Michael Shayne, the big redheaded private detective, came onto Normandy Isle from the Beach end. People in the gambling business are particular about what they say on the phone, and all Harry Bass had told him was that he wanted to see him. Shayne had done several routine jobs for Bass in the past, and had been paid well. Occasionally he spent a weekend duck-shooting at Harry’s lodge in North Carolina. Harry Bass broke the law every day of his life, but in Shayne’s opinion it was a hypocritical law, one that couldn’t be enforced, especially in a resort town. In any real showdown, Shayne and Bass both knew that they would end up on opposite sides, but that day might never come, and in the meantime, they were friends.
After crossing the Normandy Waterway, the drive began to curve. Suddenly Shayne jammed on his brakes. The road ahead was blocked by two cars. One, a long black Cadillac, seemed to be on fire.
Swerving far over, he stopped and jumped out. Both cars had their headlights on full, and at first glance he thought they had been abandoned. It was an odd scene-an empty street, empty sidewalks, two empty cars, one of them burning. Several long strides brought Shayne to the Cadillac. The hood was up. Thick white smoke was pouring out of the motor. He sniffed sharply. He couldn’t identify the smell. It was pungent and acrid, like the smell of burned gunpowder. There wasn’t much heat. The smoke seemed to originate somewhere underneath, perhaps in the oil pan.
His foot kicked against a portable fire extinguisher. He retrieved it and found the button controlling the spray. Before he could use it on the fire, he saw a man lying face down on the sidewalk. The back of his jacket was burning.
With a quick burst from the extinguisher, Shayne put out the flames. The man was a Negro, not big but solidly built. Shayne stooped to pull him farther from the burning car. His white cap fell off as Shayne lifted him. The back of his head was bleeding. Under his arm, the detective felt the strap of a gun harness.
He didn’t like this at all. Two cars meant a minimum of two people. Here was one of them. Where was the other? He didn’t recognize the Negro or either car, but Harry’s house was only a couple of minutes away and he knew there had to be some connection with the phone call from Harry twenty minutes earlier.
He was still bent over the unconscious Negro when he heard a grating noise behind him. He whirled. A big man with a grotesquely twisted nose dropped on him from the top of the wall. Shayne tried to twist out of the way but he tripped on the Negro and was carried to the sidewalk with the big man on top of him. He rolled, bringing one elbow up in his assailant’s face. The man grunted and slammed a fist the size of a small ham against the side of Shayne’s head.
Shayne’s reaction was instinctive. He rolled with the punch and lashed out with his foot at the big man’s middle. As his foot went home, air rushed out of the big man’s lungs, and Shayne knew he could take him.
Then a second man jumped off the wall, a suitcase in one hand and a gun in the other, and Shayne was clipped behind the ear with something much harder than a fist. The Cadillac’s headlights blurred and overlapped.
“OK,” a voice said urgently. “Cool him and let’s get out of here.”
Shayne grabbed upward through the blur and dazzle. His fingers closed on the big man’s shirt and dragged him down. He had no leverage, and for the moment there was no strength in his arms. He twisted his knuckles in the big man’s eye, to mark him so he would know him if he saw him again. The nose broke away altogether, and Shayne realized it was part of a broken mask.
“Let me,” another voice said with a sneer. “You don’t want to ruin those high-price shoes.”
Three of them, the redhead noted, and another small explosion went off inside his skull. His grip on the big man’s shirt front loosened. He was kicked twice more, and then they left him.
A door slammed. The noise echoed back and forth painfully inside Shayne’s head before dying away. He made himself roll on his side for a better look at the car: a gray Dodge sedan with Florida plates. Slowly and patiently, Shayne slid his hand inside the unconscious Negro’s jacket and tugged the gun out of his holster. But by the time he had it the tail lights of the Dodge were around the curve. The gun slipped away, and when he scrabbled after it he only succeeded in knocking it underneath the burning car.
The fire was now blazing with an intensity that brought Shayne to his feet. His mind was functioning in short bursts. He knew his way around these bay islands and it was possible that they didn’t. When they hit Normandy Drive, which way would they turn? Probably they would avoid Miami Beach, with its bottlenecks and its difficult traffic. They would turn right, crossing to North Bay Village on the 79th Street Causeway, then on into the Little River section of Northeast Miami. If he could force himself into motion and move fast, he might be able to catch them on the causeway.
He lurched against the Cadillac. The doorframe was hot against his hand. He careered away at a slanting angle. The pavement tilted violently, tilted again, and he brought up against his Buick. The door opened for him and the motor seemed to start by itself. Time was moving in jumps. In an instant he was doing fifty.
