The Private Practice of Michael Shayne Read Online Free PDF

be cautious.”
    “Have it your way,” Shayne said impatiently. “If you’ve got anything worth listening to, spill it.”
    There was a hesitant silence.
    Then with sudden decision the man said, “It’s about your friend, Larry Kincaid.”
    Shayne tensed. “What about him?”
    “He’s in a jam. I’m calling for him. Can you come to the beach right away?”
    “Yes.”
    Shayne’s eyes were very bright. The thumb and first finger of his left hand massaged the lobe of his left ear.
    “I’m calling from a place near the Seventy-ninth Street causeway. I’ll meet you down the beach a few blocks—at the end of the first street dead-ending against the ocean. I’ll park my car with my lights shining west so you can’t miss me. How long will it take you?”
    “Twenty minutes.”
    “Good.”
    The sound of the receiver being jammed on the hook clicked against Shayne’s ear drum.
    He hung up slowly, went back to the table and poured another long drink, put it down in evenly spaced swallows, then opened the front table drawer to get a .32 automatic.
    The gun was not there.
    His clock pointed to 11:02. He started to the bedroom, thinking that he might have slipped it under his pillow, turned back and pulled the drawer of the desk all the way out, frowning and poking around in the litter of papers. Dazed and confounded, he set the drawer in the grooves and closed it slowly.
    “Now what the hell,” he muttered, casting back to the last time he had seen the pistol. Just a couple of days ago. Steel rusts fast in Miami’s damp climate, and he distinctly remembered cleaning the weapon and leaving a film of oil on the metal two days previously.
    Also, he was positive he had returned it to the drawer where he invariably kept it.
    He crossed to the phone and asked for the night clerk.
    “Shayne speaking. Has anyone been in my room lately without my knowledge?”
    “Not that I know of, Mr. Shayne. Except—your friend, Mr. Kincaid. He waited up there for you earlier this evening. You were out when he called—and he asked to wait for you in the apartment.”
    Shayne said, “I see.” He hung up.
    He stood uncertainly for a moment, gray eyes narrowed to slits. Larry had visited his room this evening—his pistol was gone. Now, Larry was in trouble—
    He went out of the room in long swift strides, down the stairway to his car, made a U-turn in front of the drawbridge and turned into Biscayne Boulevard. He headed straight north, passing both the County and Venetian causeways, getting his battered roadster up to a smooth sixty where the residential section began to thin out and there was little traffic.
    Grim-jawed and tense, trying not to think at all, he held the speedometer needle at sixty until he slowed for the traffic light at Seventy-ninth Street and swung to the right. Leaving the lighted boulevard behind, he had the indicator shivering just below eighty when he rolled up on the first bridge of the almost deserted Seventy-ninth Street causeway, holding it at that speed until approaching the sweeping curve near the east end which he made with screaming tires.
    He eased onto the peninsula, over a high-arched bridge spanning a canal, and the clock on his dashboard said he had been driving sixteen minutes when he turned south on the ocean drive, past hamburger stands and beach cabins, driving slowly and watching for a dead-end street with a car parked near the ocean with headlights facing out.
    He found it after a few minutes, a palmetto-lined pair of sandy ruts. The headlights of a parked car burned brightly at the end where a sloping cliff broke down to the shore.
    There were no houses near in either direction, and the only sound in the night stillness was the crash of waves below. He cut off his motor just in front of the parked car.
    He got out, blinking into the blinding lights, waded through loose sand over his shoetops, and made his way to the shiny coupe with a single figure in the driver’s seat. The man was