Framed in Blood (11 page)

Watching the action of the big black car behind him, Shayne knew with grim certainty that he was going to get an answer when he straightened out at the end of the last curve and saw the long straightaway completely deserted.

He was ready when the pursuing car came up on his left with a sudden surge of power. Hunched over the wheel, Shayne stared straight ahead, apparently oblivious of the other car until a shouted warning caused him to turn his head.

The two cars were moving abreast with only a few feet between them. Shayne looked directly into the face of a hooked-nose man sitting beside the driver, motioning Shayne into the curb with his left hand and cuddling the butt of a Tommy gun with his right. The ugly muzzle protruded over the top of the lowered window and pointed directly at the head of the detective.

Shayne nodded, swung his eyes sharply back to the road as the Cadillac pressed in on his left fender. He sucked in a deep breath, wrenched his steering-wheel sharply to the right, and stepped hard on the accelerator. His sedan lunged toward the guard fence midway between two posts as he grabbed the door latch, opened it, and let the impact of the crash send his body out in a looping dive.

He catapulted through the air, clear of the plunging car, forcing his body muscles to go limp as the soft beach sand rushed up to meet him. He landed on the back of his shoulders with an impetus that knocked him breathless.

At the same moment there was a terrific crash. He dragged himself to his knees, panting for breath, and saw his car settle upside down in five feet of water with the four wheels showing above the surface.

Stunned and groggy, he reacted instinctively to carry out the plan he hoped would give him the advantage over the two gunmen. He dragged himself erect and plodded through the deep sand to the foot of the perpendicular piling supporting the roadway embankment against the bay waters at high tide.

Crouching, he waited, the automatic in his hand.

Shayne’s sudden maneuver had sent the Cadillac a hundred or more feet beyond the broken guardrail. Now, from his place of concealment he heard hurrying footsteps on the macadam above and angry voices cursing him.

“… plain goddamn scared to death when he saw my gun,” the hook-nosed man grated. “For a shamus with a reputation like he’s got—”

“Not a sign of him yet,” a surly voice cut in. “He’s drowned by this time, for sure. The boss ain’t gonna like this.”

“How can we help what the fool done? Le’s get outta here fast, Tiny. Ain’t no use hangin’ around. We been lucky so far, but somebody’s likely to come along any minute.”

“Nuts,” said the surly driver of the car. “Only a few feet of water there. We got to drag ’im out.”

“What the hell for? He’s drowned by this time.”

“He’s supposed to have that stuff on ’im,” Tiny reminded the hook-nosed gunman. “The boss sent us out to get it. We drag ’im out, see, and go through his pockets.”

“To hell with that,” growled the gunman. “The cops are likely to be prowling by here any minute. If they find us down there—”

“Rescuing a drowning man,” said Tiny. “We’re driving along and we see a guy break through the guardrail. So we stop to save him. Hell, there ain’t a mark on the Cad, and he damn sure won’t do any blabbin’, and maybe we get a medal or somethin’.”

“Maybe you’re right at that,” the hook-nosed man agreed reluctantly. “Reckon we can slide down where the fence is busted.” His voice trailed off, and Shayne waited tensely, peering around to see a shower of sand precede a body that dropped heavily down the embankment. He landed with a grunt, picked himself up, and Shayne saw the hook-nosed man whose Tommy gun had been pointed at him a few minutes ago. “Come on down, Tiny,” he called up to his companion. “I ain’t gonna stay here ’less you—”

“Stand out of the way!” Tiny yelled. “Look out!” The hook-nosed man took a backward step, glancing wildly around. He saw Shayne’s huddled figure less than ten feet away, and his hand dived toward his shoulder holster when he saw the gun in Shayne’s hand.

Shayne pulled the trigger of the small automatic. A round hole appeared directly above the hooked nose, and the man’s body fell limply on the sand, face down, his right arm crumpled beneath him, reaching for the holstered gun.

Instantly another body landed in a flurry of sand. Shayne swung his automatic to cover the driver of the Cadillac. He pressed the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun had jammed after ejecting the first cartridge.

