Stranger in Town

2

Shayne ran steadily across the fields for fifteen minutes, slowing to a dogged trot after his first burst of speed, then to a walk when he reached another barbed wire fence that bordered a dirt road running approximately parallel to the highway behind him.

Dimly in the distance, some three or four miles, he judged, there was a faint glow on the skyline that marked the city lights of Brockton.

At least, he supposed it would be Brockton. He hadn’t noted the exact time when he stopped at the bar for a quiet drink before dinner, but it hadn’t been quite dark and he imagined it must have been close to seven o’clock.

It was fully dark now, and his watch told him it was a few minutes after eight. He had been in the bar not more than fifteen minutes, he thought, before the girl entered. So he couldn’t have been unconscious long enough to have been carried too far from Brockton. Not far enough, certainly, so he would be this close to another Central Florida town large enough to give off such a glow of light as was ahead.

He had terrific headache, and the neck muscles on the right were so numb and bruised that he was forced to carry his head slightly askew to make the pain bearable, but that was the extent of the physical damage he had suffered as far as he was able to tell.

There were farmhouses dotted along the dusty country road as he strode along toward the lights of the city, but he hesitated about going up to one of the houses and trying to arrange for a ride into town.

He was in no great hurry to get back, he told himself grimly. He had a lot of thinking to do before he reached his parked car again.

If it was still there in front of the bar where he had left it. And walking, any sort of physical exercise, was good for thinking.

There were so many unanswered questions. Who-how- why?

Who was the girl who fingered him in the bar? And the men named Gene and Mule?

Mule was a type he knew well, and who could be dismissed from real consideration. First, because he was obviously a half-witted brute who would happily kill on orders from Gene; and also because Shayne didn’t think Mule was likely to enter into the picture again-not after the sound Shayne had heard of the impact between the bumper of the speeding car and Mule’s body.

Gene was a different matter. Cold anger and a helpless sense of outrage sent a tremor up and down Shayne’s spine as he considered Gene. He had never, he told himself flatly, encountered an individual whom he so much desired to meet again. And the third man whom he hadn’t even seen?

But it was difficult to keep his thoughts on Gene and the other man more than fleetingly. Inevitably and without his volition, they returned to the Girl.

For now he was so thinking of her. With a capital G. Back and forth in his mind, he went over and over each moment that had followed her arresting appearance in the doorway.

A girl of eighteen. An exquisite beauty. With every external sign of character and breeding. Yet she had deliberately come to that bar-room, had deliberately selected him sitting at the booth as her victim, had deliberately put the finger on him for two of the most murderously inclined gents he had encountered for a long time.

Somehow, he couldn’t doubt that she had known exactly what she was doing. That she had known they were behind her, and that when she stopped and spoke to Shayne she was deliberately signing his death warrant.

Looking back on it carefully, he couldn’t doubt that. Those fleeting impressions he had received from her face as she approached him. She had known what she was doing.

But why? In the name of God, why?

Even granting that somehow, someone had divined that he would be seated in that particular bar at that time, and granting also that somehow the girl had recognized him-still, why?

He wasn’t working on any case. He had just completed a lazy week of vacationing with congenial friends in Mobile, and he didn’t know a reason in the world why anyone should want to waylay him. Sure, he’d made plenty of enemies among criminals during the past ten or fifteen years-but that was in the past. Anyone who had a killing grudge against him had had many, many much better opportunities to bump him off in Miami than this crazy set-up tonight.

Twice he stepped to the side of the dirt road and concealed himself in the bushes to allow a car to pass. One in each direction. One of them could have been Gene still looking for him-and he didn’t want to meet Gene again quite yet. Not until he had oriented himself a little and gotten a gun out of the glove compartment of his car. Also, he was nearing the outskirts of Brockton now, and he still had more thinking to do before deciding how to play the queer hand of cards that had been dealt to him.

There was one faint possibility, he decided. Could be something had come up in Miami after he left Mobile that morning. Some new client whom Lucy had told that he was driving back from Mobile and wouldn’t be back until late. Some case so important that someone had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to stop him in Brockton before he reached Miami to handle it.

A telephone call to Lucy would settle that, of course. Even if it did prove true-there was still the riddle of the Girl.

The dirt road turned into macadam, and then into a city street with small houses dotted along either side. Shayne turned off on the first side street he reached, which seemed better lighted and more thickly populated, and before he had walked two blocks was lucky enough to flag down a cab that had just dropped a fare at a house ahead.

Shayne climbed in the back and gratefully relaxed against the cushions as the cab pulled away. The driver turned his head to ask, “Where to, Mister?”

The question brought Shayne up with a jerk. Where to, indeed! How could he describe the bar-room where he had parked his car? He hadn’t noticed the name of the place, nor even the street it was on.

He hesitated a moment, and then explained, “You’ll have to try and help me find it, I guess. I drove in this afternoon from Tallahassee… on the main highway.”

The driver said, “Yeh?”

“I don’t know the town at all,” Shayne told him. “I hit pretty heavy traffic and one or two stop-lights. I was looking for a bar to stop for a drink, and came to one on the right-hand side where I parked and went in. My car is still there… I hope.”

The driver chuckled and said, “With a parking ticket if it’s been standing more’n an hour.” But he didn’t ask any questions except, “You want I should hit the highway about the center of town and take it slow till you see the place? Lotsa bars along there. Think you’ll know the one?”

“I’ll know my car at least. A black Hudson sedan. Miami license plates.”

He settled back and made his aching head as comfortable as possible until they reached the center of town and the cab swung into the highway leading through from Tallahassee.

“I remember passing here,” Shayne told him. “Eight or ten blocks ahead, I guess.”

The taxi driver spotted the sedan with Miami license plates first. “That it, Mister?”

Shayne peered out as he slowed and saw his familiar tag on the rear. “That’s it.”

The driver chuckled as he pulled in to the curb in front. “Got you a ticket under the windshield wiper awright. If there ain’t no cops hangin’ around, whyn’t you pull on out to Miami and forget it?”

Shayne said, “Maybe I will.” He got out stiffly and gave the man a generous tip. Then he walked back to his car, unable to repress a wry grin at sight of the big, square parking summons under the wiper.

Cops! he thought disgustedly. Right around on the dot to check up on overtime parkers, but let a man get slugged in a public place and dragged out on a murder ride, and where in hell are they?

He stopped beside his car and opened the right-hand door. The flat. 45 automatic was where he had placed it that morning. He lifted it out and slid it inside his waistband and belt, snugly against his inner right thigh, then slammed the door shut and strode across the sidewalk to open the door of the bar-room he didn’t remember leaving more than an hour before.