Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, September 1974

The Deadly Taxicab by Talmage Powell

The man in the back seat moved and suddenly he could feel the cold steel at his neck. “Don’t try anything,” the man said. Gus shrugged. The next stop for him was Death!

The needling rain had all but stopped, and Gus Coulakis knew the boom of business was tapering off for the night. He cruised north on Gramercy, his taxicab a cozy swathe of warmth against the late-hour chill that had swept in behind the rain.

Traffic had thinne’d to an occasional swish of tires peeling along otherwise deserted streets that still reflected a black-slick. Then there was movement half a block ahead, a tall, bareheaded figure in a flapping raincoat angling into the cold halo of a street light and waggling a signal.

Gus slowed, craning his stumpy neck. With all the street violence nowadays, Gus sometimes wondered if he hadn’t been as safe in that old war, the one in Korea. He studied the raincoated figure as it enlarged in the headlights. Blondish young guy with wind whipping through shorter-than-yippie hair and a well-trimmed beard. Clean-cut. Seemed to be sober. He was carrying a suitcase, which seemed to Gus a good sign.

Gus slid the wheel to the right, braking at the curb. Anyway you cut it, you maybe bought trouble every time you made a payment on the hack. After all, the most angelic looking young fellow he’d ever taken aboard was the one who’d tried to cut Gus’s throat with a dull fisherman’s knife.

Ushered by a wash of cold air and a rustling of the raincoat, the passenger plopped in the rear seat. “Union Bus Station, please.” He talked straight, not like he was goofballed or geared up.

Gus flipped the meter to life and gave the crate some gas. He lifted a dead cigar stub from the ashtray and clamped it between his teeth. He was a stumpy figure behind the wheel with a pleasantly ugly face of crags and creases beneath his visored cap.

“Nice rain. Sort of washed the air.”

“Yeah.”

Gus glanced in the rear view mirror. He liked fares who talked, people from places he’d never seen. It was the moving around the city and meeting people that kept Gus punching a hack.

The silence from the back seat ruled out the weather as an opener. In his warm, easygoing gutteral Gus tried his standard number two wedge. “How about those Mets?”

“Yeah.”

Okay, the guy wasn’t talkative, and Gus respected the other man’s rights with a silence of his own.

The heavy shadow of a viaduct flowed across the misty windshield as Gus turned off Gramercy. He’d have coffee and a cruller in the all-night restaurant at the bus station, he decided. Pick up a final fare among debarking bus passengers. Call it a night and get some sleep.

Tomorrow was Sunday, and Gus liked to feel his best on his day off. After church he’d take Gerata and the kids to lunch at the Acropolis, which his brother Chris owned, and if the sun came out—

The thought was sucked right out of Gus’s head by a round little pressure on the back of his neck.

Gus’s short-fingered peasant’s hands went stiff on the steering wheel.

“Take it easy,” he requested cautiously, “I know a gun barrel when I feel one, and I ain’t fool enough to reach for any hard ware.”

“Then we’ll get along, understanding each other.” The voice from the rear was cool, conversational.

He’s a pro, Gus decided, knows the score, figures the odds, won’t go off half-cocked, at least. Gus knew the suitcase was a gimmick, a clever prop. Part of the robber’s modus operandi, as Lieutenant Bradshaw of the Robbery Detail called such things, carried along to lull cab drivers who might have otherwise passed up a fare in the cold glare of a street-light.

“Pull over,” the robber suggested.

“Yes, sir.”

Gus eased the taxi to curb-side. He threw a glance the length of Fielding, the old brick street they had turned onto. All he saw were the shadows of warehouses and garages in the feeble street glow. Not a police cruiser in sight. Not even, another car, for that matter.

“You look like too nice a joe for this kind of thing,” Gus said.

“Save your breath!”

“I got a wife and three kids. How come you want to do this to my wife and kids?”

“They’re your lookout, hackie.”

“Then how about yourself? Why do it to yourself? Don’t life mean nothing to you? What kind of future you got?”

“Depends on how much, bread you’re carrying.” The young man grated a laugh.

“How about a deal?” Gus asked. “You put down the gun, and I swear it’s like you never took it out. I’m a good listener. You got troubles. I got troubles. Maybe we can be some help to each other know guys in my church, important guys, who’d try you on a job.”

“A nine-to-five? You think I’m sortie kind of square?”

“I think you’re a mixed up kid,” Gus said bluntly. “I think you can either be grateful — or very sad — you ever got in this taxicab.”

“Look, dummy,” the young man said between his teeth, “you’re beginning to talk like it’s you, not me, that’s got the gun.”

“I ain’t forgetting the gun,” Gus assured him. “I’m just telling you, this is a special kind of taxicab.”

“Yeah? What does it do? Blow up like a doomsday bomb?”