With a savage curse he threw the useless weapon aside and lunged at Tiny who threw up a hand to protect his face when Shayne leveled the gun on him. Shayne’s weight smashed the man to a kneeling position, and they both sprawled on the sand. Bouncing to his feet, Shayne whirled to see his opponent rising slowly and jerking a blackjack from his hip pocket, and in that fleeting moment Shayne realized why he was called Tiny. He was not more than five feet two and nearly a yard wide. His long arms reached to his knees, and his eyes were set close together in a face that was ludicrously flat except for the sharp nose.

Tiny’s right hand, wielding the blackjack, described a vicious arc, but Shayne drove in fast with his head low. The blow grazed the left side of his head with searing pain, but the impact of his body threw the heavy, short man off balance, and Tiny staggered and went down, his flat, unprotected face upward. Shayne aimed his big foot at the man’s blunt jaw.

Tiny jerked his head in time to take the crushing weight on his collarbone, flung out both his apelike arms, and grabbed Shayne’s leg. The jerk brought the rangy redhead down on top of him. Shayne doubled one knee as he fell and ground it into Tiny’s groin.

Tiny gave a guttural moan of pain, but he was tough and an expert at this sort of in-fighting, and his squat body was writhing, twisting long arms and ironthighed legs around the detective.

Shayne fought to get one arm free as he went underneath and succeeded just in time to spread his fingers over Tiny’s face as he brought the blackjack into play again. One of his fingers found an eye socket, dug in, and there was an animal scream of pain, a sideward writhing that allowed Shayne to eel from under and stagger to his feet.

Tiny was coming up again, his face contorted, and blood streaming from his eye, his yellowed teeth snarling with atavistic hatred. Shayne plowed in, slugging full-arm lefts and rights into the flat face, the weight of his body behind each blow. The shorter man wavered dazedly under the onslaught, taking one backward step, then two, reeling from the blows and trying to lift his arms to protect himself, refusing to go down under punishment that would have killed an ordinary man.

Shayne’s breath was whistling through his teeth when he stopped from sheer weariness, leaving Tiny swaying, his face battered to a pulp, yet held on his feet by some force beyond consciousness. The blackjack had dropped from his lax fingers.

Shayne scooped it up, swung it with precision and cruel force. It struck Tiny between the eyes, and he went down like an ox felled by the blow of an ax.

Without another glance at the recumbent figures, Shayne picked up the jammed automatic, dropped it into his pocket, and scrambled up the embankment to the highway. Moving painfully, driving his tortured muscles, he went to the Cadillac, opened the door, and saw that the keys were in the ignition. He got in and sat for a moment drawing in deep breaths to ease the fast beating of his heart. In the mirror he saw blood oozing down the left side of his face and dripping onto his ripped shirt. Sand stung his eyes and was caked on his face and clothes. He blinked watery lids until most of the sand washed out of his eyes, then turned the keys in the ignition, gunned the motor, made a U-turn, and headed back to the mainland.

Slumped wearily behind the wheel, he drove slowly until he slid into the curb at the side entrance of his hotel. When he reached for the keys to turn off the ignition he felt a hard object slide against his thigh. He removed the keys and turned to look at the object on the seat.

It was a short length of one-inch pipe with connection threads on one end. Careful not to touch the exterior, he explored with a forefinger, found one end open, and slid his finger all the way in to lift it. Scowling at its heaviness, he discovered upon close examination that the threaded end had been poured full of melted lead, as vicious a small weapon as he had ever encountered. The heavy end was covered with dried blood that contained a few hairs and bits of flesh and skin. The other end was clean. He slid his finger out and left the weapon on the seat while he got out and opened the rear car door to look inside.

Pushed close against the back of the front seat was the Tommy gun.

His mouth was grim when he closed the door and turned back to retrieve the short length of pipe. Balancing it carefully on his finger, he crossed the walk and dragged himself wearily up one flight of stairs to his apartment.

He paused as he neared the door. He distinctly remembered closing it and hearing the latch click when he went out. Now, it stood partly open, and in spite of the bright sunshine outside, light from the electric fixtures in the living-room streamed through into the darkened hallway.

Setting his teeth hard he thought of the jammed and useless automatic in his pocket, then glanced at the lethal weapon impaled on his finger. To use it on the intruder meant getting a firm hold on the clean end and destroying whatever prints might be on it and replacing them with his own.

Weary, and with his sore muscles aching, he muttered an oath and strode angrily through the doorway.

