Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

The coarse voice came back. “You kiddin’?”

“I think, sir, that you are wasting my time.”

“No! Hey, don’t hang up! Cool it a sec — cool it.” Desiree heard an indrawn breath that rattled. “Doc Sam, I gotta see yuh!”

“Who is this, please?”

“Never mind. Yuh wanna live?”

“I prefer to.”

“Then I gotta see yuh pronto!”

“Please—”

“Some people are gonna make a hit on you!”

“What!”

“I’m on the other side, Doc. I been on the other side, but I’m cuttin’, yuh know?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Doc, I ain’t got time to lay it all out for yuh. I got me a bum deal today, I got me a — Never mind. I’ve been on the Commie coaster and I’m gettin’ off. Yuh understand that much?”

“Yes,” Desiree said slowly, making it sound as if she was not sure she did understand.

“Okay,” said the coarse voice, “so I’m returning a favor to some rats. I’m squealing. Some people are gonna make a hit on yuh. If yuh wanna know when and how you be at eighth and Crowly in thirty minutes. Yuh can make it from there.”

“Tell me now!”

“Not on the horn, doll. It’s complicated.”

The line went dead. Desiree put the phone together slowly. It was quiet in the suite. She became conscious of the silence. She cocked her head. There was no sound of rushing water, no grunts. She stepped into the bedroom. “Sam?”

“Doctor Herchenfelder, Miss Fleming,” the deep voice behind the closed bath door clipped. “And please vacate my bedroom. Yours is—”

“I’m going out, Sam.”

“Excellent. And while you are out perhaps you will have the decency to take another suite?”

“Now is that any way to talk to a wife?”

“If I wanted a wife, Miss Fleming, I’d have taken one five years ago. Washington is going to hear about this.”

“Washington made the reservation, remember?”

“Miss Fleming, please! I’m sure there has been a misunderstanding. Surely your superiors don’t expect—”

“My superiors often expect the impossible, Sam.”

“Doctor Herchenfelder!”

“I’m toddling off, but you stay put. Okay? You won’t leave the suite? Promise?”

“Miss Fleming, I am retiring!”

“Do just that.”

Desiree left the suite and locked the door. She looked up and down the empty corridor. Uncertainty was high in her. Vibrant, tousled, twenty-three, in blouse, pink Capris, short coat and gun, her new assignment from Washington’s most secreted bureau suddenly seemed stuffed with hazards and she was not positive that she was doing the right thing in leaving Doctor Samuel Herchenfelder.

She had been told to protect Doctor Herchenfelder at any cost. The call could have been a ruse to lure her from the suite. It could have been designed to clear a path to the scientist. What would a more experienced agent do?

Desiree rode the elevator down to the vast lobby. She knew three things about the caller. He had a coarse voice, he had information he was not suppose to have, and he did not know Doctor Sam Herchenfelder was a man.

She got out of the cab at 9th and Crowly to walk the final block. The city shimmered in lake fog and she was now filled with the sensation that she had been duped. Desiree’s inclination was to return to the hotel as quickly as possible, but the cab was gone.

She hunched deeper inside the short coat and walked on quick steps. Motorists and pedestrians had bowed to the fog. A single car crawled along the shrouded street and disappeared and she did not meet anyone on foot. The heels of her loafers seemed to click unusually loud against the silence of the night.

She traveled the block quickly, to stand just outside the dull light of an intersection street lamp. She looked around. She attempted to pierce the mist. She seemed alone.

“Doctor?”

The high-pitched voice came out of the whitish swirl to her left. Reflexively, she whirled and went down to the concrete fast. A gun boomed against the wet night. Desiree heard the whistle of the slug. She rolled, her right hand digging for the tiny gun in the shoulder holster under the short coat.

The big gun boomed again and this time the slug chewed concrete near her head. She rolled into a wall and cried out. In the fog, she’d rolled in the wrong direction.

She’d meant to roll into the gutter, into a storm sewer with luck, anywhere to gain an ounce of protection. But now she was plastered against a wall and exposed. She thought herself a huge target and she desperately fired a shot wildly from the tiny gun. She expected a return shot, a slug crashing into the top of her skull.

The lone sound was the pounding of fleeing footsteps.

A rattle escaped Desiree. She came off the wall and sat up on the wet sidewalk. The night was abruptly quiet again, but she knew that within seconds the intersection would become cluttered. Someone somewhere had heard the shots, and someone somewhere would call the police.

Desiree Fleming scrambled to her feet and ran. She had passed an alley entrance midway back in the block. She wanted that alley.

A wide-shouldered citizen loomed out of the fog ahead of her and jerked to a stop. “Hey, lady, I heard—”