by Jim Thompson
Diffidently Earl handed Doc the water jug. “Get you some grub too, if you want it, Doc. Just figured you’d want to do your eatin’ at night when you could come outside.”
“Of course,” Doc said. “We won’t want a thing now, Earl.”
“Well—oh, yeah. No smokin’—guess you don’t need me to tell you that. Don’t believe I’d even light a match if I was you. Little smoke or fire shows a long ways off.”
“I understand. There won’t be any,” Doc promised.
“Ever chaw? Got an extra plug with me you can have.”
“Well, now, that might be all right,” Doc said. “Thank you very much, Earl.”
Earl went back to the house. Doc politely held the canvas door aside, and waited for Carol to precede him.
It was an hour or so before dawn. Without a word, Carol curled up on the floor and was almost immediately asleep again. Doc hunkered down against the wall and took a chew of tobacco. He had slept himself out during the past two days and nights. Now sleeping was something to be done when he could no longer stay awake; something to be conserved against the boredom of wakefulness. He chewed and spat, carefully covering up the spittle each time. Occasionally he looked at the dark shadow that was Carol, and his eyes became brooding and thoughtful.
With the first rays of sunlight, the manure pile began to gather heat. By ten o’clock, when Carol came suddenly awake, Doc had stripped himself naked except for his shoes and socks, and was sitting crosslegged on his pile of clothes.
He shook his head warningly as she broke into startled laughter, then grinned in good-natured self-depreciation. “Which would you say was the funniest?” he whispered. “Me or the symbolism of the situation?”
“I can’t decide.” She laughed softly. “Maybe I’d better get into the act myself.”
She undressed, wiping away the sweat with her clothes, making a cushion of them as Doc had with his. And now that they were alone, Doc showed a great deal of concern about her many cuts and bruises. Carol made little of them; she deserved them, she said, for making a darned fool of herself. But she was pleased by his solicitude, and completely rested and relaxed, she felt very kindly toward him.
Head tilted to one side, she gave him an impish look. Then, leaning forward suddenly, she took his bristled face in her hands and…
A soggy mass struck her on the forehead, slid down across her face. She sat back abruptly, scrubbing and brushing at herself. “Gaah!” she spat disgustedly, nose wrinkled. “Ugh! Of all the filthy, messy…”
“Now, that was a shame,” Doc said. “It’s the heat, I suppose. It softens this stuff up and…”
“Please!” She grimaced. “Isn’t it bad enough without you drawing me a picture?”
That was the end of any lovemaking. Doc withdrew behind the calm mask of his face, and Carol sank back into her former listlessness. As the long hours dragged by, she talked to herself silently; jeered the vague they and them for the fools that they were.
A lot of fun, isn’t it? Oh, sure! Just like the movies. Real dramatic and exciting. Two big, bad, brainy bank robbers, hiding naked in a pile of manure!
The heat brought hordes of flies. It brought out swarms of corpse-colored grub worms, which dropped down on their heads and backs or crawled up under them from the floor. And it brought a choking, eyewatering stench, which seemed to seep through every pore of their skins.
Once, in desperation, Carol started to swing back the canvas door. But Doc pushed her away from it firmly. “You know better than that. Try a chew of tobacco.”
“Tobacco? That’ll kill the smell of this stuff?”
“No. But it’ll take the taste of it out of your mouth.”
She hesitated, then held out her hand. “Gimme. I can’t be any sicker than I am already.”
She took a small chew. It did make her sicker, but it was a different kind of sickness, and even that was a relief.
She and Doc sat chewing and spitting, not bothering to cover the spittle, not having to. The manure dripped and plopped down on it. And the flies swarmed, and the bugs crawled. And so the long day dragged on, and at last it was night.
Earl carried several pails of water down from the house, and they were able to douse away some of the filth. But the stench and the tobacco-tainted taste of it remained with them. It flavored the little food they were able to eat; in their imagination they could even taste it in the whiskey which Earl served them from a hip-pocket bottle.
