"Tell Millis that if there is anything at all I can do, she need only ask."
After I parked my blue pickup and walked back to the Flush, I opened the little panel to see if I"d had visitors while I was away. I was so used to finding nothing wrong that I stood staring stupidly at the unlikely object which had been placed inside the recessed area where the lighted bulbs were. It was a stick figure of a cat made of red pipe cleaners, with whiskers made of nylon fishline. The bulbs were all lighted. I"d had no visitors who broke in, at least. If it was a message, the meaning eluded me.
And when I showed it to Meyer ten minutes later, it did not mean anything to him either, nor had I expected it to.
It was a clear day, chilly in the shade, hot in the bright sunlight, even at quarter to four. Meyer lay supine on a sun cot on my sun deck, his heavy chest pelt glistening with sweat from the exercises I"d talked him into. Meyer equates exercise with obligatory games and all the other enforced boredoms of childhood. But he is never in as bad shape as I expect him to be. I have accused him of secret calisthenics and he looks at me as if I had accused him of watching General Hospital or Dallas. He says his semifitness, a rubbery condition at best, is an inherited characteristic.
I sat in the lotus position on a beach towel on the deck, my back to the late sun as I replaced a broken eyelet on a boat rod, winding the waxed linen around and around and around.
"Jornalero could have been half right," he said from under the straw hat that shaded his face.
"Half right about what?"
"He wouldn"t have to have any direct connection with the trade. He"s perfectly set up to be a laundryman. If he could absorb two hundred million a year, spread it around the world and bring it back in as wages and bonuses and dividends and fees, he might earn three percent on the transactions, which would be six million."
"Somebody would have to trust him with the money."
"So he would know where it came from. Which, in a sense, would make him a part of the whole mess, wouldn"t it?"
"He"s very impressive. I"d trust him with money"
"From what he said, do you have any clue as to what could have happened?"
"I think he thought somebody got impatient. They got too eager to show some results and make the people in Peru happy. And it made him angry.
"That would fit," Meyer said. "From October into late December, with nothing happening. So they make some moves just to be doing something, whether it makes any sense or not."
"Maybe he can fix it. But I"m not going to unwrap any gifts."
"Why should they send gifts when they can put a man with a rifle and a scope sight on any of those roofs over there?"
I looked over my shoulder at the roofs on the high buildings beyond the boat basin. When you aim down at a forty-five-degree angle, you cut the estimate of distance in half. That keeps it from throwing too high. The effect of gravity on the slug is diminished by the angle. I felt a circle of ice as big as a silver dollar three inches below the nape of my neck.
My little ch.o.r.e was done anyway. I had tied off the heavy thread. All that remained was the sh.e.l.lac, and I could do that below. I gathered up the towel and the spool of thread, the knife and the broken eyelet. When I turned to face the distant buildings, the circle of ice slid around my body as I turned, and ended up on the left side of my chest. I forced a yawn, and for an instant the ice was in the back of my throat, then reappeared on my chest.
"Sun"s about gone," I said.
"If you say so," said Meyer.
I went below. He went back to his beamy cruiser to await the arrival from the airport of one of his female executive friends, a California lady who owns vineyards and sends him the occasional case of rare vintage wine. According to Meyer, whenever he takes her over to the islands, they sit around and discuss economic trends and international trade. And drink wine. Whatever happens, I do know that each one of his lady executive friends believes in her heart that she is the great love of Meyer"s whole life. It shows when they say good-by. And in Meyer"s special way, perhaps it is true. They all are. Not that there have ever been that many of them. Six perhaps. Or seven.
And that evening when I wasn"t thinking about dying, I nearly did. Again.
Nine.
I HAD planned to stay aboard that Thursday night. Christmas and New Year"s Eve had been duds. I had long ago given up expecting too much of them. But this time it was even less than usual. The little toss with Millis had made me feel listless and grubby. I had been reading Lewis Thomas and for the first time he depressed me, even when he said that the glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone"s desire to be useful. Maybe I had a desire to be useful which had no outlet.
For once there was such a fat sum in the hidey-hole that the next segment of my retirement stretched into the misty future. But I couldn"t think of any way I wanted to spend it. Maybe get on an airplane and fly to Peru. Airplanes made me think of the Mick, and reminded me that I hadn"t warned him of the remote chance of something unpleasant happening to him too. For once he answered instead of his machine.
