Count Backwards to Zero

Chapter 5

Shayne returned to his cabin.

He seldom carried a gun, but when Sally Marquand had called from Bermuda to tell him that she found herself in what was turning into a rather bad jam, he had taken a .38 with him. He hadn’t used it. Coming aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he had tossed it into a drawer. Now he pulled out his shirt so it hung loosely over his slacks, and stuck the gun in the belt.

He hesitated, about to leave the cabin, and took out the gun again to check the clip. It was empty.

He weighed the gun thoughtfully, and returned it to the drawer. He had left his passport beside it. Taking it out, he flipped it open. The passport photograph, in which Shayne looked like one of the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals, had been sliced out.

He swore briefly. It had been adroitly done. Only someone with Shayne’s highly developed sense of smell would have discovered the mutilation before disembarking. Presenting his passport to the Immigration officials, he would have been delayed until he could prove his identity.

He went back to A deck, consulted a cutaway diagram of the ship hanging outside the purser’s office, and went forward to the captain’s cabin. He gave the door a few hard knocks and went in.

“Captain?”

There were two rooms. When Shayne switched on a light, another light came on in the bedroom and a voice called, “What is it?”

When Shayne reached the doorway, the captain, a big beak-nosed man named Stackpole, was sitting up looking at him. Shayne held out his Florida private detective’s license.

“I’m Michael Shayne. I need some major cooperation, and before you give it to me you’ll need more to go on. Do you know the Bermuda Police Commissioner? Or the Deputy Commissioner, Ian Cameron?”

Captain Stackpole put in his teeth and made a quick pass at his graying hair before taking Shayne’s leather folder. He glanced at it and gave it back.

“I know Cameron. He’s the son of an old schoolmate of mine.”

“He can vouch for me if you call him. I know it’s late, but they owe me something.”

Captain Stackpole, like Shayne himself, was a man doing a job. Without requiring any more information, he picked up the telephone and gave a few quiet instructions.

“This is a police matter, I take it,” he said to Shayne.

“Smuggling. It seems to be something fairly big.”

“We’ve come to expect it on the southern run. They think the Miami Customs will be softer than New York, but it seldom turns out that way. Are any of the ship’s people involved?”

“I don’t think so. But there’s still a lot I don’t know.”

“We have a high personnel turnover these days. We take what we can get, and that includes some pretty doubtful people. If you find any crew connection, Mr. Shayne, I’d appreciate a little advance notice so we can have a company representative standing by. It may take a few minutes to get Cameron. Coffee? Whiskey?”

Shayne asked for whiskey. The Captain made the drink without ice and opened a soft drink for himself. Until the phone rang at the bedside, he talked easily about earlier smuggling attempts on the Southampton-Miami crossing. It was true, he admitted, that he only knew about those that had been frustrated.

The phone rang.

“Cameron, it’s John Stackpole here. Sorry about the lateness of the hour and so on. I have a person called Michael Shayne in my cabin. He says the name is familiar to you.”

He listened for a moment. “He appears to be moderately sober. I’ve given him a small whiskey. Should I trust him, and if so, to what extent?”

He listened another moment, thanked Cameron, and said goodnight.

“You have your clearance, Mr. Shayne. He seems to feel I should hand the ship over to you, but I won’t quite do that. What did you have in mind?”

Half an hour later, pushing a low-wheeled dolly, Shayne entered the Queen Elizabeth’s afterhold.

The big cavernous space was weakly lit up by unshaded bulbs on each exposed steel rafter. After relocking the door, he began the hunt for Little’s doctored Bentley.

He had brought a powerful four-cell flashlight. The cars were as crowded as they would have been in a busy downtown parking lot. Each was chocked to the deck and fixed to an adjustable axle clamp. He had to move sideways between rows, and step on bumpers to get from one row to the next.

He checked a Bentley in an outermost row, and found Dr. Quentin Little’s name on the red tag wired to the steering wheel. It seemed to be riding very low on its rear wheels. Shayne stooped to look at the gas tank.

The bright beam of his flashlight shot all the way across beneath the cars. A moving shadow caught his eye. He swung the flashlight instinctively, but nothing that shouldn’t have been there showed in the light. He pointed the beam another way, keeping his eyes on the spot where he thought he had detected movement.

The shadows changed slightly. He stabbed with the light, and picked up a man’s feet and legs.

They were in the opposite aisle, at the far side of the massed formation, scissoring rapidly. Straightening, Shayne saw a blurred, crouching figure.

He hurled the flashlight. It revolved end over end, and was still burning when it crashed against a bulkhead and went out. Shayne was already running. He was parallel with the figure, separated by the densely massed cars.

