“Shut up, damn you. That’s over and you know it.”
“Do I?” she screamed, dancing forward. “And you never really cared about her, did you? You were just in it for the money, to squeeze a few horses out of her before she got sick of you. You lying bastard. You saw her again last night. Don’t you think I know that perfume? I ought to by now. Those damn little cigars she smokes?”
“I said to shut up.”
“And what if I feel like having some sex in the middle of the day? Tim’s not like you. He’s got a little consideration for the way a person feels.”
Her husband kicked out at her ankles. As she dodged back he feinted at her with one open hand.
“And he wants to know about the twin tonight,” she cried. “And did you use to drive for Domaines. What did you want me to do, turn him loose in the barns?”
He feinted at her again and as the knife came up his other hand came up beneath it. He caught her wrist and with a quick wringing motion shook the knife out of her fingers. She kicked at his groin with one bare foot. He jabbed her almost playfully in the jaw. It was more of a push than a blow, but it dropped her to the floor without a sound.
Rourke, having finally forced the couch to let him go, was on his way to the door. He was fumbling at the knob when Thorne swung around and cuffed him lightly. Rourke stopped trying to open the door.
“I hate like hell to slug a woman,” Thorne said ruefully, “but you don’t know Win. You may think she was fooling with that carving knife.” He shook his head. “She would have stuck it in me if I’d given her the chance. It’s happened before. She punctured one of my lungs. She probably soaked up quite a few martinis, didn’t she?”
Rourke straightened his tie. “We only had a couple. She was telling me about that accident you had. What was the name of the horse? Don J.”
Thorne tossed his head in a way that made Rourke think of a spirited horse. “Don’t remind me. Things were just beginning to break right for me when that happened.”
Rourke motioned at Thorne’s unconscious wife. “We’d better do something about her.”
“Aah,” Thorne said. “It’s a policy of mine-bat them around now and then, it’s the one way to keep them in line. She’ll be OK.”
Reaching out suddenly, he pulled Rourke off balance and sent him spinning into the interior of the trailer. Rourke crouched, watching warily to see what came next.
“I don’t pretend to be any great brain,” Thorne said. “I’m trying to figure something out, and it may take a minute. You’re a reporter, she said. From the News.”
“I’ve got a press card if you want to see it.” Rourke knew he was sweating, but he didn’t want to show Thorne how nervous he was by wiping his face. “We want to run a piece about what actually happens in the course of a race, how you get the most out of a horse, the things you have to look out for, and so on.”
“What was that about the twin?”
Rourke smiled weakly. “Just talk. It happened to come up.”
The flesh around Thorne’s little eyes contracted and he yelled, “Goddamn it, what do you mean, drinking my gin and necking around with my wife?”
Rourke tried to look surprised and amused. “Was that what you thought when you came in? No, no. You’re barking up the wrong tree. She had a bit too much to drink and she tripped. That’s all in the world that happened.”
Thorne sneered. “I happen to know that kid. Am I supposed to be blind, that I don’t notice the top button on your pants is open? The only thing that surprises me, she didn’t have the radio on.”
He moved toward Rourke, completely filling the space between the furniture. The contest, Rourke could see, was going to be strictly one-sided. Thorne outweighed him by forty pounds, and it had been years since Rourke had had any exercise except pecking at a typewriter.
“If you try to get back at me by putting something lousy in the paper,” Thorne said, “I’ll come after you, and I’ll find you, don’t worry. I can’t let you get away with feeling my wife just because you work on a paper. Win wouldn’t like it and she wouldn’t understand it. We’ll make up, but there’s got to be blood and a couple of teeth on the floor when she conies out of it, or she’ll think I don’t give a goddamn.”
His eyes narrowed, and all at once Rourke realized that he was only using his wife as the pretext. Rourke had made the mistake of asking about the twin double, and Thorne was going to see to it that he didn’t ask any more questions until after the payoffs. That look didn’t mean the kind of friendly punch in the head he had given his wife. It meant a beating.
Rourke took a deep breath and rushed him, butting as hard as he could at the point where his rib cage came together. It was like running into a wall. Rourke reeled back as Thorne’s left fist came around. It connected with, his ear and his head rang like a bell. He snatched up the butcher knife and threw it blindly at Thorne. Whirling, he cleared Win’s unconscious body in one bound and hurled himself at the long window over the stainless steel sink. A row of cactus plants was lined up on the sill, and Rourke carried them with him as he went through in an explosion of shattered glass, his eyes closed, arms up to protect his face. He bounced off a tank of bottled gas and landed in the dirt in a welter of glass and sash and broken pots.
He rolled, came to his feet, and darted away between trailers. The emergency flow of adrenalin that had helped him through the window continued to carry him for a moment, but there was blood in his eyes and he could hardly see. He made a right-hand turn, realizing abruptly as the first wave of pain hit him that he wouldn’t be going much farther under his own steam. His one chance was to lose himself in the jumble of trailers, perhaps crawling underneath one to rest till he felt better. Then he could work his way back to the highway and see if some kindly motorist would take him to a doctor.
He stumbled and went down, his head still ringing from Thorne’s blow. He forced himself to his feet and kept going, at a dogged, shambling half-run.
Then a solid figure loomed in front of him and he collided with Mike Shayne.
CHAPTER 6
Michael Shayne had walked into the lobby of the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach at two o’clock exactly, the time fixed for his appointment with the go-between who had promised to bring him one step closer to the recovery of stolen diamonds worth $100,000. The man was late. Usually this wouldn’t have bothered the detective. People in the go-between’s position often have trouble making up their minds. But today, after waiting only ten minutes, Shayne phoned the insurance company and told Mort Friedman, the man he was dealing with there, that his contact had failed to appear. He would call in, probably, and Shayne asked Friedman to set up another date for the following day.
“Make it later this afternoon, Mike,” Friedman said. “This whole thing is very jumpy.”
“I won’t be available,” Shayne said briefly. Friedman wanted to know why. Shayne replied evenly that something else had come up, Friedman made an acrid comment on that, and before the conversation was over Shayne concluded that he had possibly lost a valuable retainer.
Leaving the Beach, he crossed the bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway and picked up the northbound expressway in Buena Vista. Shifting onto the Sunshine State Parkway at the Golden Glades interchange, he continued north, holding his speedometer needle steady at ten miles over the speed limit. He was swearing to himself. Rourke, he knew, had a special nose for certain kinds of trouble. His way of working up a story was to walk in, ask leading questions, and see what happened; and more often than Shayne liked to remember, what happened was that he ended up flat on his back hollering for help. One of these days, the redhead promised himself, Rourke was going to get into some stupid jam and find that Shayne had packed a bag and taken his secretary to New York to see a few of the new shows, leaving no phone number where he could be reached.