He looked balefully, but without surprise, at the bulky figure of Chief Will Gentry seated solidly in a deep chair.

Shayne let his gaze travel slowly around the still-disordered room as if seeing it for the first time, then growled, “Damn it, Will, you might at least straighten up my place after you get through tearing it to pieces.”

ANOTHER DEAL

GENTRY’S BEEFY FACE expressed a ludicrous combination of consternation and surprised anger as he stared steadily at Shayne’s appearance.

“My God, Mike,” he rumbled slowly. “What have you been doing?”

Shayne looked down at his torn and bloody clothing, put the fingers of his free left hand tenderly to the side of his head where Tiny’s blackjack had torn the top of his ear from the surrounding flesh, said, “Out doing a job for your Homicide Squad—as usual.” Stalking over to his desk he laid the pipe down carefully, extracted his finger, then glared around the room and muttered, “I hope you had a search warrant when you did this.”

“It was like this when I came in half an hour ago. What do you mean about doing a job for Homicide?”

“What I said,” Shayne snapped. “If you’re not responsible for this, who in hell is?”

“You tell me,” exploded Gentry. “The same man, I suppose, who tore up your office. I thought you probably found it like this when you came back earlier, and I’ve been waiting, swearing I was going to throw you in the can for not telling me when I called you about Bert Jackson.”

“Why wouldn’t I have told you?” Shayne demanded. “I’d like to know who it was as much as you would.”

“Maybe it was Mrs. Jackson,” Gentry returned with heavy irony, “looking for divorce evidence you turned up against her.”

“Might be.”

“I’d say Mrs. Jackson is a very determined woman,” Gentry commented, settling back in his chair.

“What sort of weapon killed the elevator operator last night?” Shayne asked.

“A round heavy object. Not too big in diameter,” Gentry told him cautiously.

“Something like this?” He pointed a knobby finger at the pipe.

“Something like that,” he conceded, slowly chewing a dead cigar to the other side of his mouth.

Shayne said, “There are a few hairs and skin stuck to the dried blood in the threads. Your smart boys can compare them with samples from the operator. You can also probably get prints from the other end that will match one of two guys you’ll find on the bay sand off the south side of the causeway near the beach.

“One of those two,” he went on sourly, taking the jammed .32 from his pocket and laying it on the desk beside the pipe, “has got a bullet from this lousy gun between his eyes. His partner may be dead, too. The damned gun jammed before I could shoot twice, so I’m not sure.”

“Who are they, Mike?” Gentry asked in a dangerously low rumble. “What are you giving me?”

“A couple of killers.” He started to shrug out of his coat, winced with pain, then stepped over to Gentry and said, “Help me off, will you? I’m afraid I’ve got a couple of cracked ribs.”

Gentry pushed himself up and helped him ease the coat off. “Give me the rest of it fast,” he demanded gruffly. “How did you come to tangle with them?”

“They tangled with me,” Shayne told him. He limped across to the liquor cabinet, poured four ounces of cognac into a glass, limped back, and eased one hip onto the desk.

“Crossing the causeway in my car,” he continued. “A big black Cadillac came up behind me and forced me into the bay. A driver and a Tommy-gun artist. You can find the place by a hole in the guard fence and my car upside down in the water. I drove the Cad back,” he added casually. “It’s parked downstairs at the side entrance. Tommy gun in the back.” He took a long drink of cognac and began unbuttoning his shirt.

“Why? What were they after?”

Shayne’s sore face muscles rebelled at an attempt at a wry grimace. “I don’t know any more about it than I do about my office and apartment being ransacked. Help me get this shirt off, Will. I’m getting under the shower so I can take a look at what’s left of me.”

Will Gentry eased the shirt off, one sleeve at a time, ejaculating, “My God, Mike,” when he saw the lacerations and bruises on the detective’s torso. He began easing the straps of the undershirt from one shoulder, then the other, and stripped the garment down to the waist.

“Thanks, Will. I can manage the rest.” Shayne went stiffly through the open bedroom door and into the bathroom.

Gentry went to the telephone and barked a number into it. He was sitting in the big chair with a highball glass at his elbow when Shayne returned fifteen minutes later wearing a pair of shorts and a patch of adhesive tape on his ear. Spreading areas of red and purple showed all around his torso, and his jaw was bruised and swollen.