Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982

Texas was a lot like Miami. It was full of sound and fury, death and destruction. Mike Shayne felt right at home. It was one of the worst feelings he’d ever had!

I

Michael Shayne was just stepping out of the building on Flagler Street where his office was located, when a rough hand suddenly grabbed his arm in an iron grip and spun him around. “Shayne, you goddam shamus!” someone roared, and then Shayne saw a big fist coming right at his face.

He ducked, letting his reflexes take over. The punch sailed by harmlessly, and Shayne stepped in closer to the man who had thrown it. He hooked a short, vicious left to the man’s unprotected stomach, followed with a devastating right cross that lifted the attacker off his feet and sent him sprawling on the sidewalk.

The man looked up at Shayne and rubbed a jaw that was going to be plenty sore, as bystanders hurried to get out of the way. Shayne’s pulse was pounding, pumping adrenalin through him in preparation for the fight to continue. But it was evident from the grin that broke out on the other man’s face that the fight was over.

“Damn, you can still hit!” the man said with a rueful chuckle. “Remember that night in Tampico when those merchant marine boys got into a brawl and you pitched in to help them out? You really cleared the decks in that bar, fella.”

Shayne’s lean face was a study in consternation now. Of all the people who might attack him in downtown Miami, Shayne would never have expected this one.

He took a deep breath. “Lomack, you’re as crazy as you ever were,” he said. “I’ll bet they still call you Mad Jack, don’t they?”

The man grinned even wider and held out a hand for Shayne to take. As the big detective helped his former assailant up, the man said, “Hell, yeah, they still call me Mad Jack. Only it’s behind my back now.” His voice dropped to a mock whisper. “Seems they’re afraid of the big boss, afraid I might fire ‘em.”

The man started dusting his expensive suit off, and Shayne said, “The last I heard of you, you were still in Texas. What are you doing here?”

“What, can’t I come see an old friend? After all, you’re the famous private detective, Mike Shayne, and I knew you when you were still roughnecking in the oil fields.”

“That was a long time ago,” Shayne said, “and I knew you when you were doing the same thing. But now you’re Mad Jack Lomack, the millionaire wildcatter.”

“Yeah, things change for all of us, don’t they, Mike?”

They sure as hell did, Shayne thought as he looked at this man who had been one of his closest friends, a lot of years back and a lot of miles away. Lomack still looked about the same, allowing for the passage of time. He was a few inches shorter than Shayne, thick-waisted and broad-shouldered. The closely-cropped beard was still a thick, luxurious brown, and the hair was the same, though there was a little less of it now. Lomack was wearing more expensive clothes now, too. He looked prosperous, which he had never been in the old days. The oil business had obviously been good to him.

“We really raised some hell in our time, though, didn’t we?” Lomack went on. “Good times, good times. And it’s really good to see you again, Mike.” He massaged his jaw again and added, “I just wish I hadn’t decided to see if you’re still as quick as you used to be. You are.”

“I’ve slowed down some. What do you say to a drink?”

Lomack clapped Shayne on the back and laughed. “I say what took you so long to ask? Is there a good place around here?”

“I was just on my way,” Shayne said. “Come on.”

It was late afternoon, and Shayne had just left the office for the day when Lomack made his unexpected appearance. Lucy Hamilton, the big redhead’s beautiful secretary, was still upstairs, finishing up the day’s paperwork. Shayne was supposed to meet her for dinner later on. He hoped Lomack would be able to join them, and said as much to the oilman.

“Well, I’d like to, Mike,” Lomack said, “but to tell you the truth, this isn’t just a social visit. I’ve got a problem I’m hoping you can help me with.”

Shayne had figured as much. They had reached a nice little cocktail lounge a couple of blocks away from the office, and as he opened the door, Shayne said, “You can tell me all about it over that drink, Jack.”

“You still drinking Martell, ice water on the side? It used to amaze me how you could come up with cognac in those jerkwater Mexican towns a hundred miles from nowhere!”

As they settled into a booth, Shayne hoped that Lomack’s problem wasn’t a major one. The two of them had shared drinks and brawls and hour after hour of hard, backbreaking work in the oilfields. He didn’t like the thought of Jack Lomack in trouble.

It looked like that was the case, though. Lomack kept up the jovial front until after their drinks had arrived, laughing over the reminiscences of earlier, wilder days. But then as he wrapped his fingers around a tumbler full of whiskey and took a long swallow from it, Shayne saw the change come over his face.

“What’s the trouble, Jack?” Shayne asked as he sipped on the cognac he had ordered.

Lomack put his glass down carelessly, sloshing some of the amber liquid out. He ignored it and sighed heavily. “It’s pretty simple, Mike,” he said. “Some folks back in Texas think I killed about two dozen people.”

Shayne’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. He had heard a lot of surprising statements in his years as a private detective, and he had learned to automatically stifle his reactions. But he couldn’t prevent the sudden tightening of his face, the narrowing of his eyes as he frowned. And he couldn’t stop the hand that lifted to his earlobe, to tug on it absently.

“Doesn’t sound too good, Jack,” he said after a long moment of silence. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”

Lomack showed his age more now as he said, “I guess you heard about the drilling rig going down off the South Texas coast a few weeks back. That was one of my rigs, Mike.”

Shayne remembered seeing the story on a television newscast. He said, “I didn’t hear much about it, but I know what you’re talking about. There was some kind of explosion on the rig and it sank, is that right?”

“Right. It sank, with twenty-seven people on it. By the time the rescue people got there, only two of them were still alive and hanging onto some debris. Those two are still alive, or at least they were when I left Texas; the other twenty-five are at the bottom of the Gulf.”

“And you’re saying that somebody holds you responsible for that disaster?”

Lomack nodded. “The insurance company, for one. They’ve got an investigator on the case, and they’re going to hold up my settlement as long as they can.”

“That’s normal, in a case that big, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. And they know my company has been having some trouble lately.” Lomack’s fist came down on the table sharply. “But dammit, it’s awful when somebody thinks you’d kill all those people just to get a little money.”

“It’s been known to happen,” Shayne said softly. “Not everybody is as honest as you, Jack.”

“Crazy but honest,” Lomack said, more than a trace of bitterness in his voice. He shook his head. “That’s bad enough,” he went on. “But then these things started showing up.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and put it on the table.

Shayne started to take it, then stopped the motion abruptly and asked, “Is this something the cops should be checking for fingerprints?”

Lomack waved a hand. “Don’t worry about that. They’ve got the others. When this one came, I decided it was time I did something on my own. I came to see you.”

Shayne picked up the paper and unfolded it. It was plain white paper, and someone had printed a message on it in block letters. It said:

It was unsigned, and Shayne knew that the printing would contain no clues as to the author of it.

“There have been more of these?” he asked Lomack.

“Several. I tried not to let them bother me too much. Oh, I brought the cops in on it, that was the only reasonable thing to do, but they weren’t able to find out who was sending them. It was only when I got this one that I really started to get scared.”

“Why this one?”

Lomack’s hands clenched into fists. “Because this one was the first one I could take to be a threat to Maggie.”

“Maggie?” Shayne remembered plenty of women in Lomack’s life, but that name rang no bells.

“My wife.” Lomack’s gaze got far away. “Loveliest woman you ever saw in your life. Certainly the loveliest one I ever saw. The note says I’ll feel the same pain as the families of the men that went down with the rig. Maggie’s the only family I’ve got, so that must mean she’s going to be taken away from me.”

The pain and anxiety he was feeling came through in his voice. Shayne was quiet for a moment, digesting what Lomack had told him. Finally, he said, “Try not to borrow trouble, Jack. Whoever wrote the letter might not have meant any harm to your wife.”

“Then what else can it mean, dammit?”

Shayne didn’t have an answer for that one. He gave Lomack a second for the burst of anger and frustration to pass, then asked, “Is it possible that sabotage was responsible for the sinking of the oil rig?”

“It sure as hell is. Like I said, the insurance company is investigating, and they haven’t decided yet just what did cause the trouble. One thing’s for sure — it wasn’t weather-related. The night was calm and clear. The two survivors haven’t been able to talk much yet— They’re both still in the hospital, in serious condition — but they both remember there was an explosion before the rig went under.”

“Had you been out there recently?”

