The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (41 page)

Beth suggested. “Maybe he didn’t do it, Ken. Maybe he didn’t kill that girl.”

Lieutenant Gilly was skeptical. “Yeah. Maybe. And maybe some day filet of grunt will sell for as much as snapper fingers. Well, Tampa only being sixty miles away, I thought I’d let you know. You want me to post a guard in the alley?”

Beth’s fingers tightened on mine. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary, Ken. Even if Charlie should come here I don’t think he’d hurt me.”

“No,” Gilly agreed. “Well, it’s just as well. I can use every man I have on the roadblocks. But if he should slip through and come here, you let me know now, Beth.”

He clumped on back down the stairs. A moment later the police cruiser purred off into the night. I could feel the cold sweat start on my cheeks. The boys were beginning to haul in the net – and I was in it. It wouldn’t be long now.

Beth sat back on the bed, all business. “No one ever comes in here but me, and I was going to suggest you stay here until after I’d talked to Mr Clifton. Now that’s out. When you don’t show up at the blocks, they’re going to know you got through and someone is bound to suggest the police search this apartment. There’s only one logical place for you to stay.”

I asked her where that was.

She said, “Out at the house. You know it and the island better than anyone else. An army couldn’t find you there if you didn’t want them to. Now, tell me the whole thing from the minute you were released from prison yesterday morning.”

I gave her a play-by-play description. But I still didn’t like the Clifton angle and said so. “You say the guy loves you. You say he’s asked you to divorce me and marry him. Well, what’s his reaction going to be when you tell him I’m in town? He’s going to reach for his phone and call the cops. The guy is a bargain hunter. And it’s a lot cheaper for him to turn me in to be burned than it is for him to pay for a divorce.”

Beth said I wasn’t doing Mr Clifton justice. He was really a very fine and a very honorable man. She shook her curls in my face. “Besides I’m not going to tell him you’re in town. You have to admit he is smart?”

I said I did.

Beth continued. “All I am going to tell him is that I don’t think you killed that girl and ask his advice on how to go about hiring a private detective to prove it.”

It didn’t sound too bad. The guy was smart. And Beth was right about the island. I could hide out on it indefinitely. “Well, okay,” I agreed. “But how are you going to contact me?”

She said she would find some way to do so without making Ken Gilly suspicious. “After all, it’s our house. I have a right to go out there anytime I want to. Maybe I want to put it in shape to be sold.”

I asked her when she’d been out there last.

She said, “Not since shortly after your trial. For a long time I didn’t care what happened to it. Now, if we can straighten out this mess you’re in, we’re going back there to live.”

I got up to go while the going was good and Beth walked to the door with me. “I love you, Charlie.”

I said that went double. I felt some better. I felt a lot better. But we still had a long row to hoe. I didn’t see how anyone could possibly prove I hadn’t killed Zo.

I wanted to stay. I knew Beth wanted me to. But Ken Gilly was nobody’s fool. When I didn’t show at the roadblocks he’d know I had slipped into town before they had been established and would put a stake-out on Beth’s apartment without telling her anything about it.

Beth kissed me at the screen door. “I’ll be out – soon. With good news to report.”

Keeping close to the wall and out of the moonlight, I tiptoed sideways down the stairs to the alley and made my way towards the nearest street. I’d gone perhaps twenty yards from the foot of the stairs when the big guy stepped out from behind the bole of a pineapple palm.

“You there,” he stopped me. “What’s your name? And what are you doing prowling an alley at two o’clock in the morning?”

My first thought was,
Ken left a stake-out after all
.

I thought fast: I didn’t know the man. He was obviously new to the force, at least since I’d been sent to Raiford. If he took me in, I was dead. I still had the murder gun in my pocket. They’d burn me like they’d burned Swede. My only chance was to bluff and run.

“Why, my name is Olson,” I lied. I tried to feint him off guard by making him look where I was pointing. “I live in that house back there, officer. And I’m on my way downtown to try to locate an all-night drugstore.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

There was a glint of silver in the moonlight. I thought at first he was throwing a gun on me. Then his arm reversed itself and started up in a familiar arc and I knew what he had in his hand. Backing a step, I let it rip air where my belly had been.

