Armed… Dangerous… ms-54

by Brett Halliday

  He went into a windup and sent the key spinning off into a tangle of alder and briers. He listened, but didn’t hear it come down.

  “It may be hanging from a twig where I can pick it up in the morning,” he said. “And maybe not, too.”

  “I am sorry, darling,” she said in a small voice. “This means we must come back here tomorrow?”

  “If we’re rushed we can leave it. It’s in a safe place.”

  She gave a low laugh. “Why I was so angry was because of Irene. You are mine, dear, for the present. Please remember that.”

  He looked down at her for a moment. Then they turned and walked back to the house, arms touching.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Sanitation truck was scheduled to leave the police warehouse at ten-thirty. Because of the rechecking made necessary by the death of Herman Kraus, its departure was held up for an hour and three quarters.

  Power had not been able to warn Shayne of the delay. The truck was due at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue at eleven-ten. To be safe, Shayne’s group had been in place fifteen minutes earlier. Except for Shayne himself, they became more and more conspicuous as the minutes passed. As for Shayne, he was wearing the uniform of the Sanitation Department, a little too tight, with an inspector’s badge on his cap. He stood on the corner of Twenty-sixth with a clipboard, observing the traffic. He had a paper bag under one arm, containing, among other things, a. 45 automatic. Occasionally, when a bus or a larger-than-usual truck went by on its way uptown, he made a small mark on a ruled pad that was clipped to the board. In the two hours he stood there, moving south to the corner of Twenty-fifth from time to time to break the strain, only one person paid any attention to him. This was a Puerto Rican boy, who watched for a time and then asked what he was doing.

  “Making a survey,” Shayne growled. “Beat it.” Szigetti was in a bar on the other side of the street, nursing a beer. A morning paper lay unopened beside him; he couldn’t focus on anything smaller than a major headline. But he claimed to be ready for action in spite of his hangover, and to prove it, before leaving the house on Staten Island, he had gone down to his basement shooting gallery and put four out of six shots into the bull’s-eye.

  Irene, in a sliver of a luncheonette around the corner, was letting her sixth or seventh cup of coffee grow cold in front of her while she read the paper. That was all right; Shayne didn’t think the name Herman Kraus would mean anything to her. Brownie was a short way up Twenty-sixth, at the wheel of a waiting car. On Twenty-seventh, his dress rack parked in the doorway of the nearest loft building, Billy was straddling a fire hydrant watching three or four neighborhood kids play stoopball.

  At twelve-thirty Shayne used the glassed-in booth on the corner of Twenty-sixth to dial the number of one of the public phones in the Northwest terminal at LaGuardia. Michele answered.

  “Still hasn’t showed up,” he said, rolling an unlighted cigar between his fingers. “How much longer do we wait?”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “There is a thing in the paper I don’t like. Another few minutes.”

  “Baby,” Shayne said softly, “we’re out in the open here. What thing in what paper?”

  He was able to imagine the expression on her face as she tried to decide how much to tell him. “A suicide. It frightened me at first, but it has no connection with us. It is because of a girl. It will make no difference.”

  “It better not make a difference,” Shayne said roughly. “Because if somebody’s blown this-”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t happened,” she said quickly. “The story would be written in quite a different way.”

  “Baby-” Shayne began. He broke off, seeing Rourke’s black Ford cruising slowly past. The left-turn blinkers were working, a signal that the garbage truck was four blocks away. “Here it is!”

  He slammed down the phone. Coming out of the booth, he lit his cigar. He had been smoking cigarettes up to now. Brownie, seeing the lighted cigar, switched off the motor of the car he was in and came out onto the street. In the luncheonette, Irene got up hastily with a nervous yawn, giving her bangs a pat. As Shayne came abreast of the bar, Szigetti appeared in the doorway, blinking and loosening his shoulders, seeming to be fighting off a wave of nausea.

