The detonator was roughly the size of a cigar box. Shayne had it in a paper bag, holding it loosely in his left hand. After cranking the handle of the plunger, he was ready. Anyone who looked closely could have seen two wires coming out of the bottom of the bag, running down to the gutter and from there to the side hatch; but Shayne already knew that this was a city where people minded their own business. A block from the waterfront, there were few pedestrians, most of them looking like longshoremen or teamsters. Three out of four of the vehicles turning in from Eleventh Avenue were trucks.
Shayne’s big body was relaxed, his eyes sleepy, but in fact he was as alert as a terrier watching a woodchuck hole. The motor of the big truck ticked behind him. Trouble, he knew, could come from any direction. Power covered him on one side, Jamieson on the other, but he was relying mainly on the detonator, and he kept the paper bag in plain view.
He smoked his way through two cigars. He was in the middle of the third when the big rearview mirror on the truck’s fender showed him a man in a black Homburg and a well-cut dark suit, which made him conspicuous in that neighborhood. Shayne came around without hurrying, his right hand hovering above the mouth of the sack. The man was carrying a Val-Pack, an army officer’s suitcase. It was heavy enough to pull him down on one side. He was in his sixties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed oddly self-conscious.
Shayne touched the plunger lightly, his cigar cocked at a steep angle. The man approached at a plodding gait. He was clean-shaven, but there were ingrained dirt specks around his eyes. Several paces from Shayne he said, “Mr. Maguire?” and thrust the suitcase forward.
His voice, high and squeaky, confirmed what Shayne already knew: the shadowy Mr. A. had sent a substitute. Shayne reached for the suitcase, and at that instant he was struck a blow on the left shoulder. The detonator fell to the sidewalk. He pivoted on the ball of one foot, his brain registering automatically that he had been fired on from across the street.
The man in the new clothes started at him in horror. He dropped the suitcase and turned to run. Power was on the sidewalk a few paces ahead of him. He fired. The man tumbled to the sidewalk, hit in the knee.
Shayne went down, putting the truck between him and his hidden assailant. He still felt no pain in his shoulder, but he couldn’t do anything with his left hand. He reached for the paper bag, realizing as he did so that someone was above him in the cab. The gear-shift shrieked. His outstretched fingers touched the handle of the plunger. He twitched it toward him and drew the detonator in against his body, doubling over on it to hold it steady. The truck jerked out from the curb, the wires tightened, and with a fierce contraction of his whole body Shayne jammed the plunger down.
The explosion blew out the side hatch. In an instant the entire cargo-space was a sheet of flame. Power was beside Shayne, trying to pull the detonator out of his hand. Shayne gripped it convulsively. A small wiry man burst out of the cab and leaped into a waiting car, which shot away.
“Mike, for Christ’s sake! Let go.”
Shayne came to one knee and shook him off. He caught a flicker of movement at an open second floor window in a brownstone. He knocked Power out of his way and started for the building at a shambling run, his left arm dangling. Tim Rourke jumped out of the bakery truck and ran toward him.
The downstairs door of the building was propped open. Shayne heard running footsteps above him as he started up the stairs. He was feeling pain now, but he plowed on. Each flight seemed steeper, more treacherous, worse lighted than the one before. His lungs were bursting as he pushed through the heavy door at the top of the final flight and emerged into blinding sunlight.
He checked himself abruptly. The tarred roof was studded with a pigeon shed and various vents and chimneys. This was the first in a row of three brownstones, and as Shayne’s eyes adjusted he saw a man racing toward the stairwell of the third building. He looked back for an instant. Shayne recognized Szigetti.
Shayne had come as far as he was going. He stumbled to the low coping overlooking the street. The burning truck had moved just far enough from the curb so it blocked both lanes. It was almost directly beneath Shayne, and as he looked over the coping he could feel intense heat.
“Power!” he yelled. “Jamieson!”
Power was nowhere to be seen. Shayne yelled twice more. Then Power and Jamieson ran out onto the roof behind him.
“What, Mike?” Power demanded. “What?”
Looking down, Shayne saw Szigetti burst out of the front door of the other brownstone and set out toward Tenth Avenue at a fast walk without looking back.
“Too late now,” Shayne said.
CHAPTER 16
“Hell, Mike,” Tim Rourke said. “It was a long shot right from the jump. You told me so yourself. Long shots sometimes come in, but not all the time or they wouldn’t be long shots. Excuse the lecture, but I don’t like the way you’re taking this, pal.”
Rourke, Shayne and Power were in a narrow cell on the ground floor of a hospital called St. Luke’s. Shayne was stripped to the waist, sitting on the edge of a high bed while a young Turkish doctor worked on the hole in his shoulder. It could have been worse. The shoulder bone had been nicked, and he would have to carry his arm in a sling while the ligaments grew together, but in three weeks he could be back playing golf, no more than a half dozen shots off his usual game. This off-the-cuff diagnosis came from an X-ray technician. As for the doctor, he apparently spoke no English beyond “Hurt?” and “OK.”
Rourke went on, “But if we’d been able to swing it, what a story, what a story! As it is, I don’t know how much they’re going to let me write.”
He looked at Power, who was hunting for an ashtray. Power tapped the ash from his cigar into the cuff of his pants.
“Maybe not too much, Tim, at present. That’s the point about black operations: when they poop out, the best thing is to shut up and cut your losses. Mike, I know how you feel, coming this close. One thing we can say, we sure as hell tried! Even as it stands it’s far from a total bust. Actually we’ve achieved quite a lot.”
“How do you make that out?” Shayne said through set lips.
“We’ve got two members of the original stickup team, Billy Matthews and Tug Wynanski. It’s just a question of time till we pick up the others.”
“Who won’t be able to tell you a thing,” Shayne said.
“But we don’t know that. Look at a few of the leads we’ve got. Who rented the girl’s apartment? Who leased the house on Staten Island? When we develop Tim’s movie film we’ll have a good picture of the guy who tried to take off in the truck.”
“One of the things you’re telling me is that you don’t have the girl?”
“No,” Power said with regret. “Somebody got there first. She was gone and Brownie was gone. The Jetstar you told me about took off from LaGuardia at five-forty-five, probably with Michele and the banker aboard. If they’re still on board when it lands in Lisbon, I’ll be very much surprised. But we couldn’t call on the Air Force to shoot them down, could we? And to get another piece of disappointing news out of the way-the number she called did turn out to be the Swiss bank on William Street. But you remember she asked for extension thirty-eight. There are only thirty-seven extensions.”
“Big surprise,” Shayne commented. “How about the character who was carrying the suitcase? I don’t suppose he was anybody?”
“Nobody at all. He did it for ten dollars and a new suit. But you never know. Somebody had to hire him and clean him up and tell him what to do. He’s here in the hospital and we’re getting a statement from him now. And the whole Kraus angle is far from closed. What the hell, Mike, it’s police work. I can see now we were hoping for the moon. I wanted to go off the force in a blaze of glory, but that’s not the way the world’s run. The trouble was, too many things had to synchronize. I think we made a mistake in setting the price that high. Perhaps at a lower figure they wouldn’t have taken a chance they could put you out of action before you could work the detonator.”