The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (13 page)

I tried to reassure myself. He could navigate, or he wouldn’t have tried to fly the Gulf in the first place. He gave the location in reference to Scorpion Reef, so he must have sighted Scorpion. Fifty miles was only a few minutes in a plane, so he couldn’t have gone far wrong in that distance. And there had to be visible white water. He’d been intending to go back to it in a boat, hadn’t he? He must have known what he was doing.

Then something else struck me. “Wait,” I said. “Barclay told me to set a course to the
west
of Scorpion Reef. Are you sure you said east?”

“Yes. He must have misunderstood. I said north-northeast.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I went out into the after part of the cabin and leaned over the chart. With the parallel rulers I laid down a line 33 degrees from Scorpion Reef, picked fifty miles off the edge of the chart with the dividers, and set them on the line. I stared. There was no shoal there.

Beyond, another 20 or 25 miles, lay the Northern Shelves, a wide area of shoaling water and one notation that three fathoms had been reported in 1907. Could he have meant that? But if he had, we didn’t have a chance. Not a chance in the world.

In the first place, if he couldn’t fix his estimated position within twenty-five miles that short a time after having sighted Scorpion Reef his navigation was so sloppy you had to throw it all out. There went your first assumption, the one you
had
to have even to start: that Macaulay had known where he was himself. And in the second place, that whole area was shoal. God knew how many places you might find white water at dead low tide with a heavy sea running. Trying to find an airplane with no more than that to go on was so absurd it was fantastic.

Fumbling a little with nervousness, I swung the rulers around and ran out a line NNW from Scorpion Reef. Barclay said she had told him that direction. I looked at it and shook my head. That was out over the hundred-fathom curve. Nothing there at all. And if he’d been headed for the Florida coast he wouldn’t have been over there in the first place.

I thought swiftly. We’d never find that plane. To anybody even remotely acquainted with salvage work the whole thing was farcical except there was nothing funny about it here, under the circumstances. They were going to think she was stalling. She’d already contradicted herself once, or Barclay had misunderstood her.

Three-quarters of a million dollars was the prize. Brutality was their profession. I thought of it and felt chilly along the back.

I was still looking at the chart when the idea began to come to me. I looked at my watch. It was just a little less than two hours since we’d cleared the seabuoy. Guessing our speed at five knots would put us ten miles down that line. Growing excited now, I marked the estimated position and spanned the distance to the beach westward of us with the dividers. I measured it off against the edge of the chart. It was a little less than nine miles.

Hope surged up in me. We could do it. There was still enough glow in the sky over Sanport to guide us, and if there weren’t all we had to do was keep the sea behind us and go downwind. The water was warm. You could stay in it all day without losing too much body heat.

I hurried back through the curtain and told her my idea.

She was scared. She couldn’t swim very well, but when I told her there wasn’t a chance in the world of finding that plane and that they’d kill us anyway, she agreed.

I told her to play sick, grab the belt as she got past Barfield, and go overboard holding it while I handled Barclay.

She nodded. “Thank you for everything,” she said softly. She thought we were going to drown.

I put my hand against her cheek. “We’ll make it,” I said. Just touching her brought back that intense longing to take her in my arms. I stood up abruptly and went back on deck. It was very dark. Barfield growled something and went below. I sat down in the cockpit, on Barclay’s right and as near him as I dared.

“Nice talk?” he asked.

“Very nice,” I answered.

“She really didn’t know what he was doing, did she?”

“No.”

“Could be,” he said.

My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness now. I looked astern and could still see the faint glow over the city. Involuntarily, I shuddered. There was a lot of dark water between here and the shore.

“Did she tell you where the plane was?” Barclay asked.

“Yes,” I said. I repeated what she had said, and asked, “Where did you get the impression it was west of Scorpion Reef?”

“That’s what she said,” Barclay answered. “She said NNW.”

“She was suffering from shock,” I said coldly. “I believe she had just seen her husband butchered in cold blood. And, anyway, it’s a cinch he wouldn’t have been to the westward of Scorpion Reef if he’d been heading for the Florida coast.”

“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see about it after breakfast. Get some sleep and don’t try anything stupid.”

I started to say something, but at that moment I heard voices in the cabin. She had started up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Barfield’s voice growled.

“I – feel nauseated,” she said. I could barely hear her. “ – fresh air –”

“Hey, Joey,” Barfield called out. “All right to let her up?”

I waited, holding my breath.

“No,” Barclay said. “Find her a pail.”

If she hadn’t passed him we had no chance at all, but it was now or never. I swung. My fist crashed into the blurred whiteness of Barclay’s face, and at the same time I yelled, “
Run!
”

Barclay fell back, clawing in his pocket for the gun. She came up through the hatch, moving fast, with Barfield shouting behind her. I could see her for a brief second, standing erect on the deck at the forward end of the cockpit with the bulky life-preserver clutched to her breast. Then she was lunging and falling outward, splashing somewhere in the darkness. I grabbed Barclay’s jacket and pushed him into Barfield as he came lunging up. I slid over the rail, and water closed over me. Even as I was going down I tried to keep myself oriented.

The
Ballerina
was off course now, all of its angles gone. I started to swim back, hoping to spot her blonde head or the white of the life belt, but the whitecaps were confusing.

