A minority were not, and this minority tended to cluster together in rundown sections close to the river. It was into the worst and most notorious of these inner cities that Millie Love directed Mike Shayne. The area wasn’t exclusively Spanish, of course. Some blacks and Anglos lived there too. It was exclusively hoodlum and extremely dangerous for an outsider to go into.
Mike Shayne knew the section from the old days, but even he was astounded at the extent to which it had deteriorated. Many of the buildings seemed about to literally collapse inward upon themselves. Small grocery stores with Spanish language signs, disreputable eating places and bars. The few people on the streets were either furtive or brazen in their manner.
Millie Love told Shayne where to park. As he did so another car pulled to a stop a block behind them. No one got out. Shayne wondered if he was being followed, or if Millie was. If so he hardly dared hope that the shadower was anyone friendly to himself.
The woman didn’t give him any time for speculation, but pointed him down a narrow alley between two decrepit tenements. Back of that was an empty, weed-grown lot where rats scurried out of their way. Across the street from the lot was a fenced junkyard heaped with rusted old car bodies, and a house. Both backed up to the slow, murky waters of one of the little canals that branched out of the Miami River in this section of town.
Millie pointed to the house. “That’s where we’re going.”
It had once been a comfortable, even expensive, frame two-story bungalow with a sloping shingled roof and a wide porch in front for Sunday afternoon lemonade and sitting out. Now it was sadly run down.
There were lights in the ground floor rooms, but heavy drapes had been drawn so that it was impossible to see inside. A heavy and brooding air of menace seemed to shroud the whole place.
Millie Love came up on the wide old porch with Shayne and knocked on the door, a quick, rhythmic tattoo that the big detective was sure must be a code known to the man inside.
He heard heavy footsteps inside and someone opened the door just a crack and held it there.
“It’s me, Julio,” the woman said. “I’ve brought the goods you wanted.”
Mike Shayne didn’t wait any longer. He raised one big foot and kicked against the door as hard as he could.
If the man inside had been braced to resist, Shayne might have broken his ankle. It would have been trying to kick down a log stockade.
Julio wasn’t braced though. He had begun to pull the door inward to open it for the woman, and the sudden and smashing attack caught him completely offguard. He was forced back two or three steps, and Mike Shayne got into the room.
He whirled round to face the man and almost gasped in surprise. Julio was big all right. He stood at least six foot six in the white tennis shoes he was wearing. Besides the shoes he had on white hospital pants and a sport shirt that was size extra-large and still bulged over his chest till the buttons were ready to pop. His arms and biceps were at least as big and muscular as those of a champion weight lifter.
The hands were immense, with powerful, hooked fingers, nails almost like claws and a mat of black hair on the back of each. The face was square, brutal and gaping in surprise. He wore his greasy black hair in a shoulder-length tangle.
Mike Shayne got a quick glimpse of course. He hadn’t time to analyze what he saw as he swung a terrific, looping right hand punch at the man’s jaw. One of Shayne’s long rights would normally knock down a bull.
It didn’t knock down Julio. He didn’t have time to roll away from the punch? Maybe he didn’t even see it coming.
Shayne’s fist connected solidly with a force that came close to breaking his own wrist. It was like slugging the bronze statue of Columbus over in Bayfront Park.
Julio didn’t stagger or even give back a step. He stood there and took the punch without flinching. The pain that flashed up the detective’s arm from that blow almost paralyzed it, but as far as Julio was concerned, he might have been slapped with a wet towel.
The two immense hands hooked up and in towards. Mike Shayne’s face, but he wasn’t punching. He was taking a judo hold with a skill born of long experience. Shayne recognized it instantly as a hold long thought to be unbreakable.
Julio crossed his arms as he went for Mike Shayne’s throat. With his right hand he gripped the right side of Shayne’s coat collar; while his left, which had crossed over the right wrist, gripped the left side of the collar.
This was a classic example of the judo master’s way of gaining holds on his victim’s clothing. But the tightening of the coat collar to make it a garrote was not the only part of this attack.
Julio applied strangling force by drawing his fists together, but in so doing, he supplied cruel and steadily increasing pressure on Shayne’s throat with his right forearm.
Shayne knew that once that hold was applied it was virtually impossible for him to get at his attacker’s hands to break the hold. The fingers had more than a throat hold, they were also twisted into the cloth of the coat collar.
The crossed arms let Julio press his elbows so close against the detective that they were safe from an edge-of-the-hand hack that might have hit the nerve.
Similarly his own big chest was so close to his folded arms that his foe had no possible way of worming his hands up between the arms for the standard hold break.
Julio also tried to pump his knee up into Shayne’s groin or abdomen for a paralyzing blow, but the detective was able to throw a block with his own knee.
That still didn’t give Shayne any grace as far as the throttling tactics were concerned. That terrible pressure grew more and more and he knew that the time before he would black out and then die was growing short.
There was still one possible way of nullifying this awful attack. Mike Shayne had seen it demonstrated by a professional Black Belt wrestler years before and he tried it now.
He arched his own body back as far away from the giant Julio as he could make it go. Then he got his right hand in between them, pointed the hand by joining and stiffening his fingers and driving the pointed hand with a mighty and convulsive counter jab right into Julio’s solar plexus.
The big strangler must have been overconfident. He hadn’t been ready for that counter and Mike Shayne had delivered it perfectly. Julio’s wind went out and he was briefly shocked into paralysis.
Mike Shayne didn’t waste a single split micro-second of the time his sudden counter attack had gained him. As the jab made Julio lease his hold and bend forward instinctively, Shayne’s own two big hands locked behind the head and forced Julio’s face forward and down. As he did so Shayne brought up his own knee and slammed it against the dazed and gasping giant’s left ear.
Then he stepped back swiftly, letting go his hold. As Julio fell forward, Shayne brought up his foot in a kick like a football player attempting a field goal. The kick to Julio’s head almost tore it off his shoulders.
That ended the fight. Big Julio was down and unconscious on the floor.
Shayne himself was still shaken and gasping for air. He stood there swaying back and forth on his feet. It was as narrow an escape from death as Shayne had had in a long while and he knew it. If he hadn’t happened to have seen the demonstration of the one possible way to break that unbreakable strangler’s hold, Big Julio would have one more entry to make in his diary of death.
The thought of the diary made him turn towards Millie Love. She had followed him in off the porch and stood there with the police positive thirty-eight revolver still in her hand. She was looking at them both and her face held the same expression of cruel glee that Shayne had seen on the visages of spectators at bull fights arid cockfights?