“Hell, Mike,” Tim Rourke said. “It was a long shot right from the jump. You told me so yourself. Long shots sometimes come in, but not all the time or they wouldn’t be long shots. Excuse the lecture, but I don’t like the way you’re taking this, pal.”
Rourke, Shayne and Power were in a narrow cell on the ground floor of a hospital called St. Luke’s. Shayne was stripped to the waist, sitting on the edge of a high bed while a young Turkish doctor worked on the hole in his shoulder. It could have been worse. The shoulder bone had been nicked, and he would have to carry his arm in a sling while the ligaments grew together, but in three weeks he could be back playing golf, no more than a half dozen shots off his usual game. This off-the-cuff diagnosis came from an X-ray technician. As for the doctor, he apparently spoke no English beyond “Hurt?” and “OK.”
Rourke went on, “But if we’d been able to swing it, what a story, what a story! As it is, I don’t know how much they’re going to let me write.”
He looked at Power, who was hunting for an ashtray. Power tapped the ash from his cigar into the cuff of his pants.
“Maybe not too much, Tim, at present. That’s the point about black operations: when they poop out, the best thing is to shut up and cut your losses. Mike, I know how you feel, coming this close. One thing we can say, we sure as hell tried! Even as it stands it’s far from a total bust. Actually we’ve achieved quite a lot.”
“How do you make that out?” Shayne said through set lips.
“We’ve got two members of the original stickup team, Billy Matthews and Tug Wynanski. It’s just a question of time till we pick up the others.”
“Who won’t be able to tell you a thing,” Shayne said.
“But we don’t know that. Look at a few of the leads we’ve got. Who rented the girl’s apartment? Who leased the house on Staten Island? When we develop Tim’s movie film we’ll have a good picture of the guy who tried to take off in the truck.”
“One of the things you’re telling me is that you don’t have the girl?”
“No,” Power said with regret. “Somebody got there first. She was gone and Brownie was gone. The Jetstar you told me about took off from LaGuardia at five-forty-five, probably with Michele and the banker aboard. If they’re still on board when it lands in Lisbon, I’ll be very much surprised. But we couldn’t call on the Air Force to shoot them down, could we? And to get another piece of disappointing news out of the way-the number she called did turn out to be the Swiss bank on William Street. But you remember she asked for extension thirty-eight. There are only thirty-seven extensions.”
“Big surprise,” Shayne commented. “How about the character who was carrying the suitcase? I don’t suppose he was anybody?”
“Nobody at all. He did it for ten dollars and a new suit. But you never know. Somebody had to hire him and clean him up and tell him what to do. He’s here in the hospital and we’re getting a statement from him now. And the whole Kraus angle is far from closed. What the hell, Mike, it’s police work. I can see now we were hoping for the moon. I wanted to go off the force in a blaze of glory, but that’s not the way the world’s run. The trouble was, too many things had to synchronize. I think we made a mistake in setting the price that high. Perhaps at a lower figure they wouldn’t have taken a chance they could put you out of action before you could work the detonator.”
Shayne said nothing.
Power went on, “Now look at a few plusses. We’ll harass that bank a little. We probably won’t be able to close them up, but he can’t use it again, either. We’ve cost him some money and some prestige. All the information we’ve picked up will go into the international files. One of these days we’ll nab him. The girl’s finished for anything important. From now on the French cops will stick to her like a burr. Mike, don’t look so damn depressed. You know as well as I do that nobody wins them all.”
“I don’t have to like it when I lose,” Shayne said.
Power stood up. “You’ll be staying over, won’t you, Mike? I want to buy you a drink when we’re under less of a strain. I’ll have word from Lisbon in the morning.”
Shayne winced as the doctor tightened the bandage and taped it in place. “No, I might as well get back. If it’s anything interesting, call me in Miami. I’m sorry it panned out this way.” He forced a small grin. “Maybe I’ll feel more human back on my home turf.”
The two men shook hands. Power left.
Shayne said, “Time for my medication, Tim.”
“Sure.”
Rourke held out the bottle of cognac. The doctor glanced at him while he drank, but said nothing, perhaps not trusting his English.
“You didn’t come out too bad,” Rourke went on. “There was nothing in that suitcase but phonebooks, so there’s no point in asking for ten percent of that. But the seventy-five hundred bucks in the Grand Central locker is yours. I’d like to earn seven and a half for three days’ light, agreeable work, including time in the sack with a damn cute chick, unless I miss my guess. You had to sleep with her, didn’t you? She had to think you were definitely her boy. It was an obligation, poor chap.”
“Lay off.”
“Come on, Mike! You didn’t accomplish much, but neither did they! Those drugs were going to be incinerated anyway. You got a bullet in the shoulder, but I’ve never known a small thing like that to slow you down. Let’s go out and tie one on. I have a tentative date with Terry Fox, and she can probably dig up a friend.” He added, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
He grinned, but there was no answering grin from Shayne. The detective worked his injured arm into his shirt sleeve.