“The day before. I know what the insurance people think. They think I hid a bomb out there with a timer on it. But they’ll never prove it, because it didn’t happen.”

Shayne swallowed the last of his Martell and signaled the bartender for a refill. “Assuming that the explosion was deliberate,” he said, “I think we can rule out any of the men on the rig as the one who planted the bomb. Who else was out there and then left?”

Lomack shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Several people could have been out there... My operations manager, the drilling coordinator, other people in the company, maybe...”

“You haven’t checked any of them out?”

“I’m sure the police have, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. Makes me think they didn’t find anything incriminating about anybody else and still consider me the prime suspect. But that’s one reason I’m here. I want you to check everything out, Mike. If it was sabotage and murder, find that out and find out why. That’s the only way the insurance company will be satisfied... and the only way I can get rid of the nut who’s sending me those threats.” Lomack’s voice dropped, and Shayne had to listen closely to hear the intense words. “Besides, if it was sabotage, some bastard killed twenty-five men. Nobody should get away with something like that.”

Lomack was sincere, Shayne was sure of that. And he was sure what his answer to Lomack’s proposal was going to be.

“I’ll find the answers, Jack,” he said. “You can count on that.”

The old familiar grin came back on Lomack’s face. “I knew you’d take me up on it,” he said. “Mike Shayne never could resist a challenge. I’m booked on a flight back to Corpus tonight. Is that too soon for you to leave?”

Shayne shook his head. “I’ll make a few phone calls to clear the decks here, then head back to my place and pack a bag.”

Lomack lifted his glass. “Here’s to the two of us,” he said. “We’ll raise hell, just like we did in the old days.”

“Sure, Jack,” Shayne said, raising his glass and clinking it against Lomack’s.

II

Some things never change, Shayne was thinking as he put clothes in a small suitcase in his apartment a little while later, and some things can’t help but change. Jack Lomack still had the same spirit he had always possessed, but years of making his living mostly behind a desk had changed his capabilities. The Jack Lomack he had known before would have charged any problem headon, never asking for help. He might be grateful for any help that he got, but he wouldn’t ask for it. Now Lomack knew he was out of his element and had wisely sought out Shayne.

Lomack’s business was oil. Shayne’s was murder.

He snapped the suitcase shut and carried it out into the living room of his apartment. Lomack was prowling around the room, another drink in his hand, too tense to stand still and wait. Shayne said, “I’m ready to go, Jack. I called Lucy and let her know where to find me for the next few days.”

Lomack tossed off the rest of his drink and said, “I want to meet this Lucy of yours when all this trouble is cleared up. I’m sure she’s a hell of a girl, though what she sees in an ugly son like you is beyond me.”

Shayne was glad to hear the bantering tone on Lomack’s voice again. The man might be down, but he was far from out. He hefted the suitcase, grasped Lomack’s arm, and said, “Come on, Jack. Let’s go to Texas.”

Lomack was fairly quiet during the ride out to the airport in Shayne’s Buick, quieter still as they boarded the big American Airlines jet bound for Corpus Christi. This evening flight wasn’t heavily traveled, and Shayne hoped to put the time in the air to good use.

He started by getting Lomack to tell him all he knew about the sinking of the offshore drilling rig. Thinking about it was obviously a burden on Lomack, but Shayne knew he had to have all the background of the case if he was to have any chance of cracking it.

“The thing of it is, it could have been an accident,” Lomack said. “Something could have happened with the equipment to cause an explosion. We’ve had divers down, checking what’s left of the platform to see if they can find any trace of something that shouldn’t have been there. So far, nothing has turned up. And everything my company has done has been gone over and taken several steps further by the insurance investigators. That rig was insured for millions of dollars, Mike, and those boys don’t trust old Jack like you do.”

“They’re just trying to run their business the best they know how,” Shayne commented.

Lomack nodded emphatically. “Oh, hell, I know that. I don’t have to like it, but I know it. What I can’t figure out...” He paused, and Shayne waited silently for him to go on. “Well, most of this has been kept out of the papers. How did whoever’s sending those threatening notes know that I’m a suspect in this? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Shayne’s eyes narrowed. “That is a good question,” he said slowly. “One that we’re definitely going to have to answer.”

Lomack went on talking about the tragedy at sea and its aftermath, and Shayne took it all in, filing it all away in his keen brain. When Lomack was through, Shayne changed the subject abruptly by saying, “Tell me about Maggie.”

The smile that flashed across Lomack’s face told Shayne a lot. Even though a look of concern replaced the expression a second later. Lomack said, “One beautiful lady, let me tell you, Mike. And the smartest one I ever met, too. She worked for me for nearly seven years before I talked her into marrying me. Went from the steno pool to accounting and right up into management. She was Mitch Lund’s executive assistant when I finally got her to say yes.”

“Lund is your operations manager, right?” Shayne asked, running his memory over what Lomack had told him about the personnel of his company.

“Yeah. Good man. The things that he and Maggie and John Morrall did made the company a whole hell of a lot easier to run. It almost ran itself most of the time.”

Shayne remembered Morrall’s name, too. The man was the drilling coordinator. If Shayne understood the set-up properly, Morrall and Lund were in charge of most of the day to day activities of the company. Lomack might set things in motion, but the other two men kept them going. That meant they would be intimately familiar with the details of the drilling rig, and Shayne meant to talk to them at length as soon as he got a chance.

“You sound like marriage agrees with you, Jack,” Shayne said.

“Best thing that ever happened to me, that’s all.” His fingers knotted together. “That’s why I got so damned worried and decided to come get you. I don’t want anything happening to Maggie, Mike.”

“What precautions have you taken besides coming to see me? Have you hired some kind of security service?”

Lomack nodded. “There’s a man there at the house twenty-four hours a day, armed and ready in case anything starts to happen. I’m praying that it doesn’t, but...”

“It never hurts to be sure,” Shayne told him.

The big detective leaned back in his seat and fished a cigarette out. As he lit it, he looked out the window beside him at the night sliding by outside. There was nothing to see but darkness. Must be what it was like at the bottom of the Gulf, under hundreds of feet of water, he mused. The thought didn’t do anything for his peace of mind.

Lomack had fallen silent again, and Shayne didn’t bother trying to draw him out for a few minutes. Instead, he thought about everything that he had been told, and he didn’t like some of the thoughts he was having.

Earlier, he had believed Lomack implicitly. But now, despite the old friendship between the two of them, Shayne found his investigator’s natural curiosity at work. He had trained himself over the years to keep an open mind, to suspect everyone involved in a case, until he was sure that he held the truth in his hands. And this case, if he was going to investigate it, couldn’t be any different.

Could Lomack have been responsible for the explosion that sent the rig down? Shayne’s gut said no, but at the same time, the man had admitted that his company had been weathering some financial hard times. A big insurance settlement might have gone a long way toward ending that.

But would Lomack have been callous enough to murder so many men, just to collect some money? Again, everything inside Shayne denied it... but he hadn’t seen Lomack in a lot of years. Anyone can change, Shayne thought. It was just a question of how much change was possible in one man.

There were other angles to be considered, though. Someone else could have had a reason to blow up the rig. Lomack had been unable to come up with any likely suspects when Shayne asked him about that, but Shayne knew very well that no one becomes much of a success in the oil business without making some enemies along the way. It could have been someone who wanted to hurt Lomack and his company, and in an even more chilling possibility, it could have been someone with a grudge against just one man working on that rig. Shayne knew that things like that had happened before; trains and planes had been bombed with tremendous loss of life, just to get at one particular person.

Shayne ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and leaned his head back against the seat, closing his gray eyes. Those were all things that would have to be looked into when they arrived, but the answers wouldn’t be found here in this airplane. The answers, if there were any, were waiting in Texas.

It was not quite ten o’clock, local time, when the flight arrived in Corpus Christi. As the plane nosed down over the coastal city, Shayne remembered all the other times he had been in the Lone Star state, riding into Houston on oil tankers as a young man, roughnecking in the oil patches out in West Texas, returning to El Paso as a private detective to solve several murders and clear up a very messy political scandal. The times spent here had been good ones, if a little hectic. Shayne just hoped that this visit turned out as well as the last time he had come to Texas to investigate a murder. That case had ended with him owning a partial interest in a silver mine...