  Shayne had to whistle to Billy. The boy jumped up and ran for the dress rack. On Twenty-seventh, a small man whose name Shayne hadn’t been told cranked up a tractor and began to jackknife his trailer out into the working lanes, preparing to close off the block.

  Shayne crossed to the west side of Sixth as the Sanitation truck came into view, a lumbering monster painted bright yellow, with the Department of Sanitation insignia on the door and over the high cab. Traffic was moving smoothly. The sidewalks were jammed with garment workers on lunch hour. Billy worked his rack through the knots of gossipers on the sunny corner. He reached the utility post while the garbage truck was between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth.

  The lights were synchronized so that a theoretical single car, moving at a steady thirty-three miles an hour, could drive from one end of the island to the other, meeting nothing but green lights all the way. In real life, of course, nothing is so simple. Cars move in packs. Midday traffic jams in this district were common. Billy reached up to the one-way arrow on the lamp post and waited. The truck passed Szigetti. Billy pressed the button.

  Surprised, for he expected a few more blocks on the green, the driver came down on his brakes and stopped with his front wheels over the pedestrian line.

  The big trailer near the Broadway end of the short block slanted across the street. It continued to maneuver forward and back, not leaving enough space for anything to get by. The cars on the Sixth Avenue side of the blockade began to move on the green.

  Shayne stepped off the curb as Irene ran screaming along the opposite sidewalk, with Brownie right behind her. In rehearsals they had timed this entire segment of the action at under thirty seconds. The Sanitation truck had two sets of handgrips on the tailgate, one on each side of the conveyor belt which carried trash and garbage to the powerful chopper which chewed it up before letting it drop into the main bin. Two cops were clinging to the handgrips, their heads turned toward the sidewalk.

  The moment Shayne stepped off the curb, Billy rolled the dress rack along the sidewalk to Szigetti. Turning on his heel, he started back up Twenty-seventh.

  Irene screamed, “No! Don’t! Let me alone, damn you!”

  These were not the lines she had rehearsed; she believed in the spontaneous school of acting. There was no doubt, Shayne thought, that to an onlooker her terror and revulsion were real. Brownie overtook her and yanked her around. He gave her a slap that sent her staggering back against a parked car. She caromed off and came back with her fingers raised and curled.

  “Don’t do that again, Sambo!” she warned. “Your white-pussy days are over. Get back uptown where you belong, black boy!”

  Brownie seized her long black hair. “Where you been these last two nights? You cheated on me for the last time, you ofay bitch!”

  He worked up a mouthful of spit and released it in her face. A sound came from the crowd. She slowly wiped the spit out of her eyes while Brownie collected another mouthful.

  One of the cops jumped down and shouted to the driver, “Wait here!” After an instant’s hesitation the second cop joined him, feeling for his nightstick.

  Still holding Irene’s hair in his fist, Brownie backed her across the sidewalk, his face only a few inches from hers. The sudden violence had emptied a patch of sidewalk around them.

  “Who’s going to make me go?” he yelled. “Not you, Whitey! Not by yourself! Better bring a few friends!”

  Whirling her by the hair, he slammed her against the window of a shoe-repair shop. She tried to knee him in the groin. Both cops started across the sidewalk, their nightsticks half-raised.

  Shayne reached the cab. He wrenched the door open and snapped, “Move over. Street’s blocked up ahead.”

  The driver took in
Shayne’s uniform and badge in a glance and began to move. His companion was craning out the other window.

  “Big colored fellow beating up on a white girl!” he cried excitedly.

  Szigetti slid the dress rack into the open space between the cops and the quarreling lovers. He pushed hard. They batted foolishly at the swinging dresses, as Shayne had done two nights before in the house on Staten Island. While they were tied up, Szigetti reached through the dresses and squirted tear gas into their eyes from a pocket dispenser.

  Irene and Brownie had already separated and disappeared.

  Szigetti screamed, “Where’d that black bo go? He threw acid at them! Come on!”