After I finished telling him why it might be well for him to keep his back against the wall, he told me I wasn"t making very much sense. I told him that a lot of things weren"t making good sense lately, but that"s the way the world was at the moment. All over the planet, I told him, people were -trying to make sense out of chaos.
"What are you drinking?" he asked me.
"At the moment, coffee."
"Keep right on with it, pal," he said, and hung up.
Ten seconds later came the muted bong as somebody trod on the mat at the head of my stubby gangplank to the aft deck, and moments later a fast rapping on the door to the lounge, and a voice calling, "Hey, Trav! Hey, McGee!"
It was Annabelle Everett, with a wide happy smile and a bottle of chilled domestic champagne, to tell me she had, that morning, gone to work in a travel agency, loved the people she was working with, had found the computer easy to operate and was going to move in with one of the girls who worked there because the one who had quit, whose job she had taken, was getting married and moving out to Texas. Annabelle was on a high. I got out the ice bucket and opened the champagne and put on some music. She had gotten all her morale back in one fell swoop. So she wanted to celebrate with one person who had tried to tell her that marrying Stu the weatherman was not a really outstanding idea.
The champagne was slightly acidic, and later on at the steak house the steaks were stringy, the drinks watery, but nothing could quell her spirits. I drove her back to her sixth-floor walk-up apartment in that dying condominium, the Plaza del Rio, walked up with her and went in on invitation. She was beginning to unravel at the edges. Her eyes began wobbling. I insisted we have one more little drink. She had some cheap scotch and I made hers stiff. Then I took my time drinking my weak one. When I had finished I took our gla.s.ses out into the small kitchen and rinsed them and put them upside down on the drainboard.
I checked the bedroom and found a king-size bed. I turned it down, went out and gathered her up and carried her in and put her on the bed. I felt very prim and sanctimonious. And then I realized that, after all, she had been celebrating, and she had made it clear what she wanted the end of the evening to be. I shook her to make certain she couldn"t wake up, and then I stripped her and left her clothes in what would look like hasty disarray, some on the floor, some on a chair. I covered her up, then rumpled up the bed, both on her side and on what was intended to be mine.
I found a lipstick and wrote on her bathroom mirror: "Thanks for everything, Trav." I left a night light on and let myself out, making certain the door locked when I closed. it. After all, a girl needs her pride.
I was so pleased with myself I almost missed the slight movement of a shadow in the condo parking area. The parking area had not been lighted at night for a long time. What light there was came from the high white glare of a fast-food enterprise a half block away. Half the area was in blackness, and in the other half, where I had parked, the distant light made long black shadows on the broken asphalt, shadows of the cars and the overgrown bushes. There were maybe twenty cars in the lot, and they were parked fairly close together in that part of the lot closest to the entrance.
I backed up and waited for a car to start up, or for the sound of someone breaking into a car. Caution is a habit, dearly acquired. Caution must be accompanied, whenever required, by the necessary flow of adrenaline, to make the machinery work all the better. I was in the best shape of the past two years. I am gifted from birth with a lot of quick. The hand-eye coordination is better than most. The four inches over six feet provides leverage. Looking slow and lazy helps also.
When nothing happened, I eased along the side of the building, staying in blackness, feeling ahead with each foot before putting my weight on it. The shadow could have been a neighborhood dog, angling across the area. When I reached the rear corner of the building, I waited again. There was a faint light from the other direction, and if I went further I would step out into it. My night vision was improving the longer I waited. I could see the outline of my Rolls pickup. And as I watched it, the outline changed. A man was on the far side of it, moving from the cab toward the tailgate, moving from my left to my right. I saw a faint red arc as he lifted a cigarette into view above the truck bed, moved it to his mouth and lowered it again, then turned and walked back. When his silhouette disappeared behind the cab, I ran silently toward the dark shadow of the nearest car, bending low, running at half speed. It was three cars from my own. The only way I could avoid the light was to work my way under the cars. I stretched out on my back and, eased under two cars, pulling myself along by finding handholds on the undersides of the cars.
I crouched quietly in the shadow of the car parked next to mine.
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h"ll probably stay up there with her and screw her all night."
The voice was startlingly close. A bad-tempered voice, muttering. And too close. I did not understand it until I felt the car I was touching move slightly. The voice was sitting in the car. I made myself smaller against the side of the car.
"Shut your face, Sully." a thinner, higher voice said. It was inside the car also. It had the flavor of command.
