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

The car curved in a sweeping arc into the shadowed mouth of an alley and drifted down a narrow, walled-in passageway. I eased the car to a stop with just a touch of the brake as the early-morning stillness settled in around us.

I raised an arm and sleeved the breathless summer night’s perspiration from my forehead, then sat for a second listening to the low-pitched street noises and other night sounds peculiar to this particular backwater of the city.

“Let’s go, Mickey,” Tony growled. “Move it. He’s not comin’ to us out here.”

“He’s not coming to us in there, either, if he hears us,” I said softly. “Don’t slam the car door when you get out.”

Tony’s snort was muffled. “Eleven nights in a row we stake out this miserable hole, an’ eleven nights you got to say ‘Don’t slam the car door’? At least get yourself a new line.”

I slid out on my side. The macadam underfoot was damp with night mist. Tony’s sardonic whisper floated out to me from the front seat. “I was tellin’ Louise before you picked me up tonight it was a damn good thing this had been her idea in the first place, or she’d never have trusted me out till all hours all these nights, even with you as chaperone.”

I grimaced at the mention of Louise’s name. I removed my watch with its tell-tale radium dial and put it into my pocket. Across the alley Tony scrambled from the sedan. We met at the front of the car, Tony’s solid two hundred pounds bulking larger-than-life in the night.

Tony had been my detective partner for two years. He was three years younger. We had both made plainclothes from the ranks, within a month of each other. With little in common between us, the partnership had worked. Originally we had tolerated each other. Lately it had been something less than that. And no wonder.

I turned left into the darkness and followed the alley brickwork with my palm until I came to a heavy wooden door set flush with the building line. “Bronson called me this mornin’ an’ asked for his keys back,” Tony muttered from behind me.

“Tell me inside,” I said tautly.

I wanted no distractions while we were getting inside. The big key in my left hand opened the alley door whose bottom sill was eighteen inches above the bed of the alley. I felt the familiar tensed apprehension in stomach and chest as I stepped up into the pitch-black opening. Automatically I freed my arm from the clinging pull of my shoulder holster, the leather made sticky by the night’s humidity.

I took two steps forward and stopped, listening, my hearing pitched up into the forefront of my consciousness. Behind me I could hear Tony’s breathing and the faint rasp of the closing door. I crept soft-footedly down the wooden-floored corridor, so solidly dark it was like pushing into a substance with weight.

I placed my feet carefully, a hand on the wall beside me checking off the corridor doors. At the third one I produced another key and with infinite care unlocked and eased open the door.

In a sliver of murky light from the front room of the jewelry shop beyond, I could see the usual jumble of materials on the watchmaker’s bench in the dingy little workroom immediately before me. I widened the aperture silently and stepped inside.

Tony moved in past me, and I closed the door gently. A man might get used to that dry-mouthed, adrenalin-accelerated, heart-pounding corridor-walk in a hundred years, I reflected. And then again, he might not.

I could see the heavy timber leaning against the wall, the timber that should have fitted snugly into the stout braces bolted to either side of the door through which we’d entered. It had taken a lot of talking to induce Joe Bronson to leave that timber down eleven nights in a row. Talking wouldn’t have been enough if I hadn’t had something on Joe Bronson.

Tony walked out through the hanging curtain into the front part of the shop. I made an instinctive negative gesture he couldn’t see. For an instant I could see him silhouetted against the lighter background of the shop’s front windows. The off-street refraction of light illumined the blunt, swarthy features and the surprising red hair, the rough, rusty red of the off-type redhead. I knew that thick, hirsute forearms and pillar-like thighs bulged the material of the lightweight summer suit that was just a blur in the part-darkness.

I kept my voice down when Tony walked back into the workroom. “One of these nights you’re going to do that one time too often, man.”

“Ahhhhh, we’re wastin’ our time here.” Tony’s disgust was evident in his voice. A penlight flashed on in his hand and spotlighted the base of a telephone on the watchmaker’s bench. Tony dialed rapidly, the whirring clicks staccato in the quiet.

“Costanza,” he said curtly. “Where is he?” He listened impatiently. “All right, all right,” he interrupted. “You told me. Music with it I can’t use. We’ll call you when we leave.” He replaced the receiver. “No action again tonight. Jigger says our man is in bed.”