“My car’s in the lot here,” Lomack said a few minutes later as they strode through the terminal after picking up their luggage. “I want you to stay with us, and we’ve got plenty of room, so don’t go giving me an argument about it.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Shayne grinned.

He was struck by the similarities between Corpus Christi and Miami as Lomack wheeled his big car away from the airport and toward the bay. There were the same wide boulevards, lined with palm trees, the same marinas packed with pleasure craft, the same tang of salt in the air from the ocean. Shayne felt right at home.

Lomack turned the car onto Ocean Drive and piloted it past the huge homes there, facing the lapping waves of the Gulf from behind expansive, carefully cared for lawns. He said, “I guess the place is kind of gaudy, but you know how it is. People expect you to keep up a certain kind of image.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Damn, I can’t believe I just said that. Before you go back to Miami, Mike, you and I are going to have to do some real old-fashioned hellraisin’, show these people around here that Mad Jack’s still got some life in him.”

“Nobody would ever think that you didn’t,” Shayne assured him.

Lomack nodded at a house coming up on their right. “There’s the place,” he said. “Like I told you, plenty of room.”

Shayne had to agree with that as he studied the house. There were enough lights on in it for him to tell that it was a sprawling three-story structure, built of stone with a steep, gabled roof. A wrought iron fence ran around the property, with a gate to one side that was standing open. As Lomack turned onto the long driveway that led up to the house, the headlights of his car swept over another vehicle that was parked by the house. Shayne saw the insignia of a private security company on its doors.

“I see the guard’s on duty,” Lomack grunted. “That’s good to know.”

Shayne started to nod in agreement, but something suddenly made him tense and sit forward. His eyes searched for and found the flicker of movement he had seen a second before. It was close to the house, in a section of shadow between two lighted windows.

Of course, it could have been the guard, making his rounds, but there had been a furtiveness about it that made Shayne’s insides clench. He snapped, “Get up there in a hurry, Jack.”

Lomack shot a puzzled glance at him, but he reacted to Shayne’s command. His foot came down harder on the accelerator, and the big car shot forward.

Shayne wished he had his gun in its regular place in his shoulder holster. The whole rig was packed away in his suitcase, though, for the airline’s sake. Maybe a gun wouldn’t be necessary...

Shayne still wished he had it.

He saw the movement again, close to the house, and now he could tell for sure that it was a figure, running away from the driveway. Shayne barked, “Hold it!” and Lomack stomped the brake, rocking the car to a stop. In a flash, Shayne was out the door and running after the fleeing figure in the shadows, but not before he caught a glimpse of Lomack’s suddenly-terrified face.

Shayne was barely aware of the slamming of Lomack’s door behind him. The oilman ran toward the front door of the house, calling, “Maggie! Maggie, are you all right?”

The running figure ducked behind a shrub, and some instinct warned Shayne. He jerked to one side, and the night was split by a muzzle flash as a pistol blasted. There was a whining in the air next to Shayne’s ear, and then he was throwing himself back the other way, zigzagging toward the shrub that concealed the gunman.

He might have gotten there if his foot hadn’t hit the soft shape on the ground. Instead, Shayne went sprawling to the soft turf of the lawn.

He landed awkwardly, but was instantly rolling to one side. Another bullet chewed up the grass where he had been an instant earlier. As he went over and over, the world spinning crazily around him, he saw a fragmented image of Jack Lomack jerking open the door of his house and pausing there, framed against the light coming from inside.

“Jack!” Shayne roared, knowing that Lomack was a perfect target. “Get down!”

Lomack’s head jerked around as he looked toward Shayne. The danger didn’t come from the gunman in the shadows, though. It came from behind Lomack, from inside the big house.

As Shayne came surging up onto his feet again, he felt as much as heard the heavy, thumping explosion from inside the house. The ground shook in sympathy with it, and noise and flame licked out from the windows. The blast threw Lomack backwards, flinging him off the porch like a discarded doll, sending him hurtling to the ground several feet away.

Shayne’s eyes snapped around. He was expecting a bullet to slam into his body, but the figure with the gun appeared to be gone. Whoever it had been, the work it had come to do was over now.

Shayne started toward the house in a staggering run. The whole place was ablaze now, and the bright glare it threw over the lawn showed Shayne what he had tripped over seconds before as he chased the intruder. It was the body of the security guard, and from the size of the bloodstain on the man’s shirt, Shayne knew he was dead even before he paused long enough to feel for a pulse. Not finding one, he ran on toward the house and Lomack.

Lomack was on his feet now, screaming his wife’s name against the crackling roar of the fire. He was shambling toward the burning building, his face contorted into a frozen, stunned mask, when Shayne reached him. The big redhead threw his arms around his friend and pulled him back. It took all of Shayne’s strength.

They stumbled back, the heat from the blaze beating against them, and as they lost their balance and fell to the grass, Shayne saw Lomack’s lips moving. The man wasn’t screaming anymore, but Shayne knew he was whispering, “Maggie...”

Corpus Christi was a lot like Miami, all right. It was full of sound and fury, death and destruction this night.

Mike Shayne felt right at home. And it was one of the worst feelings of his life.

III

Shayne’s mood hadn’t improved any by the next morning. It was still as black as the charred beams of the house where Lomack had lived. He stood in front of the ruins, watching as men from the fire department and the police arson squad combed through what was left of the house.

“Think they’ll find anything else?” Shayne asked the man standing next to him.

Lieutenant Travis Aguilar shrugged. He was in charge of the case, and the look on his lean, dark face told Shayne that he didn’t much care for it, either.

“Do I think they’ll find anything that’ll help us?” Aguilar asked. “Not really. We’re sure already that someone set the place to blow up; we found part of the incendiary device that didn’t quite get consumed. And we found the woman’s body.”

Shayne’s mouth quirked in a bitter grimace. He had been there when Maggie Lomack’s remains were discovered, and he was just glad that her husband had been in a hospital room at the time, pumped full of a sedative and knocked out.

It was mid-morning now; the body had been discovered several hours earlier. Shayne said to Aguilar, “Any word yet from your forensic department?”

“Last I heard, they were still trying for a positive make. There’s been some trouble coming up with dental records. The cause of death was pretty obvious, but I’m sure they’ll check that, too.”

“And you’ll let me know what they find?” Shayne prodded.

Aguilar swung his gaze away from the burned house and toward Shayne. “I might,” he said in a flat voice. “Just as a courtesy, you understand. I don’t think I need to remind you Mr. Shayne, that you’re not licensed to operate as a private investigator in the State of Texas. Nor are you licensed to carry a gun.”

“I know that,” Shayne replied in a voice just as flat. “But Jack Lomack asked me to look into this business for him, and I told him I would. I’d like to be able to keep my word.”

“I’ve got no objections to you keeping abreast of the situation. Just don’t try interfering with it.”

Shayne said nothing. He wasn’t going to make any promises he knew he’d have a hard time keeping.

The two men stood in silence and watched the men in slickers and hard hats going through the rubble for several minutes. Then one of the arson investigators came out toward them, slapping ashes and soot off his gloves.

He shook his head as he approached them, saying, “I think we’ve found all we’re going to find. I’m sure no one was in the house except the woman when the bomb went off, just like Mr. Lomack told us. Their maid’s damn lucky last night was her night off. You’ll get a full report from my office, Lieutenant, but I can tell you this much. Whoever torched this place didn’t want it to have any chance to survive. He made sure the bomb had plenty of punch. We’re just lucky we didn’t lose the whole neighborhood.”

Shayne repressed a shudder as the man’s words recalled the moments after the blast when it looked like the whole world was going up in flames. It had taken quick, efficient work by the fire department — and a lot of luck, as the arson man had said — to keep the fire from spreading to the neighboring houses. The big lawns and the wide spaces between the houses had helped, but the disaster could have easily been worse.

“Thanks,” Aguilar said to the arson man, then turned and stepped over a police barricade, heading toward his car parked at the curb. Shayne followed.

“What about the security guard?” Shayne asked, his long legs allowing him to catch up easily with the shorter man.

“Killed by one shot to the chest,” Aguilar said. “I’d guess that the murderer got into the house, set up his bomb, then was leaving when the guard spotted him. That must have been just before you and Lomack arrived.”

