Christa, sitting forward, questioned him with a look. He weighed the phone in one hand, then put it down.
“This may he the break I’ve been waiting for,” he said decisively. “Don’t leave this room. When Tim Rourke phones, tell him to come here.”
“Mike, we decided-”
He thrust the thirty-eight into the side pocket of his jacket. “They had no way of knowing she was calling me. It’s a chance to get everything sorted out so we’ll know where we are tomorrow. But if I do get booby-trapped, the gold is scheduled to go out of La Guaira on a ship called the Mansfield City. Give it to the cops, and let’s have everybody picked up when they make the transfer.”
“Mike, be careful.” She added softly, “Come back to me.”
Shayne gave her a slanting grin and ran for the elevators. On the second floor he looked for Room 285. The door was locked, but a locked hotel door never delayed Shayne for long. He entered carefully, his gun out. After waiting a moment, he snapped on the overhead light.
One of the two beds was turned down for the night. The other was badly tangled. A crumpled pillow and a spilled box of chocolates lay on the floor. Shayne took in the scene in a fast glance. As he turned, he heard the loud blast of an automobile horn outside. After going on too long, it broke off abruptly.
Shayne went quickly to the window.
This room was on the blind side of the building. He looked down on a dimly lit expanse of parked cars. The horn sounded again, this time briefly. A flicker of movement near one of the mercury-vapor lamps drew his eye. Three figures, a woman and two men, were struggling in the front seat of a white convertible. The top came down and hid them from view.
Shayne moved fast.
He took the stairs to the mezzanine three at a time. Still moving quickly but without seeming to hurry, he descended the curving stairs to the lobby. Ward, the Negro clergyman, was in his path, talking to one of the older women from the tour. He nodded to Shayne and turned as though to stop him.
“Meeting a plane,” Shayne said, and brushed past.
As he approached the taxi stand to the right of the main entrance, an elderly Negro sprang to attention beside a battered Checker cab.
“Cab, sir?”
“Yeah, and I’m in a hurry.”
The driver slid behind the wheel. Shayne came into the front seat beside him. The driver wheeled the cab around, completing the turn just as the convertible shot out of the driveway leading into the parking area.
“There they are!” Shayne snapped. “My wife’s in that car.”
The driver, a small man with grizzled hair and gnarled hands, came down hard on the gas. “There won’t be any-altercation?”
“Nothing like that,” Shayne told him. “This is just to see where they go, to protect myself. She’s trying to hit me for heavy alimony. Don’t hang too close. Just don’t lose them.”
“Because,” the driver continued, shifting gears, “I wouldn’t want to become mixed up in somebody else’s domestic argument. I’m a peace-loving man.”
“So am I,” Shayne said, peering ahead.
The driver glanced across at him skeptically. “And that thing that’s dragging down the right-hand pocket of your coat could be a pipe, too, but I doubt it.”
Shayne sighed. “Why do I always pick a driver who notices things? I’m a detective. The lady’s not my wife. She’s my client’s wife.” He took out a twenty-dollar bill, held it up so the driver could see the denomination, and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “All right now?”
“Well-l-”
“How long’s this Checker been kicking around?”
“Nearly as long as I have. The difference is, everything’s been replaced a few times and I’m still running on the original parts. They made a good automobile. This about the interval you like?”
“Fine.”
The convertible they were following was a recent-model Pontiac. It twisted through the cobblestone streets of the Old Town. As it emerged into the countryside, Shayne told his driver to drop farther back. The road surface became rapidly worse. The Pontiac’s big double taillights danced crazily as the wheels went into potholes or over breaks in the asphalt. The high old Checker was less troubled by the road, but the motor labored as they began to climb. “You could use a valve job,” Shayne observed.
The driver chuckled. “Can’t the same be said for almost everybody? For another ten dollars I’d be willing to cut my lights through here. I know this road like a newspaper, and it’s easy with another vehicle to follow.”
Shayne paid him, and he slowed abruptly as the lights went off. Whenever the taillights ahead vanished from view, he put his own dims back on and speeded up till the road straightened and the taillights reappeared. They crossed an intersection and continued another few miles in silence.
“This is bad country around here,” he said nervously. “The people will pick the meat off your bones, if they catch you, and leave nothing of your automobile but the chassis. I can’t make out where this fellow is going.”
“Doesn’t the road go around the island?”
“Not this one.” He swung the wheel to avoid a bad hole. “He is driving too fast for conditions. He’ll lose the bottom out of his oilpan if he isn’t careful. No, the coast road is behind us. I can tell better in a few kilometers. There is a Y ahead. If he goes to the right, it is one thing.”
The road dipped and the taillights disappeared. When they came into view again, the driver murmured, “Now we see.” A moment later: “To the left. Now we can turn around and go back to town.”
“Where are we?”