When the sloop was some 75 yards away, I lifted my head and called out, not too loudly, “Shannon. Shannon!” There was no answer. I wondered if I had gone beyond her. I began to be afraid, and called out again.

This time I heard her. “Here,” she said. “Over this—” The voice cut off, and I knew she had gone under. She was off to the left, downwind. I turned.

Another sea broke over me. Then I was floundering in the trough. The blonde head broke surface right beside me. “Thank God,” I said silently, and grabbed her dress. She clasped her arms tightly about my neck and tried to pull herself up. We went under. I felt suddenly cold in water that was warm as tea. She had
both
arms about me.

Our heads came out. I shook water from my face. “Shannon! Where’s the lifebelt?”

She sputtered and fought for breath. “It – I—” she said, and gasped again. “I lost it.”

It was the bright sunlight streaming into the cabin that brought me out of it slowly. And then the wonderful nightmare of the night in the water came back to me. The lifebelt was gone, and she knew we couldn’t make it. Yet she’d ignored Barclay’s hailing from the
Ballerina
as he tried to locate us in the darkness. She’d been wonderful. Scared, but she’d followed my directions fully. Stripped for buoyancy, we tried the hopeless push toward Sanport, orienting on the stars.

It was dawn and we hadn’t covered a third of the way, when I choked up enough breath to tell her.

“I couldn’t tell you before,” I said. “Even – if he had run out on you. But doesn’t matter now. Have to tell you. I love you. You’ve never been out of my mind since you walked out on the edge of that pier—”

She didn’t say anything. She brought her arms up very slowly and put them about my neck. We went under, our lips together, arms tight about each other. It was like falling endlessly through a warm, rosy cloud. I seemed to realize, very dimly, that it was water we were sinking through and that if we didn’t stop it and swim up we’d drown right there, but apparently there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to turn her loose long enough to swim up. We went on falling, through warmth and ecstasy and colors.

We’d broken surface again, and then I’d seen the masts of the sloop. They were still looking for us. Suddenly I realized she’d let go, voluntarily. I’d gotten to her, even as I realized that the sloop was bearing down on us. Barclay’d made good use of those 7 × 50 binoculars. I remember Barfield’s whistling as he dragged her aboard. Then I’d blacked out.

It was four in the afternoon when Barfield shook me awake. The husky guy hated my guts all right, but evidently Barclay had told him to lay off. He told me to make some sandwiches and coffee, wake Shannon, and get up on deck. It was while she was dressing and I was preparing the food that the idea came to me. If we could shake these two, all problems were solved. Why go back? Here was the
Ballerina
, the girl I knew I wanted, and eighty thousand dollars. We could change our names, get married in one of those little Caribbean ports. We’d change the name of the boat and its Port of Registry. We’d stay away from the big ports, cruise the world, and they’d never find us.

The dream faded abruptly. My two friends upstairs were calling from on deck. You couldn’t dream them away.

I had five days, maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime – I hoped.

Shannon helped me bring the food.

Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.

She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.

He looked to me. “Take the helm.”

He took a sandwich, glanced at me and then at Shannon. “We’re about fifty miles from land. Don’t try any more swimming stunts and forget about the dinghy. I’ve thrown away the oars. We’ll pistol whip you, Blondie, if either of you tries anything again.

“Now let’s get down to business. Tell us exactly what your husband said about that plane crash.”

Shannon stared at him, contemptuously.

“All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He was heading for the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later his starboard engine caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get to the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”

“Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”

“He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around in rough weather. The locker was aft, already under water.”

“What about the diver?”

That hurt her. She hesitated, sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”

Barclay lashed it at her suddenly, “Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”

She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”

She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”

I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still had to find the reef. It was hopeless.

Barclay lit a cigarette. “Okay. Now, what was the position?”

“Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”

He stared coldly. “You said westward last night.”

“I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.

“Make up your mind – fast.”

“It’s north-northeast.”

“We’ll see,” he said crisply. “George, get that chart, the parallel rulers, and dividers.”

Barfield brought them up and the two of them studied the chart. Shannon regarded them as if they were lice. Barclay’s face was thoughtful. “North-northeast—”

I knew what he would find, and waited, tensely.

He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon Macaulay.

“Come again?”

“You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like me to do?”

“Tell the truth, for once.”

“I am telling the truth.”

He sighed. “The chartmaker was lying. The nearest sounding shown here is 45 fathoms.” He paused and nodded to Barfield. “George.”

I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go ahead.”

It hung poised, ready to go either way. “Don’t be a damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”

He saw I was right.

Barfield lounged on the seat with a cup of coffee in his hand. “The hero,” he said. “We’ve got a real, live hero aboard, Joey.”

The breeze held steady out of the northeast, day after day, and the miles ran behind us. I’d bought time for us, but I hadn’t bought much, and every day’s run was bringing us nearer the showdown. I knew what would happen when we got down there and couldn’t find any shoal. Something had to happen before then; we had to get a break. But they didn’t drop a stitch. When one was asleep the other was watching me, never letting me get too near. And there was always Shannon Macaulay. They had me tied, and they knew it. It was unique, a masterpiece in its own way; we were at sea in a 36-foot sloop, so all four of us had to be sitting right on top of the explosion if it came. I couldn’t hide her or get her out of the way.