“You know about the threats that Lomack has been receiving, don’t you?”

Aguilar nodded. “I know. I’ve been handling that, too, which is why I was assigned to this. We hadn’t made any headway on finding out who was sending them. Maybe now we will.”

“Lucky this happened, then,” Shayne said bitterly.

Aguilar spun toward him, a finger stabbing the air. “Look, Shayne,” he grated. “You’ve got no way of knowing this, but I worked for Jack Lomack a few years ago, before I became a cop. He and Mrs. Lomack are friends of mine. We’ll find out who did this, and we’ll find out if whoever did it also sent those notes. And I’m just as sorry as anybody else that this happened. But you stay out of it, understand?”

Shayne returned the man’s intense look for a long moment, then said quietly, “I understand, all right. But you’re wrong about one thing. You’re not as sorry about this as Jack Lomack is.”

Aguilar had no retort for that. He sighed after a second, then turned toward his car just as an officer waiting inside it held out a microphone to him. “Radio call for you, Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s Forensic.”

Aguilar strode forward, motioning the other officer out of the car. He took the microphone and slid into the seat.

As he talked on the radio, Shayne took out a cigarette and put it between his lips. It was only when he reached for a light that he realized how the spurt of flame from a match would look to him at the moment.

He put the cigarette up and decided to wait until later.

Aguilar was through on the radio. He hung the microphone up and stepped back out of the car. Shayne came up to him as he leaned against the fender and sighed.

“What about it?” Shayne asked. “Or have you decided not to tell me?”

Aguilar’s dark eyes locked with Shayne’s icy gray ones. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “What I just heard doesn’t really change things, though. They still don’t have a positive ID on the body, but they found something else.”

He paused, and Shayne growled, “Come on.”

Aguilar rubbed at his jaw wearily. “Her skull was fractured.”

Shayne grasped what he meant immediately. He said, “He knew, then. Whoever set the bomb knew she was in the house. It was no accident; he meant for her to die, might have even killed her before the blast went off.”

“Knocked her around pretty good, at any rate. There were no fallen beams around the body when we found it. The wounds couldn’t have been caused when the roof caved in.”

Shayne grimaced. “We knew it was murder already.”

“But now it’s premeditated. The woman could have been an accident, if the torch didn’t know she was there in the house, and the guard was probably just a moment of panic. He knew the woman was there, though, that’s for sure now.”

Shayne nodded and ran his thumbnail along the line of his jaw. After a moment, he said, “You think you could give me the name of that maid and a list of the men who died on the oil rig?”

A look of pure exasperation came over Aguilar’s face. “So that you can start running around and conducting your own investigation? Didn’t I just tell you to let us handle that, Shayne?”

Shayne shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask,” he said casually. It would have been easier if Aguilar had given him the information, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t come up with it on his own. He started to turn away and said over his shoulder, “I’ll be in touch.”

“Hold it, Shayne,” Aguilar barked. “Just what have you got in mind?”

“Somebody’s got to get started on the funeral arrangements,” Shayne bit off in return.

That was true enough, he reflected as he stalked away toward the rented car he had parked several feet away. Somebody was going to have to start thinking about things like that.

But not him. He had more important things to do... like finding a killer.

There were several ways to look at it, Shayne mused as he drove away from the place. The person who set off the firebomb could have been a grieving relative of one of the victims of the rig disaster. At least one person blamed Lomack for that, the person who had been sending the threatening notes. But there might be other reasons someone would want to strike at Lomack, and the controversy over the sinking of the oil rig might make a mighty convenient smokescreen.

For that matter, he thought, it wasn’t even certain yet that the dead woman was Maggie Lomack.

That train of thought led to still more questions in Shayne’s mind. He gave a mental shrug and decided that he didn’t know enough about the case and its personalities to make an intelligent guess yet.

Which meant that he was just going to have to find out.

The offices of the Lomack Corporation were in a neat, two-story brick building not far from the harbor and the ship channel. Shayne drove over the high causeway spanning the harbor and followed the directions he had gotten from Lomack during one of the man’s few coherent moments following the explosion. Despite the tragedy that had hit its owner, the place appeared to be business as usual this morning, Shayne saw as he pulled into a nearly full parking lot.

The carpet on the lobby floor was thick and soft, the music coming from concealed speakers muted and soothing. An attractive receptionist looked up from her desk with a smile and asked Shayne, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’d like to see Mitch Lund and John Morrall,” he replied. “My name is Mike Shayne; I’m a friend of Mr. Lomack’s.”

The smile on her face tightened a little. She must have assumed that he knew what had happened the night before. She said nervously, “I don’t know if they’re available right now, Mr. Shayne. You don’t have an appointment—”

“I know,” Shayne cut in on her. “But I’m looking into all the trouble Mr. Lomack’s been having, and I really want to speak to them.”

“Well...” she hesitated. “Mr. Morrall’s not here, but I can call Mr. Lund...”

“Please.” Shayne kept his tone polite, but she could see the determination on his lean face.

The girl picked up the phone on her desk, punched out a number quickly, then said, “Mr. Lund, there’s a Mr. Shayne out here to see you. He says he’s a friend of Mr. Lomack’s”

The voice on the other end spoke back to her, and then she hung up, looking up at Shayne and saying, “He’ll be right out.”

A door on the other side of the room opened only seconds later, and a tall, thin man hurried out. He was young, only thirty or so, but his hair was so fair as to be almost white. He extended a hand to Shayne and said, “Mr. Shayne? I’m Mitch Lund. Jack’s spoken of you often. Come on back to my office.”

“Thanks for giving me a few minutes,” Shayne said as he returned the handshake. “I won’t take up much of your time.”

“Take as much as you like,” Lund said as he ushered Shayne down a corridor and into an office that was smaller but just as richly appointed as the lobby. He waved Shayne into a chair, then said, “Would you like a drink? Or some coffee?”

“Coffee,” Shayne said. “But put a drink in it.”

Lund looked haggard, as if he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, but he grinned at Shayne’s comment. He said, “I know the feeling,” then went over to a small bar at the side of the room and poured two cups of coffee, adding a generous dollop of brandy to each one.

Shayne took a grateful swallow of it as Lund walked around behind his big desk and sat down. The operations manager of Lomack’s company said, “What can I do for you, Mr. Shayne?”

“Jack asked me to come down here and investigate the sinking of his oil rig,” Shayne said bluntly. “Now I’m going to investigate the bombing of his house and the murder of his wife, as well.”

Lund winced. “God, that’s an awful business. Terrible thing to happen. Do you or the police have any idea who did it?”

“The cops think it may be the same one who sent him some threatening notes, somebody who held a grudge against Jack and blamed him for the loss of that oil rig.”

“He told me about the notes,” Lund nodded. “Somebody is really warped if they think Jack had anything to do with sinking that platform.”

“You and I know that. But there are a lot of crazy people in the world, people who might think that blowing up Lomack’s house and wife would be a way of seeing justice done.”

“That’s crazy, all right.”

“You’re sure that Lomack didn’t have anything to do with the rig going down?”

Lund’s look of concern was momentarily replaced by one of anger, then he got the emotion under control. “You’ve known Jack a long time, Mr. Shayne. Do you think he’s capable of destroying his own rig and killing a lot of people in the process?”

“I’m asking you,” Shayne said.

“For the record, then. No, I do not think Jack had anything to do with it. It’s just not possible.”

“What happened, then?”

Lund clasped his fingers together on the desk. “Any number of things. Do you know much about drilling rigs, Mr. Shayne?”

“I used to, but it’s been a lot of years. What I know is probably obsolete by now.”

“You know what happens when a well goes up, though. Depending on what kind of gases are involved, it can be a pretty devastating explosion. I think someone was careless out there; someone caused a spark where he shouldn’t have. The explosion threw the rig out of balance and it went down. That’s not supposed to happen, but many things happen that aren’t supposed to.”

“It could have been sabotage, though?” Shayne asked.

“Of course it could have. But no one’s found any proof of that. And they’ve been looking, I can promise you that. We’ve all been looking.”

“If it was sabotage,” Shayne began, then looked up at Lund, “who would have had a reason to do it? Who would want to hurt Lomack that bad?”

