He waited tensely and saw a dancing flicker of light play against the wall of the corridor. It steadied as he watched it, and almost immediately a flashlight, held waist-high, emerged from one of the office doors and swung down the corridor in his direction.
He drew back so the light of the flash would pass him by and shine harmlessly into the interior of his hideaway as the man came closer, his own flashlight held ready, the first finger of his right hand firmly on the trigger of his revolver.
He would wait as long as possible before exposing himself to the intruder. It was almost a certainty that the man had a duplicate key to the padlock on the back door, and if he felt sure he was alone in the building he would first unlock the doors to let a truck back inside.
There would be two or three men with the truck, Shayne reasoned, to do a fast job of loading it, and if he were lucky he’d be able to take them by surprise and round up the whole gang.
The light flashed through the door opening in front of him from a distance of twenty feet, casually showing the emptiness of the small office, flickered away to the right as the bearer of it hurried around the bend in the corridor with the beam directed toward the back doors.
He passed within two feet of Michael Shayne, and was silhouetted momentarily against the reflected light of his flash, showing a medium-sized, slender, bareheaded man, bent forward slightly, and there was the glint of metal in his right hand as he approached the locked doors.
He straightened in front of the doors and Shayne waited breathlessly for him to pocket the gun and produce a key to unlock the padlock.
Instead, there occurred one of those inexplicable happenings which confound reason. Perhaps some sixth sense warned him of danger from behind. Perhaps there was some animal emanation from the detective who waited so tensely. Shayne was destined to never know what caused him to whirl about suddenly, sinking into a crouch and shining the beam of his torch directly into the detective’s face as he waited inside the open doorway.
Michael Shayne’s left thumb and right forefinger reacted simultaneously. The powerful beam from his flash bathed the crouching figure in white light at exactly the same moment as the gun in the man’s right hand erupted in an ear-shattering series of explosions so closely spaced that they sounded like one long-drawn blast. And Shayne practically felt the bullets fanning the still air above his hair by the fraction of an inch.
At the same instant, his own weapon punctuated the r-r-r-r-r-r of the other gun.
The flashlight and the gun clattered to the floor, and the shadowy figure of the man swayed and then crumpled downward into a shapeless heap of lifeless flesh.
The flashlight lay on the floor with its beam focussed on the wall four feet away. The gunman lay quiescent, un-moving.
Shayne got up from his chair stiffly. Faintly, through the closed and padlocked doors, he heard the roar of a truck’s motor, the high-pitched whine of gears as it moved away in the blacked-out area, and he knew he had muffed the assignment to a certain extent.
Only one of the gang lay dead in front of him. The others outside had heard the rattle of gunfire inside the warehouse and were escaping.
He went through the door shining his light down on the recumbent figure. He was young and had a pallid, ratlike face. He wore a blue, rain-repellent jacket which was un-zippered to the waist, showing a black-and-white checkered sport shirt beneath. A spreading stain of crimson showed in the exact center of the chest of his sport shirt. Six inches from the curled fingers of his right hand lay the weapon which had thrown the lethal bullets that had sung their song of death above the red hairs on Shayne’s head just a minute before.
It was a curious and ungainly sort of hand-weapon, unlike any pistol Shayne had ever seen before. He held his light full on it for a long moment, then stooped and picked it up speculatively. It felt curiously light in his hand for its bulk and its demonstrated lethal potential, and he hesitated before dropping it into his coat pocket and then bringing his thoughts back to the necessities of the moment.
He turned back from the dead man, went into the dispatcher’s office and lifted the telephone to see if it had been put out of operation with the disruption of power.
He was rewarded by the welcome humming of a dial tone, and he dialled the Miami Beach police headquarters and reported who he was and where he was, and that he had a dead body for them to come and pick up at their convenience.
Then he hung up and poured himself a sixth mug of coffee, sat down and lit a cigarette and waited for the police to come.
2
Michael Shayne grew restive as he sipped the hot coffee and waited. He might be in for a long wait, he realized, before the police got around to answering his call on a night like this. There were innumerable small emergencies to be coped with during a storm like this one. Branches of trees blocking city streets, cars skidding on rain-slicked pavements or stalled at intersections under the pounding of wind and rain, flooded basements and terrified housewives phoning in to report suspected prowlers in their yards.
And the Miami Beach police force would not consider his call a real emergency. After all, he had reported the man dead and promised to wait for them to come and pick up the body.
The other man’s flashlight lay on the floor outside where it had fallen, still burning brightly, and Shayne had lain his own on the desk beside him, so the interior of the office was now quite well illuminated. Outside, the storm continued to rage without seeming abatement, while inside the heat seemed heavy and oppressive due to the sudden cessation of forced cool air. Sweat formed on Shayne’s forehead and he wiped it away angrily. He knew the apparent rise in temperature must be purely psychological. It probably hadn’t risen more than a full degree since the airconditioning went off, but it seemed at least ten degrees hotter.
He shoved the mug of hot coffee away from him while it was still half full, and suddenly recalled that he had promised to telephone the warehouse manager the moment there was anything to report.
There was a slip of paper beside the telephone with his name and home number written on it. Shayne turned his flashlight slightly to better illuminate the instrument and paper, bent forward and dialled the number written there.
A woman’s voice answered the third ring. “Hello.”
“Is Mr. Ericsson there?”
“Just a moment.” And then he heard her voice calling faintly, “John. It’s for you.”
The manager’s voice came over the wire twenty seconds later, “Yes? Ericsson speaking.”
“Mike Shayne, Mr. Ericsson. Maybe you’d better come down to the warehouse.”
“What? Has something happened, Shayne? Did they…?”
“The power went off ten minutes ago,” Shayne told him succinctly, “and a man came in through one of the office windows. I had to kill him. I’m waiting for the police now.”
“Gracious! That’s terrible. If you could have captured him alive…”
Shayne interrupted wearily, “I couldn’t. He was too quick on the trigger for that. Might be a good idea if you were here when the police come to verify the fact that I was hired to do the job.”
“Of course, I… as soon as I can make it in all this wind. I’ll come to the side door, Shayne. The office entrance. I’ll… ah… knock twice and then once to let you know it is I. Please wait for me.”
Shayne said drily, “I have no intention of going anywhere,” and hung up. He stood up, then, his mind active and interested now that he knew Ericsson was on his way. He picked up his flashlight and swung the beam across the desk to the opposite wall and focussed it on a series of six distinct round holes in the woodwork spaced not more than a quarter of an inch apart and almost exactly horizontal.