The Detonators (31 page)

“It’s ten thirty-five,” she said.

“Night or day?”

“Night. That’s what comes after beans. Day is what comes after eggs. That’s how you tell, in here. You’ll learn.”

There was wry humor in her voice, and she seemed to be a person whose acquaintance might be worth cultivating; but my mind was clearing only slowly, and I could consider only one subject at a time. Ten thirty-five p.m. Only four hours and a little since the needle had gone into my arm. Beautiful.

I found myself grinning at the thought of how neatly my handsome lady navigator had tricked me, leading me to think we still had some ten hours of sailing left, when apparently she’d brought us well within sight of our destination before dropping the anchor. I remembered the islands surrounding us and realized that I’d probably been looking at Ring Cay without knowing it as I tidied up
Spindrift
’s deck, waiting for my honorable parole to expire while she caught up on her sleep below. Then a pleasant dinner to throw me further off guard, and some quick work with the spring-loaded hypo while I was still expecting to have the whole night in which to make my final preparations. A short run under power in the fading evening, light; and here we all were in Blackbeard’s old storm harbor.

“Are you all right?” the girl above me asked, perhaps suspecting hysteria. “What’s funny? If there’s a joke, please share it. I haven’t had a laugh in a long time.”

“Private joke,” I said. “Too long to explain.”

When I looked at her directly at last, she stirred with embarrassment and said rather stiffly, “It’s been known to take a bath, given the opportunity. When properly scrubbed and dressed, it bears a close resemblance to a female human being.”

One day I’m going to have one of those assignments that involve nothing but lovely perfumed ladies in gorgeous gowns, but this obviously wasn’t it. Not that the girl was unattractive, although it was a little hard to tell at the moment. She’d presumably started out a week or two ago as a neat and clean and pleasant, if somewhat sturdy, young woman with blond hair cut off straight across her forehead and below the ears. The fine hair had undoubtedly been smooth and shining then, but it was soiled and tangled now. Her snub-nosed face hadn’t been washed for a long time. Her light-blue T-shirt was stenciled in black across the front: i’d rather be sailing. It was rather spectacularly grimy, as were her white linen shorts; and there were splotches of what looked like dried blood, although I could see no injuries. A gold wedding band and a small diamond looked out of place on her dirty hand. When she spoke, her nice even teeth looked very white in her dirty face. Her eyes were blue.

“It isn’t nice to stare,” she said. “You might embarrass the girl… No, please rest a little longer. You’re too big for me to catch if you start to pass out and fall over.”

I said, “
Carmen Saiz
?”

She laughed. “Heavens, no, do I look Spanish?… Oh, the ship? Yes, that’s right, I think somebody did say that was the name of it. If you want to call this beat-up seagoing relic a ship.”

“Mrs. Brennerman? Mrs. Molly Brennerman?”

That startled her a little. “Yes, I’m Molly Brennerman. Who are you?”

“Matthew Helm. I work for the U.S. government, too, although not in the Coast Guard.” I looked around. “Where’s the other one?”

“My husband died,” Her voice was quite even. “He was killed by a shark as he tried to get away to get help for us.”

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” After a moment, I said, “But there was supposed to be a third—”

“Oh, you mean Ricky. Ensign Ricardo Sanderson, U.S.C.G. He’s right up there on that cot beside you. Well, above you. He… got impatient. He tried to be brave a couple of days ago, he thought he’d figured out a way for us to break out of here, but it didn’t work and they beat him up pretty badly. I’m afraid he has a bad concussion, among other things. He… kind of comes and goes. He should have medical attention, but they just laugh when I ask.”

Another good one, I thought. It couldn’t have been fun, locked up in here endlessly, the last couple of days with no company but a badly hurt youth who was conscious only intermittently; but there was no whine in Molly Brennerman’s voice. I noted that while her clothes were wrinkled and dirty from long wear, they weren’t torn.

“You’re all right?” I asked.

“What do you mean?… Oh.” She grimaced. “I’m Molly the Pig Girl, as you can see, after a couple of weeks—I’ve kind of lost track of time—in the same clothes, first of some kind of a cottage on shore and then on this filthy ship after it came in. But nobody’s ravished the body beautiful yet. By now, the way I look, who’d want to?”

