5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 98: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

98 I asked him. “And what’s the trouble?” Ryan pointed to the _ second-floor ees over the grease rack and washing sta “Up there. I don’t get to town often but I have plenty of canned provisions.” If he sold a dollar’s worth of gas a week, it was a miracle. The station was Florida Moorish with peeling stucco. All that part of Anastasia Island was low sand dunes, rolling over the cement curbs that some real estate genius had put in to bait customers. There weren’t more than half a dozen houses, as far as I could see, and they all looked lone- some and haunted. A few hadn’t even been finished. There I was, making head- quarters at what had started out to be the village center. The Last Stop Service Station was shaped like an E with the middle bar missing. One wing, with dirty, broken windows, had been a lunch counter, deli- catessen, and grocery, judging from the blistered letters on the glass. The other wing, with arches to let in the salt breeze, was mostly garage space. The biggest laugh was the four gas pumps out in front. “What’s all this that’s threatening you, Mr. Ryan?” I asked again. He poked his head a little farther for- ward and squinted toward the highway that runs the whole length of Anastasia Island. His eyes were blue and worried, with veins standing out on the whites. I couldn’t decide if he’d been drinking too much or not sleeping enough. He had a weakish sort of mouth that didn’t match the rest of his face. A nice fellow with a good voice, only I wouldn’t want him on my side in a knock-down-and- drag-out fight. No, Rvan wasn’t his name, not by a damn sight. The Rvans are a fighting tribe, like the Carmodys. “Well, there’s a bearded man hanging around, shooting at me.” he said. It would have been silly to ask him if he ever shot back and if not, why not. He iust wasn’t the type. “When and where?” I asked. YAN looked helpless. He made a ges- ture at the sand dunes. “I don’t know exactly. From all directions. Usually at night.” FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE “How about the sound?” Boy, was he dumb! “There isn’t any sound. He must use a silencer.” That meant the other guy was a busi- nesslike man. Still and all, Ryan had been close enough to see that the guy was big and had a beard, and he hadn’t got his head shot off. That was funny. The shaggy man was a screwball, or Ryan was, or they both were. I didn’t ask him why didn’t he call the bluecoats. That’d be rotten for my business. “How did it all start?” I asked when he turned to the glassed-in room where the-dusty cash register was and showed me the stairs that led to the second floor. “What’s in back of it all?” Ryan fished a butt out of his pocket and got his lighter going. I turned down his offer of a cigarette. “Hell, no,” I said. “Not when I got half a cigar left.” While I was waiting for Ryan to start talking, I looked out across what decided not to be a town. One of the houses, the nearest, didn’t have any broken win- dows. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. It was the flicker of light, as if a mirror, for a second, had caught the sun. I didn’t say anything about that but I was wondering plenty. “Can you shoot?” Ryan finally asked. My answer made his eyes bug out. Be- fore he had even seen my hand move, I had a gun pointing at his stomach. “Ever. see it done faster?” That brag was purely a business mat- ter. He admitted he hadn’t. Then he twisted his face into a sourish grin, one of the kind with memories behind it. “If you handled cards that way, you’d make a million,” he said. That: was a laugh. Maybe you know that place in Saint Augustine, the one with a bric-a-brac front and horseshoe arches with colored tiles. Well, it’s a club. They let me in without a card and they let me out without my dough. So I was glad to take this job. A pal at the agency had told me about it. His men were busy with divorces and things like that and they’d turned Ryan down. But I needed gas money to San Francisco and before long, I’d have been eating egg stains off my tie. “Who lives in that house over there ?” ANICLOOO S (©) (C(O)