The bullet went into Adam’s left shoulder. The helmsman, after a series of crazy swings, finally brought the hallucination to an end by smashing the Paladin into the jetty at full speed.
There was an explosion. Shayne, deafened, reeling, saw Adam fly backward. Then a beam came down. Shayne blacked out briefly.
His return to consciousness was slow and painful, a difficult climb up a steep slope in total darkness. He smelled smoke. The helicopter rotor seemed to be flailing at him. The facing wall was gone. Uniformed men with rifles were running along the jetty. He saw Adam crawl along the littered deck, his left arm hanging limp. Something was wrong with one leg.
A man swarmed down a cable dangling from the helicopter. He slung Adam onto a T bar. Adam yelled, pointing at Shayne in the wreckage of the deckhouse.
“Kill him!”
Shayne was pinned to the white rug by the heavy beam. One of the soldiers leaped aboard, unslinging his rifle. Adam’s man picked up a submachine gun, checked quickly with Adam, and took careful aim at Shayne. Nothing happened, and after working the slide desperately, he threw the gun down.
Now there were a half dozen Venezuelans on board. Adam tried to get off the T bar, but at that moment the helicopter swooped up and away.
The soldier with the rifle was too confused to fire. Shayne’s last glimpse of Adam was a blackened face contorted with fury. Then the winch in the helicopter whined insanely and the two men were hoisted aboard.
CHAPTER 20
No one thought of lifting the beam until Tim Rourke and the others arrived from Maiquetia. By that time Shayne was unconscious again.
A bright light burned through his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, the light dispersed and changed into the white walls of a hospital room. His head and left arm were bandaged. A tube connected his right arm with a bottle hanging beside the bed.
Rourke swam into view. “I tried to persuade them to add cognac to the mixture, Mike, but it’s against the rules.”
“What about the chopper?” Shayne said weakly.
“Far, far away. You know you hit about twenty-five yards from a gendarmerie barracks? Let’s say everybody was a little taken aback, in Spanish. By the time I heard about the helicopter, it was too late to do anything. We’ve alerted the main airfields, but nobody thinks there’s much chance. Do you feel well enough to talk? Painter’s here.”
“If Painter’s here, I don’t feel well enough to talk.”
“I thought you might say that. There’s also a Treasury guy named Carmody. What do I tell him? That you’ll give him a buzz as soon as you feel better?”
Shayne hitched up in bed.
“Easy,” Rourke said.
“Do they have a guard on the yacht?”
“All taken care of. It went down in five feet of water, but the tide’s out now so it’s just sitting there. If you’re thinking about the gold that was under the floorboards-”
“That’s the gold I’m thinking about.”
“The hull split open and it spilled out. When the water went down, there it was, giving off a nice soft glow.”
“Get the doctor in here. I want this thing out of my arm.”
Ten minutes later, a hard-eyed Michael Shayne was sitting up in bed, supported by three pillows, confronting a tough little Irishman named Hugh Carmody. Shayne had insisted on calling a man he knew in Washington to verify Carmody’s credentials. Painter, too, was present. The dapper little chief of Miami Beach detectives gave Shayne a hostile look when he came in.
“You’re breathing,” he said. “I knew this wouldn’t turn out to be my lucky day.”
“What are you doing down here, Petey? You ought to be back home finding out who killed Jules LeFevre.”
“I already have a pretty shrewd idea who killed Jules LeFevre. You. I’m hoping you’ll tell me why.”
The passengers and crew of the grounded DC-8 had been brought to Puerto Sao Luis by truck. Shayne gave Rourke the names of the ones he wanted to see, all of them women. While Rourke was rounding them up, Shayne and Carmody did some hard bargaining. The gold from the Persian Gulf theft was already in Treasury hands, but Carmody still didn’t know what had happened to the shipment that had left Miami on the DC-8. Finally he agreed to pay five percent of the combined seizures, and Shayne made him put it in writing.
Christa exclaimed when she saw Shayne, and hurried to the side of the bed. “Thank God you’re all right.”
Naomi Savage, looking frightened, refused Rourke’s offer of a chair. Mary Ocain came last. She raised her camera and a flashbulb went off.
“Tim Rourke’s idea,” she said. “It’s a big story. Everybody’s going to want pictures.”
“All right, baby,” Shayne said wearily. “I’ll take you first. Pay attention, Petey. I don’t want to go through this twice.”
Mary, flushed and defiant, looked almost pretty. Shayne looked at her for a moment in silence.
“I had a long talk with Nikko,” he said. “I was surprised. I heard you tell somebody you’re a virgin.”
A muscle flicked in her face. “That was-a slight exaggeration.”
“Why did you tell me Naomi offered you a bribe to forget you’d seen some extra luggage?”
Mary looked quickly at Naomi, whose eyes remained fixed on Shayne’s face. “I suppose she denies it?”
“Tim,” Shayne said.
“What’s the question, Mike? Why was George sick to his stomach last night? I’m in a position to explain that.” He grinned. “Mrs. Savage told the waitress George hasn’t been doing very well in bed, and she wanted to slip an aphrodisiac in his chili. The girl was glad to help. Only I guess it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. It was a drugstore emetic.”
Naomi murmured faintly.
Painter said, “Will you bear in mind that I don’t know who any of these people are, Shayne? They’re just names to me.”
“Keep listening,” Shayne said. “George is Naomi’s husband. He’s a big good-looking guy, but I think she realizes now that he’s essentially a jerk. Still, she’s married to him, and she wanted to keep him out of trouble, if possible, especially after she realized that the way they had it set up, if anything went wrong, no one would believe she hadn’t been in on it all the way. She fed him something to make him too sick to take part in the action. And it worked. A man named Thompson died. A man named Jaime Sanchez died. Two Japanese gunmen died. But George lived through it. And then she set out to discover exactly what kind of razzle-dazzle this bunch of crooks was trying to pull. She decided she had to get rid of the extra luggage container. She couldn’t tuck it under her arm and walk out with it. Explain something to me, Naomi-where did you get the explosive?”
“From Al Luccio.”
“That’s what I thought, but how did you persuade Al Luccio-”
Her eyes rose to meet his. “I tried a half dozen different stories, and he didn’t believe any of them. Finally I told him”-she hesitated, swallowing-“well, I told him you’d rented a car and I wanted to wire something under the hood, and he said he’d be glad to cooperate.”
Shayne laughed.
Mary exclaimed, “She blew off the compartment door!”
“Yeah,” Shayne said. “A little lump of plastic explosive taped to the inside of the door over the lock. She borrowed a stewardess’s uniform so she could move around the airport without being noticed. She must have had a detonator at her seat. But something jammed, and the container didn’t slide out until later, as I’ve been telling Carmody. All right, all this indicates that Naomi had nothing to do with the smuggling, and Mary’s a liar.”
“But Mike,” Christa objected, “don’t you remember? We heard Naomi talking to George about changes in the plan.”
“We heard a woman’s voice. It wasn’t hers. You were in bed with me at the time, so it wasn’t you. It had to be Mary.”