Tim Rourke jumped a foot. “My God, what was that?”
Mike Shayne yelled, “Get down, Tim. Flat on your face!” and went into action. He jumped across the cabin and pulled the lamp cord out of its socket to plunge them into darkness.
“What’s going on?”
“Somebody took a shot at us through the glass,” Shayne said. “I think he was either on shore or on another boat and using a rifle.”
“He just tried again,” Tim Rourke said.
He was right. They didn’t hear the rifle shot, but they did distinctly hear a bullet strike the stern of the yacht. Then another whined into the water right off the stern.
Mike Shayne was up the hatch and out on deck with a speed that was extraordinary for such a big man. He left his gun in its holster, but pulled the big, three-inch-blade pocket knife he always carried and got it open.
Even as he reached the stern, another bullet splashed white splinters from the thwart of the old skiff tied to the stern.
Mike Shayne slashed with his knife at the ancient rope with which the skiff was tied to the after rail. He cut through and the tide began to pull the skiff away from the yacht. As it drifted, Shayne ran back into the wheelhouse and threw himself flat on the deck inside.
Two more bullets hit the skiff as it drifted. Then, when it was a good fifty yards from the yacht, the distant marksman hit the target he’d been aiming at from the start. It was the innocent looking rusty five gallon gas can on the floor of the outboard skiff. The contents weren’t gas. When the bullet hit, the can blew the skiff to toothpicks and showered the yacht with water and debris. The blast shook windows on the causeway.
As the crash died away, Rourke ran up into the wheelhouse. “That was supposed to be us,” he yelled. “How did you ever know to cut that thing loose?”
“I almost didn’t,” Shayne said. “I knew it was crazy for him to shoot at us when we were down in the cabin. Once the light was out nobody but an idiot would expect to hit you or me, but he kept on shooting.
“That meant it wasn’t us he was shooting at. Then I remembered that outboard. It didn’t belong with a luxury craft like this. When we came out I figured the killer had used it to board, but he wasn’t on board. When the shot came, I guessed that it must have been left for a target. I decided to get rid of it. I guess it was none too soon.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Let’s not and pretend we did,” Shayne said. “Anybody sharp enough to rig this trap is also sharp enough to figure we just might survive the bomb. He’ll expect us to bolt in that case, and lie’ll be ready for it. You stay right where you are.”
Shayne went out on deck and climbed down into the fast runabout, the Dolly. He started the engine, cast off the line, climbed back onto the yacht and kicked the runabout clear of the larger boat.
The Dolly, its throttle wide open, started to roar away down the Bay.
The second runabout came in on a converging course to head it off. This one was painted black, and moved very fast. As it slid alongside the Dolly someone stood up for a second and tossed something inside, then cut wildly away.
The Dolly disintegrated in a fountain of flame and smoke.
IX
“I told you he’d have something up his sleeve,” Mike Shayne said as they watched the wreck of the Dolly go down into the dark water. “Sort of a single track mind though. Bombs and again bombs.”
“How are we going to get back to shore?”
“This boat is bound to have a ship-to-shore phone,” Shayne said. “Even if it didn’t, the Harbor Police will be closing in on the scene of two explosions that size. They’ll take us ashore.”
Tim Rourke had found a portable bar in the cabin, and the bar had a bottle of whiskey. He drank and passed the bottle over to big Mike Shayne.
“Our friend is a mixture of smart and dumb,” Shayne said as he wiped his mouth with the back of one big hand.
“How do you figure that?”
“Oh come off it, Tim,” Shayne said. “You can figure that as well as I can. You tell me.”
“Well, he was smart enough to know he couldn’t buy off the pair of us. Maybe he knew your reputation for honesty. If he knew that much, he could also figure we couldn’t resist the temptation to come out to this yacht. He knew if he couldn’t buy us, he had to kill us. On top of that he was smart enough to rig the bomb in the skiff. I suppose he figured he could explode it at long distance by rifle fire and run no risk from us. The bomb would have blown us up and sunk this yacht.”
“He misjudged the difficulty of hitting that mark with a rifle in fading light, shooting over water,” Shayne said. “That isn’t easy. He must be a crack shot or a rank amateur to even try it, and my vote goes for the expert. It was still a fool thing to try. Success depended on his making it with the first shot. That was dumb.”
“Maybe it was,” Rourke said, “but he was still sharp enough to close in and bomb our escape craft.”
“That wasn’t so smart, either,” the big detective said. “If I had really been on the Dolly when he closed in, I’d have had my gun with me. When he stood up to toss that bomb, I could have shot his head off, and would have.”
They heard a motor then and saw the lights of the Harbor Patrol boat bearing down.
“Okay, okay,” Rourke said. “What would you have done in his place?”
“If I’d been stuck with this caper,” Shayne said and laughed, “I’d have set the yacht here as bait. Then when we were coming up the. Bay in Dolly, innocent as babes, I’d have come close in that black speedster of his and tossed my bomb. Before we got near the yacht. That’s when we were off guard and he could have got, away with it. That’s what a real smart man would have done.”
An hour and a half later the two friends were in the oak panelled office of Miami Police Chief Will Gentry. The Chief, an old friend of both Shayne and Rourke, had had a car waiting at the dock when the Harbor Patrol brought them in.
He had glasses and a bottle of Mike Shayne’s favorite French brandy on his big mahogany desk, and a box of the long, black, Havana type cigars for which he was famous.
“Someday you’re going to stretch your luck, too far,” he said to the redhead. “Everytime you show up in the middle of a case I ask myself is this the time. One of these days the answer is going to have to be yes.”
“Not this time, Will,” Shayne said. “Not this time. By the way who owns that big yacht we were on? The estate of the late Harvey P.?”
“Not quite,” Gentry replied. “In a couple more days it would have been. The owner was trying to sell it to Peckinbaugh for a red hot price.”
“Oh? What owner?”
“The boat is registered in the name of Slim Peters, Mike. He’s been using it as a floating home down in the islands.”
“Slim Peters!” Tim Rourke exploded. “So he’s the one.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again,” Shayne said.
“I don’t know about that,” Rourke protested. “Slim needed money, lots of it, and needed it bad. Sally’s stake in old Harvey’s will gets him out of that hole. He owns the boat so he can use it to trap us. He’s from the West so he has to have used a rifle before. It was a man who stood up in that cruiser and tossed the bomb into the Dolly. What more do we need?”
“We need evidence that would stand up in court,” Mike Shayne said over his brandy and cigar. “Look at it this way. We know Sally Peters is into the will for ten million. That’s a lot of course, but Slim Peters is running a big gambling chain with at least six casinos, and maybe more not in his own name. In a setup like that, ten million dollars is a drop in the bucket.”