Occasion ... for Disaster by Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer (good inspirational books TXT) 📗
Book online «Occasion ... for Disaster by Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer (good inspirational books TXT) 📗». Author Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer
"Mr. Malone," the sergeant said wearily, "people just don't realize what's going on in this town. We never did have half enough cops, and now, with so many men resigning and getting arrested and suspended, we haven't got a quarter enough. People think this strike business is funny, but if we spent any time fiddling around with traffic and parking tickets, we'd never have time to stop even crimes like this, let alone the big jobs. As it is, though, there haven't been a lot of big ones. Every hood in the city's out to make a couple of bucks—but that's it so far, thank God."
Malone nodded. "How about the FBI?" he said. "Want them to come in and help?"
"Mr. Malone," the sergeant said, "the City of New York can take very good care of itself, without outside interference."
Some day, Malone told himself, good old New York City was going to secede from the Union and form a new country entirely. Then it would have a war with New Jersey and probably be wiped right off the map.
Viewing the traffic around him as he hunted for another cab, he wasn't at all sure that that was a bad idea. He began to wish vaguely that he had borrowed one of the policemen's horses.
Malone wasn't in the least worried about arriving at Mike Sand's office late. In the first place, Sand was notorious for sleeping late and working late to make up for it. His work schedule was somewhere around forty-five degrees out of phase with the rest of the world, which made it just about average for the National Brotherhood of Truckers. It had never agitated for a nine-to-five work day. A man driving a truck, after all, worked all sorts of odd hours—and the union officials did the same, maybe just to prove that they were all good truckers at heart.
The sign over the door read:
National Headquarters
NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD
OF TRUCKERS
Welcome, Brother
Malone pushed at the door and it swung open, revealing a rather dingy-looking foyer. More Good Old Truckers At Heart, he told himself. Mike Sand owned a quasi-palatial mansion in Puerto Rico for winter use, and a two-floor, completely air-conditioned apartment on Fifth Avenue for summer use. But the Headquarters Building looked dingy enough to make truckers conscience-stricken about paying back dues.
Behind the reception desk there was a man whose face was the approximate shape and color of a slightly used waffle. He looked up from his crossword puzzle as Malone came in, apparently trying to decide whether or not this new visitor should be greeted with: "Welcome, Brother!"
Taking pity on his indecision, Malone strode to the desk and said: "Tell Mike Sand he has a visitor."
The waffle-faced man blinked. "Mr. Sand is busy right now," he said. "Who wants to talk to him?"
Malone tried to look steely-eyed and tough. "You pick up the intercom," he said, "and you tell Sand there's a man out here who's in the cloak-and-suit business."
"The what?"
"Tell him this man is worried about a recent shipment of buttons," Malone went on.
"Mister," the waffle-faced man said, "you're nuts."
"So I'm nuts," Malone said. "Make the call."
It was put through. After a few minutes of earnest conversation the man turned to look at Malone again, dizzied wonder in his eyes. "Mr. Sand says go right up," he told the FBI Agent in a shocked voice. "Elevator to the third floor."
Malone went over to the elevator, stepped in and pressed the third-floor button. As the doors closed, the familiar itch of precognition began to assail him again. This time he had nothing else to distract him. He paid very close attention to it as he was carried slowly and creakily upward.
He looked up. There was an escape-hatch in the top of the car. Standing on tiptoe, he managed to lift it aside, grasp the edges of the resulting hole and pull himself up through the hole to the top of the car. He looked back down, memorizing the elevator, and then pulled the hatch shut again. There was a small peephole in it, and Malone put his eye to it and waited.
About twenty seconds later, the car stopped and the doors opened. A little more time passed, and then a gun, closely followed by a man, edged around the door frame.
"What the hell," the man said. "The car's empty!"
Another voice said: "Let's cover the stairway."
Two pairs of footsteps receded rapidly down the hall. Malone, gun in hand, teleported himself back to the previously memorized elevator, tiptoed to the door and looked out. The two men were standing at the far end of the hall, posted at either side of the stairwell and obviously waiting for him to come on up.
Instead, he tiptoed out of the elevator hefting his gun, and came up silently behind the pair. When he was within ten feet he stopped and said, very politely: "Drop the guns, boys."
The guns thudded to the floor and the two men turned round.
"All right," Malone said, smiling into their astonished faces. "Now, let's go on and see Mr. Sand."
He picked up the guns with his free hand and put them into his coat pockets. Together, the three men went down toward the lighted office at the far end of the hall.
"Open it," Malone said as they came to the door. He followed them into the office. Behind a battered, worm-eaten desk in a dingy room sat a very surprised-looking Mike Sand.
He was only about five feet six, but he looked as if weighed over two hundred pounds. He had huge shoulders and a thick neck, and his face was sleepy-looking. He seemed to have lost a lot of fights in his long career; Sand, Malone reflected, was nearing fifty now, and he was beginning to look his age. His short hair, once black, was turning to iron-gray.
He didn't say anything. Malone smiled at him pleasantly. "These boys were carrying deadly weapons," he told Sand in a polite voice. "That's hardly the way to treat a brother." His precognitive warning system wasn't ringing any alarm bells, but he kept his gun trained on the pair of thugs as he walked over to Mike Sand's desk and took the two extra revolvers from his pocket. "You'd better keep these, Sand," he said. "Your boys don't know how to handle them."
Sand grinned sourly, pulled open a desk drawer and swept the guns into it with one motion of his ham-like hand. He didn't look at Malone. "You guys better go downstairs and keep Jerry company," he said. "You can do crossword puzzles together."