“In a district known as La Esmerelda. The right fork comes down into a valley where there are cane plantations. The left fork goes nowhere. A ridge with a waterfall, a view of the ocean. A man from New York started to put up houses there, then he went away. That is how it is done, it seems. There is one house, only half finished. People say he will return when the banks give him more money.”
They reached the fork. He cut his wheels and began to turn.
“How far is the house?” Shayne said.
“A few minutes on foot. Also a few minutes by car-the road is bad. If you listen, you can hear the waterfall.”
“Pull over and wait for me.”
“No. As I told you, this is a bad part of the mountains, and so I think I will go back to the lights of the town. If you are getting out here, that will be five dollars.”
Shayne opened his wallet. “Fifty.”
The old man shook his head. “I do not interfere in anybody’s business. But when a man with a weapon in his pocket follows a woman in a modern automobile into the mountains, I know from history that shots will be fired. And the man with no connection with the affair is always the one struck by the bullets-that is the way it happens in St. Albans.”
“I’ll make it a hundred.”
“I am truly sorry, sir. Even a third-class funeral costs more than a hundred dollars.” The valves tapped loudly as the motor idled. “I am nervous to be standing here. Are you coming or staying?”
Shayne paid him and got out. “Come back in an hour.”
Again the driver apologized; this had to be his last fare of the night.
“There is a telephone at the inn at the foot of the mountain. And of course,” he added slyly, “there is always the Pontiac.”
“Yeah.”
“The road goes straight to the site. There is a big hole, where the man planned to build a swimming pool. A person might fall into it if he hadn’t been told it was there.”
He came down into low gear and roared away.
Shayne waited for his eyes to adjust to the change of light. The noise of the Checker’s motor dwindled away beneath him. There was no moon, but the sky was brilliantly sprinkled with stars.
He started up the road, which was rutted and unpaved. In places it had washed badly. There was dense foliage on either side. As he rounded a bend, the sound of the waterfall became suddenly louder. Seeing a light ahead, he went more carefully, stopping every few steps. Soon he was able to make out the white bulk of the Pontiac, parked just off the road. As the foliage fell away on either side, a building took shape against the stars.
The light he was following proved to come from a battery-powered lantern inside the building. He heard voices, and a figure crossed in front of the light. Standing absolutely still, he let his eyes range slowly along the front of the building. It was long and low, on a single level. The framework was finished and the roof had been closed in, but construction had been interrupted with the sheathing barely begun. There was only one room with walls. Space had been left for two large picture windows looking north. At that end of the house a still-unpaved terrace stretched almost to the edge of the waterfall.
The ground was open, dotted with piles of building material. Off to the right, Shayne saw the irregular outlines of a big piece of earth-moving equipment, a bulldozer-backhoe combination.
Crouching, he moved closer to the house, his gun in his hand.
A man’s voice said complainingly, “What a bunch of bushers. How much planning went into this, I’d like to know? Very damn little. I thought I was going to be working with pros.”
Another voice, with a trace of a Japanese accent, answered stiffly, “There is nothing to talk about. We have to kill her at once. Forget about Savage.”
“Chop chop,” the first voice said with a sneer. “That’s all you know.”
Mary Ocain said brightly, “Am I allowed to say something?”
Her voice was thin and shaky, but she seemed in an odd way to be enjoying herself. Shayne reached the building line. There was a rough scaffolding still in place. Maneuvering around a low pile of cinder blocks, he moved cautiously toward the nearest opening in the plyscore sheathing.
The Japanese said sarcastically, “You don’t wish to be killed? Think of that.”
“Does anybody?” Mary said. “I don’t know what happens to murderers down here, but they’re probably executed, and I should think you’d be willing to talk about an alternative.”
The first man broke in. “Don’t let Yami scare you. He’s not going to kill anybody-we’ve got enough headaches as it is.”
“That’s good,” she said, “because I told Mike Shayne about those phony suitcases, and maybe I told other people. You can’t be sure, can you? I’ve been chattering away to various people all day. Don’t you want to avoid trouble?”
“The thing we absolutely want to avoid is trouble.”
The Japanese said, “Dead people don’t bother anybody.” A thin beam of light slanted through a hole drilled in the plyscore to admit an electrical cable. Shayne saw Mary Ocain, her ankles and her wrists bound, lying in the middle of the long room near the lantern. The Japanese, the same man who had tried to kill Shayne in the Orange Bowl, was wearing a short-sleeved pullover, flowered shorts, and sandals. His legs were knotted and muscular. The second man was sitting on a nail keg, smoking a cigar. His name on the passenger list had been given as Samuel Thompson. He was conservatively dressed and looked like a businessman.
“But why do you think we shouldn’t kill her?” the Japanese demanded. “It worries me, all this changing around. When I make up my mind to do a thing, I like to do it.”
“If we do it,” Thompson said, “if we do it, it has to be right. This is an island, don’t forget. The police here were trained by the British.”