There was a sc.r.a.pe of leather on hardpan, and then a third voice, and I guessed it was Cigarette moving over from my truck to the far side of the sedan. "What"s with the conversation, guys?" His voice was soft and guarded.
"Sully"s getting tired of waiting."
"So am I," Cigarette said. "Want we should go up there and take him?"
"Forget it," said the voice of command. "Too much can go wrong."
Sully said, "We were lucky nothing went wrong already, the way you followed so close."
"Knock it off, both of you. Cappy wants it done soon as we can. An accident. Shut up and wait." I spent ten silent minutes wondering what the h.e.l.l I was going to do next. Three of them, planning to give me a fatal accident. Let me count the ways. I had not spotted anyone following me. I am always on the watch for a tail. So the man was good. Maybe he had the car rigged for two sets of headlights. That would do it, at night.
Sully made my mind up for me. "I"m going to get out and move around some."
"Go ahead."
He got out my side. It was a four-door sedan, and he opened the back door as I squirmed back away from him. If he headed toward the rear of the car, I was fine for the moment. But he came toward me and his knee hit my shoulder. As he grunted with surprise, I lunged up and grabbed him by the clothing and yanked him down, turning him as I brought him down, turning him away from the car, using leverage to drop him on his back. His head made a melony sound against the hardpan and he went loose. Somebody yelled, and as I got up, I drove my shoulder into the reopening door of the car, hammering it shut. But it didn"t slam. It bounced off something, and a man screamed so loudly I guessed that he had his hand on the doorframe to pull himself up out of the seat. I scooted around the back end of the sedan, looking hard and fast for Cigarette. Nowhere in sight. I froze and then, as I heard a grunt of effort behind me, I dropped with the top of my left shoulder ablaze, swung my legs around and kicked his legs out from under him. As he went down I saw the glint of the blade in his hand. I bounded up before he did, and kicked him in the face with the side of my shoe as he started up. He rolled all the way over and ended up on his hands and knees, and so I kicked him again. Hands can be fragile. Broken hands hurt like sin. He ended up on his back, knife tinkling away under one of the cars. I didn"t want to stay for names and serial numbers. I didn"t know how badly I was bleeding. I piled into the pickup, started it in a hurry and backed out in a big swing, turning my lights on as I started forward. The one I had thumped first came wobbling out from beyond the other car. He came right out in front of the pickup, then tried to turn and run, but he entangled his feet and fell. I swerved away from the major portion of him, but my right front wheel went over both his knees, making a sickening celery sound, accompanied by a high gargling scream.
I kept checking myself on the fast ride back, listening to see if I felt faint or dizzy. My shirt was sopping wet in the shoulder area. I got aboard without incident, peeled the shirt off as soon as I was aboard and b.u.t.toned up.
Then I checked myself with mirrors. It was such a tiny gouge I almost felt let down. I had ducked almost all the way beneath the thrust. It had sliced the very top ridge of the muscle, torn some nerves, opened some blood vessels, but could almost be covered by a Band-Aid. I held cold-water pads on it until the bleeding stopped, and then used a mild antiseptic and pulled the edges together with narrow strips of tape. It was awkward having to work using the mirror, and the final product looked clumsy, but it was a lot better than where he had wanted to plant the blade-right to the hilt, six inches lower. And how had they planned to make that look like an accident? Maybe they had planned an accident so totally messy n.o.body would notice a knife wound.
I stretched out and unwound with a flagon of Boodles and ice. I had ruined one hand, one set of knees and the lower half of a face. Three men, one of whom was named Sully, taking orders from someone named Cappy. Reasonably competent professionals waiting for me in the dark, to inflict an accidental death. Maybe Jornalero had not moved quickly enough. Or had not believed me. At least I could give Jornalero a name now. And I could watch him closely to see what happened when I gave him the name.
On Friday morning Jornalero saw me immediately. He said it was a beautiful morning. No dispute. Bright and cool. He said he had been up very early for a sunrise sail on his catamaran. He said that his resolution for the new year was to do more sailing and get in better shape. I said my resolution was to keep breathing.
"Is there any reason to think you might not, Mr. McGee?"
I told him my three reasons. I could not give good descriptions of the men, but I had noticed that it was a recent dark-colored, four-door Pontiac, license USL 901. And the three men discussed giving me an accidental death on the orders of one Cappy. The only other name I had was Sully, who would probably never walk really well again. The expression on his face showed dismay and concern.