"Now, Mike, we—" one of them began.
Mike Sand snorted. "Go on," he said. "Scram."
"But he was supposed to be in the elevator, and we—"
"Scram," Sand said. It sounded like a curse. The two men got out. "Like apes in the trees," Sand said heavily. "Ask for bright boys and what do you get? Everything," he went on dismally, "is going to hell."
That line, Malone reflected, was beginning to have all the persistence of a bass-bourdon. It droned its melancholy way through anything and everything else. He signed deeply, thought about a cigar and lit a cigarette instead. It tasted awful. "About those buttons—" he said.
"I got nothing to do with buttons," Sand said.
"You do with these," Malone said. "A shipment of buttons from the Nevada desert. You grabbed them from Palveri."
"I got nothing to do with it," Sand said.
Malone looked around and found a chair and an ashtray. He grabbed one and sat down in the other. "I'm not from Castelnuovo," he said. "Or Palveri, or any of the Mafia boys. If I were, you'd know it fast enough."
Sand regarded him from under eyelids made almost entirely of scar-tissue. "I guess so," he said sourly at last. "But what do you want to know about the stuff? And who are you, anyhow?"
"The name's Malone," Malone said. "You might say trouble is my business. Or something like that. I see an opportunity to create a little trouble—but not for you. That is, if you want to hear some more about those buttons. Of course, if you had nothing to do with it—"
"All right," Sand said. "All right. But it was strictly a legitimate proposition, understand?"
"Sure," Malone said. "Strictly legitimate."
"Well, it was," Sand said defensively. "We got to stop scab trucking, don't we? And that Palveri was using nonunion boys on the trucks. We had to stop them; it was a service to the Brotherhood, understand?"
"And the peyotl buttons?" Malone asked.
Sand shrugged. "So we had to confiscate the cargo, didn't we?" he said. "To teach them a lesson. Nonunion drivers, that's what we're against."
"And you're for peyotl," Malone said, "so you can make it into peyote and get enough money to refurbish Brotherhood Headquarters."
"Now, look," Sand said. "You think you're tough and you can get away with a lot of wisecracks. That's a wrong idea, brother." He didn't move, but he suddenly seemed set to spring. Malone wondered if, just maybe, his precognition had blown a fuse.
"O.K., let's forget it," he said. "But I've got some inside lines, Sand. You didn't get the real shipment."
"Didn't get it?" Sand said with raised eyebrows. "I got it. It's right where I can put my finger on it now."
"That was the fake," Malone said easily. "They knew you were after a shipment, Sand, so they suckered you in. They fed your spies with false information and sent you out after the fake shipment."
"Fake shipment?" Sand said. "It's the real stuff, brother. The real stuff."
"But not enough of it," Malone said. "Their big shipments are almost three times what you got. They made one while you were suckered off with the fake—and they're making another one next week. Interested?"
Sand snorted. "The hell," he said. "Didn't you hear me say I got the first shipment right where I can put my finger on it?"
"So?" Malone said.
"So I can't get rid of it," Sand said. "What do I want with a new load? Every day I hold the stuff is dangerous. You never know when somebody's going to look for it and maybe find it."
"Can't get rid of it?" Malone said. This was a new turn of events. "What's happening?"
"Everything," Sand said tersely. "Look, you want to sell me some information—but you don't know the setup. Maybe when I tell you, you'll stop bothering me." He put his head in his hands, and his voice, when he spoke again, was muffled. "The contacts are gone," he said. "With the arrests and the resignations and everything else, nobody wants to take any chances; the few guys that aren't locked up are scared they will be. I can't make any kind of a deal for anything. There just isn't any action."
"Things are tough, huh?" Malone said hopelessly. Apparently even Mike Sand wasn't going to pan out for him.
"Things are terrible," Sand said. "The locals are having revolutions—guys there are kicking out the men from National Headquarters. Nobody knows where he stands any more—a lot of my organizers have been goofing up and getting arrested for one thing and another. Like apes in the trees, that's what."
Malone nodded very slowly and took another puff of the cigarette. "Nothing's going right," he said.
"Listen," Sand said. "You want to hear trouble? My account books are in duplicate—you know? Just to keep things nice and peaceful and quiet."
"One for the investigators and one for the money," Malone said.
"Sure," Sand said, preoccupied with trouble. "You know the setup. But both sets are missing. Both sets." He raised his head, the picture of witless agony. "I've got an idea where they are, too. I'm just waiting for the axe to fall."
"O.K.," Malone said. "Where are they?"
"The U. S. Attorney's Office," Sand said dismally. He stared down at his battered desk and sighed.
Malone stubbed out his cigarette. "So you're not in the market for any more buttons?" he said.
"All I'm in the market for," Sand said without raising his eyes, "is a nice, painless way to commit suicide."
Malone walked several blocks without noticing where he was going. He tried to think things over, and everything seemed to fall into a pattern that remained, agonizingly, just an inch or so out of his mental reach. The mental bursts, the trouble the United States was having, Palveri, Queen Elizabeth, Burris, Mike Sand, Dr. O'Connor, Sir Lewis Carter and even Luba Ardanko juggled and flowed in his mind like pieces out of a kaleidoscope. But they refused to form any pattern he could recognize.
He uttered a short curse and managed to collide with a bulky woman with frazzled black hair. "Pardon me," he said politely.
"The hell with it," the woman said, looking straight past
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