He closed his eyes quickly, and lay for a long time trying to remember what had happened. For a while he lay inert, then memory flooded his aching head.
The ride with the young punk, the detours, and finally, their arrival at a spot on the bayfront. The car parked there had been empty. The man who was anxious to pay him ten thousand dollars to keep Nora Carrol’s name out of her husband’s murder had been nowhere in sight. He recalled his mustached companion’s description of the man who had hired him — big, broad-shouldered, and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. And he remembered the explosion.
Vaguely, he wondered what time it was, but dreaded opening his eyes again.
Bit by bit the incidents of the night floated through his mind in confused sequence, and all of a sudden he was possessed by a terrible anger. Anger at himself for being so stupid, and at the punk who had taken a shot at him.
He pulled himself up slowly to a sitting position. His head throbbed violently. He rested it on folded arms atop the steering-wheel, and kept his eyes closed.
After a while he opened them, and, gritting his teeth against the pain, he shifted his position and looked in the rearview mirror. A wave of nausea swept over him. Pain throbbed at the rear of his right temple. His hairline partially concealed the raw wound, an abrasion between the ear and the right temple. There was considerable swelling, and a circle of dried blood surrounded the injury. He turned his head carefully and looked down at the dried blood on the cushion.
There was utter silence on the isolated shore of the bay. Through aching eyes he saw that the sun was well up and shimmering on the smooth surface of the water. The other car was gone, of course, and his watch showed that the time was 9:18, and that he had been out cold for about five hours.
He got out of the car and forced his cramped legs to hold him erect. He staggered to the cable barrier, ducked under it, and made his way down the sloping embankment. Taking a handkerchief from his hip pocket, he wet it in salty bay water and gingerly removed the bloodstains from the wound and the side of his face. He took off his light suit jacket, found bloodstains on the collar, threw it across his left arm, and went up the incline with the damp handkerchief against his face.
He examined his car before getting in, and found a jagged hole in the metal top of the sedan, close to the windshield and almost directly above the steering-wheel. The impact had pushed the jagged edges of metal outward, and he knew the gun had been fired from below, and inside the car.
It was all clear now. The young man, the supposedly innocent bystander who had met him at the filling-station, and told a glib story of being hired for the job of guiding him, had drawn a gun as Shayne drove up to park beside the waiting car, and fired it when he was looking to his left, expecting danger from that direction.