The Detonators, page 23
That did make her angry, and we rode the rest of the way to the marina in silence. When I asked the driver how much I owed him for the long ride out and back, and the endless wait, he shook his head.
“It is all taken care of, sah… No, sah, I appreciate your kindness, but it would not be wise for me to accept any of your money. Good night, sah.”
We watched him drive away. I grimaced. “Our big friend seems to carry a lot of weight around here.”
“Back during the Civil War, the blockade-runners probably had a lot of influence, too. Matt…”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”
I looked at her standing there, slender and handsome in the darkness, in her little white dress. “Now what the hell do you want?”
She laughed softly. “Is that any way to respond to a humble apology?”
I said, “That’s just it. You’re not a humble girl, and you’re not an apologizing girl.”
She licked her lips. “I just… didn’t want us to waste what’s left of this evening being angry with each other. Come on, all this thinking and talking has made me feel sexy as hell!”
I carefully avoided looking in the direction of the building that housed the dark office, the johns, and the public phones, as she took my hand and hurried me past them, laughing—a couple of kids running out to play, or in to play. It was one of those times when you have to go by your instincts. I had some information to pass along; but my well-traveled instincts said I could be more useful by maintaining close relations with this girl and following her lead now than by stuffily rejecting her advances and insisting on making an immediate report to Washington. I’d also be taking more risk, of course; but that comes with the territory. Spindrift lay motionless and lightless in her rented slip. I jumped down and helped my companion down, and we paused in the cockpit for a lengthy and rather breathless kiss that soon threatened to get out of control.
“Oh, God, not here on that damn hard seat!” Gina gasped, freeing herself reluctantly. “I’ve got great big bruises from the last time!”
I unlocked the hatch and slid it back. When I turned back to her, she was wearing nothing but her sexy panties. The little denim number was draped over her arm and her high-heeled shoes were in her hand.
“Give me your jacket; I’ll hang it up for you, with my dress.” She touched her lips to mine again, but lightly, so as not to tease the beast inside. “Just give me a moment, please.”
“Take all the time you want,” I said. “As long as it’s no more than thirty seconds.”
She laughed and disappeared into the cabin. I wrestled off my tie and got out of my shirt and pulled off my shoes and socks, waiting. Unlike her, I wasn’t brazen enough to strip further in the open cockpit, even though the marina seemed to be totally asleep under the lights.
“All right, darling.”
I tossed the clothes I held into the cabin and followed them down. Gina had turned on a weak light in the galley; she awaited me in the dark main saloon, to use a fancy nautical name for a space that was just big enough to hold the two facing settees and the folded table. I could see that she’d dispensed with her last wispy garment, and that she’d transformed the starboard settee—mine, if it matters—into a berth, awaiting us, inviting us. She came into my arms and winced. Laughing, she bent over to figure out the tricky revolver holster, then freed the gun and tossed it onto the other settee.
“Always so many lousy preliminaries!” she gasped, coming to me again, naked and warm and eager.
Then there was a small, springy click as, embracing me, holding me, she fired the automatic hypogun we carry, which she’d got out of my jacket, into the big muscle of my rump. I had time to hope that, working hastily in bad light, she’d managed to charge the ingenious little weapon with the right capsule, the green one. The red-and-orange ones kill.
23
I awoke to daylight, thinking fuzzily that it had been the green one all right, but the green what? I seemed to be lying in a cradle, rocked like a baby; and there was something wrong with my arms and legs. The thought brought me back to full consciousness. I realized that I was tied hand and foot and lying in my usual bunk; but the bunk cloth was up, a high canvas edge that you raise—with lines that secure to padeyes overhead—to keep yourself from being thrown out in heavy weather.
Spindrift seemed to be under way. In fact, we were apparently well off shore, judging by the sea conditions. We were crashing along in a good breeze, carrying plenty of sail, as was the lady’s custom. We were on the starboard tack, making mine the high side of the vessel. The retaining canvas did save me from taking a quick trip across the cabin when we heeled to a sharp gust of wind; but it also gave me a shut-in feeling that was a bit claustrophobic.