“I can only think of one man.” Lund put his hands palm down on the desk. His face was bleak now, his anger coming through clearly. “You talk to Winslow,” he said. “You talk to Dennis Winslow.”

IV

Twenty minutes later, as Shayne left the building and walked out to his car, he reflected on what Mitch Lund had told him and hoped that the lead Lund had given him would result in something worthwhile.

Dennis Winslow was a name Shayne hadn’t heard before, but it didn’t take Lund long to fill him in. Winslow owned a small refinery up the coast a bit, and until recently, Jack Lomack had supplied him with the crude to keep his operation going. All that had changed, though, when the two men argued. Lomack had simply diverted Winslow’s oil to another refinery, and since then, Winslow had been struggling just to keep from losing everything. It was the kind of story that Shayne knew was common in the oil business, two strong-willed men at odds with each other, with the stakes, even on this level, in the millions of dollars.

Other things had come out of the conversation with Lund, too. For one thing, the operations manager had indeed been out to the drilling rig a few days before the disaster. It wasn’t unusual at all for him to visit the installation, but it proved that he did at least have an opportunity to plant a timebomb on the rig. His motive for doing such a thing was another question; from all that Shayne had seen of him, Lund was an honest, loyal employee to Jack Lomack.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden realization that someone was leaning on the fender of his car. The man doing the waning was tall, well-dressed, and watching Shayne intently with piercing eyes. He was nearly bald, despite only being in his forties, Shayne would guess, and he looked about as friendly as a barracuda.

“Mike Shayne?” he asked as the big redhead walked up.

“That’s right,” Shayne acknowledged, “and that’s my car you’re leaning on. Who’re you?” His voice was blunt. The last thing he was in the mood for was more trouble.

“My name is Earl Craig,” the balding man said. “I think we’re in the same business.”

“You’re the insurance investigator,” Shayne guessed.

“Right.” Craig named the company he worked for, then said, “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Shayne. I hear that Jack Lomack hired you... to look into the sinking.of his oil platform.”

“You sound a little doubtful about that, Craig.” There was an unctuous quality to the man that put Shayne’s teeth on edge. The smirk on Craig’s face only made it worse.

“Like I said, your reputation is pretty well-known. You’ve been known to pull some pretty raw stunts in the past. You’ll do damn near anything for a client, won’t you?”

Shayne didn’t know whether to take a swing at the man or just ignore him and get in the car and drive off. He did neither. Instead, he held onto his temper and said, “You need to get your facts straight. Call some of your colleagues in Florida. I’ve done a lot of insurance work myself.”

“Yes, but you’re working for Lomack now.” Craig straightened, and the smile dropped off of his face. “We don’t need anyone else poking into this case, Shayne. I’ll get to the bottom of it and find out if Lomack really did cause that explosion himself.”

“You don’t sound like you doubt that very much.”

The smirk came back. “I don’t. I’m convinced that Lomack is guilty as hell. It’s just a matter of proving it now.”

Shayne’s fingers were trying to clench into fists. He made them relax and said, “I guess you heard what happened last night.”

A brief shadow passed over Craig’s face. “That doesn’t change things,” he snapped. “Some lunatic takes the law into his own hands and blows Lomack’s house up. Well, I’m sorry it happened, but that’s not my concern, Shayne. All I care about is getting to the truth about that oil rig.”

Shayne had had enough. He stepped forward, and Craig moved out of his way. Shayne grasped the car door and opened it, then looked over his shoulder and grated, “You’ve got an ax to grind with Lomack for some reason, and that worries me, Craig. Especially since it’s not public knowledge that your company is investigating the sinking of the rig.” His voice dropped and became even more intense. “Somebody else found out about that, found out that Lomack is a suspect in the sabotage, if there was any. How do you think that happened, Craig?”

Shayne slammed the door before the man could answer, started the car, and pulled away, leaving Craig standing there with an angry look on his face.

That was interesting, Shayne mused as he drove away. Craig was definitely hostile toward Lomack and was determined to prove that Lomack was behind the blast that had sunk the rig. The leak that had established Lomack’s guilt in the mind of at least one other person, the one who had been sending the notes, had to have come from one of three sources — Lomack’s people, the cops, or the insurance company.

Had Craig told someone else that he thought Lomack was guilty? And was his vendetta against the oilman a personal one, or was Craig just another example of the syndrome Shayne had seen in other bureaucrats — that everyone was guilty until proven innocent?

Shayne’s mouth quirked in a short, ironic grin. It was starting to look like Lomack had a lot more enemies than he had thought he had. That seemed to happen often to people who were too good-natured to hold grudges themselves...

Winslow had an office in corpus Christi, Lund had told Shayne, though his refinery was twenty-five or thirty miles up the coast. Shayne followed the directions Lomack’s operations manager had given him and found the place without too much trouble.

Seeing Winslow was another matter entirely, though, he discovered. The pretty but nervous girl at the desk in the office told him, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Winslow is out of town right now. He won’t be back until next week. If you’d like to make an appointment then...?”

“No thanks,” Shayne grunted. “You don’t know where I can reach him now?”

She shrugged helplessly. “He didn’t leave me an itinerary. When he called me last night, he just said he was taking a short vacation.”

“Last night?” Shayne tried not to sound too interested.

“Yes, sir, he called late last night. I was really surprised...” She broke off, realizing that she might be revealing more than her boss would want her to. “You’re sure you don’t want to make an appointment?”

“I’ll check back if I do,” Shayne told her, then left the office with still more questions buzzing around in his head.

Someone was waiting for him this time, too.

Lieutenant Aguilar stepped out of his unmarked car as Shayne approached. There was a smile on his lips, but not in his eyes. He said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, Mr. Shayne. I thought you were going to be making funeral arrangements. Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?”

“Just asking a few questions,” Shayne said shortly.

“I hope you’re not representing yourself as a licensed private investigator, or worse, as a member of the police force.”

A curt laugh escaped from Shayne’s lips. “And I hope you don’t think I’m that stupid, Lieutenant. No, I’m just acting in my capacity as a private citizen with an interest in this case.”

“Most private citizens don’t go around investigating bombs and explosions and possible mass murders,” Aguilar said softly. “They leave those things for the police. That’s the smart thing to do.”

“Maybe I’m not smart. But I do know that Lomack was on the outs with Dennis Winslow, and I know that Winslow supposedly left town in a hurry last night. Sound interesting, Lieutenant?”

Aguilar’s eyes narrowed. Under his breath, he said, “I knew Winslow wasn’t at home, but—” He broke off, then went on in a louder voice, “Look, Shayne, if you’re not going to butt out, then maybe we’d better talk. No point in us duplicating everything the other one is doing.”

“You mean you’d spill what you’ve got so far?” Shayne had his doubts that Aguilar meant it, and that came through in his voice.

“You want proof? All right. We know that someone let it slip that Lomack was being investigated. We know that he and Winslow were having trouble. We know that both Mitch Lund and John Morrall were out at that rig just a couple of days before the explosion. And those two, plus Lomack, were the only ones out there who weren’t there when it went down. The crew changed every five days out there, and the next change wasn’t due until the next day. That enough for you?”

Shayne put a hip against the car and lit a cigarette. There was a warm breeze coming off the Gulf, and it would have felt good if he hadn’t been so wrapped up in what Aguilar was saying. After a moment, he said, “You’ve checked out Lund and Morrall?”

Aguilar nodded. “They look clean. You’re thinking that maybe one of them sold out to Winslow and planted the bomb?”

“It’s a possibility. Then they leaked the fact that Lomack was a suspect to some of the families of the dead men, again trying to cause more trouble for Lomack.”

“And if one of them was doing all this for Winslow,” Aguilar speculated, “then Winslow could have gotten scared when someone actually took the grudge against Lomack far enough to blow up the man’s house. Winslow ran because he was afraid someone would connect him with the whole thing, maybe through Lund or Morrall.”

“It plays,” Shayne said, frowning in concentration. The theory covered all the bases and answered all the questions, as far as he could see.

But there was something nagging at him, something that said the explanation was out of kilter somewhere.

A thought suddenly occured to him. He asked Aguilar, “Did your boys ever come up with a positive identification of the woman found in Lomack’s house?”

