He drifted over to the table and rested one hip on it. Manny Farber walked toward the open door. The guard shouted, “Stand still or I shoot.”
Farber turned back, and Weinberger fitted his hand around the gun. Although he had never before touched a gun, his finger instinctively found the trigger. He shot the guard in the head.
The Arab tumbled backward down the steps, taking his gun with him. The other Arab whirled. The compartment filled with blast and concussion, as though the plane had been blown apart, and the guard went flying, jerking his arms almost comically, like a puppet out of control.
A voice said evenly in English, “All of you down.”
A tall redheaded man, with one arm in a sling, was standing at the bottom of the compartment. He had a double-barreled shotgun. His right shoulder was turned toward them, the shotgun barrels resting on his cast.
Weinberger was between the redheaded stranger and the cockpit. He dropped as though shot himself, and pulled Farber down.
The pilot appeared. His gun was up, but before he could fire, the shotgun roared again. The pilot went back hard against the instrument panel.
“Mike Shayne,” Farber said.
“How’re you doing, Manny?” The redhead broke the shotgun and reloaded. “Now we’ve got guns for everybody. There are a couple more pistols in the bag.”
A revolver shot sounded outside, followed by a burst of submachine gunfire. Bullets tore through the skin of the plane. Weinberger picked up one of the Arabs’ guns and started for the door. Shayne ordered him back.
“There’s no hurry. They’re the ones in trouble now.” He grinned. “What kept you? I was beginning to think you wouldn’t get here.”
“We were beginning to think we wouldn’t get here alive,” Weinberger said. “I’m glad to meet you, Shayne.”
“How many are still out there?”
“Two.”
“We can handle two. Manny, you watch the door.”
Shayne entered the cockpit carefully. Weinberger followed, unable to hold still. Through the curved windshield, he looked across to a catwalk on the nearest wall. A fat man in loose clothes crouched on it, sighting with a pistol resting on the iron railing. He tightened visibly, fired twice, then jumped back into the shadows. Somebody yelled. A submachine gun, thrown or dropped, skidded across the floor. Another gun fired from directly underneath the plane.
“That locates him,” Shayne said.
He called Hill, and posted him in the cockpit. He crossed the main compartment, stepping over bodies, and went down a short ladder into the bomb-bay. Nothing happened for a moment. Looking down from above, Weinberger heard a grinding sound, and saw the belly-doors slowly open. Rashid, below, looked up and fired. Shayne was back out of sight, against the curving wall. He reached out and fired one barrel without aiming. Drawing back, he changed position. Rashid turned slowly without returning the fire. Weinberger started down the metal ladder.
Shayne heard him and shook his head. Then, like a clumsy ox, Weinberger slipped. Looking back on it later, he blamed the fact that he was wearing sandals.
He went all the way down, hit the edge of the open door, snatched at the gun but lost it, teetered for a second and fell onto Rashid’s shoulders. Jarred to the floor, he grabbed the Arab’s knees. Rashid brought the gun down, but Weinberger came up inside it. His fingers closed on Rashid’s throat. Hit repeatedly with the gun-butt, he managed to hold. Letting the gun swing, the Arab seized his clutching hands.
They were closely entangled, and Shayne, above, found it impossible to fire. He swung from the bomb-rack with one hand and dropped into the fight, driving them both to the ground.
His cast struck Rashid a blow from above and behind. Weinberger heard shouts and running footsteps. People were all around them. He continued to hang on. The Arab’s face, an inch from his own, contorted and began to darken. They looked into each other’s eyes. The Arab’s eyeballs protruded, a tracery of red lines standing out against the white.
Weinberger went on choking him, knocking his head again and again on the concrete, for a considerable time after he knew he must be dead.
18
At Shayne’s request, the Army nurse pressed a button, bringing up the head of the bed, and brought him a second pillow. She was the nicest-looking woman he had seen in weeks, black-haired, as graceful as a seal, and presumably she wasn’t a killer, a thief or a dealer in heroin. Nevertheless, she was getting less than Shayne’s full attention. He was too mad.
She put a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and offered him a lemonade with a bent straw.
“Lemonade,” he said.
“Get well, Mr. Shayne,” she said lightly, “and we’ll let you have all the hard liquor you can drink.”
While still in the air after dropping through the bomb-bay doors, Shayne had aimed a kick at the Arab’s spine. He had connected solidly, but the weight of his cast had pulled him off balance and he had come down hard on his left arm. Now both arms were in casts, and he was taking it badly. He bit down on the cigarette and she had to take it away.
“Be nice, please? I know it’s not pleasant, but from what people tell me, worse things could have happened. Incidentally, we’re overstaffed here since the cutbacks, so I’m pretty much available if you want anything. Within the general context of the patient-nurse relationship-”
“Hmm,” he said.
“I mean, if you want to be read to, or if you’d like a massage-Do you play chess? What I’m trying to get at, I think this whole thing today was fantastic!”
She took a deep breath and smiled. “All right, I got that off my chest. There are some policemen outside. I can easily tell them you’re sleeping?”
“No, I want to wind it up.”
In a moment Will Gentry and two others came in.
“Just you, Will,” Shayne said.
“You’re calling the shots,” Gentry said equably, and waved the others out.
“Did you get any of the messages I’ve been sending you?” Shayne said when they were alone.
Gentry filled his pipe. After he had it alight, he said, “We had a kind of communications breakdown. Phone calls didn’t get through for about forty minutes. As luck would have it, the radio net wasn’t working too well either.”
“As luck would have it. Did you go to Boca Raton? Did you find anybody with a fresh black eye?”
“I did, Mike. A handsome woman, except for that eye. I caught them as they were leaving for the airport. As soon as I told her my name she took me into a bedroom and tried to bribe me. Nobody’s done that for the last couple of weeks.”
“What did you book her for?”
“Attempted bribery and passing counterfeit money. I’ve been talking to Coddington about that, and it seems we’ll have to use the same evidence in two different cases.”
“All right, start the questions.”
“Who killed the woman outside the radio station last night?”
“Murray Gold. Her name was Esther Landau. She was working for Israeli intelligence. She got my name from a guy in Washington, and she was trying to intercept me before I went on Tim’s show. Gold was there to make some arrangements with a cop who came to see him in Israel. Will Gentry, he called himself.”
Gentry continued to smoke.
Shayne said, “What happened to Gold, has he turned up anywhere?”
“He’s dead. I know you’ve been arranging most of this, Mike, and you probably arranged that.”
“Did you kill him?”
Gentry shook his head. “Angie Robustelli killed him. He caught him with a suitcase of heroin in his car, and shots were exchanged. I keep trying to persuade Angie that he’s too quick with his pistol, but it’s an old habit. The funny thing is, it isn’t heroin. Somebody burned somebody, somewhere along the line.”
“How did Robustelli make out?”