Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

by editor Leo Margules

  The girl caught his hand and helped him aboard. The wiry, leathery little man carried a canvas bag that looped over his wrist, and a fish spear for a weapon. The canvas sack bulged awkwardly.

  Tod Tolliver slid out of his skin-diving gear and the detective took it and put it down for him. Sandra handed him a waiting towel and a robe. Tolliver rubbed himself dry, then put the robe on over the red trunks he wore.

  “Mite chilly,” he said, grinning at them. “Been waiting long?”

  “Don’t tease us, Captain,” Sandra said. “Did you find the submarine? Is it down there?”

  “Here.” The captain swung her the wet canvas sack. “Open this up, gal, and see what you see.”

  With a sharp intake of breath, Sandra Ames grabbed the sack and wrenched at the drawstrings to open it. The wet canvas resisted, but presently the bag gaped open and she tumbled out a rectangular metal box onto the deck. It was a discolored gray, but did not look corroded.

  “Pure aluminum,” Tod Tolliver said laconically. “Keep the water out for a long time to come yet. I rigged up a tool to open it easy.”

  He rummaged in a long chest bolted to the deck near the companionway, and brought out something like an oversized can opener.

  “I’ll open it,” Shayne said, and took the metal box from Sandra Ames. He turned it over and studied it for a moment. Stamped into the top were German letters and numerals.

  “Just jab her in and go around the edges,” Tolliver said. “She’ll open like a can of sardines that way.”

  He jabbed the point of the opener into the metal at a corner. The aluminum cut without difficulty. In less than a minute he had cut around three sides and bent back the loose flap of metal. Inside were tightly packed bundles of green. He spilled these out onto the deck and Sandra, hovering over him, scooped one up and ripped off the paper band that encircled it.

  “Ten-dollar bills,” she whispered. “Look at them, Mike! And down underneath us there’s a million dollars’ worth of them. Maybe more!” She jumped to her feet and looked inquiringly at Tolliver. “The K-Three Forty-One is down beneath us?”

  The captain nodded. “’Bout a hundred yards off our bow,” he said. “Seventy foot of water. That’s the bow, it’s on a coral reef. Stern is in a hundred twenty feet. Lying on her side. Big hole amidships. Looks like she either took a direct hit from a torpedo underwater or was bumped by a free floating mine. Went down fast.”

  “I’m going down to see!” Sandra cried. “I’ve got to make sure.”

  She ran down the companionway to the cabin. In hardly a minute she came out, wearing a brief bathing suit and lugging a skin-diving outfit, almost new. She slid into it with practiced speed, and Tolliver helped her get the air tanks adjusted on her back.

  “Don’t try going inside,” he warned. “There’s some moray eels made a home in that submarine. You got to know just where to go or you might get trapped.”

  The girl nodded impatiently. “I’ll take your spear,” she said. “I’m a good skin-diver.”

  She went down the ladder at the stern, waved, then pushed off. For an instant she floated, then threw her legs in the air and dived straight down. A moment later she was gone.

  “That girl’s got it bad,” the captain said. “Treasure fever.” He cocked a blue eye beneath a bushy brow. “Sorry about lying to you, Mike. But Mollison wanted to stick to the Spanish treasure story until we actually got everything signed, sealed and delivered. If it leaked out, or if you said no, it wouldn’t be took too serious. Somebody’s always looking for Spanish treasure.”

  “No hard feelings, Captain,” Shayne said easily. “I’d have played it cagy too.”

  “You want to dive down too?” Tolliver asked. “You can use my outfit. Plenty of air left in the tanks.”

  Shayne shook his head. “I’ve never tried skin-diving,” he said. “But I know it isn’t something you can pick up in five minutes. Anyway, I don’t need to see it if both you and Sandra say it’s down there.”

  “It’s down there, all right,” Captain Tolliver chuckled. He stripped off his trunks and began to pull on faded khaki trousers and a khaki shirt. “One day right after the war ended I was anchored off here trying to fix a bent propeller blade. Had to get in the water and take it off the shaft and like a ninny let it drop. I sounded and found it was only seventy feet. Had a skin-diving rig on board because I used to try diving to find some of these Spanish wrecks that really are in these waters. So I went down and there was my propeller right beside this submarine.

