Stranger in Town

21

It was nearing midnight when Shayne finally approached Miami on the wide and well-lighted boulevard leading into the city from the north.

There was still brisk traffic in both directions at this hour, and the lights of downtown Miami glowed a welcome for him ahead.

“My town,” he found himself thinking with a queer sort of warmth he had never felt before. A nice town to come back to, by God. Particularly after Brockton. His neck still pained him when he forgot and turned his head too far or too abruptly, and the bullet creases in shoulder and thigh burned a little, but he felt good nevertheless.

He was just about twenty-four hours late, he reminded himself. Twenty-four hours since Lucy Hamilton had sat in her apartment with a bottle of cognac on the center table waiting for his return.

As he neared the street that turned off Biscayne Boulevard toward her apartment, he wondered if she would be sitting up waiting for him again tonight.

He hadn’t called to say he was on his way-hadn’t spoken with her since the morning telephone call when she’d told him about the man waiting in his office.

After the wind-up in the hotel room in Brockton, he felt he couldn’t get out of the town fast enough. There had been a lot of questions and a long statement to be given to the State Police, and then all he’d thought of was getting away.

He didn’t consciously plan to turn onto Lucy’s street as he approached it, but his thoughts of her induced an instinctive reflex action that swung the wheel hard to the left at the intersection when he reached it.

He slowed at the second block on the side street, and a wide, pleased grin lighted his rugged face when he saw light shining from the front windows of her second-floor apartment.

He pulled into the curb directly opposite, cut the motor and got out stiffly. Inside a small, neat foyer, he put a blunt forefinger on her button and pressed it, then turned and waited with his hand on the knob of the inner door for her to release the catch.

There was a buzz and the knob turned. He stepped inside and slowly began climbing the stairs, trying not to limp but wincing each time he pulled his wounded leg up another step.

He heard the sound of a door opening above, and quick, light footsteps approaching the landing. He paused with his left hand holding the railing and looked up to see Lucy poised on the top step above him. She wore a pleated hostess gown of stiff silk that swirled about her ankles and clearly outlined her slender figure in the light from beyond.

He grinned and lifted his right hand in a casual greeting and said, “Hi,” and began climbing toward her, taking great care now that he shouldn’t limp.

She drew back silently and waited for him, her brown eyes enormous and questioning in the strained tenseness of her face, brown hair drawn back smoothly and knotted at the back as she wore it in bed.

Michael Shayne’s face was even with hers when he stood on next-to-the-top step. He stopped there and his grin widened, and then it went away as he saw her hands were clenched tightly into fists at her sides, and that a tear was rolling down each unrouged cheek.

He said gruffly, “Don’t look like that, angel. I’m all in one piece. Kiss me.”

He moved up the last step and she flung herself into his arms, sobbing.

He held her tightly with his good arm and tipped her face up and carefully kissed the tears from her cheeks and the hollows of her eyes and said wonderingly, “Damned if I don’t believe you’ve been worried.”

She drew back from him and swallowed hard and said wretchedly, “I called that hotel in Brockton an hour ago. They refused to tell me anything. Except there’d been shooting in your room and you’d been taken off by the State Police and you were badly wounded and… and I didn’t know what had happened.”

His grin came back as he turned her toward the rectangle of light that was the open door leading into her apartment.

“Well, you know I told you there was this girl in the bar last night…”

“I know you did and I’ve been hating her ever since. Did she do that to your face?”

“Not with her own hands, but…”

Shayne stopped on the threshold and looked approvingly at the neat room with a low coffee table drawn up in front of the long sofa with a bottle of cognac, an ice-bucket, a pitcher of water and two glasses standing on it.

His arm tightened about Lucy’s slim waist and he turned her slowly to face him.

“She wanted me to stay over another night, angel, but I told her you’d be waiting here with a bottle of cognac in the window to light my way for me.”

He kissed her lips gently and they went toward the sofa together.