Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 4, October 1977

She returned to her room and, with all the afternoon in front of her, she considered what she could do and what she could not do. There were so many things she could not do. If only Jeff had left her one little scrap of information, anything at all. Then, as if he’d spoken to her, she remembered.

“Sweets, anything happens. There’s a hiding place in the Cathedral, under the seventh pew from the front, Center.”

She took a cab to the central square, stopped at the old cathedral. Its vast interior was cool, quiet, and her chill didn’t oppress her. She knelt, without thought, and felt under the seat. She found an envelope and a key. That and a sequence of numbers were for Jeff’s apartment in Mexico City. She could go there.

An image of the bathhouse haunted her. It was all dirty, rough concrete. It would be deadly at might. It would be beyond her ability to go there alone. How could she struggle through that night and meet the man who wanted to kill her? She would rather wait in her room. But if she waited in her room, then there would be no escape from anything.

She had to go to the Supermercado and make her purchases. She had to consider Jeff’s way of doing it. She had to make sure everything was securely wrapped and hidden in the neat shopping bag which she had purchased.

Concealment was almost out of the question. She had to wait for the sun to sink, and then she had to race for the cab and ride down the beach. Her walk to the bathhouse took only seconds. She stopped, listened. She heard only happy shouts from far away. She entered. No one was there.

She found it not as dirty she expected. The tile floor was smooth and even. She set to work without hesitation and spread the lard, making nice even coats all the way from the entrance, backing herself farther and farther into the last possible corner. She kept with her only the. hard secure shape of her iron tongs. Her wait was long, and she didn’t know if she would last out the full length of time until it would be ten o’clock.

She turned down her breathing to a slow soundless in and out tune. Her heart was neither too rapid nor too slow. She heard a quick scrabbling on the rocks outside, and then the voice at the door.

“Mees! I have horse. You wanta buy horse?”

She said nothing. She waited. His dark outline blocked the light, and then the man slid into the entranceway. She knew she had less than one second more.

“Here!” she said finally, “I’m here!”

He started his rush with a as savage grunt. He gave a yell. He made a wild movement with his machete, but it clattered on the tile, and he slipped and sprawled into a crazy crablike, twisting shape. She could see his hands and arms.

His head offered her a clear target, and she swung with all her weight. His violence turned into quiet, peaceful somnolence, and he lay humbly at her feet. She stepped carefully beyond him, picked up his machete, and then with her hands firmly encased in her best gloves, she swung down.

Lynda opened the door of Number 317 on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City and walked straight to Jeff’s wall safe. She now knew its combination almost by heart. She checked the pile of currency. She felt the chill less and less. For a few seconds, she sat beside the phone and then she dialled a number.

“José, I have a job. Twenty thousand. Will you do it?”

“Who?”

“Julio Anthony.”

“Si!”

A Word from Willie by Charles Peterson

“Weedy Willy” was not going to be missed. But it was up to the police to run down his killer from a crazy clue.

* * *

Wilfred Weede, better known as “Weedy Willy” to police and acquaintances, was not a particularly attractive specimen in life. In death he was even less so, for whoever had engineered Willy’s departure had attempted a wholesale rearrangement of his ferret-like features prior to dispatching him with a kitchen knife.

The knife lay some inches from Willy’s outstretched right hand, near the overturned kitchen table. The kitchen itself was a mess — even the wall phone had been tom away and lay in a corner amid shards of chinaware, indicating that Willy had not gone gentle into that good night, but had scattered blood about with a lavish abandon in his going.

He had, however, retailed enough to write one word on the light grey asphalt tile with a finger.

“ ‘KWXOTE’?” said Dan Herndon in puzzled tone. He was the younger of the two Homicide Division detectives on hand, a tall, solidly-constructed, carefully dressed man in his thirties, with coppery hair which he wore longer than regulations, strictly interpreted, would allow. “What the hell kind of a dying message is that?”