  He raced into a nearby vestibule, but no one else in the crowd wanted to join him in the pursuit of a large, dangerous Negro who had already managed to disable two cops. The cops were clawing at their eyes.

  Above in the truck’s high cab, Shayne jammed the stick into low and was off with a roar, swinging the wrong way into Twenty-seventh. Both lanes ahead were empty. So far Michele’s scheme was working well.

  “One-way street!” the regular driver cried.

  “Don’t I know it,” Shayne said grimly, chewing on his cigar. “Some jokers are trying to hijack us. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  The driver Shayne had displaced was a small, swarthy man, and like Shayne he had a cigar between his teeth. He hadn’t been told what cargo he was carrying. All he knew was that the cartons and canvas bags had been loaded with care, being checked off one by one on a master list as it was put in the truck. Instead of using the rear hatchway and the conveyor belt, they had been loaded through the side hatch, so they could be rechecked at the incinerator. And then he had been given a two-cop escort, another indication that something unusual was happening.

  After one look at Shayne, he peered worriedly ahead at the trailer truck. It inched forward, leaving just enough room for a scooter or a Volkswagen to squeeze past.

  Shayne slowed. Billy burst from between two parked cars and leaped onto the foothold on the right of the cab. Clinging to the door handle he yelled, “In there! Take a right! A right! For Christ’s sake give her some gas!”

  Shayne swung the wheel hard. The big truck rocked up over the curb. At the sight of the wooden police barrier Shayne hit the brakes. Billy screamed and he bulled ahead. The barrier went over and was crushed beneath the front wheels.

  He plunged into the alleyway he and Michele had reconnoitered the day before. Behind the building he veered sharply into the unloading space. Billy threw the door open on his side, waving a gun.

  “Out!” he shouted. “You guys out!”

  The Sanitation worker nearest him was slow to move. Billy jabbed him in the ribs.

  “I said move!”

  The regular driver looked at Shayne, his black eyes liquid with terror.

  Shayne said warily, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got kids. Let’s let somebody else be a hero.”

  “All of you!” Billy said, his voice high.

  The two Sanitation workers slid past Billy onto the loading platform. Shayne followed, his hands raised.

  “Lie down,” Billy snapped.

  The two men fell obediently to their knees. Billy whipped out handcuffs. He had four pairs, two of which he tossed to Shayne.

  “Hands behind you,” he told the Sanitation men.

  So far Shayne had been following Michele’s schedule. Now for the first time he introduced one of the variations he had worked out with Power. A burly plainclothes detective, garbed as a janitor, came out of the loft building, carrying a mop and a ten-quart pail filled with dirty water. Billy was stooping over the driver, putting the handcuffs on his ankles. He looked around as the janitor swung the pail, knocking him sprawling. The detective then hit him with the mop and dived for his gun hand. Billy managed to free the gun, but the detective, working with speed and precision, brought Billy’s arm down sharply across the edge of the loading platform. The gun dropped to the blacktop below.

  Shayne hit the detective a token blow, and the detective staggered backward, sitting down hard. Billy wrenched himself up and fell on him.

  “Go on!” Billy cried over his shoulder at Shayne. “Go!”

  The detective was flopping around, pretending to be trying to free himself. Shayne hesitated.

  Billy shouted again and Shayne leaped into the cab. He let the truck’s acceleration slam the door for him. He headed for the dividing wall on the property line, and hit it squarely. Sure enough, it went down with a clang.

  Through another delivery alley, almost a continuation of the one he had just left, he saw Twenty-eighth Street. There was another wooden barrier at the mouth of the alley. Being in less of a hurry now, he removed it by hand, and turned east on Twenty-eighth.

  At Broadway he stopped following the route that had been laid out for him. The excavation site where the cargo was to be transferred was on Twenty-first, seven blocks downtown. He turned uptown on Fifth. At the Empire State Building he turned left, staying on Thirty-fourth as far as Eleventh Avenue.

  At this point he pulled in to the curb, raised the hood and removed three spark plugs. After prying up the points so they would no longer fire, he put them back and slammed down the hood.

