The Scarlet Ruse (22 page)

She was gone, abruptly. She knocked the shade off the fixed lamp, found the switch, ran around the foot of the bed to my side, made some small gobbling sounds and ran back to her side.

"Frank?" she said. "Here? Soon?"

"Settle down. We'll play it as if he were going to show up about dawn. Today. Every day. You cooked him. You cooked him as many ways as there are."

"What have you got there?"

"What does it look like?"

"It's a gun, damnit. I meant, where did it come from?"

"Put some clothes on."

"What am I going to do in them? Are we leaving? Or what?"

"Put on the pants and the long-sleeved shirt again."

"If you think I'm going out into those bugs, you're-"

"Shut up, will you? Just get dressed and shut up."

"You can't tell me what to-"

"I can take you out onto the bow, with a deck chair, and tie your arms to the arms and your feet to the footrest, and your neck to the backrest and leave you there and see how good a shot he is."

"Now come on! I don't mind jokes, but when you-"

I stood up. "No joke. The more I think about it, the better I like it."

She let her mouth sag open as she looked at me. And then she swallowed without closing her lips, an effort that made her throat bulge and convinced me she was taking me seriously.

"You mean it!"

"Just shut up and get your clothes on."

She did. It did not take her long. She went into the head and came out with her hair brushed glossy and a new mouth in place.

"Can I ask you something, Trav?"

"Like?"

"What makes you think he's coming here?"

"It's too long a story."

"Okay."

I put on khakis, and a dark green knit shirt with short sleeves, and old deck shoes. She followed me up to the sundeck. I went forward and stepped up onto the rail and hooked an arm around a stanchion for balance. I looked south through the nine-power Japanese glasses. Though there was a line of gray in the east and the glasses had good light-gathering qualities, it was like looking into a smudge pot. I couldn't even find a horizon line.

I dropped back to the deck, looked around, trying to organize something. Running would indicate to him that I'd guessed right. He would have to assume Mary Alice had told me everything useful. Not running would indicate innocence or stupidity or some of both. It might be the best answer. I discovered that I was trying not to think of Meyer. If my guess about Sprenger's actual schedule was right, Meyer could have been subjected to some sudden and very ugly persuasion. Stubborn old bear. Weird old economist.

Think, damnit! Like the little signs IBM used to distribute before they suddenly realized that if it were ever obeyed, if men everywhere really began to Think, the first thing they would do would be to take a sledge and open up the computers. A few are doing it already, sly seers, operating in sly ways. They have to guard the computer rooms these days. A little alnico magnet, stuck in exactly the right place with a wad of chewing gum, can erase a hundred thousand units of information before they find it.

Think! But the Flush felt like a ponderous toy, something in a foolish game for over-aged children. Meyer and I had been using it as a treehouse, hiding the secret words, the pacts, the membership list, the slingshots, and the Daisy Air Rule. Now a real live man was going to come across the flats and blow the treehouse out of the water. Maybe I could get out the old bubble pipe and waft some soap into his eyes.

Prediction. He would have to have Meyer with him, because though Meyer could find No Name from the remembered shape of it, he certainly could not describe to anyone else how to find it.

Prediction. He would have someone with him. He would not want to rent a skiff with an outboard himself or send Meyer to rent it. The safe play would be to send a third man, with instructions to come back in the skiff from Regal Marine and pick them up.

So then, three of them. If he brought "Dave Davis," which seemed possible, it would make a goodly weight of meat in the rented boat. He would want a good boat, for capacity and for speed. Regal Marine certainly catered to some very early-bird fish freaks. Predawn rentals, so you can get out to the feeding grounds by dawn, aching to hook into the King of All of Them.

Once he had found us and identified us, Meyer's function would be ended. Once Sprenger had killed us and located the investment account items aboard the Flush, the third man's portion of the job would be finished. I did not care to use up any mental energy speculating about how he would handle everything from then on. I would not be able to care.

The band in the east widened until it began to shine gray upon the world. The islands began to show, in a thin milky mist. So this one, No Name, was too close to the Flush, and we stood too tall beside it, to make it good cover for a boat moving toward us. It would have to be the island in front of us, over a hundred yards away.

It was light enough, or would be by the time I got the hooks in and the Flush cranked up, to retrace the winding, unmarked channel back south to good water. Live to fight another day or run again. Or meet up with Sprenger and company under the worst possible conditions. If there is anything more vulnerable to sniper fire than a pleasure boat in shallow waters, I would like to hear about it. Maybe those Texas sportsmen who used to shoot the sand hill cranes from cover as the big ungainly birds came gliding in for a landing had found something easier to kill. Suppose I did manage to disappear? What would then happen to Meyer? He could wear a sickly smile and say, "Mr. Sprenger, they were supposed to be here!"

So whether he came at dawn or at dusk, the problem was the same. Instead of having all day to think about it, I had a fraction of an hour.

Go wait for him in the mangroves? Set the scene here so he would… A rusty gear in the back of my mind groaned and turned. The dry bearings squealed.

"What's with you?" she said.

"Always try on the Indian's moccasins," I said.

"What?"