With the commotion of the boat’s progress, I wasn’t aware that she was there until a comer of the canvas dropped and I saw her looking down at me. She had on her seagoing costume of tank top and jeans. Among the other chores we’d taken care of in Nassau was the laundry, using the marina’s coin machines; so her clothes looked fresh and clean once more. But her face was shocking, gray and drawn and skull-like, with the colorless lips twitching uncontrollably.
“Damn you!” she breathed. “Oh, damn you, damn you, damn you!”
Then she raised her hand abruptly. I saw the gleam of the little .25 automatic and tried to roll aside as she fired it at my face. Bound, and still groggy from the knockout drug, I didn’t quite make it. Something rapped me sharply on the left side of the head just above the ear. The blow was hard enough to turn the world bright red and make my extremities tingle strangely. I lost interest in making any further moves; I just lay there trying to cling to the few scraps of consciousness that remained to me. Somehow it seemed important to be there when the next bullet hit; it would be a shame to miss the great experience of dying.
I heard something clatter on the teak floor of the cabin. Strangely, I wasn’t relieved, although I realized that she’d let the gun fall, unable to make herself shoot again. But I’d been trained to be very careful with firearms and her sloppy gun handling scared and annoyed me. Dropping it like that, she undoubtedly hadn’t had sense enough to unload it first, or even set the safety. It was just as likely as not to go off, bouncing around like that. But it didn’t.
I was aware that she was lifting my head—which seemed to be a long way from my body—and stroking my face and probably getting my blood all over her nice clean jeans and undershirt. A pity.
“Oh, my God, he’s dead, I killed him!” she moaned, sitting on the bunk and rocking me in her arms. “Matt, please! Matt, dear, I didn’t mean… Well, yes, I did, but I want you to understand, darling. You’ve got to understand! I had to do it. It was the only logical thing to do! You’d have spoiled everything, but I’m sorry, sorry, sorry… Oh, God, it’s getting all over everything! But that’s crazy, dead men don’t bleed like that… Matt! Matt, wake up!”
I made my lips move. “What the hell for?” I asked thickly. “So you can shoot me again?”
She said, “Oh, God, what a mess! Where do you hide your first-aid kit?”
I said, still speaking with difficulty, “First… first the gun, please. Before we take a big roll and it slides across the cabin and goes bang. At least put the safety on. I don’t mind so much being killed intentionally, people have been trying that for years; but I’d hate to die from a stupid firearms accident. And you’d better check and see if we’re taking water, although a twenty-five-caliber bullet isn’t going to do the damage of a shotgun slug. A quarter-inch hole shouldn’t sink us very fast. And the first-aid kit is in the back of the locker with the shotgun. But first of all give me a handkerchief or a towel or something to contain the gore, will you?”
She looked at me for a moment without moving. Then she disengaged herself and stood up to look down at me. Her face was human once more; and when her mouth twitched a little, it was with a hint of amusement.
“Nothing like having the murder victim take charge at the scene of the crime,” she murmured.
“Somebody’s got to, if the murderess just sits around with her mouth open,” I said.
She reached around into the galley—on a twenty-eight-foot boat nothing is very far from anything else—and found a clean dishtowel and gave it to me. I had a hard time holding it in the right place with my arms bound together. She studied me for a moment, frowning.
She spoke carefully: “Back in the good old days when people took honor seriously, there used to be something called parole. The prisoner gave his word not to try to escape or attack his captors for a certain period. If I untie you… An hour, while we get you patched up and this cabin cleaned up?”
“You’ve got your hour,” I said, holding out my wrists.
She laughed a little sharply. “Anybody would think you were doing me a favor…”
Three-quarters of an hour later we had things pretty well under control. The little automatic had disappeared into a place of concealment unknown to me, I hoped with the safety on. We’d learned that the bullet had not achieved total penetration. After glancing off my skull, and drilling through the foam-rubber mattress and the plywood of the bunk, it had come to rest in a can of chili con carne stowed in the bin underneath after first blowing apart a can of pork and beans. Another mess to clean up. Considerable amounts of gore had been mopped off me and the woodwork. The bloody bedclothes, and Gina’s stained clothes, were soaking in cold water in a bucket in the cockpit. You’d be surprised how much red stuff you can get out of a relatively small head wound. Since I was still bare to the waist, as I’d gone to meet my love the night before, I hadn’t suffered any clothing damage. The crease in my skull was covered by a large Band-Aid.
