Scorpion Reef (9 page)

A voice said, “All right, Jack. Break it up and turn around.”

I was so tight and the tension broke so suddenly I was conscious of an almost hysterical impulse to giggle over the idea I knew now he’d heard her say Bill, all right, because he called me Jack.

Instead, that is, of just shooting me without bothering to say anything.

I turned. A light burst in my face, and another voice I would know anywhere remarked with urbane weariness, “I say, you people are oversexed, aren’t you?”

Two thoughts caught up with me at once. The first was that they hadn’t heard us and didn’t suspect anything. Her reaction time had been so fast they’d caught us kissing, just what you’d have expected of two people in a parked car along the beach. That was good.

But it was the second one that pulled the ground from under me. They had that light in my face. They’d be blind if they didn’t see the marks that pug had left on it.

I had never been more right. “Hmmmm,” Barclay said softly, somewhere in the darkness. “So that’s where he went.”

I didn’t say anything. I could feel the hair prickle along the back of my neck.

“Came to see you, didn’t he?”

“Who?” I asked, just stalling for time. I had to think of something. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t be dense, if you don’t mind. Chap you hit, up at the lake.”

If I denied it they wouldn’t believe me, anyway, and when he didn’t show up they’d go out there and ask the watchmen. They’d know then I’d done something to him. There was a better way: talk like a loud-mouthed fool, and admit it. It didn’t have much chance, but at least it had more than the other.

“If that’s who you mean,” I said. “He did. I guess you haven’t seen
his
face. And that’s not all. If you don’t keep him out of my hair he’s going to be bent worse than that the next time you get him back.”

“Where is he now?”

“How would I know?” I said. “Was he supposed to tell me his plans?”

It was creepy. I was scared and in a bad spot, trying to talk like Mike Hammer, and to nobody. There was just that light glaring in my face and a whole universe of blackness around it.

“Well, it isn’t important,” he said. “But there’s another matter. We’re about to suggest that you leave town, Manning, and do it immediately. These sylvan assignations of yours and Mrs. Macaulay’s are becoming something of a nuisance; this is twice we’ve been led on a fool’s errand just to find you rutting about the landscape. Get out of the car.”

I didn’t want to, but I got out. I heard her shaky indrawn breath as I closed the door. “
No. No. No—
”

It was a good, cold-blooded, professional job. Nobody said anything. Nobody became excited. I never did even know for sure how many there were besides Barclay. I swung at the first dark shape I saw, because I had to do something; the blackjack sliced down across the muscles of my upper arm and it became a dangling, inert sausage stuffed with pain. They pulled both arms behind me and bent me back and slugged me in the stomach. At first I tightened the abdominal muscles in time to the cadenced beat of it,
slug
, swing,
slug
, but after a while I lost even the power to do that. Somewhere far off I could hear her crying out and opening the car door, but then somebody pushed her and she fell.

When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared in my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.

I
TRIED TO ROLL OVER.
I was conscious she was on her knees beside me, helping.

“The animals,” she said. “The filthy—unspeakable-animals—” Her voice broke.

When I could sit up I slid backward and sat propped against the side of the car while the waves of sickness subsided. My whole right arm prickled and felt numb except for the hard welt of pain above the elbow, and I couldn’t move the hand. I rubbed it with the left. She sat down on the sand beside me, took the arm gently in her hands, and massaged it.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. The left hand clenched, down against the ground, and sand ran between my fingers. I opened and tightened it again, and swallowed, conscious of the dry, metallic taste in my mouth. After another deep breath some of the shaking went away. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just fell down.” In a minute we got back in the car and sat down. She lit a cigarette for me; I held it in my left hand and tried to work some feeling into the right. I could hear the surf swishing dreamily behind us. All the violence had washed out of the night as suddenly as it had come. They’d given me their little demonstration and were gone. They didn’t have to stick around and tell me what would happen if they caught me again. That was understood. And in just a few more hours they were going to start wondering what had happened to that little thug. When they did they’d come and ask me.

Some of the numbness was leaving my arm now and I could drive. We started back. Neither of us said anything about the way I had kissed her when she put on that act for them. It would only be embarrassing. “What did Macaulay do to them?” I asked. She hesitated.

“It’s all right,” I said. “If it’s none of my business—”

“No,” she said slowly, staring ahead at the headlights probing the edge of the surf. “It isn’t that. It’s just that I don’t know the whole story myself.”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Most of it. But not all. He says I’ll be safer if I never know. It happened about three months ago. He had to go to the Coast on business, for about a week, he said. But three days later he called me late one night, from San Antonio, Texas. I could tell he was under a bad strain. He said for me to pack some bags, put as much of our stuff in the car as I could, and leave right away for Denver. He didn’t explain; he just said he was in trouble and for me to get out of New York fast.

“I did, and he met me in Denver. He said it was something that happened at a party he went to, in some suburb of Los Angeles. I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but he finally admitted a man had been killed, and he had seen it—”

“But,” I said, “all he has to do is go to the police. They’ll protect him. He’s a material witness.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “One of the people involved is a police captain.”

“Oh,” I said.

It sounded too easy and too pat, but on the other hand there wasn’t any doubt she was telling the truth. I tried to discount the fact I’d probably have believed her if she’d told me the other side of the moon was an amusement park, but it still came out the same way. She wasn’t lying. But what about Macaulay himself?

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Eight years.”

“And he’s been with that marine insurance firm all the time?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s been with them ever since he came out of law school, back in the thirties, except for three years in the service during the war.”

I shook my head. There was nothing in that. We came into town. The traffic lights were flashing amber now, and the street-sweeping trucks were out. I stopped beside her car and got out with her. She put out her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “It’ll be bad, waiting for that card.”