Aguilar frowned. The newly-found openness between the two men was still tentative, and he hesitated before saying, “They’ve run into some trouble there. Mrs. Lomack never had much dental work done. They’ve found nothing inconsistent with it being her corpse, but—”

“But they still can’t be sure, right?” Shayne cut in.

“We’re keeping the possibility of a switch in mind,” the lieutenant assured him. “It’s your turn to talk now, Shayne. Do you have anything that makes you think it wasn’t Lomack’s wife?”

“Not a thing,” Shayne told him. “Just some uneasy feelings. One other thing I was wondering about. Earl Craig, the man running the insurance investigation, seems to have something against Lomack, too.”

Aguilar nodded. “You don’t know Craig, Shayne, so I can see why you’d wonder about him. He hates everybody; to his mind, every claim against his company is fraudulent. I guess that’s why they hired him.”

Shayne nodded in acknowledgement of the information and then reached for the door handle on the car. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m glad we’re not going to be knocking heads on this.”

“Wait a minute,” Aguilar said. “What are you going to do now?”

“I thought it was about time I paid a visit to John Morrall. I talked to Lund earlier, and he told me that Morrall was at another drilling rig up the coast, this one on land.”

Aguilar waited a moment to reply, obviously mulling something over in his mind. Then he abruptly said, “Oh, what the hell. No point in you paying that car rental place any more than you have to. I was just going to see Morrall myself, since Winslow’s ducked out. Want to ride along with me?”

“Thanks,” Shayne grinned. “I think I’ll take you up on it.”

“Okay. I’ll have to stop at a phone and call in first, let the station know where I’m going. My radio went out, and they’ve got me calling in pretty regular.”

Shayne smiled. It sounded like Aguilar felt the same way about going through channels as he did. The lieutenant’s irritation with his superiors was obvious.

They drove in Aguilar’s car over Nueces Bay, going north and following the coastline. For the moment, speculation about the case was put aside, as Aguilar asked Shayne about his career in Miami and his relations with the police there. When Shayne hesitated, Aguilar grinned and said, “I might as well tell you, Shayne, I’ve met both Will Gentry and Peter Painter at police conventions before. So I’ve heard about you from both sides of Biscayne Bay.”

Shayne had to grin at that, imagining the difference in the comments from Gentry and Painter, the chiefs of police in Miami and Miami Beach respectively. “Will and I have worked together pretty effectively,” he said. “Painter’s another story.”

“I know.” The way Aguilar said it made Shayne chuckle.

Aguilar was sharp enough, Shayne decided during the halfhour ride, and he was glad the lieutenant had stopped being hostile to him, even though he was certain that Aguilar’s motives were strictly pragmatic. He had realized that Shayne wasn’t going to leave the case alone and decided that it would be easier to keep an eye on him like this. Shayne didn’t care about that. All he wanted to do was find out who had caused so much trouble for Jack Lomack, and he didn’t care how.

Aguilar turned off the state highway they had been following a few miles further on, onto a smaller blacktop road. It soon turned into a dirt road, and Shayne saw the derrick up ahead, in the middle of a grassy field. They were a few miles away from the Gulf now, but it still made its presence known by the smell in the air. There was the bite of sulphur in it, too.

An open area surrounded the oil rig. Aguilar parked at the edge of it. The two men got out of the car and walked toward a small mobile home parked a good distance away from the derrick. Shayne knew this was where Morrall would likely be found; the trailer would serve as a field office and a place for the roughnecks to catch a few winks of sleep when they got the chance.

Shayne and Aguilar were still twenty or thirty feet from the trailer when its door opened and a man stepped outside. He kept one hand on the doorjamb and regarded them curiously. There was a yellow hard hat on his head, and he wore coveralls like the other men who were scrambling around the rig. Shayne glanced over at the lieutenant, and Aguilar nodded. They had found John Morrall.

The steady rumble of the derrick’s engines filled their ears as they approached the trailer and Morrall. It was a familiar sound to Shayne, well-remembered from his past.

They never even heard the rifle shot.

But its results were all too evident. Morrall jerked back, grabbing at his chest, slumping against the trailer. His mouth opened wide, but the agonized cry he must have given was lost in the roar from the derrick.

Shayne launched into a run, covering the distance to the trailer with a few strides of his long legs. Aguilar was right behind him. Expecting more shots at any second, Shayne took hold of Morrall’s arm and dove into the trailer, pulling the wounded man with him. Aguilar followed, whipping his gun out and spinning to cover the area behind them as he leaped into the trailer.

Shayne was aware of shouts coming from outside. The men on the rig must have seen part of what happened and wondered what was going on. They would be running over to check on the safety of their boss.

“I don’t see a damned thing,” Aguilar snapped, raising his voice enough so that Shayne could hear him.

“Must have been a rifle,” Shayne said, crouching beside Morrall’s limp body and searching for a pulse. “Could have come from anywhere around here.”

Aguilar glanced over his shoulder, his face tight and worried. “How’s Morrall?” he asked.

Shayne’s heavy sigh was answer enough. The bleak look on his face and the grim words just confirmed the situation.

“He won’t be telling us a thing,” Shayne said. “He’s dead.”

V

It was touch and go for a few minutes. All the angry roughnecks knew was that Morrall had been shot, and Shayne and Aguilar had been found right there with the dead man. Aguilar’s badge had bought them some time, though, and the lieutenant was able to convince the men that he and Shayne had had nothing to do with the murder.

There was a phone in the trailer. Aguilar got on it as soon as he could and called for help. More officers and a technical crew were on the way now, but until they got there, all Aguilar and Shayne could do was sit in the trailer with the corpse and try to figure out what had happened.

“It’s got to be Winslow,” Aguilar said fervently, obviously furious now. “He’s been keeping an eye on Morrall, and when he saw us come up, he decided that he couldn’t risk us questioning Morrall.”

“Because Morrall was acting on Winslow’s orders when he planted the bomb on the oil platform?” Shayne speculated.

“That’s the way it looks to me.”

“Was there any history of trouble between Morrall and Jack Lomack?”

“None that my investigations turned up,” Aguilar admitted. “But every man’s got his price.”

Shayne looked thoughtful. The moment of silence following Aguilar’s comment stretched out as Shayne reached up to pull on his earlobe and frown.

“It’s only a matter of time now,” Aguilar finally went on. “We’ll catch up to Winslow. I really figured he’d be a long way away from here by now, but I guess he felt like he had to hang around to take care of Morrall if we got too close.”

“Yeah,” Shayne said. Distraction was evident in his face and voice.

Aguilar watched the big detective from Miami for a minute, then shrugged and stepped outside the trailer. Shayne stayed where he was.

Death was following death in this case. First the twenty-five men on the oil rig, then the guard and the woman in the house, and now the man sprawled at Shayne’s feet, covered with a blanket Aguilar had found. There seemed to be no limit on murder here in Texas.

Or was there...?

The police technicians and more detectives showed up within half an hour, and Shayne and Aguilar each went over what had happened several times. The angle of the fatal bullet was calculated as best it could be, which was only roughly, and uniformed officers were sent out to search in that direction for several hundred yards. Shayne had his doubts that they would find any evidence of the sniper.

The body was taken away, and after what seemed like forever, Aguilar was ready to leave, too. Shayne caught him before he left and said, “How about a lift back to my car, Lieutenant? I left it outside of Winslow’s office, you’ll remember.”

“Sure,” Aguilar nodded. “Come on.”

The two men were fairly quiet on the ride back into Corpus Christi. Aguilar seemed convinced now that his theory about Winslow and Morrall was correct. Shayne wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t feel like discussing his doubts with the policeman.

It was late afternoon before they got back to where Shayne had left his rented car. As Shayne got out, he said, “Thanks for letting me tag along, Aguilar. I wish the day had turned out better.”

“At least we’ve got a pretty good idea what happened now,” Aguilar said. “Winslow won’t be able to run far enough to get away forever, and I’ll bet when we start looking closer into Morrall’s finances, we’ll find out that he got richer all of a sudden lately.” The lieutenant paused and sighed wearily. “It’s not a happy ending for any of us, but it’s an ending. Like I told you, I’ve known Jack and Maggie for several years; I think he’ll at least have more peace of mind if he knows the reasons behind what happened.”

“Yeah,” Shayne grunted, closing the door. “So long.”