"I don"t understand this at all," he said. "I was told there could have been a misunderstanding and I said that it would be wise to correct it, and I was told that it would be corrected right away. Would you please go back out to reception while I make a few phone calls."
It was a long fifteen minutes before he sent for me. He seemed depressed: "Sit down, Mr. McGee. Certain people found your performance last night impressive. I must say that I do too."
"I made a call last night to a friend to see if it was police business, but there was no sheet on it, so I guess they didn"t check into a Lauderdale hospital."
"They managed to drive to... a different city. They"re receiving medical attention."
"Why the foul-up?"
"I"m very sorry, but I have been told not to discuss this with you any further."
"What the h.e.l.l does that mean?"
"They want to settle for you. And close the books."
"Look, does anybody disagree that Billy didn"t order the killings and I didn"t do them?"
"I think it"s understood."
"Then why, d.a.m.n it?"
"Let"s just say it cleans up a certain situation."
"There are men doing life in the slam because somebody wanted to clean up a certain situation."
"Precisely."
"And you are not kidding me?"
"I am telling you more than I should. I will even suggest to you that you take the money you received for recovering that yacht, and go away for a year or two."
"Can you introduce me to somebody I can talk to about this mess?"
"Out of the question. Sorry I can"t be of any more help." He stood up. My signal to go.
"I have the funny feeling, Arturo, you would have helped if you could."
"Sometimes there are no choices," he said.
I kept hearing him say that as I drove through heavy traffic out of the city and north on the Interstate. I could eliminate my choices one by one. Go to the authorities? And what seems to be the trouble, sir? Well, some people want to kill me. Why is that? Because I located a boat with dead people on it. Did you kill them? No, sir. Oh, I see. They think you did? No, they know I didn"t. Then why do they want to kill you? I think because they have to kill somebody-just to show they"re on the job. Okay, who are these people? I haven"t any idea. How do you know they want to kill you? They keep trying. I see. Mr. McGee, I am going to arrange an appointment for you with a man whose job it is to listen to people"s troubles and problems.
Or I could undo the umbilical cords that affix the Busted Flush to the slip, and head down around the peninsula and somewhere up the other side. Find a place where I could anchor out, and use the dinghy for sh.o.r.eside supplies, live small and careful. And longer.
Or close up the Flush and fly to Cairns up there at the top end of Australia. Summer there, and the fishing is good. Walk over to the aquarium at feeding time and study the dwarf crocodiles and think about Jornalero"s a.s.sociates. Sample the brawny Australian beach la.s.sies who can windsurf all day without tiring a single muscle.
Hang around and let them keep trying.
When I walked out to the Flush I found a man sitting on the finger pier, legs dangling, staring at the Flush and tapping cigar ashes into the water. He looked fat, but from the way he carne to his feet, all in one motion, I knew he was in better shape than he looked. He wore a blue work shirt and khaki pants, a Greek seaman"s cap and thick leather sandals. He was short and broad with a square jaw, no neck, a deep red sunburn, small brown eyes, deep-set, white eyebrows and lashes.
I was a good ten inches taller than he. He tilted his head and looked up at me and said, barely moving his lips, "Three four nine one two three eight. In ten minutes. Now point to something over near the motel."
I did as asked. He thanked me, touched his cap and went trudging away. I called that number ten minutes later.
"h.e.l.lo?"
"This is McGee."
"Trav, how the h.e.l.l are you? Tommy T. told me to look you up when I got here."
"How is old Tom?"
"He"s fine. You going to be aboard about eight? I want to just stop on by and say h.e.l.lo."
"I"ll be right here."
"Great! See you." Whoever he was, he was careful.
Even though my security system indicated n.o.body had been aboard, I checked the whole houseboat carefully. And when I was through I put on snorkel and fins and took the big underwater light and checked the hull and all the adjacent pilings. I came up shivering and took a hot shower. And then there was nothing to do but cook something and wait for the man in the Greek hat.
Ten.
I LEFT one dim fantail light on. He tapped at the door at three minutes past eight. Same careful fellow. Or maybe not careful enough. I opened the door and he said, "My name is Browder."
"McGee," I said, and stuck my hand out. He took it and I pulled him in and held tight as Meyer slid in behind him, closed the door with one hand and jabbed him once in the back with the barrel of my Colt Diamondback and then moved back away from him to what I had told Meyer is a safe and appropriate distance.