There was nobody on the street. I was still holding her hand, hating to see her leave. Then I remembered the awkward thing I’d said in that bar as a result of looking at her like this, and let it drop. “Don’t go out of the house at night while I’m gone,” I said. “If you have to come downtown, do it during rush hours when there are lots of people on the streets.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

“If you see a car behind you on the way home, don’t worry about it. It’ll be mine.”

I followed her out. It was an upper-bracket suburb out near the country club. She pulled into a drive and stopped under a carport beside a two-storied Mediterranean house with a tile roof and ironwork balconies. I stopped at the curb, looking along the streets where the old, peaceful trees made shadowy patterns in the lights and all the lawns were sleek and well-kept. Violence? Here? Then I turned my head and stared at the house across the street. The windows were all dark. But they were in there, watching her as she got out of the car and fumbled in her bag for the key. She waved a white-gloved hand, and went inside.

I went on, looking the place over. It was the second house from the corner. I turned at the intersection and drove slowly down the side street. There was an alley behind the house. A car was parked diagonally across the street from the mouth of it, in the shadows under the trees, and as I went past I saw a man’s elbow move slightly in the window. They had it covered front and back. There’d be one at the other end of the alley.

All I had to do was get Macaulay out of there alive. And by that time they’d be after me, too.

I drove the car out on the pier and as I got out I thought of him down there somewhere below me in the impenetrable blackness of night and silt-laden water, and for a moment he wasn’t a vicious little hoodlum but just somebody who’d been alive a few hours ago looking at sunlight and feeling hungry and thinking about girls and inhaling smoke from a cigarette. I brushed it away savagely. There wasn’t any time for being morbid about a dead gangster. I’d be dead myself very shortly if I didn’t get out of there.

I hurried down the ladder. The waterway was dark and still, like a jungle river, and it was hot in the thick clots of shadow below the side of the pier. When I opened the door and went inside the trapped air was stifling. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three.

I went out in the galley and put some water on to heat in the big electric percolator, and then examined my face in the bathroom mirror. The puffy places were worse. That was all right, leaving here, because I wanted them to remember me, but I had to start work on them so they’d be gone by the time I returned. My stomach felt as if I’d been run over by a tank, but at least that wouldn’t show.

While I was waiting for the water to heat I pulled the bag from under my bunk and began to pack. Carter was going to think I was a sad bastard, quitting with ten minutes’ notice, but if I wanted eulogies I could stick around and there’d be lots of them at the funeral. I shaved, and put the toilet gear in the bag. The clothes hanging in the bathroom were still wet. I rolled them in a newspaper and packed them anyway.

The water was hot. I poured it into a pan and started a new batch heating. Sitting on the side of the bunk with the pan before me on a chair, I shoved the hand in and let it soak until it was as red as fire coral while I squeezed out a cloth with the left and held it against the puffed places on my face. It was intensely still except for the humming of the fan, and the minute I stopped moving and planning the room was full of her. Knowing it was absurd didn’t make any difference. She was everywhere.

She slid toward me and I kissed her again with that odd sensation of being suddenly overrun and flooded with her like a compartment below water line when the bulkhead buckles under pressure of the sea. One minute there’d been only that unstoppable trickle of her running through the mind, and the next I was drowning in her.

Nuts
, I thought irritably. Who ever heard of anything as stupid? And there was another slight matter. She was Macaulay’s wife. Maybe I should try to work that into my thoughts from time to time so it didn’t elude me altogether.

Who was Macaulay? I stared at a parboiled hand in a basin of water, looking for Macaulay, and found nothing at all. There wasn’t even the framework on which to start building a Macaulay. An executive in an insurance firm who was being hunted down by gangsters who wanted to kill him—what did you get from that?

Nothing.

He could fly a plane. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her how it happened he could fly? Of course, lots of people could nowadays; maybe I was the only one left who couldn’t. But flying came in sizes. Even I could see that. Hopping a Piper Cub sixty miles from Booster’s Junction to East Threadbare along two sets of railroad tracks and a six-lane highway was one thing; taking off across 500 miles of empty Gulf and God knows how many miles of green broadloom jungle was something else. You had to be a good dead-reckoning navigator, and you had to know you were good, to tackle it.

And if he knew exactly where that crashed plane was, he wasn’t only a good navigator—he was a superb one. Of course, she had said it was within sight of the coast, but that didn’t mean much. One part of a coast line can have a hellish knack of looking just like another part of a coast line, even when you’re approaching it under sail at five knots, and I imagined it was a lot more so when it was flying back toward you at a hundred miles an hour. Of course, you were higher; but that probably didn’t help a great deal. You could just see more things you were probably wrong about.

Then suddenly I thought of something else that was odd. The plane was in sixty feet of water, but still it was within sight of land, near enough to see some landmark to identify the spot. Off Yucatan? I’d never been down there, but I’d seen it on the charts plenty of times, and it was my impression the ten-fathom curve was a lot farther out than that. I shrugged. Maybe she had meant something else was near enough to get a bearing on, an old wreck, or a shoal.

I went on soaking the hand and holding hot compresses on my face. At dawn I drove out to the nearest cafe and drank some coffee. I was beginning to feel people behind me now. It had been nearly twelve hours since he’d disappeared.

I drove downtown to the bus station. There’d be an eastbound bus at 10:35.1 got in line with a few other people at the window. When my turn came I asked for a ticket to New York. After the man had filled in the blanks on a yard of paper and stamped it in half a dozen places I looked in my wallet and made the awful discovery I was seven dollars short of the price.

Actually I had it, of course, but I slapped all my pockets and turned them out and looked stupidly through my wallet three or four times while the line behind me grew longer and people began to mutter. I milked it until his patience began to wear thin, and then told him to set the ticket aside and I’d be back later with the rest of the money.