Aguilar leaned over and asked through the open window on the passenger side, “Going back to Miami, Shayne?”

Shayne lit a cigarette and looked out at the rays of the late afternoon sun slanting down on the Gulf. “Soon,” he said. “I thought I’d stop by the hospital first and see Jack. He may still be knocked out, but I’d like to pay him a visit anyway.”

“I understand. Adios.”

Shayne watched Aguilar drive away, then got in the car and pointed it toward the hospital.

As he drove, his mind was clicking over rapidly, going over everything he had seen and heard since meeting Jack Lomack in Miami only twenty-four hours before. He thought back on the things he had been told by Lomack and Lund, and by Aguilar and the insurance investigator, Earl Craig.

There was something... He had his fingers on it, and then it slipped away...

The nurses at the hospital weren’t too happy about letting Shayne into Lomack’s room, but they didn’t stop him. The oilman was still full of sedative, as Shayne had suspected he would be. He wasn’t completely out, but he paid no attention when Shayne came into the room. Lomack gazed up at the ceiling through slitted lids, looking wan and drained. Shayne felt a wave of sympathy go through him, and he didn’t like the feeling. Jack Lomack had never been the type to want sympathy.

But he would want answers. Aguilar had been right about that much. Lomack would want to know why and how this trouble had come to him, even if the answers might hurt worse than ignorance.

Shayne’s eyes narrowed. It was there, the thing that had been bothering him, and he had his hands firmly on it now. Once it was in his grasp, the other facts started falling into line with it.

No, Lomack wouldn’t like the answers. But now Shayne could give them to him.

VI

Shayne knew he had been lucky. He had figured the whole thing out in time to get where he needed to be in order to follow the man he needed to follow, but it had been close. He had spotted his quarry as the man pulled out of a parking lot and fallen in behind him, tailing a little bit closer than he would have in Miami, simply because he wasn’t as familiar with the city. It wouldn’t matter, though; the man wouldn’t be looking for a tail. He would be convinced by now that Shayne and everyone else were following the false trail he had laid out for them.

As he drove, Shayne could feel the grimmest of smiles tugging at his mouth. He wasn’t looking forward to this confrontation, but it couldn’t be avoided, either.

The trail led north out of Corpus, the way Shayne and Aguilar had gone earlier in the day. Full night had fallen now, and the taillights of the car ahead led Shayne on past the turn-off to the oil rig, through the town of Aransas Pass and into a series of small resort communities right on the coast. Shayne drove past motels full of vacationers and lighted fishing docks packed with amateur anglers. They were after flounder, trout, and redfish.

Shayne was fishing in deeper waters. He was after a killer.

The car he was following pulled in at a small string of cabins for rent, across the street from a beach and a boat basin full of shrimp boats. Shayne drove on past and made a right into the parking area beside the beach. He killed the lights and the engine, then got out of the car quietly, listening to the lapping of the waves against the sand.

He knew damn well he wasn’t licensed to carry a gun in Texas, but his pistol rode in its holster anyway. He wasn’t licensed to track down murderers here, either, but some things didn’t have much respect for state lines. Quickly, with long strides, he crossed to the cabins and found the one he was looking for. The car he had followed was parked beside it.

The small cabin was lit up inside, but curtains closed off the windows and kept him from seeing in. As he stepped up on the little cement porch and leaned toward the door, though, he could hear the voices coming from inside. All it took was a few words to prove that he had been right.

Now he could get the rest of the answers for Lomack.

Shayne slipped the gun out and clasped it lightly in his hand. He couldn’t open the screen door without making any noise, but that didn’t matter. Even if the wooden door was locked, it looked flimsy enough that he knew it wouldn’t slow him down.

There was no point in waiting now. Shayne grasped the screen door, threw it back, twisted the knob of the wooden door, and slammed into the cabin.

The man inside whirled, his hand going toward the revolver he wore at the small of his back. Shayne lined his sights on him and snapped. “Hold it, Aguilar! Don’t touch it!”

As Lieutenant Travis Aguilar froze in front of Shayne’s gun, the blonde woman lying on the bed sat up sharply and let a curse rip from her mouth. Shayne’s gaze flicked over to her, and he said harshly, “You stay still, too, Maggie. I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name, Mrs. Lomack.”

Aguilar looked stunned. His dark eyes flicked from Shayne’s face to the barrel of the gun, and his tongue came out and licked over suddenly-dry lips. He said huskily, “What the hell is this, Shayne?”

“The end of your plan,” Shayne told him flatly. “The score stops going up now, Aguilar. There won’t be any more murders.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?” the blond woman quavered. “There haven’t been any murders—”

“Forget it,” Shayne cut in. “Your boyfriend almost had me fooled, till I turned things around and looked at them from a different angle.” Aguilar stiffened, but he tried to put a confident look on his face. “Look, Shayne,” he said, “you’re already in trouble for busting in here like this and threatening us. Don’t make it any harder on yourself by coming up with all kinds of wild accusations.”

“Not just accusations.” Shayne shook his head. “I’m going to come up with proof that you’re behind this whole thing.”

Aguilar snorted in derision. “You can’t prove that I had anything to do with that platform sinking.”

“That’s right,” Shayne admitted. “You didn’t. I think it was just a tragic accident. Lomack and everybody else admitted that was a possibility, but sabotage seemed so much more likely. The investigation that you pressed, plus Earl Craig’s interest in it, made it seem even more sinister. But the only thing sinister about it was the opportunity you saw to get what you wanted — Maggie Lomack and her husband’s money.”

Aguilar started to gesture angrily, stopped the movement when he saw Shayne’s finger tightening on the trigger. He said hotly, “What if she is Maggie Lomack? That doesn’t mean anything. I was just hiding her out so that the killer wouldn’t find her.”

“Then why didn’t you tell anyone else? Secrecy, protection for Maggie?” Shayne nodded. “Plausible enough. You thought it through pretty well. Some of it just doesn’t quite jibe.”

“Like what?” Aguilar challenged.

“Like the fact that Dennis Winslow just barely had enough money to keep his business hanging on, from what I heard. How did he get hold of enough cash to pay off Morrall to sabotage the rig? You were the one who kept suggesting that theory, Aguilar.”

Aguilar shook his head. “How do I know where Winslow got the money? We’ll find out when we catch up to him. Why else would he shoot Morrall if he wasn’t involved?”

“He didn’t shoot Morrall.” Shayne jerked his head at Maggie Lomack. “She did.”

“You’re crazy!” the woman exclaimed.

“You called her,” Shayne pressed on, “before we went out to the drilling rig where Morrall was working. After you gave me that phony story about your radio not working, so that you could make a call in private. Maggie was hiding out somewhere, but she got there first and waited until we showed up, then put a bullet Morrall.” Shayne’s voice dropped. “He didn’t even have the slightest idea why he died. He never knew he was just a pawn in the game you two were running. Like Winslow.”

“And what does that mean?” Aguilar asked. “We might as well hear all of this fairy tale.”

“You knew that Lomack and Winslow had been having troubles. You decided to set Winslow up as the villain behind all of it. After sending the notes to Lomack, notes that had to come from somebody on the inside of the investigation, you made it look like Winslow and Morrall sank the rig and that some grief-crazed relative of one of the dead men blew up Lomack’s house. That way you had patsies to blame for all the trouble, and for Lomack’s murder.”

“But Lomack’s not dead,” Aguilar protested.

“That much of the plan didn’t work,” Shayne said, watching them closely. “Lomack was supposed to be back from Miami when the bomb went off. Instead, the only one unlucky enough to be there was the maid who must have come by for some unexpected reason. You hit her, probably harder than you intended to, and went back to setting up your bomb. Then you shot the guard as you were leaving. Too bad your time was so short. Otherwise you could have taken the maid’s body with you and she wouldn’t have been mistaken for Maggie Lomack.”

Aguilar was still shaking his head, as if he didn’t believe a word of it. The blonde was looking a lot more worried, though, Shayne noticed.

“That changed your plan quite a bit.” Shayne went on. “Instead of Lomack being dead, you had to accept the fact that Maggie couldn’t return now, not as long as Lomack was still alive. If she did, then the two of you would be right back where you started. No, all you could do was let Maggie stay dead in everyone else’s mind. The two of you would just have to be content with what Maggie’s been skimming away from the company ever since she worked for Jack.”