There was no one at the house, so Earl had to get back to it quickly. Which meant that Carol and Doc could not linger in the open as they had hoped to. Reluctantly they went back beneath the canvas door flap and into the wretchedness of another night. Doc settled himself down to as much comfort as he could create. Carol moved restlessly from one spot to another on the filthy floor.
Why? she whispered fiercely. Why did they have to be here? First those terrible underwater holes that even a rat would have run from, and now this—this—place. It didn’t make sense. After all, there’d been plenty of heat on them after they’d jumped the train, and they’d had to hide then. But never had they holed up in anything as bad as the Santises had provided.
“We were on the move then,” Doc pointed out mildly. “We weren’t pinned down in so small an area.”
“I don’t care! I say we could hide just as well in some place that we could at least stand—that was endurable, I mean.”
Doc said that they seemed to have endured thus far. Then, patiently, he went on to explain that the best hiding place was always the one which seemed utterly impossible for human habitation. The water holes, for example; as she had said, even a rat would have shied from them. And now the manure pile. If it was nauseously repellent even at a distance, who would expect anyone to take refuge inside of it?
Carol listened dully. Then ceased to listen. Or to think. She’d better not complain any more, she guessed. Her position was uncertain enough as it was. Unlike Doc, however, she had not schooled herself to accepting what she could not change, so she simply deadened herself to it. Lapsing into a blind, blank lifelessness where time was at once endless and nonexistent.
They were in the manure pile for two more nights and days.
On the third night, Earl came down to them without his usual burden of provisions.
“Grab yourself a bite at the house,” he explained. “Get cleaned up, too. Looks like you’re on your way.”
Earl lounged on the porch, his pack of vicious-looking curs romping around him. Seated around the kitchen table were Ma, the boat captain, Carol and Doc. Carol’s hair was cut short to her head. Both she and Doc wore rolled-up stocking caps, jeans, and loosely fitting sweat shirts. To all appearances they were one with the captain’s crew—his three kinsmen who stood behind his chair, beaming, frowning, smiling, as the case might be, in exaggerated imitation of his expression.
Right now they were all frowning.
“But twenty-five thousan’!” The captain rolled his eyes heavenward. “What is twenty-five thousan’ for such a risk? A mere pittance!”
“Then it ain’t really the risk you mind,” Ma said drily, “long as you get paid enough for it. That’s the way it sizes up, Pete?”
“Well…”
“Sure it is. So you got a bigger risk, and you’re gettin’ bigger money. Twice what you ever got before. An’ that’s more’n fair, and it’s all you’re gonna get.”
The two money belts were on the table. Ma opened them, and counted out an equal amount from each.
Melodramatically, the captain continued his protests. “It will not do, senhora! Me, I do not mind. We are old friends, an’ with friends one is generous. But my crew—” he turned and shook his head at them. “You see? They will not do it! They insis’ that…”
“Who you kiddin’?” Ma laughed. “Them ginks don’t even know what we’re talkin’ about.”
The captain scowled, then, his manner undergoing a complete change, he also laughed. “Well, one must always try, yes? Even wi
th friends, it is no less than a duty. But now that we are agreed…”
He reached for the money. Ma dropped a hamlike hand over it.
“When you get back,” she said. “When I get the word from these people that they got to where they were goin’, safe an’ sound an’ with all their belongins’.”
“But—but,” the captain sputtered, coloring. “You think I am stool pigeon? You do not trust me, yes?”
“Huh-uh. Didn’t say nothin’ like that.”
“Then why? An’ suppose there is trouble? What if I could not come back, eh?”
“Then you wouldn’t get no money. An’,” she gave him a steady look, “you wouldn’t need none, Pete.”
His eyes fell. He mumbled weakly that the matter was really nothing to dispute about; he was quite content to wait for his money. Ma nodded, wadded the bills into a roll and tucked it into the front of her dress.