I grinned. “Ask me again when I’m ambulatory.” I noticed that my shirt seemed to be badly ripped, although the damage was mostly to the collar and shoulder where I couldn’t really see it. When I tried to raise myself and twist a bit to look, a sharp pain stabbed me in the side. Well, my subconscious had been warning me that I’d been hurt, although I had no memory of it. “Oh, Christ!” I breathed. “What happened, did they drop me on something hard when they were hauling me in here?”

“You were kicked.” Molly Brennerman’s voice was expressionless. “I’m afraid they found the little knife under your shirt in back, Mr. Helm. I hope you weren’t counting on it too heavily. He said to tell you no more tricks like that or it won’t be just your ribs he’ll kick in.”

I’d already determined that I still had my belt, with its peculiar buckle; one of Washington’s cute secret-agent gimmicks. The searchers had apparently looked no further after finding the decoy knife, which was precisely why I’d worn it.

“Pope?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Was the man who kicked me calling himself Albert Pope? Plumpish, blondish, thinning hair, in his forties?”

“Oh, that man.” She frowned, remembering. “Is he important?”

“Yes. Very.”

“More important than me, you mean? Or Ricky Sanderson?” She was watching me shrewdly. “Somehow I get the impression you’re not really a rescuing angel, Mr. Helm. You’re more the bloodhound type.”

“You get some very sound impressions, Mrs. Brennerman.”

“He wasn’t the one who kicked you,” she said. “But I saw a man answering that description several times while they were holding us temporarily in the captain’s quarters—there, I actually did get to use a shower, for a few days, and even wash out my clothes, although you wouldn’t know it now—before they got this lockup cleaned out for us so they wouldn’t have to guard us constantly. If you want to call this clean. The superstructure is aft, and the cabin overlooks the whole deck. The man you call Pope would come out of the hold every couple of hours to smoke a cigarette, then go back down again. He seemed to be doing some kind of mechanical work down there. At least he was usually in coveralls, sometimes pretty greasy; although once he was wearing some kind of elaborate protective clothing. But he had nothing to do with us, with the day-to-day administration of this place, the care and feeding of prisoners, security, that sort of thing. That’s Junior’s department.”

“Junior?”

She grimaced. “Well, Ricky—Ensign Sanderson—and I started out by calling him God, Junior. Or God, j.g. Because of the way he acted. But we wound up simply calling him Junior. A fairly young fellow with delusions of grandeur. Give a certain kind of guy a lot of power he isn’t used to, and a gun, and a few creeps with guns to take his orders, and I guess you’ve just naturally got an instant little Hitler. Anyway, he runs this installation tough and enjoys every minute of it.”

“Description?”

She frowned, half closing her eyes. “Five eight or nine, I’d say; and he wishes he were taller. Regular features, dark eyes, wavy brown hair, one of the blow-dry jerks. A very pretty man. Where do all these lovely little male creatures come from? John Wayne, where are you now that we really need you?” She-made a wry face. “Maybe I’m prejudiced. Brennerman was six two, ugly as a backhoe, and built like a slab of oak. I hated him on sight, the great macho bastard towering all over those nice young men. I gave him a very hard time, until I discovered he was one of the gentlest, kindest, bravest… Oh, God, I’m going to cry!”

She got up quickly and turned her back to me. I pulled myself cautiously to my feet, hoping the broken rib, if it was broken, would stay put and not go wandering around. The last time I’d been kicked in the side—the other side, thank God—I’d eventually wound up in the hospital with a punctured lung.

Molly Brennerman was leaning against the wall of our cell, pressing her forehead against the painted metal, sobbing. I turned her around and held her, and she clung to me desperately. After a while, her crying tapered off.

“Thanks, you’ve got a friendly shoulder,” she gasped. “You don’t happen to have a friendly hanky?”

“Be my guest.” I put it into her hand. “Do you want to tell me how it happened?”

“I thought there was something wrong with me!” she breathed. “Not a single tear, even though I saw it… That slashing fin and the great black shape of it and all the blood in the water! And the way I went dead, dead, dead inside and couldn’t cry a drop; I thought maybe I hadn’t
really
loved… Oh, God, talk about delayed reactions, here I go again. Sorry!” At last the new paroxysm subsided. After a bit of sniffing and mopping, she said, “I guess, well, you don’t like to break down in front of the kiddies, it upsets them so.”