“Christ, Mike!” Rourke burst out. “That bullet could have landed six inches away from where it did, and you’d be dead! What’s wrong with you? You ought to be celebrating!”
Shayne turned a burning look on his friend. Rourke said warily, “All right, forget I said it.”
“By God, Tim, you’ve put your finger on it!”
“On what?” the reporter said suspiciously.
Shayne told the doctor impatiently, “Finish it up, will you, doc?” And to Rourke: “Don’t you see? Power said everything had to synchronize. That was true for us, but it was true for them, too. Their timing had to be perfect. One guy walked up to me with the suitcase. A car turned the corner. I reached for the suitcase, the gun went off. Another guy jumped from the car into the cab of the truck. And it worked. There was only one thing wrong. They didn’t kill me.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Mike.”
Shayne laughed happily. “The shooter was six inches off. A little better aim, and I couldn’t have pushed that plunger, right? Right!”
“I’m surprised at you, Mike. It’s easy to miss even at point-blank range with a handgun. That was a downward shot, the hardest there is.”
Shayne pushed off the table. Pain stabbed him in the shoulder. He stood still to let the doctor fasten a sling around his neck.
“No, I didn’t tell you about this guy,” he said, his eyes alive. “He wouldn’t miss unless somebody told him to miss. Szigetti-he’s one of the best shots I’ve ever seen.”
“On a range,” Rourke said skeptically. “This was in combat.”
“Tim, at that distance he could have put a slug through my skull with both eyes shut, in the last stage of Parkinson’s disease. They wanted me to push that plunger. They wanted that truck to burn.”
“Mike, make sense.”
The doctor knotted the sling at the back of Shayne’s neck. “OK?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Shayne said impatiently. “The truck was loaded with envelopes. They certainly looked real. I opened one of them, and the stuff inside certainly looked like heroin. But I didn’t give myself a shot to see what effect it would have on me. For all I know, it could have been sugar or cornstarch. Let’s go.”
“Mike, you didn’t notice the way that truck was burning. If you think you’re going to rake around in the ashes and find anything, let me tell you-”
Shayne stuck a cigarette in his mouth and Rourke lit it for him. “I wish I knew Turkish. I’d like to tell the doctor I feel better.”
“Funny,” Rourke said. “I feel worse. Maybe you’ll tell me what this is all about if I stay out from underfoot and keep feeding you drinks.”
Shayne grinned at him. “You’ll have to do more than that, Tim, if I’m right. You just saved me from making a very bad mistake. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I wonder myself,” the reporter said glumly. “Not often, though.”
Rourke still had the use of the police Ford with the phone in the back seat. When they arrived in front of the Motor Shop, a heavy wrecker was pulling out with the great charred hulk of the Sanitation truck. Only one piece of fire apparatus was still there, a small traffic-control truck with a revolving beacon.
“Want me to tell them to wait so we can look it over for burned cornstarch?” Rourke said.
“We’re not looking for cornstarch. We’re looking for heroin.”
“Why, obviously,” Rourke said sarcastically. “A couple of tons, wasn’t it? It must be around somewhere.”
They found a place to park on Eleventh and waited till the wreck was gone and traffic on the block had been allowed to return to normal. Shayne got out.
“I have to pick a lock, Tim. I’ll need more than one hand.”
“I don’t know anything about picking locks.”
“Then it’s time you learned.”
In front of the small door into the Motor Shop, Shayne handed the reporter his wallet and told him where to find his collection of picking equipment. Together, not without difficulty, they managed to force the lock. Inside, Rourke located the light switches and turned everything on.
“Let’s see, two tons of heroin,” he reminded himself. “Where would be a good place to start?”
“First we find a truck with a dented fender.”
They started along the line of disabled vehicles. When they reached the end Rourke suggested, “Maybe they hammered it out?”
“There wasn’t time,” Shayne said. “Well, it’s not the first hunch I ever had that didn’t pay off. As Power says, we really have achieved quite a lot, about as much as you could stick in a bug’s eye-Wait a minute.”
One of the five-ton monsters had been pulled out on the floor. The front end was up on jacks and one of the wheels was off. The hood was up. A pad was thrown over the fender so the mechanic could lie on it while working on the motor. Shayne strode toward the truck and jerked off the pad.
There was a deep vertical dent underneath.
“Here it is, by God!”
Rourke helped him open the side hatch. “Yeah,” Shayne said with satisfaction, seeing the cardboard cartons and the bundles of nine-by-twelve envelopes.
“I’m a genius!” Rourke exclaimed, performing a jerky little dance. “I thought I was saying you were lucky to be hit in the shoulder, not the head. What I really was saying was that we ought to hurry down here and look for a truck with a dented fender.”
He reached in to pull out an envelope. Shayne said sharply, “Leave it alone, Tim. Close the hatch. We’ve got to hurry.”
His tone was urgent. Rourke gave him a single quick glance, then slammed the hatch and fastened the toggle bolts.
“Now I know what we do,” he said. “We get a few dozen cops and wait for somebody to show up. Mike, I believe we’re going to pull this out of the fire!”