"You'll see what I mean when I get through. If I have time to finish. Here. Take these. Use this to focus. You keep sweeping that area over there. If you see any kind of a boat coming toward us or moving across that area, sing out."

"Where'll you be?"

"Busy."

When I climbed aboard, she looked down at me from the sun deck and said, "What the hell are you doing?"

"You're supposed to be watching."

"Okay, okay. I'm watching."

"Have you got with you any kind of hat that Frank Sprenger would know and remember?"

"He isn't much for noticing clothes. Unless he's bought them for you. I like big floppy cloth hats with big brims. I've got a red one that's really red, and he kidded me about it."

I swarmed up and took the glasses and got up on the rail and searched. I saw a dot moving across the glassy sea a long long way off. I hustled her below, and she got the hat out of one of the suitcases she had planned to leave behind. It was more than red. It was a vivid scarlet. I dug around in a forward gear locker and found the old fenders I should have thrown away, but was saving in case I had to use them in a lock somewhere, with the sides of the lock black with oil. They were of ancient gray canvas, stained and worn, and filled with matted kapok. They were cylindrical, about thirty inches long and as big around as her head.

I tried the hat on one and it fitted.

"You have fallen out of your tree," she proclaimed.

"You are going to be hiding, minus the long black hair, and this is going to be your body, floating in that two-man raft."

Once she got the idea, she helped. She did give a small cry of desolation when I gathered all that hair into my left fist and then gnawed through it with the kitchen shears between hand and skull. She fastened it into a long fall with rubber bands. I taped it to the fender. I wanted a lot of weight in the raft. I checked on the distant boat and found it closer each time. I used a spare anchor, wired to all the fenders, and a lot of canned goods to overload the rubber raft. I threw a blanket over all the junk, tucked it down, shifted the stuff around to look like a woman shape under the blanket. The fender with hat and hair was at one corner of the raft, shining black hair spiffing out from under the scarlet brim to lay in sharp contrast against the yellow rubber.

I took it out quickly, wading, swimming, pushing it, and used a small mushroom anchor to hold it into a very gentle tide current so that the red hat end was toward the island I thought he would use as cover when approaching.

When I climbed up onto the Flush, she was standing there, looking quite changed with her hair gnawed off ragged and short. She was staring out at the raft and held her clasped hands close to her throat. When I turned and looked, I saw what caused the curious expression on her face. It was better than I hoped. It was spooking her. She floated out there, dead in a raft. I wondered if she had ever really been able to comprehend the fact of her own eventual and inevitable death. Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.

When I got the glasses on the boat, they brought it so close I had the startled feeling they could see me as clearly as I could see them. Three of them, in a pale blue boat, proceeding very slowly, angling from my left to my right. From there I knew they could see the white of the superstructure of the Flush through the trees on No Name. I estimated they were a little bit less than one mile away, and they were moving very slowly because they were crossing the shallows. The direction indicated they were moving over to where they could turn toward No Name in the concealment of the island a little over a hundred yards west of me. Yet I could not be certain they were not merely early morning fishermen.

I went below and got back in a hurry, carrying the spotting scope. I turned the eyepiece to the sixty-power click and used the angle between the rail and stanchion as a rest. Sixty power makes an object at six thousand feet look one hundred feet away. The narrow field made it very difficult to track a moving object. They were coming into deeper water and picking up speed. I caught them in quick and momentary glimpses. It was one of the countless imitations of the Boston Whaler, with the central console where the operator can stand and run the big outboard by the remote controls. I could not catch the man running it. He seemed big enough to be Davis. The time I got him in focus long enough, he was looking south. I saw a planter's hat with bright band tipped forward, jammed down on his head to keep the wind from whipping it off. Yellow shirt.

Meyer sat on the stowage box in front of the console, leaning back against it, arms folded. Or tied? Folded. He wore his old souvenir hat from Lion Country. The white hunter variety, with a plastic band stamped to imitate leopard. Frank Sprenger was in the bow, sitting on the casting platform. He wore a black T-shirt, white shorts and a bright orange baseball cap with a long bill, and big dark sunglasses. He held a fishrod in his hand, pointed straight up. He wore binoculars around his neck.

When I saw those, I backed down and away. She was waiting for me on the side deck, swallowing frequently.

"On their way," I said, answering the question before she could ask it.

"What do we-"

"Now listen. Carefully. We've got ten minutes, probably more, before Sprenger gets in position. He'll leave his friend in the boat, and he'll wade to that end of that island, where the sand bar is. The other end is in water too deep, and this end is closer to us. Okay now, what he would want to do would be get comfortable, get a nice clear field of fire through an opening in the mangroves where they begin to thin out, and then wait until we were both on deck and then drop me first and then you. I think he would want information to keep from wasting time in search, so he would drop me with a head shot or a heart shot and get you through the legs."

"It makes me sick even to listen to-"

"So he is going to look and find the kind of ruin he might have caused himself. Both boats disabled and your body in that raft. Somebody got here first. That thing about moccasins, I was trying to say that it is the kind of thing he would accept, would believe had happened. His little world is falling apart anyway, and so this is one more rotten disaster he hadn't counted on. But it isn't going to make him reckless and impatient. He's a careful man. He'll wait quite a while, I think. He'll watch for some movement by that dummy in the raft. Sooner or later he'll have to satisfy himself. I think what he'll do is sink the raft. Then wait a while longer and finally come aboard, maybe alone, more probably with friend."