A light winked at him. The sound of a pistol shot hammered back and forth across the metal enclosure.

The shot had been snapped off at random, to let Shayne know that he was stalking an armed man. Shayne jumped into a pool of shadow.

There was a dimly lighted doorway ahead of the other man, and he was dearly trying to reach it without disclosing his identity. Bent low, Shayne ran to the door on his side of the hold, where he had left the dolly. He tipped the tools and equipment onto the floor. The clatter drew another shot.

Shayne grabbed a heavy long-handled pipe wrench. Throwing himself down on the dolly, he launched himself from the wall with a powerful kick.

He shot along the top aisle, surprised by his own speed. Low enough not to be seen, he careened across the hold and was still moving very fast when he collided with the wall. Wrestling the dolly around, he kicked off from a bulkhead and rolled at the figure running toward him.

He saw a white shirt, a pale face, a mop of hair. The figure leaped straight up, picking up his feet like a second baseman making a double play, and Shayne shot beneath him.

Twisting off the rapidly moving dolly, Shayne hit the wall and came around. In the same motion he threw the wrench.

The heavy-jawed wrench struck the man between the shoulder blades. He staggered, nearly losing his footing. An instant later he was out the door.

By the time Shayne reached the doorway, the dimly lighted corridor was empty.

He waited, listening. Then he closed the door and pushed an empty drum against it, where it would be knocked aside if the door opened.

He retrieved the dolly. One of the casters was bent but it was still serviceable. Reloading it with his welding and cutting equipment, he rolled it to the Bentley.

Captain Stackpole had given Shayne authority to draw on the ship’s machine shop for any tools he needed, and he had brought a wide assortment, including a working light with a long heavy-duty cord. He found an outlet and plugged in.

He opened the Bentley’s luggage hatch, removed the spare wheel and turned back the floor carpeting. It was beginning to seem more and more likely to Shayne that at least some of Little’s story was true. A quick glance told him that the bolts attaching the gas tank to the chassis had been recently replaced.

He had to jack up the rear end and crawl underneath to reach the nuts. He found them easy to turn.

He could see from the tension on the rear springs that the tank must be unusually heavy. Bracing himself, he pushed upward with both hands. It gave perceptibly, but it was obviously going to give him trouble.

He drew jacks from nearby cars and began jacking it out, using one at each corner. At intervals, he slid out to see how it was coming. The tank cover was a half inch longer and wider than the tank itself, providing a flange that could be bolted to the body. The entire cover had been sliced off and later rewelded. The new weld was daubed with dirty grease, but under the bright 150-watt bulb, Shayne could see the faint scar where it joined the natural accumulation on the underside of the car.

He had three hours till daylight. He needed it all.

He disconnected the hose and opened the gas line, draining the tank into an oil pan. After measuring the tank carefully, he reconnoitered the neighboring cars and picked a late-model Oldsmobile. The steering wheel tag gave the owner’s name and an address in Coral Gables, adjoining Miami to the south. The two tanks were nearly the same shape and size, though the flange on the Bentley’s tank was wider and the bolt holes were spaced differently. On the American car, the bolts were rusted in place, and Shayne had to burn them off.

Because of the lack of space to maneuver, the transfer was difficult. The Oldsmobile’s tank lifted out easily after being drained and disconnected, but putting the Bentley’s tank in its place took an hour’s straining and prying. To bring the tank clear of the floor of the Bentley’s luggage space, he had to block up the jacks. It got away from him briefly as he was levering it over, and it left a bad scar in the front fender of a Jaguar.

Now, shining his flashlight into the tank’s open neck, he saw that it was, in fact, extremely shallow. The false bottom was slick and black. Before rolling it to the Olds, he inserted a small rectangular object wrapped in heavy plastic. This was a homing device, part of the standard survival equipment in the Queen Elizabeth lifeboats. The switch had been taped open, and for the last hour or so it had been transmitting a tiny pulsing buzz at thirty-second intervals. The batteries had a 36-hour life. The effective range of the device, Shayne understood, was a little over ten miles.

It was attached to a long wire. Leaving this dangling, Shayne began the difficult task of raising the heavy tank high enough so he could work it into the open trunk of the Olds. He found it a fraction of an inch too long. Firing up the cutting torch he had brought from the machine shop, he burned off a narrow strip of Detroit steel, allowing the heavy tank to drop into place. And then it was necessary to drill new holes for the bolts. He used only two. Before attaching the hose he ran the wire through the hose opening and beneath the car, and tied it into the Oldsmobile’s antenna.

After that, he installed the Olds tank in the Bentley, connected the gas lines and filled both tanks.

Back in his cabin as dawn was breaking, he showered and changed clothes and settled down to wait for the phone to ring.