Free Pay-Off in Blood by Brett Halliday Page B

drop the smouldering cigar butt in an ashtray, and very carefully set the highball glass down on a table beside him. His eyes were very cold, and his mouth tight-lipped.
    “I don’t believe you, Shayne.”
    Shayne said, “That’s your privilege.” He settled back comfortably and grinned. “Why don’t you go to the police and protest? They’d be delighted to hear all the details about your arrangement to collect twenty grand from Doc Ambrose tonight.”
    His host was leaning toward him stiffly, breathing sibilantly through flared nostrils. “I think you’re lying. I think you got your big hands on that money, Shayne, by some sort of hocuspocus … if you didn’t gun him down yourself and lift it off him. I want it.”
    Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders. “Sue me.”
    Without shifting his gaze from Shayne’s, he said, “Sap him, Jud.”
    Shayne sensed motion behind his chair… too late. The roof fell in on him. He rocked forward in his chair, and then slid laxly to the floor. His eyes became glazed and he fought back successive waves of unconsciousness, and then he pushed himself up to his knees and began laughing up into the face of the seated man.
    He nodded his head, and Phil kicked the redhead in the ribs. There was searing pain as though all the bones had given way under the shattering impact, and he pitched heavily to his side.
    Dimly and from a vast distance, he heard the incisive voice say, “Put him out cold, Jud.”
    Jud was, as Shayne had realized the first moment he saw him, a professional. He carried out the boss’s order swiftly and efficiently. Shayne felt numbing pain, and then he heard no more and was conscious of nothing more for a long time.
    He came back from blackness very slowly into darkness. Queer images wavered back and forth haphazardly in his mind, and it required certain periods of recurring consciousness for him to realize where he was and how he had got there. Slowly, lying on his back on the hotel carpet and blinking upward into the darkness, it came back to him. The meeting of the two men in his hotel lobby, the ride to the Bay front hotel, and his encounter with the boss.
    Shayne gritted his teeth against the dull, grinding pain in his head, and sat up. He reached up gingerly and encountered two egg-shaped and egg-sized lumps on his head. His left side was a solid mass of hurt, and he suspected that several ribs were cracked. He rolled over on his hands and knees, and then stood upright, staggering as he did so and encountering a floor lamp which fell onto the carpet beside him. He knelt by it, and groped for the switch and turned it.
    Light came from the bulb, and he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked around in a dazed way.
    It was the hotel sitting room as he remembered it. Empty, now, of everyone except himself. He looked around slowly, blinking his eyes open and shut, and they settled on the highball glass still sitting on the table where the boss had placed it. The ice in the glass had long since melted, but there remained a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom which looked damned enticing to Shayne in his present condition.
    He dragged himself forward on the floor, crawling on his hands and knees, until he could reach up and get the glass in a firm grasp. He lifted it to his mouth and drank avidly. It was good Scotch, and he knew it must have been at least a double shot in the glass to leave the dregs so strong.
    He dropped the empty glass on the floor and got to his feet, located the bathroom door and stumbled in on rubbery legs to run cold water in the wash-bowl and duck his head into it repeatedly.
    He toweled his face carefully, wincing when he touched either of the lumps on his head, and finally knew that he was going to live.
    Back in the sitting room, he glanced around carefully, turned on the overhead light, and could see no sign of occupancy except the empty highball glass on the floor and two cigar butts in the ashtray by the chair where the