"Where will we be!" she demanded, her voice stretched thin.

I took her below. It was beginning to heat up below and would get considerably worse. I warned her to expect it and endure it. Silently. She wanted her little weapon, so I traded it for the other two manila envelopes and put them in the same hiding place as the one she had given me. No point in having Sprenger find her two and decide that was the batch and leave.

I took her down into the forward bilge and through the crawlway and up into the rope locker. Even though she was a big big girl, there was room for her and a lot of anchor line, and there was ventilation of sorts. I told her she could sit with her feet dangling, but when she heard anybody, or if she heard anybody coming through the crawl-way, to pull her legs up inside and pull the door shut and slide the little bolt over to lock it from the inside. I made it emphatic. "Stay right here no matter what you hear, what you imagine, what you think. Don't try to think. Just stay until I come after you. Get cute and we're both dead."

"Where will you be? What are you going to do?"

"Take care of you. Shut up and wait. Not a sound. I've got a good place. I'll get the jump."

I left her there and went and opened up my good place, stocked it with what I thought I'd need, left it open and ready. I went to the galley and knelt and looked cautiously out of the lower right corner of the fixed glass opening by the booth that adjoins the galley.

I had thought it would give me a view of everything. The angle was slightly wrong. I could see the yellow raft and the wreck of the Muсequita and most of the nearby island, but I couldn't see the sandbar end of it. I could see to within ten feet of where I guessed he would take up his position. Now be as patient as he.

I could not have told Mary Alice the truth about what I wanted to do. I wanted the ruse of the raft, the red hat, the silence, the disabled boats, to lure them aboard, Sprenger and friend. I had the idea they would save Meyer for some conversations once they saw my stage setting. Tie him to the mangroves while they came aboard the Flush. And then, when I had my opportunity, I would merely pop out of my secret place, sap the nearest one behind the ear with a delicate twist of the wrist, hold the other one under the gun and yell boo. Turn him around and darken his world too, then truss them both with utmost care and diligence. Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork up the Muсequita and rig a pump and float her. Take both small boats in short tow and retrace the winding channel back to the main channel, and put Meyer, with a cold brew in hand, at the wheel, while I make a call through the Miami Marine Operator to one Sergeant Goodbread. Sergeant? This is McGee. I've got something for you.

No problems. Virtue prevails. A brisk encounter, made successful by the element of surprise.

Every ten minutes I looked at my watch and found that one more minute had gone by. I could hear a distant hysterical laughter of terns scooping up bait fish. I heard a jet go over, very high. I heard a drop of my sweat splat onto the vinyl floor.

My pants were dry, salt crusty, and now beginning to darken with sweat around the waist. The boat shoes were still damp. The wind was slacking off. I could see the water turning glassier. The bugs should come up out of the mangrove and grass marsh and shorten Sprenger's iron patience.

He would not be emotional now. Now it was a chore. He had been brought in from Phoenix six years ago on more of a basis than his pretty face. If punishment for trying cute tricks is quick, merciless, and permanent, fewer attempts are made, and the whole interweave of cooperation and concession runs more smoothly. If unaffiliated strangers come to the city to undercut the going street prices, and they are found long dead in an elegant apartment beside their long dead girls, fewer strangers come to town to go into business. If a man testifies before the grand jury and they find his head in a hat box in a coin locker at the airport, all grand juries accomplish less.

I changed position. My legs were cramped. Come on, Frank! I happened to be looking at the raft when I saw the scarlet hat leap into the air all by itself, along with the flat echoless smack of high velocity across water. The hat jumped up about a foot, leaping toward the middle of the raft. The impact knocked the fender forward, so that it slipped down below the round yellow bulge of rubberized fabric. It pulled the hair with it, so that only a small fringe still hung over the round of the life raft, visible from the island. I could not have hoped for a more realistic effect.

The raft began to sink at the foot end. There were three more shots, spaced one second apart. The raft settled more quickly and almost level. It disappeared. Air bubbles belched up. Then there was just the red hat, floating high on the water, but beginning slowly to settle as the salt water soaked into the fabric.

There was a silence of perhaps five minutes, and then the spaced shots began again. Six of them. I saw where they were going when the second one sent red dust into the air from the lens of the port bow running light of the Muсequita. He shot her lights off and the little chrome knob off the top of the ensign staff and the little elbow off the top of the windshield wiper.

He certainly wasn't using any target rifle, not at that rate of aimed fire. The sound had a vicious, stinging quality about it. Six shots gave me a vague clue. It was probably a bolt action, small-caliber, high-velocity load job, like that.243 Winchester Special, which dropped about a half inch in the first hundred yards, firing a seventy- to eighty-grain slug at a muzzle velocity of around thirty-six hundred feet per second.

Boats have a personality, a presence, a responsiveness. Little Doll had done her damned well best at all times for me, and I had sunk her onto a sand bar so somebody could shoot her bangles off. It had to be confusing her.