  The engine took hold haltingly and he went into the Sanitation Department Motor Shop on five cylinders.

  One long wall of the shop was lined with big yellow trucks waiting for repairs. Two mechanics were working on a truck without a front wheel. There were other workmen around the grease pit in back. A small man in oil-spattered overalls came out of a little office and listened while Shayne raced the motor.

  “Could be a bearing,” he said. “Pull in over there.”

  Shayne maneuvered the truck into an open space in the rank, shut off the motor and came back to the office. The official wrote down the truck’s serial number and the name Shayne gave him, which was that of the regular driver.

  “How soon can you go to work on her?” Shayne said.

  “Christ, look at the jobs we got lined up. Maybe next week.”

  Shayne nodded indifferently. Outside, he tossed his cigar away, shut himself in a phone booth and dialed the LaGuardia number.

  Michele answered promptly.

  “What do you think,” Shayne said. “Trouble.”

  “Trouble! Ziggy said everything was fine. Where are you?”

  “Stop asking questions and listen. It may still be OK. I think I broke the gas line when I went over that fence. Gas all over the street. Now here’s the thing. A guy I know has a truck and he’ll be here in a minute. We’ll transfer the load on the street. I’ve got the uniform on. Nobody’ll bother us. If the son of a bitch only hurries.”

  Michele forced herself to be calm. “And you will drive from there to Twenty-first Street?”

  “Hell, no. We’re going to be hearing the sirens in a couple of minutes. I want to get all the way out of the neighborhood. And they got Billy. He knows the Twenty-first Street address, so better call them and tell them to clear the hell out.”

  “I wait here.”

  “No, go to your apartment. There’s my guy now. Yeah. Now don’t worry about him, he’s OK-There’s the siren!”

  “But-” He slammed down the phone, grinning.

  CHAPTER 14

  He had checked his suitcase at Pennsylvania Station. He changed into his new suit in the men’s room and checked his appearance in the mirror. The men in the Brooks Brothers cutting rooms had allowed for all the usual possibilities, but they hadn’t expected any of their customers to wear a shoulder holster under one of their suits. There was a definite wrinkle.

  He hung the Sanitation Department uniform in a cleaning closet, and put the suitcase into another coin locker. After paying his way into the subway, he studied the map and decided on the Eighth Avenue uptown express. The train he wanted pulled in a moment later. The trip took only a few minutes. Michele’s apartment was several blocks from the subway station, and Shayne walke
d rapidly. He wanted to be the first to arrive.

  He picked his way into the inner lobby, using the small set of burglar’s tools which he carried wherever he went. Ascending to the twelfth floor, he rang the bell at 12-H. There was no answer.

  He lit a cigarette, looked at his watch thoughtfully and went back down the hall to the door of the incinerator. This was a small closet with a bin in the inner wall facing the door. The landlord, an aluminum company, had posted a notice telling tenants what articles not to throw down the chute. Shayne ripped the notice off the wall and scrawled across its back: “Out of Order Use Incinerator on 11th Floor.” He punched a hole in the cardboard and hung it on the outer doorknob. Then he shut himself in.

  A few minutes later a woman’s high heels clicked toward the incinerator. A voice said wearily, “Oh, the bastards,” and the heel-clicks went to the elevator. An elevator picked her up and in another moment brought her back. She returned to her apartment.

  Shayne went on waiting.

  The next time the elevator stopped at that floor he heard Michele’s voice, low and guarded.

  “He may be already here, so be careful.”

  When footsteps passed, Shayne cracked the door and looked out. He saw Michele, in the stylish suit she was wearing today. She had Brownie with her. She motioned to Brownie to stand so he couldn’t be seen through the one-way peephole, and slid a key into the lock. “Merde,” she said. It was the wrong key.

  Shayne opened the door and stepped out, the. 45 in his hand. Two long strides ate up half the intervening space. Brownie whirled, his hand stabbing toward his jacket.