Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 2, January 1973

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Murder was the name of the game and you made your own rules, as Mike Shayne, marked for certain extermination, followed the lethal clue which the C.I.A. had labeled, “Death to the Finder!”

Bierny had a reputation. His place was clean, his beer was cold, and his pretzels were crisp. Bierny’s was a good place to hang a hat on a drizzly Miami Monday evening.

Unless you had a drunk balancing precariously on the stool next to you.

Michael Shayne cocked an eyebrow at the neat Bierny behind the bar and used a meaty shoulder to move the heavy back up on his stool. The heavy screwed his head around and eyed Shayne drunkenly. “You-all wanna play push, friend?”

Shayne had been warned when the guy had come into the bar. Instinct had told him to move, but he hadn’t stirred. Now he wished he had clomped his hat on his red-haired skull and left. He wasn’t in a mood to placate a drunk. He wanted to sit quietly, sip a couple of brandies, and he had thought that later in the evening he might phone Lucy Hamilton, his pert secretary, and go up to her place and listen to tapes.

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