Shayne’s mind was racing. It was more of a steeplechase than a race on the flat-jumps, quick turns, hazards, then finally a hard fast run on level ground to the finish. He snapped his fingers.
“Didn’t you say we’re in a hurry?” Rourke asked.
“Damn right we’re in a hurry. A lot to do. Can you start one of these trucks?”
“Yes-s,” the reporter said without conviction, looking along the impressive lineup. “Maybe.”
“OK, the first thing to do is find one that runs.”
He started at one end while Rourke started at the other. The hardest part for Shayne was getting up in the cab. On his first try the door swung closed and dealt him a bad blow on his injured shoulder. Inside the cab, one arm was all he needed. The first truck failed to start at all. The second kept stalling. The third took hold at once, sounding healthy enough when he raced it in neutral. There was too much play in the brake pedal, which was probably the ailment that had brought it in.
Rourke was still trying to find the starting mechanism of the last truck in line. Shayne tapped the horn and his friend came running.
“Open the hatch,” Shayne called down. “See what’s inside.”
In a moment Rourke called back, “Junk. I don’t mean that kind of junk. Cans, broken bottles.”
“Full?”
“Right to the top.”
“OK. Here we go.”
He put the truck in low and eased out of line, applying his brakes at the end of the arc. They were very soft. He shifted into reverse and backed toward the grease pit at the far end of the shop.
“Give me some help,” he called to Rourke. “I want to get right to the edge of the pit.”
Rourke ran past and began waving. Shayne allowed plenty of time to stop.
“Now lift the tailgate. Can you see where it unfastens?”
Rourke disappeared from sight. “You mean the whole back piece? I see a couple of clamps, but don’t blame me if-” He jumped down. “Try it.”
Shayne pulled a lever, and the conveyor started clanking. He shut that off and tried another. Slowly the enormous body began to tilt into dumping position.
“I only want to dump part of the load. Tell me when to stop.”
Rourke moved back to the edge of the pit and gave him a hand signal. Again Shayne guessed wrong, and the upended body began to descend. He tried something else. There was a sudden roar behind him as the chewed-up rubbish cascaded into the pit.
“Stop!” Rourke shouted. “That’s enough! That’s too much!”
Shayne returned the lever to its previous position and lowered the body. Rourke fastened the tailgate while Shayne moved the truck back down the floor. He drew up beside the one with the front wheel missing.
“I’m beginning to get it,” Rourke said. “It’s the old razzle-dazzle. We switch trucks. But why?”
“Later,” Shayne grunted.
The reporter had to do most of the work. He transferred fifteen cartons, piling them carefully on top of the trash so anyone opening the hatch for a quick look would see nothing but cartons. He located the missing wheel and put it back on. Then Shayne maneuvered that truck back into the gap in the line, the third from the far end. Returning to the other truck, the one with fifteen cartons of narcotics on top of its usual cargo, he moved it forward to occupy the exact space where the other truck had been. “Now we take off a wheel.”
Rourke jacked up the front end and with Shayne’s help managed to start the nuts. He rolled the wheel into the parts office, where he had found the other. They raised the hood. Shayne dented the fender with a careful blow from a pry bar, then concealed the dent beneath the oily pad.
“They’ve got different serial numbers,” Rourke pointed out.
“I didn’t look for serial numbers when I picked out the other truck,” Shayne said. “I looked for the dent. And that’s what’s bothering me. Now we’ve got two trucks with dented front fenders.”
He had backed the narcotics truck as far behind the others as he dared, but the sharp dent in the fender still screamed for attention.
“Hide it with something?” Rourke suggested.
“No, get me a hammer.”
The reporter scrambled away, meeting Shayne a moment later at the other truck with a heavy ball peen hammer. “I don’t know about beating it out, Mike. That’s body work. You’d have to take off the fender.”
“Like this.”
Shayne took the hammer. Holding it close to the head so he could swing it with one hand, he brought it down hard on the fender. The small dent disappeared in a larger one.
“Oh,” Rourke said. “Like that. Let me.”
Using both hands, he slammed the hammer down on the right fender, which until then had not been damaged. He swung again and again, until both fenders and the radiator grille were bashed in all the way across, as though the big truck had lost a decision to an even bigger one.
Shayne stopped him.
Rourke panted, “I’m glad you let me come along, Mike. That’s the most enjoyable work I’ve done in years.”
“That’s the only work you’ve done in years,” Shayne snorted.
Rourke put the hammer back while Shayne looked around carefully to see if they had left any signs of their visit besides the newly damaged front end of the narcotics truck.
“We probably left fingerprints,” Rourke said, coming back.
“It’s a longshot,” Shayne said with a grin. “And I think you pointed out that longshots sometimes come in.”
“That’s not what I said. I said they almost always lose.”
They snapped off the lights and returned to the Ford.
“You’ve only got that one arm,” Rourke said. “And you know me, the less roughhousing I get involved in personally, the better. We need some reinforcements.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Shayne said. “Reach me the phone.”