Then, stepping in before he could recover his balance, I smashed a hard right to his jaw that smacked him off his feet and his head into an empty garbage can with sufficient force to make it ring like a bell-buoy.

He was out, cold. Striking a match I leaned over him. I still didn’t know him. But whoever he was I doubted if he was an officer of the law. If he was, he was the first cop I’d ever seen who carried a six-inch fish knife.

Then the light in the window of the apartment just over my head came on and some old dame asked nervously:

“What was that? Who’s that out there in the alley?”

I said, “Me-arrh.”

“Oh,” she said. “Bad kitty.”

Then I tiptoed out of there fast before she stopped to think that kitty cats didn’t strike matches.

The water was warm but the air was cold. The tide had changed and was going out. The pull of it was terrific. It had been three years since I’d done any swimming. I thought when I reached mid-channel that the tide was going to sweep me out into the gulf. As it was, I lost one of my shoes off the length of plank on which I had piled my clothes and which I was pushing ahead of me.

It would have been much easier to steal a boat. But I knew how most bait-camp men were. They hated to lose a boat almost as badly as a wife. A good boat cost two hundred dollars. You could get married for five. And I didn’t want to direct any attention to the island.

The knife man worried me. Who was he? How had he known I would be coming down that alley? Why had he tried to kill me? He wasn’t the man who had killed Zo. That much I knew. It hadn’t been his voice that had said, “
You got him, eh?
” Nor was he the man who had slugged me with the butt of the gaff hook. He was a much larger man whose muscles strained the shoulders of his coat. If he had swung the gaff, it would have caved in my head.

As the low-lying trees grew to their proper place in the night sky, I felt for bottom and found it. The storms of the last three years hadn’t changed the coast line of the island, not on the lee side at least. The deep water extended to within a few feet of the shore. I waded up on to the sand and slapped and tramped myself dry and warm before I put on my clothes.

Now, I was really home. My rotting nets, unused since before I had gone into the Service, still hung on their long drying racks. A half-dozen hulks and stove-in row-boats lay buried in the sand, including the bare ribs of the fifty-foot bottom that had been my father’s boat. I was glad the old man was dead. I was the first of our family to do time and the disgrace would have broken his heart.

Dressed, I turned for a last look at the mainland. It was a good mile and a half across the channel. I couldn’t see the running lights of any boats. My passage, so far as I knew, had been unobserved.

I padded, barefoot, up the weed-overgrown path toward the house, hoping I didn’t step on a snake. The path was a jungle of vines. I wiggled my way through them, being careful not to disturb them any more than I had to. I didn’t know how long I would have to stay on the island. And when both his roadblocks and stake-out failed, Gil would undoubtedly make a perfunctory search of the home place.

Then I thought of something both Beth and I had forgotten – food. Unless there were some canned goods in the pantry, food was going to be a problem. But I’d face that when I came to it. As long as I knew I was going to live, I could live on fish and rabbits if I had to.

The house itself was set well back from the shore in a clearing that we had farmed from time to time. Now the ground was sour and overrun with saw palmetto. Even in the waning moonlight I could see the fifteen-foot wide porch across the front was sagging badly in spots, supported only by the thick-trunked red and purple bougainvillea and flame vine that had been old before I was born.

I picked an orange from a tree and tried to suck it but the grove was as sour as the garden. I wondered why Clifton had offered to buy the place from Beth. Probably out of pity or in the hope of buttering her up so she would say yes to his proposal. The old place was out of the world. I mean that literally.

No one but a typical cracker fishing family or a pair of kids as much in love as Beth and I had been would want to live in such a place. And the rest of the island was as bad. It was still as wild as it had been when the wreckers had been a power in Key West and Billy Bowlegs had terrorized gulf shipping.

I walked up the stairs to the porch. Coiled in a pool of moonlight, a ten-button rattlesnake watched me from the shredded canvas of a once-expensive chaise longue I had given Beth when we’d first been married.

