He moved one of the chairs to the wall near the door and sat down. The air-conditioning unit was humming quietly. He decided not to risk a cigarette. The patient who usually occupied this room, being paralyzed, naturally didn’t smoke. There was a smell of coffee, but it couldn’t be helped; Shayne couldn’t get through a second sleepless night without the help of coffee.
The moon rose. It was three-quarters full. Shayne lowered the Venetian blind and tilted the slats, and poured another cup of coffee. He managed to kill fifteen minutes with that one cup. The night was very quiet, and he could hear Norton moving restlessly in the next room. After putting the cup on the bureau beside the pot he took several turns back and forth from the window to the door. He was fully awake, but the instant he sat down again he went into a light doze. The slightest sound at the door would have awakened him, but when there was a faint metallic clink at the window an hour or so later, it didn’t penetrate.
The sound was repeated. Shayne heard it this time, but still half asleep, he didn’t react. He even knew what had made the sound — a chisel being forced between the air-conditioner and the sash. Then the sash came up, and at that moment several things happened at once.
The moon had slipped behind clouds, but a car threw its headlights against the window, and through the tilted slats of the blind Shayne saw an all-black figure, wearing what seemed to be a tight black jersey. Something dropped into the room. Even before the headlights flashed past, the figure was gone.
Shayne sprang to his feet and called, “Joe! Outside!”
He ran to the window and wrenched at the partly-raised sash. But it was jammed. He knew he was overlooking something important, and perhaps a second and a half passed before he realized what it was. Without an instant’s further thought he drew back a step and threw himself at the window.
He had raised his arm as he plunged forward, twisting to protect his eyes and face. His elbow struck the blind with the full force of his powerful body behind it. The blind came loose with a crash, glass and wood splintered. Shayne fell through onto the veranda roof, and at that instant there was a terrific explosion inside the room.
He had brought part of the blind with him. The momentum of his diving fall carried him to the edge of the roof, where he grabbed at the gutter to check himself. He was in precarious balance for a second, but the broken-off section of the blind whipped past him and carried him on over. Snared in the ropes, he landed badly, on his side with one arm beneath him. Each noise had overlapped with the next, and the whole thing had almost seemed to happen at once, as though the shattering of the glass, the clatter of the blind as it came down, his awkward fall, had all been part of the same explosion. For a moment he couldn’t move. He lay amid the wreckage, surrounded by ropes and torn slats and pieces of wood, looking up at the sky and swearing under his breath. Then he came to his feet. “Joe!” he yelled.
He heard the pounding of footsteps inside the building. He crouched, listening. He couldn’t be sure how much time had passed since the bomb had been thrown into the room started for the corner of the house, and one of the Venetian Perhaps he had blacked out for a moment; perhaps not. He blind ropes tightened around his ankle and threw him.
He freed himself, swearing more savagely. The porch-light flashed on. Joe Wing rah out, a gun in his hand.
“Hold it!” Shayne yelled as the gun came up.
“Mike! What are you doing out here?”
“What do you think, catching fireflies? Do you hear anything?”
Wing listened. But by now there was too much noise from the house to hear anything. Norton charged out through the door. Apparently he had reached Shayne’s room in time to run into the blast; his shirt was ripped, his face blackened. He, too, was waving a gun, to Shayne’s disgust.
Lights were coming on all over the building. Suddenly a woman’s voice screamed.
“He’s got some kind of a black sweater on,” Shayne said. “Black pants. Maybe we can still—”
He set off up the driveway at a hard run. The iron gates were open; probably they were never closed. Shayne ran through and looked both ways. Several cars were parked on the drive nearby. When Norton joined him, Shayne said brusquely, “Check those parked cars. Then watch the gate.”
He turned back and met Wing as the lieutenant ran up the driveway toward him. “He can’t be far away,” Shayne said. “I haven’t heard a car.”
“We’ll have a couple of patrols here in a minute,” Wing said. “What kind of a sweater is he wearing?”
“Black jersey, skin-tight.”
“You’re bleeding like a pig, Mike.”
“Too bad,” Shayne said. “Let’s find this son of a bitch and then I’ll get a transfusion.”
They separated. Shayne had no trouble so long as he was out on the lawn, but he had to move cautiously when he went among the shrubs and bushes at the edge of the nursing home property. Reaching the high iron fence, protected at its base by a thick barberry hedge, he turned back toward the water. Off to his left, Wing’s flashlight moved back in the direction of the house. Many of the windows were lighted, and Shayne saw the gaping hole he had left as he crashed through the window ahead of the explosion.
A little crowd of patients and attendants had gathered on the porch under the overhead light. Sirens were wailing. Soon the bushes became too dense to move through without a light, and Shayne went back to the lawn. As he came into the light from the porch, Rose broke from the others and ran toward him.
“Mike! You—”
She stopped, aghast at what she saw. Shayne brushed the blood out of his eyes.
Suddenly, beneath the excited rattle of conversation from the porch, he noticed another sound — the quiet beating of an inboard motor, and then he knew the explanation of the tight black jersey.
“A skin-diver!” he shouted to Wing, who was coming out of the shrubbery on the other side of the lawn. “He swam out to a boat. Call the Coast Guard.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Coast Guard station at the end of the MacArthur Causeway turned out three patrol boats, and turned them out in a hurry. They crisscrossed the bay from the mainland to the southern tip of the Beach, but Shayne, watching their searchlights from the side porch of the nursing home, knew that they were too late. It was impressive, the kind of massive effort that couldn’t be mounted by a single private detective, but if the bomber had slipped through before the boats were in position, as Shayne was sure he had, it was wasted effort.
Dr. Shoiffet had patched Shayne up, removing several fragments of broken glass and taking several stitches in the worst gash, over one eye. He had wrenched his left shoulder, and it was beginning to stiffen. Lieutenant Wing and an explosives expert were working in the bombed-out room. Apparently the bomber had known the exact location of Chadwick’s bed. Looking at the twisted wreekage, Wing congratulated Shayne dryly on not having been in it. Morton, hearing Shayne’s call, had rushed out, and the bomb had gone off when he was wrenching at the doorknob. The door was blown off its hinges and came back in his face, shielding him from the full force of the blast.
Rose and most of the patients had gone back to bed and things were beginning to quiet down. The night had four hours to run and Michael Shayne was feeling the pressure. He was pacing restlessly up and down the porch when a car drove up to the front steps and Tim Rourke piled out. His face was puffy with lack of sleep, and he hadn’t taken the time or trouble to button all the buttons of his shirt His skinny chest could be seen through the gaps. He ran his fingers through his hair, which was all the maintenance he usually gave it.