Nice Fillies Finish Last by Brett Halliday Read Free Book Online Page B

it blindly at Thorne. Whirling, he cleared Win’s unconscious body in one bound and hurled himself at the long window over the stainless steel sink. A row of cactus plants was lined up on the sill, and Rourke carried them with him as he went through in an explosion of shattered glass, his eyes closed, arms up to protect his face. He bounced off a tank of bottled gas and landed in the dirt in a welter of glass and sash and broken pots.
    He rolled, came to his feet, and darted away between trailers. The emergency flow of adrenalin that had helped him through the window continued to carry him for a moment, but there was blood in his eyes and he could hardly see. He made a right-hand turn, realizing abruptly as the first wave of pain hit him that he wouldn’t be going much farther under his own steam. His one chance was to lose himself in the jumble of trailers, perhaps crawling underneath one to rest till he felt better. Then he could work his way back to the highway and see if some kindly motorist would take him to a doctor.
    He stumbled and went down, his head still ringing from Thorne’s blow. He forced himself to his feet and kept going, at a dogged, shambling half-run.
    Then a solid figure loomed in front of him and he collided with Mike Shayne.

 
CHAPTER 6
     
    MICHAEL SHAYNE had walked into the lobby of the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach at two o’clock exactly, the time fixed for his appointment with the go-between who had promised to bring him one step closer to the recovery of stolen diamonds worth $100,000. The man was late. Usually this wouldn’t have bothered the detective. People in the go-between’s position often have trouble making up their minds. But today, after waiting only ten minutes, Shayne phoned the insurance company and told Mort Friedman, the man he was dealing with there, that his contact had failed to appear. He would call in, probably, and Shayne asked Friedman to set up another date for the following day.
    “Make it later this afternoon, Mike,” Friedman said. “This whole thing is very jumpy.”
    “I won’t be available,” Shayne said briefly. Friedman wanted to know why. Shayne replied evenly that something else had come up, Friedman made an acrid comment on that, and before the conversation was over Shayne concluded that he had possibly lost a valuable retainer.
    Leaving the Beach, he crossed the bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway and picked up the northbound expressway in Buena Vista. Shifting onto the Sunshine State Parkway at the Golden Glades interchange, he continued north, holding his speedometer needle steady at ten miles over the speed limit. He was swearing to himself. Rourke, he knew, had a special nose for certain kinds of trouble. His way of working up a story was to walk in, ask leading questions, and see what happened; and more often than Shayne liked to remember, what happened was that he ended up flat on his back hollering for help. One of these days, the redhead promised himself, Rourke was going to get into some stupid jam and find that Shayne had packed a bag and taken his secretary to New York to see a few of the new shows, leaving no phone number where he could be reached.
    Shayne left the monotonous parkway at the Pompano Beach interchange and began following signs. The turns to Surfside Raceway were well marked. The closer he came to the track, the surer he was that something had gone wrong. He shouldn’t have let Rourke go alone.
    The big, sprawling plant was quiet, apparently almost deserted in the hot afternoon. He locked his Buick and left it at the edge of the almost empty parking area, and plunged into the stable compound on foot.
    Finding Paul Thorne’s stalls, he awakened a sleeping groom, who told him he had seen Thorne going off toward the trailer park, probably to take a nap, which was the sensible thing to do at this time of the day. Going in among the trailers, Shayne was in time to see the gangling body of his friend come hurtling through the