The Japanese cut the air with his hand. “We have to decide fast and get away. We need more than just twelve hours. They can come after us in naval vessels and catch us at sea. She knows everything, about the helicopter, the name of the ship.”
Mary declared indignantly, “How can you say that? I know nothing of the kind.”
“You heard everything said in the cabana,” Thompson pointed out, “and you won’t gain anything by lying about it.”
“All I could hear was a lot of profanity. Haven’t you got any sense at all? If you’re so worried about what I heard, change your plans! Use some other ship or bury the darn gold. Dig it up when everybody’s forgotten about it.”
“How do you know it’s gold?” Thompson asked quietly.
“All right, maybe I did catch a few words!”
The Japanese swung around. “Thompson,” he pleaded, “we don’t have time. There was a car behind us coming out of St. Albans. I have a bad feeling. Something will happen unless we finish this up fast and go. No one will come up here for days or weeks. I can use a rock and we can throw her off the cliff. It will seem that she fell.”
Shayne, ready to move, saw a glitter of light against the black building-paper on the floor behind the woman-a sliver of broken glass. She had another piece of the broken pane in her hands and was working it back and forth across the cord binding her wrists.
She said hurriedly, “I have a wild idea. All this is my own fault! I have a bump of curiosity as big as a hen’s egg, and it’s been getting me in trouble all my life. I had to sneak behind that cabana. I don’t know why.”
The Japanese growled under his breath. Shayne slipped along the wall to the unglazed window.
Mary went on, “I can see you’re working yourself up to kill me. I’ll tell you what you ought to do first. You ought to rape me! Don’t laugh! Why on earth would anybody believe I fell down a mountain? What would I be doing wandering around out here in the middle of the night? Dozens of people saw me go up to bed.”
“I don’t get it,” Thompson said in a puzzled voice. “Rape you?”
“Don’t you want to make it look convincing? You don’t want the police to think it has any connection with this stupid smuggling. What happened-I decided to go out for a walk and a couple of drunken natives picked me up. They brought me up here, and after they-abused me, they were so scared I’d have them arrested-”
The Japanese gave a grating laugh.
“All right,” Mary said desperately, “so I’m not a sexpot like some people. I’m a woman! I have quite a nice-looking figure-”
Thompson said thickly, “Cut her ankles loose.’”
“Thompson-”
“It’s got to be the real thing,” Thompson insisted. “They’ll examine the body. There was a case like it last year, an American college girl.”
“All this is, she’s playing for time. Can’t you see that?”
“Maybe. But nobody followed us, Yami. You were seeing lights that weren’t there. You’re still skittery because of what happened in Miami.”
“You weren’t there,” the Japanese said sullenly. “You didn’t see it. That Shayne-”
“I am partly playing for time,” Mary put in eagerly, continuing to work away with the sliver of glass. “But there’s something else. I’m”-she hesitated-“well, it’s ridiculous, but I’m a virgin. I’ve read all the books, but I can’t imagine what the sensation is really like. You’d be giving me my last wish, don’t you see? Don’t think you have to be gentle with me just because it’s the first time.”
Shayne thumbed back the hammer of his thirty-eight and drifted slowly into the window opening. Both men were intent on the woman. Her wrists were still together, but Shayne could see that the cord had been severed.
The Japanese swore softly. A knife in his hand flicked open.
“But leave me out of it.”
He leaned down and sliced the cord around Mary’s ankles. Thompson folded his glasses and put them away, then went down on his knees.
Shayne swung into the room. Thompson looked around, blinking, and at that moment Mary brought both hands, fingers laced, down on the back of his neck.
There was a sound behind Shayne. Before the detective could turn he was hit very hard with a short length of two-by-four. He fired, but he was off balance and the bullet went into the wall. The two-by-four came back in a chopping arc and knocked the gun out of his hand.
The blow drove him out of the way of the Jap’s savage rush. Shayne caught his knife hand as it went past. George Savage, his face a peculiar greenish white, was swinging a leg over the low sill, the two-by-four ready. Shayne levered the Japanese around, trying to use him as a weapon. But his responses were slow, and there seemed to be a heavy curtain in front of his eyes, curling out gradually to wrap itself around him.
The Japanese slipped out of his grasp and sliced his hand at Shayne’s throat. Moving slowly, with the desperation of motion in a dream, Shayne caught the blow on his shoulder. Mary was gone. Thompson, he saw, was stretched out face down on the floor. The Japanese swung viciously again. Shayne went backward, blood in his eyes. He collided with George, grappled with him weakly, feeling little resistance, and subsided to the floor.
As he slipped the rest of the way into unconsciousness, he heard the roar of a car motor. Mary. The Pontiac had been parked some distance from the house, and all she had to do was keep the pedal all the way down for about thirty yards, and they couldn’t catch her.