Earl came in from the porch. Everyone shook hands, and Doc suggested lightly that Ma and Earl come along for the journey. They demurred, grinning at each other as though exchanging some secret joke. “Guess not, Doc. Me ’n Earl kind of likes it here.”
“Yeah,” said Earl. “Yes, sir, we like it real well here.”
“An’ o’ course, we couldn’t leave now, nohow. Not with Roy still in the pen.”
Doc said that he understood. There was an awkward moment of silence with no one seemingly able to speak or move. And then, prompted by something in Ma’s attitude, Doc felt constrained to proffer payment for the help which she and Earl had rendered.
“I’d really feel much better about it,” he said with wholly insincere sincerity. “I know you’ve said you don’t need any money, but…”
“We-el, let’s see now,” Ma said. “What you think it’s been worth to you, Doc?”
“Why—” he kept his smile warm, but there was a cold lump in his stomach. Several times already he had mentally totted up the money in the belts and divided it by two. “Why, I wouldn’t put a figure on it, Ma. It’s worth whatever you say it is, and whatever you say is a hundred percent okay with me.”
“How’d five grand strike you?”
Five! He’d been expecting—well, he didn’t know just what. But when people tapped you on a deal like this, it was usually for most of what you had. And there was nothing you could do but like it.
“It’s not enough,” he declared, generous in his relief. “I’d be getting a bargain at ten.”
“Knew you’d take it that way.” Ma wagged her head in satisfaction. “Told Earl you would, didn’t I, son? But it ain’t for us, Doc. What I had in mind was, if you’re sure that five or ten won’t pinch you…”
“Ten. And it doesn’t matter if it does pinch!”
“Well, I’d like you to pass it on to Pat Gangloni. I told you he was down there, I guess. He wasn’t carryin’ very heavy when he skipped, an’ I been pretty concerned about him.”
“Good old Pat,” Doc said. “I’ll see that he gets it, Ma.”
“I’d o’ helped him myself. But he was in an’ out awful fast, an’ I didn’t have nothin’ I could get at in a hurry. So,” she wrung his hand. “I’m right pleased you’ll be lookin’ out for him. Know you mean to or you wouldn’t say so.”
“It’s as good as done,” Doc promised. “After all, Pat’s a mighty good friend of mine, too.”
They rode in the captain’s car with Doc in the front seat between him and one of his crew, and Carol in the rear between the remaining two crewmen. Fog was thickening over San Diego, slowly descending upon the bay. The car crept through it cautiously, coming into the quay from the north, then circling the city’s civic center, and returning from the south.
The boat was a sturdy fifty-footer, tied up about halfway down the long wharf. There were other seagoing craft on either side of it, a shrimp fisherman and a pleasure launch, but both were silent and dark. The captain parked the car and put the keys in the glove compartment. (It would be picked up by one of his many kinsmen.) He opened the door, spoke quickly in Portuguese and English. “Now, we are in a hurry; so we must be to go out with the tide. But we are not running. We go slow fast, yes?”
His teeth gleamed in a nervous smile. He got out and the others followed him, and they moved with unhurried haste across the quay. The captain leaped aboard, held out his hands to Carol. Doc landed on the deck a second behind her, and calling low-voiced instructions over his shoulder, the captain showed them to his tiny cabin. It was to be theirs for the voyage. He himself would bunk with the crew.
He closed the door behind him; and there was a murmuring of voices, a blurred confusion of sounds. Then the roar—quickly muted—of the boat’s twin diesels. And they moved out into the bay.
The captain came back, drew the shades over the portholes and turned on the light. “You will be very quiet, yes?” He smiled his white, nervous smile. “On the water, the sound she travels far.”
He left again. Almost imperceptibly, the boat gathered speed. They slid deeper and deeper into the fog, and the gray mass of it closed in behind them.
Doc prowled about the cabin, automatically inspecting it as he did any place that was strange to him. He was looking for nothing in particular. Simply looking. Most top-drawer criminals have this habit. It had saved Doc’s life several times, conversely bringing about the loss of another’s life or other’s lives on each occasion.
