Killers from the Keys Read Online Free PDF

to…”
    He was interrupted by a buzz from his intercom. He glanced at a lighted button and pressed a switch and said, “Yeh, Jackson?”
    A voice said metallically: “A quick run-through, Chief, turns up a known Syndicate killer in Chicago two years ago who had the monicker of The Preacher because he looked like one and always wore a black suit when he was working. Last heard of he was paired up with Little Joe Hoffman, but that was before Little Joe got sticky fingers and took it on the lam from the mob. Last we had on him, he was making book on the Beach.”
    “Yeh, I know about Hoffman,” grunted Gentry into the grilled mouthpiece. “Keep on looking, Jackson.” He flipped the switch and told Shayne irritably, “If your man is an old pal of Little Joe’s, it could be there’s a lead. But that’s out of my jurisdiction. We chased Little Joe the hell out of Miami when he tried to settle here, and he’s stayed pretty well on the other side of Biscayne Bay ever since. Painter isn’t so hard to please, and half his dicks go around with their hands out most of the time.”
    Shayne got to his feet slowly. “Yeh. If it is The Preacher on a job, it could be he’d look up an old pal to help him line things up at this end. So, thanks for everything, Will,” he ended off-handedly. “We’ll be in touch, huh?”
    Will Gentry said, “Sure, Mike,” and settled back placidly in his chair with a quizzical expression on his beefy face as the rangy redhead sauntered out.
    Five years ago, he told himself, he’d have hated to be in Little Joe Hoffman’s shoes right now. But today, he didn’t know. Had Michael Shayne changed so much in those years of increasing prosperity and in light of the increasing public respect that was accorded him? Well, men did change and grow soft. But who in hell would ever have thought that Mike Shayne…?
    Gentry broke off his cogitations abruptly and got up and clamped a hat on his head. It was the end of a day and he was getting older too, and a couple of Syndicate mobsters were no personal affair of his.

4
     
    THE LATE AFTERNOON sun was a vivid orange ball hanging low above the horizon behind him as Michael Shayne drove eastward across the Causeway. It cast shimmering lights on the placidly blue surface of Biscayne Bay, and touched the fringed tops of palm trees lining the shore in front of him with a faintly golden glow.
    He drove with the late afternoon traffic at a moderate speed, big hands lightly on the wheel, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, with eyes slitted to exclude the smoke spiralling upward past them.
    There was a look of preoccupation on his face, of inner questioning, which deepened the trenches in his cheeks and tightened the firm line of his jaw. Was Will Gentry right, he wondered. Was he getting soft and complacent? Had Mike Shayne turned into a fat-cat during these recent years, more preoccupied with cases that offered a big fee than in fighting injustice and corruption?
    He didn’t want to think so. And yet…? Life could be very pleasant in semi-tropical Miami. A man could drift pleasantly with the tide of sunfilled days and moonlit nights, lulled into complacency by the Lotus Song of the tropics.
    Well… he straightened behind the wheel, squared his wide shoulders aggressively as he rolled down the long curve off the Causeway onto Fifth Street. Here was a chance to find out just how soft he had become. If there was an acid-throwing Syndicate killer from Chicago strolling the streets of Miami in search of a victim, he represented a challenge that should stir any man out of his shell of complacency.
    Shayne spat his cigarette out the open window and swung the big sedan off to the right, southward on the Peninsula, away from the luxury hotels and swanky Lincoln Avenue toward a rowdier and lustier section of the Beach which he had once known intimately.
    Things were changed now, he noted as he drove slowly, looking for remembered landmarks. New and