“This is perfectly ridiculous!” Gina protested as, our labors completed, we sat in the cockpit, where it was hoped the fresh air would help my headache. “Sitting here like this, as if we were friends or something… I tried to kill you!”
“Join the club,” I said.
“It was the only logical thing to do,” she said. “It still is!”
Spindrift was driving right along under a blue Bahama sky under the guidance of the autopilot. We were in deep water, by the color, a rich dark blue except for an occasional whitecap. We were heading east. There was land to the south, a low islet of some kind, and a ship on the horizon to the north, presumably heading for Nassau behind us. Astern, to be nautical about it. Gina was wearing her wide, pleated khaki shorts and a striped red-and-white jersey, little more than a fancy T-shirt. Her nipples showed clearly through the thin knit stuff. But that, I told myself, was quite irrelevant.
“In that case, how soon can I expect to get shot again?” I said.
The eyes she turned on me were wide and dark. “No,” she said. “I can’t do it again. I can’t go through that again! I spent most of the night sitting right here telling myself it was the only thing. Telling myself I had to do it, I must do it. Telling myself there was no choice, not after…”
“After what?” I asked when she hesitated.
“This,” she said, taking a small piece of paper from her pocket. It looked familiar. “When you went back to Grieg, when he called you back like that, I knew he’d figured out a way to make trouble. Even though he had his money, my money, our money, he still wanted to hit back at me. Well, I was right, wasn’t I? And we can’t afford to have the position of Ring Cay become public knowledge, at least not for another few days.” With a glance at me, she tore the paper into small fragments, held up her hand, and let the wind take them off to leeward. “There!” she said. And then she sighed. “Of course that doesn’t help much, does it? You could easily have memorized it.”
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t memorized it; there hadn’t been time. I said, “You don’t have to make a big mess with a gun. You seem to know all about that drug kit I carry, and I suppose you’ve still got it around somewhere. There’s some pretty lethal stuff in there you could use. Wait till I’m asleep and slip it into me. No fuss, no bother.”
“You’re making fun of me!” She grimaced. “You know I’m through, finished. I couldn’t possibly work myself up to that again. And it’s so ridiculously sentimental. One man’s life, for God’s sake! One man who can wreck everything. And it isn’t as if I were a great humanitarian, for God’s sake! After all, you don’t hire somebody like Albert Pope, Alfred Minister, if you have a great, tender concern for human life!”
I said, “I knew a pilot who’d flown the Flying Fortresses during World War Two, dumping death and destruction all over Germany. So finally the flak got his plane, and he bailed out. On the ground, he ran into a German soldier. He had his trusty forty-five out, and he probably could have gotten away, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a man, not face-to-face like that, in spite of all the people he’d helped kill by remote control, so to speak.”
“What happened to him?”
“The German shot him, of course. And he wound up in a prison camp and came home crippled and sick and wasn’t much use after that.”
“Are you trying to talk me into murdering you?”
As she’d said, it was a crazy situation, and a crazy conversation, considering that all that kept me from overpowering her, sitting there, was a splitting headache and a shaky promise. However, she was no use to me as my prisoner, unless I wanted to go through a grim interrogation routine; and even then I’d have a hard time forcing her to get me into the place I wanted to penetrate. I had a better chance of reaching my goal as her prisoner; but I had to throw out enough of a verbal smoke screen to prevent her from guessing what I had in mind.
I said, “No, I just want you to face what you can do and what you can’t, so we know where we stand. Incidentally, I’m not much good at latitude and longitude, and I don’t have that position memorized.”
It was an out for her. If I didn’t know where Ring Cay was, I didn’t need to be killed. I could see that she wanted to believe me; but she said suspiciously, “I’m supposed to take your word for that?”
“You took my word for something else.”