  “She lay there like a dead whale, slanting down from the coral reef, and she hadn’t been there long—seaweed and barnacles had hardly started in on her. I swam around and found the hole in her side, and was just crazy enough to go in. Almost the first thing I found was a whole mess of these aluminum boxes, spilled all over—like they’d been stored right where she was blowed open.

  “Further in, there were dead men lying around, and they didn’t look nice—water and the fish had been working on them. Now they’re just bones, of course. But that’s gruesome enough.

  “I backed out and just took one of them aluminum boxes along for curiosity. When I finally got around to opening it, my eyes damn near popped out of my head. I went down for a couple more, but I didn’t want to take too many, because right away I could see what would happen if I started showing around too much money.

  “Fact, I stowed the stuff under my shack and decided to forget about it. No use asking for trouble, and I had enough to get by on. But a spell later”—Tod Tolliver looked sheepish—“a young fellow I knew and his wife were drowned and their kids had to go to the St. Francis Foundling Home. I went to see them and I found this Home needed money bad.

  “So then I got the idea I could help ’em out. Even if this cash I’d found wasn’t any good to me, it would be a godsend to the Home. So I passed around the story of coming into an inheritance from a dead brother back up north, and I went to New York and I banked ten thousand under a phony name, and I sent the St. Francis Home the cash anonymously.

  “Every year since then I’ve made a trip north, saying it’s to collect my annual inheritance. Every year I dive down to pick up just ten thousand, and that’s what I deposit in New York. I figger any more might cause questions—maybe the Treasury would get on my trail or something. I had all the trouble I wanted in my life, Mike.”

  Michael Shayne nodded. “Then Sandra and Hugo turned up, telling you they knew what you were up to.”

  Tolliver passed a leathery hand over his chin. “That’s right,” he said. “It was right upsetting. They made me a proposition. I knew there wasn’t any more peace for me unless I took it; they’d be watching me all the time to find where the sub lay. I figger to pass on to the St. Francis Home most of what I get and keep my mouth shut. ’Bout all I can do, under the circumstances.”

  He shook his head in perplexity. “Still can’t figure how they got on my track,” he muttered. “Well, I guess it don’t matter how. They just did, that’s all.”

  “Did you ever do much exploring inside the submarine, Captain?” Shayne asked. “Find any papers, anything interesting?”

  “Never tried to go too far in,” Tod Tolliver said. “Lot of the compartment doors are shut and I wasn’t going to fool around trying to open them and maybe get caught on the wrong side of one, if it swung shut. Of course, if it had still been war, I’d have let the Navy know where she lay, but bein’ the war was over, I just figured it was my private secret. Say, what about some grub? I’m hungry, and you probably are too.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Captain Tolliver started for the tiny galley, then stopped. “Want to show you something,” he said. “Look here.” He flung open the lid of the chest from which he had taken the oversize can opener. “This is my war chest. In case anybody ever followed me and I had to repel boarders.”

  Shayne looked in. There, neatly mounted on brackets, was an automatic rifle with a clip already in it. The chest also held an emergency f
ood kit, and a two-man raft with short paddles. The raft was a Navy surplus item that inflated itself when a cartridge of compressed gas was pierced.

  “Never had to use them,” Tolliver said. “But I was ready. Now let’s see about that grub.”

  8

  Captain Tolliver had coffee, eggs, ham and toast ready and still Sandra Ames had not come up.

  “Might as well eat,” he said. “No telling how long she’ll stay down there. Kind of a strange world, under the ocean is. You ought to take up skin-diving. You’d like it.”

  “I will, one of these days,” Shayne said. He took the plate and steaming coffee cup Tolliver handed him and sat down on deck. The grizzled little man sat opposite him. The sun was still not much more than an hour high in the sky, the ocean was calm, a few gulls soared in the distance. It might have been a morning at the dawn of time.

  “Looks like a quiet trip,” Tolliver said thoughtfully as they ate. “I been thinking some about that fellow last night who killed Shorty and Whitey. If he was just settling a feud with them, it was mighty providential for me. But if he was really interested in me, I reckon we shook him off. If nobody’s followed us up to now, they ain’t a-going to.”