“Not exactly,” Gus admitted. “But it’s the world right now. Your world and mine. Just the two of us, squared off in the darkness. Ain’t it time folks quit squaring off and mistreating each other? Use your head for something besides a hairpiece, pal. You take all I got, it ain’t much. It’s gone, a day or two from now. But that other, that memory of the nasty thing you’ve done and that image of yourself all nastied up from the memory, it ain’t gone. You got it for the rest of your life. Why not remember something a little better?”

“Look, man, you’re being robbed! You know that? You some kind of nut?”

“I’ve been robbed before,” Gus sighed. “I’m still around. I guess I’ll be robbed again.”

“You try to con everybody who sticks a gun in your back?”

Gus stole a glance around with a careful turning of his head. “It ain’t a con, son. You think it’s just a con to save my bread? Then you already got a lot nastier image of yourself and the world your brain sees than you ought to have.”

“You want your teeth smashed in?” the young man asked.

“Deliver, me from the thought!”

“Then get out. Empty the pockets. I’ll take the cab. You can walk back to Gramercy and hitch a ride.”

“Son. I’ve made a lot of payments on this hack. You think I’ll turn it over to you just like that?”

“You got no choice whatever, goofball.”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“All,” the young man said.

“Okay,” Gus said. “But I have to be sure I’ve talked one or two of them out of it. I couldn’t give you anything but the same break.”

“Man,” the robber said on a hissing, exhaled breath, “you’re the one going to need a break if you don’t shut your face.”

Gus’s left foot made an unseen movement. The metallic snapping sound of a released spring came from the rear seat. The young robber’s body lifted a few inches. His face contorted with sudden pain. His yowl could have been heard half a block away.

Gus had thrown himself down on his side, out of the line of reactive pistol firing,

“Hold it, son!” his muffled Voice filled the cab. “Don’t shoot or you’re dead! You’ve been hit with a poisoned dart. Without me you’re dead!”

Gus raised slowly. The robber had shifted in the rear seat. He was clawing at his left buttock, staring at Gus in shock and consternation.

“The gun ain’t no use now,” Gus said. “You see, you’ve been injected in a sensitive place with cannaballis aerobus. Deadly drug. You got about one hour to live, unless I get you to the antidote. So toss that useless little popgun on the front seat.”

The young man stared, undecided.

Gus grinned. “It’s your life, pal. Your minutes. Don’t feel hard at me. Instead, get sore at them that came along ahead of you and lifted my bread.”

Gus tipped back his visored cap. “Third time I got robbed was the charm, like in the old saying. I figured I better do something or quit driving a hack. But I like driving a hack. It’s mine, see? I worked for it, paid for it. And I didn’t like the idea of some punks taking my work and my style of life away from me. So I took the back seat out and spent a full day rigging it. It’s got five metal tubes sticking straight up from the bottom. They’re placed so you can’t sit nowhere back there without your backside being a target. Each tube has got a stout spring which I can trigger with a touch of my toe. On each spring rests a dart made from an icepick coated with that drug I mentioned. Fellow rides peaceable, he don’t never know about that back seat. Fellow like you, he does.”

The young man swallowed thickly. He lifted his left hand and stared at the brown-gummed dart he had pulled from his nether flesh.

“Stings, don’t it?” Gus said placidly. “That ain’t nothing. Just wait until your toes and fingers start to tingle. Then the needles of pain, waving all over you. Too late then for the antidote to do you any good.”

“Okay,” the young man gasped. “Just get me to a doctor.”

“Doctor?”

“The antidote, you freak out!” the young man practically screamed.

“Oh, that,” Gus said. “Sure. Hand over the gun.”

One hour and thirty minutes later, Gus and Lieutenant Bradshaw, a college trained cop who looked like a stevedore, came out of Bradshaw’s office and crossed toward the main desk in the precinct station-house.

Instead of coffee at the bus station, Gus had shared a thermos with Bradshaw after the robber was booked.

“Gus,” Bradshaw gave his head a wry shake, “I don’t know about you. I just don’t know. Maybe we ought to lift your license.”

“On what grounds?”

“Or swear you in as an official member of the police force.”

“Not me,” Gus said. “You guys go around with your lives in your hands. Anyhow, I’d make a lousy cop. I’m a hackie, Lieutenant. Even Gerata is resigned to that fact of life.”

They bellied up to the main desk. The lean young desk sergeant lifted a sandy brow.

“This is getting to be a habit,” he said. He lifted the petty cash box and set it on the desk top.

“That’s right,” Bradshaw agreed. “Gus has brought in four of them in the past two months I guess those darts really sting driven in at least an inch and smeared with that concoction of molasses, salt, iodine, and raw alcohol.”

“What’s the tab, Gus?” The desk sergeant opened Petty Cash.

“From a point on Fielding to the stationhouse, the meter says a buck-eighty,” Gus said. “But don’t forget the tip.”