Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 11, November 1982

One of DuBose’s men whom I had not noticed before but who had evidently followed us into the hangar came forward, and, taking hold of one of the great propeller blades with both his hands, turned it as DuBose switched on the plane’s engine. It didn’t catch the first time, so he was obliged to try again, this time putting the full strength of his broad shoulders into the effort. This time the propeller blades instantly converted to a blur of whirring speed, and the hangar was filled with the deafening roar of their rotation. It blanked out nearly everything else, and became all I could think of. I tried to blank it out of my mind, but when I turned back to face Landry I saw that he was concentrating hard on the plane, and on the propeller in particular.

“Steve!” I shouted. “You’re not going to—”

Still staring straight ahead, Landry said, “Stand aside.”

I moved in front of him, blocking his way. “No. I’m not going to let you do it.”

His eyes finally turned to take me in. “Shut up, and stand aside,” he said.

“Steve—”

He pushed me, a rough shove, and I fell back a foot or so. I took a step towards him and then noticed two of DuBose’s men, big, broad-shouldered Texans, take several purposeful strides in my general direction, and stop. I hesitated, deciding to make one final appear.

“Steve!” I shouted. “For God’s sake! Steve!”

He did not turn around. Instead, he took another few steps in the direction of the whirring propeller blades.

Try as I might, I could not take my eyes off them. They were moving so fast they were lost to sight. There was only a vaguely silverish blur that might have had nothing to do with speed or power. It fostered the illusion that there was nothing there at all, no blades, and that if you wanted to you could thrust your hand directly into their path, and nothing would happen because there was nothing there. Nothing that could shred the skin and chop away the bones of your hand, nothing that could turn living tissue and muscle and flesh and bone into a bleeding raw stump in a fraction of a second.

And even as I looked I saw that Landry had raised not one hand but both of them, and was moving towards the whirring blades. He was no more than three feet from them, I should judge. I started forward again, and the second I did DuBose’s two men started towards me, their intentions unmistakable. I could not have stopped Landry even if they hadn’t been there: he had the look of a zombie in his eyes, the blank stare that betokened mindlessness, or rather, blind devotion to one single idea: that he could stick both his hands into the path of the propeller blades and come away from it a rich man. And high above him, in the cockpit of the biplane, sat J.J. DuBose, his grin a wrinkled river running from ear to ear, watching Landry’s progress with frenzied anticipation. He had been right: there was no way he could stop the whirring blades in time. Nothing in the world could stop the fateful encounter at this point.

“Landry!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

The roar of the propellers drowned out my voice. It hardly mattered; Landry could never have heard me at that point even if absolute silence had prevailed.

Suddenly sickened by the whole spectacle, I turned my back on both Landry and the grinning madman in the biplane’s cockpit and walked away from both of them. I hurried, nearly running, to one of the side doors, anxious to get outside the hangar before the inevitable occurred. It seemed to me I had already done enough in the name of friendship for this hotheaded young man who was, after all, an acquaintance and no more, and that it was actually he who had dishonored what friendship existed between us by his blind devotion to money at any cost to his physical well-being.

I was running by the time I reached the door of the hangar, and I did not stop for breath until I had pushed the door open and rushed out, leaving behind me the noise and the tumult and the bloodshed that was about to occur. Careful not to glance back even once, I ran across the grounds of J.J. DuBose’s estate until at length I reached the stone and granite roadway. Once there I stopped, gasping for breath, and waited until I had the stamina to proceed, then walked swiftly along the roadway until it gave onto the highway. There I stood by the side of the road, one thumb extended, and tried my best to put all thoughts of that day’s events out of my mind forever.