  “Looks that way, Captain,” Shayne agreed. He’d been giving some thought also to last night’s killer. But so far it did look as if he’d just been settling some personal quarrel with Whitey and Shorty.

  With a small splash, Sandra Ames surfaced close beside them. She waved, swam to the ladder, and pulled herself aboard. The redhead helped her over the rail. She came aboard dripping, a lovely mermaid encumbered by rubber flippers, oxygen tanks, face plate and rubber tubing.

  She pushed the face plate up and looked at him with eyes that glowed with the fire of excitement.

  “It’s there, Mike!” she cried. “That enormous submarine lying there on the coral reefs, with seaweed growing over it now, and fish swimming around it. It’s a wonderful, fantastic world down there and in the middle of it the submarine just waiting for us to take all that money from it.”

  She drew a deep breath. “I’ll go dress,” she said, slipping out of her skin-diving outfit and letting Captain Tolliver take it. “Now I’m hungry.”

  She ran down the companionway, and the leathery old captain shrugged.

  “There’s plenty of headaches ahead,” he said. “I’m kind of glad they ain’t my headaches any more. Let someone else take the risks. Me, I’m suited to be out of it.”

  The detective started to answer, and stopped. They both stiffened and turned their heads to look up. Winging toward them from the north at an elevation of a thousand feet was a helicopter, moving sedately through the sky.

  “Coast Guard!” Tolliver exclaimed. “Looking us over to make sure we’re in no trouble. Come on, start fishing.”

  He grabbed a couple of old rods, stuck one in Shayne’s hands, and they both sat back, letting the rods project over the side of the boat while they watched the oncoming whirly-bird.

  It was definitely interested in them, for it dropped swiftly to an altitude of three hundred feet and circled them.

  “That’s no Coast Guard plane,” Michael Shayne said tersely. “No markings.”

  “Nope, it’s a private plane,” Tolliver grunted. “Looks like one of them sightseeing planes the news service has. Sit tight, they may be just curious about us.”

  But the helicopter, after circling them, paused, hanging in the air like a monster humming-bird. They saw a door in the side open and something came tumbling out. It hit the water with a splash, vanished, then bobbed to the surface again. It was an iron buoy, painted bright yellow and red, seeming anchored by a long length of chain.

  “By grab, they’re marking this spot!” Tolliver yelled, his blue eyes blazing. “They know what we’re here for. But they don’t know they’re tangling with Tod Tolliver now.”

  He threw down the fishing rod and scrambled to his chest of special supplies. He came out with the automatic rifle, checked it, and while the helicopter still hovered let go a burst at the bobbing buoy. The shots ripped the mooring open; the buoy began to sink.

  “That’ll show ’em!” Tolliver said with satisfaction. He stood looking upward. The hovering helicopter turned, and the door in the cabin opened again. Shayne guessed what was coming—too late.

  “Captain! Duck!” he yelled, but the sound of a machine gun chattering three hundred feet above them drowned him out. Bullets splashed in the water astern of them and then stitched a seam up the middle of the Golden Girl. Tod Tolliver was in the middle of the seam.

  He grunted and crumpled to the deck, dropping the automatic rifle.

  The lines of bullets came back and methodically crisscrossed the old cruiser. Shayne scrambled to Tolliver’s side and grabbed up the rifle. Kneeling, he put it to his shoulder, aimed upward at the hovering helicopter, and let go a burst directly into the cabin.

  The firing stopped. The automatic rifle ran out its clip and while he was looking in the chest for another the helicopter soared abruptly upward. As Sandra Ames came stumbling out on deck, breathless, it began to wing northward at a thousand feet or more.

  “What—” she began, and saw Tolliver. “He’s hurt!” she cried in alarm. “What happened?”

  The detective jerked his head toward the disappearing helicopter.

  “Friends dropped in for tea and games,” he growled, stooping over the old man. Painfully, Tod Tolliver opened his eyes as Shayne found a spot on his neck and pressed against the artery there. The blood spurting from his shoulder close to the neck, eased but did not stop.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Tolliver whispered. “Guess I talked too soon. They followed me. Dunno how, but they did.”