“You mean the baby officer?”

She sensed my amusement at her superior attitude and said resentfully, “Don’t look at me like that! I’ll have you know I’m almost thirty, I’ve just got this dumb, bouncing tomboy body; and he’s really
very
young.” She giggled abruptly. “You should have heard him being gentlemanly about the two of us being locked up together. Back in that cottage, at the start, before the ship came. He told me very seriously that I didn’t have to be afraid, he wouldn’t take advantage of the situation. Of me. But I shouldn’t laugh. He’s really a very nice boy, poor boy. Maybe you’d better look at him. Maybe there’s something you can do.”

“I’m afraid I’m better at breaking them up than sticking them back together.”

Ensign Ricardo Sanderson was wearing a red-and-white jersey and red denim shorts that had probably looked very sporty once. Now they were in the same soiled condition as the girl’s clothes; worse, because he’d been sick and there was more blood. Obviously, this was where she’d picked up her own bloodstains, caring for him. He might have been a handsome young man originally, but it was hard to tell now. His eyes were practically closed by the discolored swelling of his broken nose. His lips were split and puffy, and as he lay on his back breathing slowly through his open mouth, he revealed a couple of damaged teeth. Somebody had really worked him over.

But these injuries were mostly cosmetic, I decided. What didn’t heal by itself could be repaired without much difficulty if the patient lived; and I’d seen too many beat-up gents to let it bother me. What was disturbing was the ugly, swollen contusion over the right temple that made the lump on my own skull ache when I looked at it. However, there seemed to be no noticeable depression of the underlying bone.

I said, “Hell, I don’t know. The pupils are the same size, which is supposed to be significant although I couldn’t tell you why. Dr. Helmstein’s considered diagnosis is that we’d better get the kid to a hospital as soon as possible.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Where there’s a will and all that crap,” I said. “Now tell me all about the hold.”

“The what?… Oh, the ship’s hold?”

I nodded. “I happen to know that a valuable cargo—well, valuable to certain people—was thrown overboard to make the space available for other purposes. What purposes? What’s down there now? What’s Mr. Albert Pope working on down there?”

Molly Brennerman shook her head. “I’m sorry, Matt… It’s all right if I call you Matt, isn’t it? Call me Molly, please.” She drew a long breath. “I’m sorry, I did watch, I knew I should try to find out as much as possible while I had the chance, but all I know is… well, whatever it is, it required some welding. Once he came up in full welder’s regalia; you know, the face shield and the asbestos gauntlets.”

“That’s the protective clothing you mentioned?”

“No. That was something else. A complete white suit that covered him from head to foot like a deep-sea diver. I got a very… a very negative reaction from it, but I suppose that’s silly.”

“Reactions are what we want. Keep them coming.”

“No, that’s all…”

She stopped as footsteps reverberated metallically in the passage outside. A key turned in the lock.

The door was opened by a short, dark, middle-aged man I didn’t know, carrying a submachine gun, which was ridiculous. In that limited space, nobody but a suicidal maniac would turn loose a burst of lead projectiles to go bouncing and skittering around inside those steel walls—a suicidal maniac or somebody who didn’t know much about weapons, particularly automatic weapons. The man was wearing clean khaki trousers and shirt. He waved us back against the far wall. Another one, similarly dressed and armed but blond and much bigger, took up a position in the doorway. A moment later he stepped back respectfully as a younger man appeared, whom I recognized from the girl’s description. This was Junior, also wearing clean and well-ironed khakis, obviously the uniform of the local chapter of Stormtroopers Anonymous.

The girl had drawn me a good enough picture of him, as far as she could comprehend him; but she was basically a civilized person. It really takes one to know one; and for all his nicely pressed pants and prettily waved hair he didn’t fool me for a moment. I can spot a born killer a mile away; but this was one of the haywire ones who do it for fun, or would kill as soon as he got his chance and threw off the few civilized restraints that still remained to him. He carried a holstered automatic pistol on his belt: the old Colt .45 or one of its numerous latter-day imitations, often offered in 9mm as well. I wouldn’t know until I saw the size of the hole. I could wait.

“So you’re on-your feet; good!” he said. “I’m Homer Allwyn; I’m in command here. I hope you got my little message. If you try any more tricks, you’ll regret it.”