“Grandpa has to die,” she said coldly. “Tonight! Think I’m going to wait years while he takes his time to die and we live on crumbs? No! Now just get out of the way, Mr. Shayne and don’t try anything. Tod, come over here — away from them. This is a shotgun, not a rifle.”
And because it was a shotgun, Mike Shayne took the chance. He sprang forward, getting Tod Bascom’s body between him and the muzzle. Effie tried to shout, but too late. Shayne pinned Bascom’s hand and blocked his own body with Effie’s husband.
Hat Raymond took a hand once more. He dove behind the divan, creaking joints and all, hollering like an Indian again. Effie swung the muzzle, left and right, then left again, sorely confused and bewildered — her eyes glazed. Shayne was watching her closely and suddenly shot Tod Bascom toward her as he would release a bowling ball.
Bascom screamed and tried to cover his face with his hands. Effie jumped and tried to sight past him. There was too much blur for her to focus properly, and suddenly Tod crashed into her.
They were both a helpless tangle on the stairs. Shayne vaulted the divan, scooping up his fallen .45 as he went, and blasted twice over their heads. Effie dropped the shotgun and averted her face. Tod Bascom collapsed helplessly. Effie Bascom’s loud sobs filled the room.
“Damnation!” Hat Raymond cried. “Damn money! Bunch of vultures. Ruins everything. Even your own flesh and blood will kill you for money, Shayne.”
“Shut up, for a change,” Shayne said, not too unkindly. “If you didn’t play with people’s lives and dreams like an old fool, you wouldn’t tempt people into doing stupid things. Tod Bascom is a weakling who saw a chance to make money the easy way and you played on his weaknesses with all this will business. Why didn’t you tell me you had changed the will so I could know what the story was and do something about it? I had to find that out for myself.”
Hat Raymond’s eyes shone with admiration. He extended a leathery hand. “Shayne, I sure could have used a man like you forty years ago. What a time we would have had cleaning up things around here.”
“What about your granddaughter?”
The old man subsided. “A man has to take what comes. It doesn’t make me happy to know she wanted me dead. But she was temporarily out of her mind — almost insane. I’ll tell you this, young feller, I didn’t get to where I am crying over spilt milk.”
“No,” Shayne said. “I guess you didn’t, at that.”
Raymond smiled faintly. “At least, Effie’s a fighter. There’s a lot to be said for fighters. Even when they fight in the wrong,”
Mike Shayne just nodded, as he kept Tod and Effie covered. It was time to call the operator and ask for the local law to come down and make an arrest — two arrests.
But he hadn’t reckoned on Hat Raymond. The old man fixed an eye on Tod Bascom and his badly frightened granddaughter and spoke to Shayne.
“No law, Shayne. Hat Raymond takes care of his own. I’m responsible for Effie losing her head. I know this much. This young husband of her’s is no good for her. If he divorces her and forgets any claim he may have on her, I’ll let him clear out of Florida right now — providing Effie stays with me and lets me make it up to her. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
In a moment, Effie had rushed to him, eyes streaming with tears, trembling with remorse. Hat Raymond folded her gently in his arms and glared at Tod Bascom.
“There’s your answer, Bascom,” he growled. “You leaving now or does Mike Shayne have to run you in?”
Tod Bascom gulped nervously, flung a look at Effie, at the determined Hat Raymond and nodded his acquiescence. “Would you wait for me, Mr. Shayne,” he said, “while I go upstairs to pack my few things and drive me to the station.” And he walked slowly up the stairs to his room.
Mike Shayne rubbed his earlobe speculatively. Hat Raymond may have lost a son-in-law — but he seemed to have acquired a brand new granddaughter. Shayne fervently hoped so, for the old man’s sake.
“Well, Shayne,” Raymond said happily over Effie’s shoulder. “I guess everything may work out just fine.”
Mike Shayne shrugged. “Looks like it. But you’re lucky they were just a couple of crazy, rank amateurs. Well, there’s nothing left for me to do but drive back to Miami and have my secretary send you a bill for two thousand dollars.
“By the way, Hat,” Shayne went on. “I just checked the shotgun. Not a damned thing in it. They were just a pair of amateurs to the end.”
A Small Matter of Time
by Shane Stephens
They were still somewhere in the room, he knew that even though they had stopped talking. He wasn’t sure how many there were, he thought at least three.
Only two of them had spoken, never to him, always to each other. One had a lisp, especially on words like three. He gave this man the name three-she, pictured him as tall, angular, with thin nervous movements and washed-out complexion. The other man spoke in ordinary tones, neither loud nor soft, no inflection, no dialect, nothing to give him away. He was no-face.
He tried to determine the man’s height. Three-she garbled his final words as if he were bringing his face down for someone shorter than he. Couple this with three-she’s height and the other man must be quite a bit shorter. A mutt-and-jeff pair.
Another thing was his walk. No-face walked with a heavy foot. People who walk with heavy feet are usually short and squat. He remembered an uncle he had as a boy. Whenever the uncle would visit, he would know him by the walk. His uncle was just over five feet, and he weighed at least two hundred pounds.
He had liked his uncle, sometimes they would play games like tap-tap, hide and go seek, blind man’s bluff. His uncle showed him how to Indian wrestle, used to tell him how strong he was getting. His uncle was a good man. Solid, short, squat. Like no-face.
There was someone else in the room. Little noises that didn’t belong to the two who spoke, a kind of breathing from somewhere on the side when he imagined mutt-and-jeff to be elsewhere.
He listened for a sound, a gasp for air or any sound that a human makes, but all he could hear was the breathing, very faint, with a rhythm of its own. He wasn’t even sure it was breathing, it was more like a humming noise. But very soft, very soothing.
He tried to think of other things. Time was very important, people always did everything on time. There was that old joke about the world coming to an end when they ran out of time. It was silly in a way, people run out of time but not the world. Maybe he ran out of time, maybe he’s dead. No, it couldn’t be that, he was alive a little while ago.
He had been busily going about his affairs like any ambitious young lawyer. Praise for his courtroom conduct had just come from a very important client, he knew that within five years he would be made a partner in the firm, and this before he was forty. It didn’t make any sense to be dragged away from the world and shut up in a room with strange men.
If only he could see. They didn’t have to put suction cups over his eyes. He had a feeling he wouldn’t see anything even if he were not blindfolded by the cups, that the room was in total darkness. Not that he could take them off, with his hands and feet tied so tightly.
That’s another thing they didn’t have to do, he couldn’t go anywhere. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t even know if it was a room at all. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t in some kind of cave.
That didn’t sound right to him, there was no smell of a cave or anything underground. He thought of the time he had played in caves as a boy. He remembered the musty smell, the dank atmosphere, the hard time breathing as he penetrated deeper and deeper.