  “Mike, look!” the girl cried. The redhead looked up. Five miles or more away, the helicopter was just a dot in the sky. The dot became an exclamation mark as a long plume of smoke poured from it. The aircraft began to tumble like a falling leaf. It went down, out of their sight, leaving a trail of smoke that quickly thinned and vanished.

  Captain Tolliver was trying to speak. Shayne turned back to him. The old man’s lips worked for a moment before the words came.

  “Leave me here, Mike,” he said. “Get yourself and the girl back safe. Swing the deal—see those orphans get theirs.”

  “I’ll do my damndest,” Shayne promised.

  Tolliver’s breathing grew more difficult. With every breath a bubbling sound came from his throat.

  He opened his mouth to say something—but the words were never uttered. His mouth stayed open and his head lolled sideways. Tod Tolliver wasn’t there any more.

  9

  The Golden Girl was going down swiftly, but on an even keel. For a moment Sandra Ames seemed unable to grasp their danger.

  “They killed him!” she said. “They tried to kill all of us!”

  “They tried. They didn’t do it. I think we finished them off, instead. Now come on. There’s a rubber life raft here. We’ve got to get it into the water.”

  But without answering the girl ducked back down into the cabin. Michael Shayne jerked out the carefully packed rubber raft and punctured the inflator cartridge. The raft uncoiled like something living as it filled out, and he tossed it over the side, holding it with a rope. Sandra came back, wearing her light coat and carrying an overnight bag.

  “Here, hold this rope!” Shayne said. She took it. He scooped up Captain Tolliver’s light body and ducked down into the cabin. The water was knee deep. He put Tolliver into a bunk and left him. Only when he was back on deck did he remember that he’d left his jacket, with his gun and wallet, back in the cabin. It was too late now to get them.

  In the galley he found a loaf of bread and some bacon. He snatched up a jug of water, tumbled the supplies into a dish towel, and dropped them onto the raft.

  “Now climb down,” he said. “Here, give me that bag.” Shayne took the small overnight bag Sandra was clutching and held it while she lowered herself down onto the rubber raft. Then he passed it dow
n to her. It was heavy, and she grabbed it swiftly.

  He stayed only long enough to grab the paddles from the chest, and the canvas sack into which he had put the money Tolliver had brought up from the sunken K-341. The deck of the Golden Girl was now almost awash. He simply stepped on the rubber raft, sat down and pushed them away. Behind them the old cruiser went down with hardly a ripple.

  Mike picked up the paddles and handed one to Sandra. “We’ll paddle due west,” he said. “That should bring us to land eventually, though I don’t know where. Maybe a fishing boat will see us before that.”

  “But we can’t go without marking this spot!” Sandra protested. “We have to, so we can find it again! We can’t lose everything, just when we’ve found it!”

  “I’m open to suggestions. But right at the moment, I don’t see how we can do it.”

  “That box!” She pointed to the emergency kit which came attached to the raft. “What’s in it? Maybe there’s something we can use.”

  “We’ll see.” He got the lid off the small box after a struggle, and they both peered in. The contents were some packages of a special silver salt that precipitated salt water to make it drinkable, a couple of nylon fish lines with lures, and a small handbook, How To Survive at Sea.

  “The fish lines!” Sandra exclaimed. “We can mark this spot with a float attached to a fish line. Look—over there. A life preserver from the Golden Girl. We can tie it to the fish line.”

  “Better than nothing,” the redhead agreed. Unwinding one fish line, a hundred and fifty feet long, he attached all the sinkers in the kit, and all the hooks to one end of the nylon. “The hooks may catch in the coral,” he said. “Otherwise, the life preserver will just drag the sinkers away if any wind comes up.”

  Then they paddled over to the life belt, floating in the oily stain that marked the Golden Girl’s sinking. Shayne fastened the free end of the fish line to the cork preserver, and dropped the sinkers into the water. They rushed down to a depth of a hundred feet and the improvised marker floated there, tugging gently at its anchorage.