He straddled the double line between the two lanes until his head cleared. A slower car appeared in front of him. Without loss of speed he zoomed around it on a curve, his thumb on the hornbutton, trusting that if anybody was coming toward him they would have the sense to get out of his way. It was a chance he might not have taken before those knocks on the head. He was glad to see that his reflexes were working. When headlights flashed in front of him he slid back into his own lane without using his brakes.
At Normandy Drive he ran through a red light. The pain behind his eyes made it hard for him to see. The approaching headlights seemed much too bright and came straight at him, forcing him farther and farther toward the edge of the road.
It was better on the causeway. He built up his speed until he was doing seventy. The causeway straightened crossing Treasure Island and his speed kept climbing. Slower cars flashed past on his right, but he didn’t break his concentration. He was concerned with gauging gaps and distances. If one of the cars he was passing was a gray Dodge, he would find it out when he was across the bay.
He passed three cars in a bunch, cut back and touched his brakes as the lights of the mainland approached. At the end of the causeway he pulled over to let the cars behind him pass. He knew the odds were against him. He might have taken too long to get started. They might, after all, have had a reason for going into Miami Beach. And would he know the car when he saw it? The town was full of gray sedans.
At that moment it went by, one of the clump of three he had passed in his last reckless rush. There were only two men in it, one at the wheel and one in the back seat.
The man in back glanced at him as they passed. The eye Shayne had knuckled was red and swollen. The man was smiling happily, but the smile froze as he recognized Shayne.
Shayne blinked his directional signal and fell back into line, the second car behind the Dodge. His lips were drawn back in a savage grin. This was his town. His Buick had just come out of the garage with new valves and points, and everything tinkered up into racing condition. Unless the Dodge had a specially souped-up motor, he knew he had them.
They tried to hang him up on a red light at Biscayne Boulevard, but he bulled through, his horn going. When they took the curving ramp up to the North-South Express way, the Dodge leaned more than it should; probably there was something wrong with the front suspension. It came off the ramp too fast and barely recovered.
The big man shattered the rear window with a gun butt. Shayne dropped back, letting another car slip in ahead of him. He was watching for the buggy-whip aerial and markings of a police car. There were usually two or three patrolling this stretch. When he saw one across the divider, traveling north, he swung into the left-hand lane, honking his horn and snapping his headlights. They saw him, but they would have to go on a few miles, to the 79th Street connection, before they could turn. The Dodge was cutting in and out, doing eighty. Shayne stayed one or two cars back. The big man waited, on his knees behind the broken window, hoping for a shot.
When the lanes began to separate for the great 39th Street cloverleaf, one stream heading for the Julia Tuttle Causeway to Miami Beach, the other to the Airport Expressway, Shayne was not surprised to see the Dodge lean to the right, toward the airport. Shayne let it pull ahead, knowing he could come up with it again on the straightaway. He lost it for a moment. When he saw it again it had drifted to the left. The lean became more and more pronounced as the cloverleaf sharpened. The brake lights came on, too late, and the brakes grabbed unevenly. One wheel hit the low curb.
The Dodge stopped fighting the curve and plunged over a low embankment to another level, into a stream of traffic going the opposite way. Brakes and tires shrieked. Then came the inevitable rending crash.
Shayne was well past. He left his Buick on the approach to the 12th Avenue ramp, lights blinking, and worked his way back on foot along the divider, to see if there were any survivors. A siren screamed above on the Expressway. A crowd was beginning to gather when Shayne reached the wreck. By some miracle, it was only a one-car accident. The Dodge had rammed a concrete pillar, folding shut on the two men trapped inside. At some point the big man in the back seat had been jolted part way out the broken window, and the impact with the pillar had dragged him back in. He was beyond help. The concrete was slick with blood.
Shayne looked in at the driver. He was a boy in his early twenties, with a blotched complexion. He was skewered on the broken steering post.
Shayne went for his Buick. By the time he circled back to the scene the cops had arrived, including one he knew, a red-faced veteran named Squire. The redhead nodded to him.
“Anybody live through it?”
“God, no,” Squire said. “The one in front we’re going to have to take out with a can opener.”
“I suppose it’s a stolen car?” Shayne said casually.
Squire’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah. My partner spotted it right away. He’s a memory nut, thinks if he recovers enough stolen cars they’ll make him detective. Little does he know.” He fished out a cigarette. “You have anything to do with this, Mike?”
“I walked in on something out on the bay. I don’t know what, except that they didn’t want to be bothered. They got away from me there but I picked them up again on the causeway. Believe it or not, that’s all I know.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you,” Squire told him. “As soon as we get an identification, if we do, we’d better talk about it some more.”
“Sure,” Shayne said. “I’ll call in.”
Squire started to say something, then nodded. “Make it tonight, though, will you? Don’t let it go till morning.”