“I’m not going to tell anybody anything except that you’re a lunatic, Shayne. You’ll see how wrong you are when we catch Winslow.”

“That won’t happen,” Shayne said. “You killed Winslow after making him call his secretary and tell her he was going out of town. I imagine you dumped him in a bay somewhere.”

“You’ll still have to prove that,” Maggie Lomack hissed, ignoring Aguilar’s urgent shake of his head.

Shayne shrugged. “Digging can uncover a lot of things. Maybe evidence that you and Aguilar have been having an affair for a long time. Positive proof that Lomack’s books have been doctored.” Shayne smiled savagely. “Maybe even the gun you used to shoot Morrall, or the money you were going to use to start over somewhere far away from Corpus Christi.”

Aguilar laughed. “It’s your word against ours, Shayne. An out of state PI versus a police lieutenant and the wife of a prominent local businessman. How are you going to even get anybody to believe you long enough to do that investigating you’re talking about.”

Shayne took a deep breath. Aguilar had a point; Shayne was sure his theory was right now, but proving it would be another matter entirely.

There was only one other thing on Shayne’s side.

“Jack Lomack will believe me,” he said. “In all the years I’ve known him, I never lied to him, and he knows it. We’ll go to the hospital right now and stay there until he gets his wits back. Once the sedation wears off and I’ve laid the story out for him, he’ll want to get to the bottom of it.”

“He’d never believe you,” Maggie said positively. “He loves me too much.”

“Then he’d want to prove me wrong, wouldn’t he?” Shayne counterpointed. “And the only way to do that would be to look into what I’ve got to say, find out once and for all who’s telling the truth. How about it?” Shayne’s mouth stretched in a grin, but his eyes were as hard and cold as ice. “Let’s leave it up to Jack Lomack to decide.”

The moment of silence that went by dragged like weeks. A bead of sweat rolled down Aguilar’s forehead. Shayne felt like he had been standing there holding the gun forever.

“I won’t go back to him,” Maggie whispered. “I’ll never go back!”

Shayne swung his eyes toward her just as she exploded off the bed, lunging toward him, getting between him and Aguilar. Shayne saw Aguilar grabbing for his gun again. He cursed, swung his free hand, snapping it around in a backhand blow that caught Maggie and sent her spinning away. She fell against Aguilar as his gun came around toward Shayne.

The gun blasted. Maggie jerked forward and screamed.

Shayne saw the sudden blossom of red on the front of her blouse, high on the right side. He was leaping forward even as Aguilar triggered off that first hasty shot. His arm lashed out, the barrel of his pistol seeking Aguilar’s head.

The blow missed as Maggie slumped forward. Shayne felt her limp form tangling with his legs. Aguilar fired again, the shot sounding like an explosion in the small cabin. The bullet whipped by Shayne’s head as he fell.

Shayne hooked with his leg even as he was falling, trying to knock Aguilar’s feet from under him. The policeman sidestepped nimbly, face twisted in a hate-filled grimace, and sprinted for the door, banging through it into the night.

Aguilar’s cool had deserted him under fire, and Shayne felt a grim thrill at that. He came up into a crouch and paused only a second to check Maggie Lomack. She was breathing, and her pulse was slow but strong. With medical attention, she would probably be all right. There was no phone in the room, so Shayne hoped that someone else had heard the shooting and had already called for the cops.

He ran out of the cabin, hearing as he did so the squeal of tires on the street. Aguilar’s car was gone. Shayne ran toward the street, past the palm trees that bordered the courtyard in the middle of the cabins, and saw Aguilar less than a block away. Shayne threw his gun up, sighted, prayed, and fired.

He squeezed off four fast shots. One of Aguilar’s rear tires blew, and the rear window of the car shattered. It slewed from side to side, glanced off a tree and a garbage can, then rocked to a stop in the parking lot by the beach.

Aguilar was out of the car and running a second later, apparently unhurt. Shayne charged after him. There was a lot of shouting now. People were still out fishing, some of them on a pier extending out into the water, some of them on the concrete jetty that formed the boat basin. The curious shouts turned into frightened cries as Aguilar spun around, spotted Shayne, and sent slugs screaming toward him.

Shayne dove to the side, away from the gunfire. He rolled and came up running again. He might have been able to drop Aguilar with a shot, but there were too many innocent people around to risk it. He was going to have to take the killer hand to hand if he could.

Aguilar wasn’t far ahead of him now. There wasn’t much more room to run, either. He had come up against the basin with its multitude of shrimp boats. Another direction was closed off to Aguilar because there was nothing out there but the waters of the Gulf. And Shayne was behind him. That left the jetty, and it was a dead end.

Aguilar was too panic-stricken to think about that. He raced out onto the two-foot wide wall of concrete.

Shayne started after him. The waves were up slightly, splashing over the jetty, and the surface was slick. Aguilar turned and fired again. Shayne went to one knee for a second, then trotted forward again. He glanced over his shoulder. All the fishermen that had congregated in the area had cleared out now; they were there to catch fish, not to dodge bullets.

And then Shayne’s eyes narrowed. One of the fishermen hadn’t left. He was further out on the wall, and Aguilar was moving right toward him.

If Aguilar took the man as a hostage...

It was time for Shayne to do some shooting of his own, before it was too late. He dropped to a knee again, lifting his gun and calling into the night breezes, “Aguilar!”

Aguilar had almost reached the confused fisherman now. The burly, middle-aged man was only a few feet beyond the killer. Shayne wanted a clearer shot, but it didn’t look like he was going to get it.

Aguilar turned again, not paying any attention to the fisherman. His own gun came up, and he and Shayne faced each other on the jetty, twenty feet apart, in one of those moments when time seems to freeze.

Neither one of them fired.

The startled fisherman loomed up behind Aguilar, holding a net on the end of a long metal rod. He swung it, cracking the rod down on Aguilar’s wrist and sending the gun spinning out into the water. Shayne was on his feet again in an instant, charging across the space that separated them.

Aguilar cursed and tried to duck, but Shayne wasn’t going to be denied now. His knobby fist shot out, brushing past the other man’s feeble efforts to block the blow, and slammed into Aguilar’s jaw. Aguilar’s feet came up off the jetty. Arms pinwheeling, he flew off the concrete wall and splashed into the water a good five feet away.

The punch had made Shayne’s arm hurt all the way up to the shoulder. It was a damn good feeling.

“Thanks,” Shayne said, nodding to the fisherman. “You just helped capture a big one.”

“Well, he made me lose the biggest fish I caught all day!” the man exclaimed.

Shayne smiled and turned away. There were sirens blaring from the shore, and when he turned around, he saw the flashing lights.

It had been a long, hard day. It was going to be an even longer night, Shayne knew.

But now Jack Lomack would have the answers.

“It hurts like hell,” Lomack was saying a few days later. “And it’ll take me a long time to even believe it, let alone get over it.” He sighed and looked at Shayne, the sadness going deep in his eyes. “I guess I just loved her too much. It made me blind.”

“They say that happens sometimes,” Shayne agreed.

“I’ll be all right,” Lomack went on, looking out at the ocean across from his home. “Hell, there’s still plenty of work to do. We may have got all the money back those two were going to steal, but with John dead and that rig lost... Well, I’m going to be plenty busy, let me tell you.”

“Too busy to raise some of that hell you mentioned when we were coming down here?” Shayne asked.

Lomack’s smile was bitter. “I’d just as soon not, if that’s all right with you, Mike.”

Shayne sipped from the tumbler of cognac he held and said, “Fine by me, Jack. I talked to Lucy earlier today, and I’ve got something I need to get back to. We’ll make it next time.”

“Sure, Mike. Sure.”

Everybody coped in his own way, Shayne thought. He remembered other times, in years past, when something had hurt Jack Lomack. And Mad Jack had grinned and pushed up his sleeves and jumped right back into his work. Injury, hangover... heartbreak... Lomack would come through, Shayne was sure of that.

In the meantime, there were things for him to do, too. He was anxious to get back to Miami. From the way Lucy had talked on the phone, he might have some trouble coming up that would be every bit as tough as this job had been.

Yeah. Some things never changed.