She said, “Yes,” and settled back.
He pulled away from the curb slowly. “Kinda late at night to be visiting there. You got some — uh — bad news or something?”
“I’m afraid maybe it is. My... sister,” said Lucy fearfully. “That car that crashed into the bay tonight. They recovered a woman’s body and I’m afraid—”
“Say, that’s sure too bad, miss. I heard something about it on the radio.” He went on cheerfully recalling other automobile accidents and tragedies in which he had been more or less involved, and when they arrived in front of the morgue he solicitously asked Lucy if she’d like him to go in with her so she wouldn’t be “so sort of alone and all,” but she bravely refused his offer and gave him a nice tip as she got out.
She went up the stone steps diffidently to the front door with twin lights burning above it, opened the door, and stepped inside a brightly lighted but empty anteroom.
She had been told there would be an attendant on duty to assist her, and she stood hesitantly just inside the door, her heart beating rapidly and possessed by an intense desire to turn and flee from the place before anyone came to show her the body she feared might be Arlene.
A door in the rear opened as she stood there, and a heavily built man wearing a gray suit and a gray felt hat emerged and strode toward her.
He didn’t fit her idea of a morgue attendant, and she stepped aside from in front of the door, looking past him to see a small bald-headed man in shirt sleeves follow him through the door and turn to close it.
She took one step forward just as the man in gray reached her side. He stopped to stare at her in surprise, and exclaimed loudly, “I didn’t know you were coming down, too, my dear. It isn’t Helen, thank God!”
He caught her arm and swung her about toward the door before Lucy could collect her wits and disclaim knowing him. His bulky body was between her and the attendant, and he shouldered the door open while clamping a big hand tightly over her mouth and pushing her through it in front of him.
Crazed with fright and desperate with fear, Lucy struggled and kicked to free herself, making gurgling sounds behind his tight palm, but they were going down the steps now and there was no one to observe what was happening.
A black two-door sedan was parked at the curb, and he held her tightly with one arm about her neck and the hand still over her mouth as he jerked the door open and pulled the seat back.
Twisted upward as she was while still fighting to free herself, Lucy had her first clear look at his face. It seemed vaguely familiar, and the truth came to her suddenly with sickening force.
It was the man who had been in the gray sedan on the Causeway when she had tossed Michael Shayne’s makeshift bomb into the front seat.
At the same moment that realization came to her, he deliberately swung a big fist against her right temple.
A loud gong sounded inside her head and her body went limp and unconscious.
Chapter Twelve
Lucy Hamilton swung back fuzzily to consciousness some time later. She had no way of knowing how much later. Her head ached terribly, and her body muscles were cramped and painful. She had no idea where she was at first, or how she had got there. She was constricted in a narrow space, and in a moment or so she realized she must be on the floor in the back seat of a moving car.
Then, suddenly, she remembered everything. Going to the morgue to see if she could identify Arlene, the man in the gray suit coming out from the rear door and acting so abruptly as though he knew her, seizing her and whisking her out the door before she could protest, knocking her unconscious with his fist just at the moment she recognized him as the man who had attempted to collect seventy thousand dollars from her on the County Causeway.
Her head ached intolerably as she shifted position, reached out hands on either side to affirm her guess that she was on the floor in the back of a moving car.
She wasn’t bound in any way. She had just been dumped in the back, unconscious, and he had driven away from the morgue with her.
He must have recognized her there at once, she thought. He had gotten a good look at her on the Causeway in the moonlight without any hat to hide her features. So he had known immediately who she was at the morgue. And he had acted swiftly and efficiently to prevent her from going down and looking at the woman who had died in the luggage compartment of his sedan while he was thrown clear before the car went over the bank.
Why, she wondered? Why had he grabbed her and rushed her out the door of the morgue before she could protest? Did he realize she was an old friend of Arlene Bristow’s and that was why she had come? Was the dead woman Arlene, and did he have some reason for wishing her to remain unidentified?
Who was he — and what did he plan to do to her now?
She twisted cautiously in the narrow space, flexing her aching muscles and drawing her knees up, straightening to full length on her back, and then bending her knees again until the cramped blood began to flow and she felt she had control of her own body again.
She lifted herself on her elbows and gazed unhappily at the back of the driver’s head silhouetted above and in front of her. He was driving steadily on a smoothly paved highway at a moderate pace — looking straight ahead and apparently paying no attention to her at all in the back. If she only had some weapon to bop him over the head with, Lucy thought disconsolately. It might wreck the car, but anything would be better than this.
Other women in a similar position, she recalled, had been known to take off a shoe and knock a man out by socking him on the head with the heel of it. But she hadn’t changed since her walk on the Causeway, and she was wearing the same sensible, rubber-heeled walking shoes she had selected for that jaunt. If she hit him over the head with one of those, she thought ruefully, it would just anger him so he would probably knock her unconscious again.
She felt the car begin to slow as he took his foot from the gas and braked gently, and she carefully drew herself to a sitting position so she could look out the rear window without attracting her captor’s attention. Out the right-hand window in the moonlight, she could see the feathery tops of Australian pines and an occasional date palm.
The car was slowing more and more, and she strained her eyes to read the street names on corner posts as they slid past intersections.
The only thing she could read was Biscayne Blvd. on two successive corner signs as they passed. So, they were on the Boulevard traveling northward. And she hadn’t been unconscious very long after all, because after they left the northern city limits of Miami the street signs would change.
She was certain, now, that he was braking for a turn. She sat very tense on the floor with her head just below the level of the seat in front of her, straining her eyes out the window to catch the next street sign.
And she was rewarded. The car swerved in a right-hand turn and she caught the name of the intersecting street in the headlights as they swung in an arc.
Saltair Street! It was completely unfamiliar to her. She hadn’t the faintest idea where it was except she knew it must be near the northern limits of the city and right angles to the Boulevard.
It couldn’t be far to the bay here, she thought, and she sank back to the floor of the car and lay relaxed with her eyes closed as he moved along slowly for a few blocks.
She continued to lie like that when the car came to a full stop. She heard him turn off the ignition and open his door and step out, then he swung the half of the front seat forward away from her, and she knew he must be standing there looking in to see if she had recovered consciousness yet.