I opened the door and went in. The big front room smelled old and musty. By striking a match I found a lamp with some oil in it and lit it. Even as old and decrepit as it was, after three years in a six by eight cell, the house looked good to me. At least here I could breathe. There were some canned goods in the pantry but not much, enough perhaps for three or four meals.

The more I thought about Beth asking Mr Clifton to suggest a good private detective to prove I hadn’t killed Zo, the screwier it sounded. If the guy was really in love with her, he wasn’t going to cut off his prospects by sweeping the legal sand spurs out of her husband’s path to her side.

When she contacted me, I’d suggest she try to arrange passage for us both and meet me somewhere down in the Caribbean. I was pretty certain that Matt Heely would run us down, for a fresh piece of change, if not for the money he owed me. Matt was as bad as I’d been. He made good money but he threw it away with both fists and was always in financial hot water when it came time to pay his insurance or the installments on his boat.

Crossing the kitchen floor, I plowed up a pine splinter with my big toe that made me see stars for a minute. The quarter-inch callouses on my feet were gone. I’d have to have shoes of some kind. Then I thought of the old pair of sneakers I’d discarded just before making my final trip down to Shrimp Cay for the load with which I’d been caught. They should be up in the attic somewhere. Beth was as bad as a magpie. She never threw anything away on the theory that some time she might find a use for it. And this was one of the times.

Holding the lamp in one hand, I padded up the back stairs to the second floor and stopped in front of the door of the bedroom that Beth and I had used. I hadn’t had it on the first floor but here I had an eerie feeling that I was being watched. I opened the door and held the lamp high.

It was the same with the three other bedrooms on the floor. They were all as Beth had left them when she’d left the island, stripped to the bare mattress with the bedding folded neatly and piled at the foot of each bed. It was my nerves, nothing more. I started to light a cigarette as I climbed the stairs to the attic, then decided to conserve my supply. Cigarettes were another thing that Beth and I had forgotten.

The old house had been built by my grandfather when both labor and lumber were cheap. Rumpus rooms hadn’t been thought of, but he’d finished the attic as a ballroom so he and his friends could dance when a party of boats had come out from the mainland or a rare passenger vessel, New Orleans- or Havana-bound, had dropped anchor in the deep channel.

The finished section was thirty by forty feet, paneled in rare woods, with two large dormer windows on each side and two more windows at each end. But it had been a long time since it had been used as a ballroom. The windows had been boarded up and covered with cobwebs for years. Even when I had been a small boy, the attic had become a family catch-all.

I pushed open the heavy door and walked in and a sudden gust of wind blew out the flame of my lamp. Cursing the wind, I walked a few more feet. Then setting the lamp on the bare floor I lifted the hot glass chimney, struck a match and applied it to the wick.

I wasn’t alone in the attic. Sitting in built-in bunks against the wall were perhaps a dozen men, their eyes as flat and expressionless as those of the coiled rattlesnake I had seen on the chaise longue. I’d seen their faces before.

At least I’d seen similar faces in the stews of Marseille, Port Said, Sevastopol, Hamburg, and two dozen other war-torn ports. They were the faces of wanted men. Men wanted in their own countries for treason and murder and fabulous thefts. Men willing to pay a stiff price to escape the noose, the guillotine, the firing squad, and the garrote.

I straightened. “What the hell?”

A thin-faced man with a heavy accent said, “Someone make out that light.”

It was the only word spoken. Another man snatched the lamp from me and extinguished it. I reached for the gun that had killed Zo and remembered it was in the pocket of my coat. And I’d left my coat in the kitchen.

Then the first of a dozen fists found me and beat me to my knees with the deadly precision of men who have nothing left to lose. I fought back to my feet and the ring of fists hemming me in gave way for a moment as I tried to pound my way to the door. Then a foot thudded into me. As I went screaming to the floor, still other feet found my head, my chin.

The huge tarpon was back on my line. Only this time, like a fool, I’d allowed the line to become entangled with my ankles and he’d pulled me over the side of the cruiser and was heading, seemingly, for the bottom of the gulf out in fifty fathoms.

I was cold. I was wet. I was strangling. I was sinking through endless fathoms of black water, towed by the huge fish. It was strange what a man would dream.