A husky voice said, “Crawl in, honey. I’m going your way and what’s the use either of us being lonesome?”
Relaxation flooded through Lucy’s body in a great, enervating wave. She was barely able to say, “No, thanks,” in a firm voice as she marched on past the invitingly open door.
She heard it slam shut behind her, and then the motor take hold slowly. It eased up beside her and kept pace for twenty or thirty feet, and her heart began to pound again.
This might be him after all. Maybe his first approach had been tentative to see how she would react. Maybe this time he would open the door and say—
But he didn’t. He gave it up after idling beside her for a short distance without even winning a second glance from her. Then the station wagon speeded up — to search for more complaisant game, Lucy told herself wryly.
Then two young girls stopped in another convertible, giggling as they told her it was old-fashioned to walk home from a date; and a shabby coupe with a courteous old gentleman behind the wheel who professed himself profoundly shocked to discover such a young and beautiful maiden in distress, and he was the hardest to discourage of all because although he said the nicest and most courtly things, his cracked voice had a goatish leer in it that implied exactly the opposite of his words.
After he reluctantly accepted the inevitable and went on, there was quite an interval during which no one paid any heed to her. Lucy walked on steadily. She had covered about half a mile she thought, and she wondered if it was going to turn into a fiasco. It was not unpleasant walking, and she told herself that Michael would certainly be waiting for her in his car at the other end of the Causeway if she reached it without incident.
In a sense, she hoped devoutly that it would turn out that way. Even though she had worked with the detective for many years, she still had a normal distaste for violence, a normal shrinking from physical danger.
But Michael would be dreadfully disappointed, she knew, if the mysterious man failed to stop and demand the package. If this contact failed there was no other way at all they could get in touch with him. Michael had explained that to her very carefully in her apartment, stressing his belief that the man must possess definite information about two murders, and reminding her forcibly that it was entirely her fault that Jack Bristow had died before being forced to tell his story.
So, in a larger sense, Lucy Hamilton hoped with all her heart that each car coming up from behind would be the one she expected. She steeled herself to go over and over in her mind exactly what Michael had said she must do when the demand was made. Everything depended on careful timing. Both her own safety and the man’s ultimate capture.
She knew it would be he when the car began to slow some distance behind her. Traffic was lighter now than it had been when she started her walk, and her senses had become attuned to deviations in the speed of cars approaching from the rear.
None of the others had begun to slow down so far back. They had been surprised when their headlights revealed the lone figure of a woman on foot on the Causeway so late at night, and some of them at least had hesitated about bothering to stop until they were close enough to ascertain that she was young and not, at least, hideously ugly.
But the driver of this car was not surprised to have his headlights pick her out. Neither was he hesitating about slowing down until he could determine whether she was worth the bother.
She kept walking steadily as though unaware of the slowing car, edging farther to the right where a guard fence protected the edge of a steep embankment leading down to the bay waters below.
She nervously shifted her fingers on the package again, setting her teeth together tightly and feeling every muscle in her slim young body tense as a gray sedan drew abreast of her, moving no faster than she, and the man behind the wheel leaned far over to unlatch the right-hand door and swing it open.
She could not see his face beneath the low brim of a felt hat, but had the vague impression that he was big-bodied and middle-aged. The voice was harsh, with a strong and unmistakable Southern accent.
“Throw it in, sister.”
Her thumb and forefinger were achingly tight about a small round knob that protruded from the side of the package under her arm. She stopped and caught it with her left hand, tossed it lightly through the open door, jerking the small knob loose as she did so.
The car door swung shut and the motor roared and tires screeched protestingly as the sedan leaped forward.
Lucy flung herself sideways over the edge of the embankment as there was a loud explosion in the night from the front seat of the gray sedan some fifty feet distant and accelerating fast.
As she leaped over the guard fence, she saw the sedan lurch violently to the right, and to her horror realized that the fence was down at that point for a space of some forty feet and there was nothing at all to prevent the car from going over.
It did. She was sliding down the embankment when it hurtled over the edge a hundred feet in front of her, doing a lazy somersault in the air and landing with a sickening crash upside down in Biscayne Bay.
Chapter Nine
Lucy Hamilton landed on hands and knees in loose sand at the foot of the embankment, less than ten feet from the edge of the water. After the violent crash caused by the gray sedan landing upside down in the bay directly in front of her, there was almost utter silence as she crouched there trying to orient herself — trying to realize exactly what had happened — trying to think what she should do next.
Michael Shayne hadn’t planned it to end like this. She knew that definitely. He had planned and hoped to capture the man alive after she tossed the package into his car.
She had realized, from what Michael told her when handing her the package, that it contained some sort of bomb or explosive apparatus instead of seventy thousand dollars. He had warned her explicitly against pulling the small knob protruding from the side until the instant it left her hands, and had emphasized the fact that she must immediately fling herself over the edge of the Causeway after releasing it.
But there were two things Shayne hadn’t been able to take into account while planning how to entrap the man. He hadn’t known the driver of the car would accelerate so fast the moment the bomb landed, or (even if he did and thus lost control of the speeding vehicle when the explosion occurred seconds later) that the accident would occur at a point where there was no guard fence along the edge to hold the car on the roadway.
So Lucy knew miserably that she had failed in her mission as she crouched in the soft sand thirty feet below the roadway. The gray sedan had sunk without a trace in the deep ship channel of the bay which paralleled the Causeway here, and there didn’t appear the slightest chance that the driver could be rescued alive. So, for the second time this same evening, a man who might be a murderer and who certainly had some guilty knowledge of murder had died through some fault of hers before he could be questioned.
She shuddered at the thought and tried to thrust it into the back of her mind. On the Causeway above her, she could hear cars stopping now, shouts and excited voices as occupants leaped out and converged at the point where the sedan had gone over.
At the same moment, she heard a second sound. From out on the surface of the bay to her right. The loud splashing of oars, and then the low voice of Michael Shayne calling urgently, “Lucy! Are you there, Lucy?”
She scrabbled to her feet and saw him plainly. Bending his back into powerful oar strokes that were driving a light skiff toward the shore twenty feet ahead of her.
“Here, Michael.” She kept her voice low so it wouldn’t be heard above, but sent it floating out over the water so he would find her. So, this was the way he had planned it, she thought dazedly as she plowed forward through the sand to intercept him. He had been offshore in a rowboat all the time. Pacing himself to the speed at which she progressed, waiting for the sound of explosion that would tell him the blackmailer had fallen into his trap.