington information?”

“That’s the cover,” Shayne said impatiently. “The mark is a British physicist, and he thinks he’s bringing in a bomb. That doesn’t mean he actually is. The cash award in that 1949 bill was half a million bucks, which was a lot of money in those days. But with a heroin shipment today you can clear a couple of million, and you don’t run the same kind of risk.”

“I can see where a British physicist might pick up an atom bomb. Where would he get a couple of million bucks worth of heroin?”

“He didn’t organize it. From the description I’ve been given of the other guy, he’d go where the money is. He wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of collecting the full reward, and I think he must know it.”

“Mike, there’s got to be more. You haven’t convinced me.”

“We’ll have to break this off any minute, Tim, so be ready. The big trouble with the bomb story is that it was supposed to be a two-man conspiracy. The scientist and the crook. It turns out there are others involved. I’ll know better in five or ten minutes. I think there’s a hijacking in the works.”

“Great. Mike, I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I’m not brave. I don’t ever feel called upon to prove my manhood by breaking up the Mafia. I believe the legend. Those Sicilians are mean.”

“The man in the Olds,” Shayne said patiently, “is going to be named Daniel Slattery, which isn’t a Sicilian name. As soon as I see what happens to my physicist and the Bentley he’s driving, we’ll bring in the cops and make some arrests. Whatever the shipment is, it’s safe in Slattery’s car. You’ll have another copyrighted story about still another victory in the fight against organized crime.”

“Mike, your instinct is telling you narcotics,” Rourke said stubbornly. “You’ve doled out very little information, but my instinct tells me that whether it’s narcotics or not, to go home and let other people carry on the fight against crime. I’m basically a voyeur.”

“There it is! The green sedan, coming out now. Keep in touch.”

Swinging his field glasses as the Oldsmobile passed, he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man in glasses, a much younger woman beside him. Rourke’s lights came up, and he fell in line two cars behind the Olds.

The owner of a black Jaguar, the car that had been in the way when the Bentley’s gas tank slipped out of Shayne’s hands the night before, was complaining angrily about his damaged fender. A low red sports car moved out, and Shayne saw Quentin Little standing beside the Bentley.

Shayne, two hundred yards away with field glasses, tightened the focus. The Englishman seemed close to collapse. He clawed at his collar, his homely face shining with sweat. He looked around furtively, then ducked into the front seat and strengthened himself with a pull from a pint bottle.

The Customs inspector was approaching, holding a clipboard. Standing beside the open door of his car, Little tried to quiet his hands by filling a pipe. The tobacco scattered. The official came up, reached into the Bentley, and snipped off the red tag on the steering wheel. He checked Little’s customs declaration, stamped another paper of some kind and held it out.

Little had taken a backward step. His hand was inside his coat pocket. He looked at the Customs man with something approaching horror, and for an instant it seemed that he was about to refuse the paper, and turn and run. He tried to speak.

The Customs man gestured impatiently. Little accepted the paper, and the official went on to the next car. Little gasped, looked desperately around once more, and slid behind the wheel.

Shayne lowered the binoculars to watch the traffic on the boulevard. It seemed to be moving normally.

Little let out his clutch too fast and the Bentley stalled. He restarted it, but before he could swing into the northbound traffic, a Negro boy leaped out at him and began polishing his windshield.

Shayne raised the glasses again quickly. Little was attempting to flag the boy off. The symbolic windshield washing continued until Little knocked on the glass with a coin.

The boy desisted at once. He appeared at the lowered window. As he reached out, Shayne saw his hand open and a scrap of paper drop into Little’s lap.

Shayne started his own motor. A big trailer-truck passed, blocking his view for a moment. When he saw the Bentley again, it was in motion.

Shayne inched ahead, jockeying for an opening. After turning onto the boulevard, the Bentley stopped almost at once. Little got out and entered a free-standing phone booth.

Keeping his binoculars fixed on the booth, Shayne signaled his operator. He gave her a number and a man’s name.

“Tell him you’re calling for me, and you want the number of a sidewalk phone booth on Biscayne at the northeast corner of Eleventh. Ask him to hurry. Dial the number he gives you and call me back.”

Little, inside the booth, turned the slip of paper so he could read what it said, and dialed.

Shayne watched from the other side of the double stream of traffic, tapping his steering wheel. As usual, he was improvising. The fact that Little had passed through the Customs without difficulty hadn’t surprised him. It fitted every alternative theory he had devised to explain the discrepancies in Little’s story. His only plan now was to stay as close as possible and go with the action.