Бретт Холлидей - Count Backwards to Zero

“No one will shoot at you,” the mayor said. “Just pick up the money and get going.”

There was an outbreak of excited voices in the other room as the conversation ended.

“Then why don’t we—” Cecily said, beginning to get up.

“Not yet,” Shayne told her.

He continued to question her while she became more and more agitated. Sirens were sounding all over the city. “Mr. Shayne, I can’t keep my mind on this. Please?” Standing up, Shayne told her to come with him. Downstairs, he took her thin arm and they went out through the same section of the revolving door.

He put her into the front seat of his borrowed car and got in beside her. Buildings were emptying all around them. Loud-speaker cars cruised slowly along the street warning all occupants to leave their homes immediately and move back from the bayfront.

Shayne’s was the only car attempting to drive east. At one point he had to detour through Lummus Park, around the courthouse and back to 5th Street. Cecily shivered beside him, hugging herself. Her generation had never known any other age than the atomic, and she knew what had happened to the Japanese cities.

The streets were emptier the further they went. The official party had gathered around several parked cars at the corner of 5th and Biscayne. They were now the only people in sight. The MacArthur Causeway had been closed. Power boats from the yacht basin were hurrying down the bay.

Shayne joined the others, still holding Cecily’s elbow. On the steps of the auditorium, across the boulevard, he saw a conspicuous suitcase, standing alone.

“Another thirty seconds and his five minutes are up,” Gentry said.

Crowley, at his elbow, growled, “The son of a bitch is bluffing. I know it. But we can’t take a chance. All right, he wins this trick. But we’ll get him, I promise you that. We’ll nail his hide to the door.” He looked at Cecily. “What do we need her here for?”

“She knows Lightfoot. We may want to ask her some questions.”

“In one way I know him,” she said.

A solitary car appeared on the boulevard, traveling south. It passed them, came about in a wide turn and drew up at the foot of the auditorium steps. The boy came into the light, seeming even paler than when Shayne had last seen him. He had a pistol in one hand, a bullhorn in the other.

He raised the bullhorn.

“To everybody within range of my voice,” he said slowly and distinctly. “I will shoot myself if approached. Do not attempt to follow me. Wait one hour. A small price to pay to avoid enormous destruction and loss of life.”

“I’d like to pick the bastard off where he stands,” Crowley said. “I could do it, too.”

“Does that sound like the sort of thing Jack would say?” Shayne asked Cecily. “‘Enormous destruction and loss of life’?”

“I guess so, but it’s a bit phoney.”

One of the FBI men was watching the youth through field glasses. Shayne took the glasses out of his hands, tightened the knob and focussed on Jack as he approached the suitcase. The boy walked slowly, scuffing his heels. The wrist of the hand holding the gun was clumsily bandaged. The bandage was red.

Jack lifted the suitcase and went back to his car, one shoulder dragged down by the weight of all the paper money. His car didn’t start at once. A long moment passed before it moved off with a jerk.

Shayne looked at the sidewalk where he had stopped to deliver his warning through the bullhorn.

“Let’s take a look, Will.”

He pulled Cecily across with him, feeling her resistance increase as they came closer to the great passenger ship, looming up over the piers to the left. There was a small pool of new blood on the sidewalk where the boy had stood, and a double trail of drops leading to the steps.

“At this rate he won’t have much left in an hour,” Shayne said.

Cecily said in a voice that she tried to keep from breaking, “Mr. Shayne, why don’t we join everybody somewhere else?”

“It’s less noisy here. What do you think of Jack’s credentials as a booby-trap artist?”

“To tell you the truth, I never thought of him that way. He can change a light bulb, and that’s about it.”

“I’ve seen a sample of his work with a welding torch. I doubt if the kid ever took a shop course. I don’t think he could put together a booby-trap that would really go off. I’m tempted to go aboard and find out.”

“You go aboard,” she said. “I’ll join the others.”

He looked at his watch. “Fifty-eight more minutes. Plenty of time.”

She kept pulling at him. “See, he’s kind of demented, Mr. Shayne. He’d like to be famous. What a thing if you could blow up the Queen Elizabeth! You know what it stands for. The monarchy! Money and luxury! And if you included Miami Beach at the same time — it’s a bomber’s dream! Everybody’d hear the name Jack Lightfoot.”

“I take it you’ve talked to him about this.”

“All right! We did have this sneaking suspicion that Dad might be bringing out a bomb, and we kicked the subject around — but it was just talk! I didn’t give him a bit of encouragement. Once he got that notion in his mind, you couldn’t buy it out with a million pounds. You think he’s going to telephone anybody in an hour? You don’t know Jack Lightfoot. He’ll be off somewhere looking at the telly, chuckling like a damn ghoul. If he hasn’t bled to death by that time!”

“You’ve talked me into it,” Shayne said. “The safest and best thing would be to go aboard now. Manship, you’d better come with us.”

“I expect you’re right,” Manship said calmly. “I’ve got some protective suits in the car.”

“Bring three,” Shayne told him.

Manship crossed the boulevard to his car, returning a moment later with several bulky coveralls and two portable Geiger counters. Shayne held out one of the suits to Cecily. She shrank back.

“No!”

“If it goes off, it won’t make any difference if you’re there or out here.”

In the end he needed the help of two cops to get her dressed and zipped up.

Shayne borrowed a pair of handcuffs and chained their wrists together. She had to be dragged all the way. The noises she was making were muffled by the tightly sealed hood, but through the plastic face mask he saw a face contorted with terror. She shrieked, reaching the bottom of the gangplank, and fainted. He carried her up, unlocked the handcuffs on his own wrist and cuffed her to the rail.

They found the bomb within minutes of coming aboard.

It was on the bridge, in the most obvious place, lying at the foot of the great wheel. Wires were strewn about. The bomb was in a rectangular metal box about eighteen inches long and four inches high. A separate box, much smaller, was wired to the main one, and also attached to an ordinary drugstore alarm clock. The alarm was set for the half hour, well in advance of Jack’s announced sixty-minute deadline.

Manship’s Geiger counters had so far given no sign of alarm. He put them down and studied the setup. Looking at Shayne, he shrugged and took out a pair of needle-nosed pliers and an ordinary screwdriver. He waved Shayne off the bridge.

From the glassed-in deck, Shayne could see the knot of officials around the cars on the other side of the boulevard. Cecily, at the rail two decks down, was thrashing around trying to free herself.

Five minutes went by. Shayne began to itch inside the protective clothes.

There was a sound behind him and Dr. Manship came out. He had unzipped his hood and thrown it back. Shayne pulled his own zipper.

“I always did think Little was a bit of a nut,” Manship said. “There’s nothing inside but dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Not plutonium. Ordinary garden dirt.”