The cops, confronted with a silent but lighted boat, halted and conferred on the dock. They proceeded up the gangway with more caution.
“Hello?” a voice called. “Anybody aboard?”
“OK, Maguire,” a second voice said. “See if they’ve passed out or what.”
Shayne worked his hands free. There was a nervous laugh from somebody, immediately stifled. The cops stepped off the gangway, and Shayne heard them moving along the deck toward the lighted doorway. He still hoped that under cover of the confusion he could get down the ladder and cut loose the money-filled bait bucket. If necessary he could swim under the dock with it and wait till the boat was cleared. Once the money fell into Peter Painter’s hands, Harry Bass would have a hard time proving ownership. In the end it would probably escheat to the city.
“Hello?” the cop called again.
Shayne recognized Maguire’s voice. He was a tough, bullheaded veteran who was famous for extracting confessions from Negroes, and he had been commended frequently for shooting teen-age holdup men. It sometimes seemed to Shayne that Maguire only considered the season open on bandits under the age of twenty-one. An encounter with Betty and her friends, Shayne thought, would do him no lasting harm.
Maguire’s foot scraped in the doorway, and suddenly the storm broke. Shayne sat up quickly, ripped off the pillow case and began trying to divest himself of the film. The room was noisy with screams and curses. Maguire staggered to one knee. For an instant he and Shayne regarded each other on the same level. Maguire’s hat had been knocked off and his head was bleeding.
“Shayne?” he said wonderingly, and took out his gun.
Steve slapped at his wrist with a broken chair. The other cop, a plainclothes detective, was being belabored with empty bottles. His arms were raised to protect his head. The blonde girl stole around behind him and dropped him with a vodka bottle.
A man with a flashbulb camera darted in, made a picture and dived beneath the table.
Shayne stood up and started for the cabin where everything had started. He was trailing loops of film. Betty was knocked violently backward past him. A long welt had sprung up across her face. Rebounding from the wall, she threw herself at Maguire and buried her teeth in his fleshy neck. He screamed like an animal and tore her loose.
He bounded after her and hit her twice with his night stick. The first blow landed on her shoulder. The second all but tore off an ear. She collapsed at Shayne’s feet. Maguire had reached a state which wasn’t unusual with him, where he no longer knew what he was doing. He lifted the nightstick in both hands. His little eyes had contracted to red, angry pinpoints within their pockets of flesh.
Moving fast, Shayne caught the nightstick as it came down. A flashbulb popped.
“Out of this, Shayne,” Maguire grated.
He pushed Shayne and raised the nightstick again. Cords stood out on his neck. Betty stared up at him in terror. If he had succeeded in bringing the nightstick down, he would have split her skull to the brain.
Shayne hated to hit cops. It was rarely practical. He sighed, shook loose the last loop of film and nailed Maguire with a short right when he was wide open. As he sagged, the redhead took the nightstick out of his loosening hold.
“Let’s have it,” a third cop said, advancing.
With a joyful cry, Lee hit this cop in the face with a chair. She came around fast, snatched Maguire’s nightstick away from Shayne and whacked the cop with it before Shayne could stop her. She and the redhead struggled for the nightstick for a moment, and the photographer’s head popped up above the table. He made another picture, ducking out of sight as Steve scaled an empty film reel at him.
“Let go, Mike,” Lee said reasonably. “I’m going to beat his brains in.”
“Like hell you are.”
Shayne wrenched the club out of her hand. With a sideward thrust of his foot he moved Betty out of the cabin doorway.
And then, with the entrance of three more cops, he realized that the money would have to wait. They had arrived without sirens. They all had their guns out. Seeing three fallen comrades amid the broken bottles and tangled film, they were clearly in a good mood to shoot somebody. “Drop that,” the leading cop told Shayne. Shayne dropped the nightstick. Steve wavered up to the cop, ignoring the drawn gun, and tried to punch him. Missing, he fell down. The photographer popped up with a fresh flashbulb and made another picture.
13
Shayne was hustled along the dock with the others. The Beach cops used a modified Volkswagen bus for their riot calls, with two rows of facing benches. Except for Maguire, who had been driven off in an ambulance, Shayne knew only one of the arresting cops by sight, and if that man recognized him, he was careful to say nothing about it. Shayne made no attempt to identify himself or to ask for different treatment, which they wouldn’t have given him.
Betty had been permitted to put on more clothes, but her bag had been confiscated before she could comb her wet hair or do anything about her lipstick. The welt left by Maguire’s nightstick showed clearly, even in the dim overhead light, and she kept one hand cupped over her injured ear. She was rocking back and forth.
“I’m going to be sick,” she whispered.
The wagon got underway with a jerk. More police cars had collected, and the officer in charge had decided to go in using their sirens.
“Betty,” Shayne said.
He was sitting across from her, their knees almost touching. He took her free hand and made her meet his eyes.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Listen to me without saying anything.”
The cop at the end of the wagon leaned forward. “Shut up back there. No talking.”
Shayne nudged Steve, who was slumped beside him, his face a mask of dejection. When he didn’t react at once Shayne nudged him again. He started.
“What do you mean, shut up?” he shouted at the cop. “This is supposed to be a democracy!”
Lee joined in, the cop roared at them both, and all the prisoners but Shayne and Betty began to sing defiantly, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty-”
Under cover of the clamor Shayne went on quietly, “Don’t say anything to anybody about Vince. I want to find out what happened. I can’t do that if we’re tied up in jail. If it’s just drunk and disorderly I think we can get out in a couple of hours.”
She started to say something but he forestalled her. “How drunk are you?”
“Pretty,” she said weakly. “You hit that cop, didn’t you? You took his nightstick.”
“Yeah. Not only that, I didn’t drown Vince. When his body comes up we can find out what went wrong. The way the cops are going to look at it, you were together in a locked cabin, you had a fight and cracked his skull.”
Her eyes widened in protest.
“The way you’ve been waving bottles around,” Shayne said, “they’ll think it figures. I know it didn’t happen like that, but I have other things to go on, things they don’t know about. They’ll figure you put him in his scuba outfit and tipped him out of the window. It was just bad luck that he got tangled up in the ladder. You’re ideal for this, Betty. No money for high-powered lawyers, no connections. The heroin angle makes it bad. They’ll jump at it. I don’t think they can make it stick, but it could mean a pretty rough year and a half.”
She swallowed painfully. “I didn’t-”
He patted her knee. “Just take it as it comes.”
He opened his mouth and bawled with the others, “Land of the Pilgrims’ pride-”
They were still shouting and singing when they arrived at the police station. Their pictures were taken again as they emerged from the wagon. One of the photographers exclaimed, “It’s Mike Shayne!” and ran for a phone.