He checked the small shelf of books, and the first-aid cabinet. He looked under the bunk, smiling an apology at Carol who had lain down on it. He poked through the pigeonholes of the desk, located a key ring, and unlocked and examined each of the drawers. Relocking them—and leaving their contents exactly as he found them—he turned his attention to the heavy chest at the foot of the bunk.
It was padlocked at either end. Doc made a selection from the keys on the ring, found the appropriate ones on the first try and raised the heavy oak lid. There was a quantity of grayish blankets inside; also, bedded between them, several boxes of ammunition, two repeating rifles and two twelve-gauge double-barreled shotguns. Doc’s eyes lit up. Then, almost absently, he loaded the shotguns, laid them at the top of the chest and lowered the lid. He put the locks back on their staples—not locked, although they appeared to be. That completed his inspection and its corollary activities, and he rehid the keys in their pigeonhole and fixed himself a drink.
Lying in the bunk, Carol watched her husband for a few moments, then turned on her side and closed her eyes. His behavior was merely another variation of a norm. If there was anything more than that behind it, he would tell her. When and if the telling became necessary.
She slept.
Almost immediately, it seemed, she came awake again.
Out there in the night, there was a peculiar echo to the boat’s diesels. Or, no it wasn’t an echo, but the mounting purr of another engine. And against the blinded portholes, pushing stubbornly through the fog, was a fuzzy beam of light.
The cabin was dark. There was silence—tense, expectant—and then Doc’s harsh whisper. Carol could see him now, feel him sitting at her side. And near the door, she saw the white flash of the captain’s teeth.
“You do what I tell you to, Pete. My wife and I will do the rest.”
“No! Please, senhor! I cannot—it is not necessary! Only a small launch, no more than three men, I know! All…”
“That makes it all the better.”
“Please! I tell you we do not have to! I swear it, and I know thees Coast Guard. Am I a stranger to them? Have I not made this same run many times? We will chat for a few moments, perhaps, and…”
“And they’ll hold you up in the meantime. Find out who you are, where you’re headed. Get all the dope they need to have us nailed by a cruiser.”
“But—but—” there was a desperate sob in the darkness. “But later, senhor? What of that? His position will have been known, and it will be known that I, my boat, was…”
“You can blame it on me. My wife and I slipped on board without your knowle
dge, and took charge of your guns and ammunition.”
“Ha! They will believe such a story?”
“Why not? It’s a pretty good one.” Doc paused ominously. “In fact, I’d say it was a lot better than the other one.”
“You say! It is easy for—what other one?”
“The one you’d have to tell Ma Santis. Not that it would do you any good, Pete. Nothing you could tell her would do any good.”
“But…”
The captain sighed heavily. The purr of the motor launch swelled to a sluggish drone.
“I don’t like it either, Pete,” Doc said earnestly. “I hate killing, and I particularly hate this. But what else can I do?”
“What else?” It scarcely sounded like the captain’s voice. “Yes, what else, senhor? What could possibly be dearer than one’s own life?”
He turned and left. A moment later there was a cry of “Ahoy, there! Ahoy, Elena Isabella!” Then a gentle bump and the scraping of wood against wood.
Doc cocked the shotguns. He handed one of them to Carol, and silently opened the two portholes.
There were three men in the launch: a gunner, the steersman, and its captain, a young lieutenant j.g. He stood with one foot braced on the side of his boat, cap pushed back on his head. The steersman slouched nearby, an elbow hooked over the windshield. Hands in his pockets, the gunner stood by his stern-mounted machine gun.
Doc studied him. He put a restraining hand on Carol’s arm. Wait! Perhaps the three would draw closer together.
“What’s the big hurry, Pete?” The lieutenant spoke in an amiable drawl; a friend addressing a friend. “Weren’t trying to run away from me, were you?”
“R-run?” the captain laughed shakily. “Who runs? Who is in a hurry?”
“Didn’t bait up tonight, did you? Why not?”