She glanced at her watch. “Yes, and your time is almost up. Were you hoping I’d forget? Get below so I can tie you up again, there’s a good boy.”
Lying in my bunk once more, properly hog-tied, I asked, “What happens in a few days? You said nobody must know about Ring Cay for another few days.” When she shook her head and didn’t answer, I tried another question: “What is this Ring Cay, anyway? A perfect circle of an island surrounding an emerald lagoon?”
Gina laughed. “No, there is a lagoon, of course, that’s the whole point, but it’s rather long and skinny. The name comes from the massive old iron rings set into the rocks on both sides. They were used to secure the hurricane chains that ran across the bottom to snag the anchor of a ship and keep it from dragging ashore in a bad blow. Of course the underwater chains have all rusted away by this time, but the rings on shore are still there.”
“If Ring Cay is as far down in the Bahamas boonies as everybody seems to think, it’s an out-of-the-way place for a hurricane harbor,” I said.
“Yes. It’s an out-of-the-way place because it was originally prepared and used by some out-of-the-way people. We’re told that the pirate Blackbeard rode out a storm there once.”
“Sure, right alongside Captain Blood as portrayed by Errol Flynn!”
She shrugged. “I admit it could be just another Teach legend.”
“Now you’re showing off. It isn’t everybody who knows that Blackbeard’s name was Teach.”
She smiled faintly, then stopped smiling. “Matt…”
“Yes?”
“We’ve established that I’m incapable of killing you, haven’t we? So please don’t try anything… anything drastic, my dear. I’ve got to keep you from communicating with anybody for a little while, just in case you’re lying about what you remember and what you don’t; anyway, I can be most useful to our project by keeping you prisoner until it’s too late for you to interfere. But I think I can arrange it so you won’t be hurt, if you just refrain from playing any of the violent tricks I’m sure you’re dreaming up right now. Please?” Then she looked up quickly. “Oh, Christ, a wind shift! Just lie there and be good, darling.”
She’d sensed it before I had; and she was halfway up the companionway ladder before the boat rose to an even keel and the canvas broke into wild flapping overhead. I heard the rattle of the mainsheet blocks and the ratchety clatter of the jibsheet winch as she trimmed the sails to the new breeze, working, by the sound of it, as quickly and expertly as ever.
She was quite a woman, but I couldn’t forget the mad skull face she’d showed me less than an hour earlier, or the shot that should have killed me. And I couldn’t forget a man who’d been eaten—well, half eaten—by a shark; or a terribly damaged lady in a wheelchair, put there by a gent now working for Mrs. Georgina Williston and her friends. I didn’t think I’d better take her hopeful remarks about my future too seriously.
I noted that she hadn’t used any of the synthetic rope on board to tie me with. It’s all nylon and Dacron on shipboard these days, nylon where elasticity is wanted and Dacron where it isn’t. Modern cordage is a lot springier and slicker than old-fashioned sisal and manila. It’s stronger and it lasts longer, but it doesn’t hold knots nearly so well. Houdini could have freed himself from the new stuff in his sleep. But Gina had used sail ties to immobilize me: lengths of soft white one-inch tape of coarsely woven and immensely strong material designed to stay tied around the furled canvas even under hurricane conditions. Smart girl. However, while she knew her ropes and knots, she hadn’t searched me quite thoroughly enough. I had a trick or two left to use, if necessary; but for the moment I had every intention of being a model prisoner.
During the course of the afternoon we went through the awkward feeding routine and the embarrassing peeing routine. Later, I was aware of a change in our course. I wasn’t invited on deck again, but I hoisted myself up to take a peek through the nearest cabin port. The position of the sun indicated that we were now heading southward. There were no islands in sight, but the water around us was not the rich blue I’d seen earlier. Even though it was roughened by the brisk breeze driving us, I could see that it was lighter and kind of mottled, reflecting the colors of a bottom that ranged from the brightness of sand to the darkness of weeds. It seemed frighteningly close under the broken surface, as if we were driving heedlessly across a sea barely deep enough to float us; but it was actually, I guessed, between fifteen and twenty feet down. Anyway, I’d made it at last; I was sailing on the famous Bahama banks.
