A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  Behind me Sonny began to curse again, steadily this time. I turned to look at him. I was holding the two guns carefully in my left hand, dangling, with my first finger through their two trigger guards. Sonny was dead white. His face was all squeezed up between his heavy brows and his Gould mustache like a pair of wrinkled pants between the two bars of a hairy pants-hanger, and his mouth was wide open and contorted with his cursing.

  “I didn’t do it!” Jane Duval cried from the balcony. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing to do at all. Okay, I screwed them. Girgis said he would take me away from here, to America. Marie was going to go back to New York with me together, at one point. Con Taylor said he would take me away to Rome. But I didn’t kill them. I didn’t. And I don’t care. I don’t care, and I’ll shout it from every court in the land. I’ll tell it to everybody. You take me to court and see! I’ll go to court. I’m willing to go to court. I want to go to court! I can prove I didn’t do it. I don’t know who killed them. But I didn’t!” She clutched her towel around her.

  There was a long silence after she stopped. I turned to look at Sonny. So did Jim Kirk. So we both saw it when he moved the gun.

  “Hold it!” Kirk said urgently. “Hold on. Let’s just talk about it a minute.”

  “God damn you,” Sonny said. “God damn both of you. Davies, turn around here. Put those guns on the floor. Keep your right hand away from them. Lay them down, with your left hand, and push them over here.”

  I turned and put the two guns on the floor and slid them over to him meekly. Kirk watched me, hungrily. Sonny kicked the guns away from him into a corner viciously, a dangerous thing to do if you knew a hammer could bang up against a wall and ignite a cartridge.

  “You thought you were a smart guy, huh?” Sonny said, in a contorted voice.

  I didn’t answer him.

  He was breathing heavily. “Thought you’d get me over here, and get me to expose myself, did you? Okay, I’ll expose myself.

  “I killed them. I killed them both. Me. Sonny Duval. And I’d have got Con Taylor too, if you hadn’t stuck your damned nose in it. And this one, too.” He glared at Kirk. “I’d of got him too. You think I give a damn? I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn.”

  He sucked a breath. “But it won’t do you any good, all your smart shit, smart guy. Because you forgot one thing. You didn’t think about it. You gave me a gun, you dumb bastard.” He grinned.

  “I guess you’ve got the drop on me, Sonny,” I said. “You outfoxed me.”

  Beside me Kirk’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger. He kept looking back and forth from Sonny to me.

  “You’re goddamned right I have. I’ve outfoxed everybody. Until you got into it, Davies. But it doesn’t matter. This way’s just as good as any other. I was going to cut out from here anyway, soon. As soon as I’d taken care of Con Taylor. But I’ll get him some other time.” He stopped, and swallowed. He threw a quick glance upward.

  “Jane, come down here! Put your clothes on, honey, and come down. There’s nothing to be afraid of. These tough guys aren’t going to hurt you. They’re not going to hurt anybody. Come on down, and we’ll get out of here. For good.”

  I looked up at the balcony. Jane Duval’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger, too. Her hands, knuckle-white, were gripping the balcony railing. Her towel was slowly slipping off her. Now she was just about all exposed. Nobody seemed to care, at the moment. I certainly didn’t.

  Sonny swung his eyes on me. “The money’s been stashed away a long time. And I’ve got the boat. All I need is our passports. I’ve had it all ready a long time, actually. Nobody’ll ever catch up with us. When you’ve got the money, nobody can touch you. All you need is enough money, Davies. And I’ve got it.” He grinned, and swallowed.

  “They won’t even know I killed you two. I can make it look like you shot each other.

  “Honey, put your clothes on! Why are you standing there? Don’t look so scared. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Jane didn’t move. Sonny didn’t know it, but I could have told him. Jane wasn’t about to get ready to go anywhere with him, ever. She’d rather have married me.

  Sonny looked at Kirk. “You none of you ever understood her. You thought she was an easy lay. I told you over and over you didn’t understand her. Big tough he-man males. Every woman a notch on your gun. Knock them over like the ducks in a shooting gallery. Sure.”

  He swung the gun on me. “You think I didn’t see her over there at that house of yours all morning? I saw it. I recorded it. Here.” He tapped his temple with his other hand.

  Back to Kirk. “But you. You fat slob. You’re the worst of all. So I’m giving you the honor of being first.”

  Covertly I looked over at Kirk, whose eyes were bulging with disbelief. His whole face seemed to bulge outward with a mighty effort to stop what was happening to him. Here he was, his face screamed, about to die, really actually about to die, at the hands of a stupid madman, who was shooting him, who was in the act of shooting him, the whole thing was crazy, and nobody was doing anything to stop it, him, Jim Kirk.

  In front of us Sonny pulled the trigger on the little gun, the hammer rising and falling with a kind of inexorable inevitability.

  The gun crashed out, enormously loud in the room. Jim Kirk stood, blank-faced, waiting for something to hit him.

  I had an enormous desire to laugh. Sonny was still firing, at Kirk and at me, the shots crashing out deafeningly in the room. Kirk and I stood and looked at him. On the balcony Jane was screaming to add her share to the racket. For once in my life I thought I could award myself first prize, for staging and set designing if not for anything else.

  About the time he ran out of ammo and began firing clicks, it dawned on Sonny that neither of us had gone down. He looked down at the gun in his hand.

  “That’s it, Sonny,” I said, quietly. “That’s right. I put ’em in there for you myself.”

  He looked down again at the gun, a moment longer. Then, “You son of a bitch,” he screamed, and threw the gun at me and bolted out the door.

  I ducked the gun, and jumped for the corner where the two honest guns were. It was about eight steps. But the duck had cost me the split second I needed to beat Kirk, and he was there ahead of me. He blocked me off with his big butt and fell on his knees and grabbed both of them. He was sobbing.

  “I’ll kill the son of a bitch! I’ll kill him!”

  “You dumb bastard,” I hollered. “You’ll kill nobody. Give me one. He’s getting away.”

  He simply glared at me. “I’ll kill the son of a bitch! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”

  He was on his feet now, and I slugged him on the jaw as hard as I could. He sat down, his eyes a little glazed, but still holding tight to both guns. Waveringly, he pointed one of them at me. I wasn’t sure he knew I wasn’t Sonny.

  Anyway, I didn’t have time to sit down and discuss it with him. I turned my back and ran for the door.

  Up on the balcony Jane Duval was still screaming, monotonously, without an opera singer’s inflections.

  Chapter 57

  I HIT THE PATIO RUNNING, and went across it at a dead run for the boat stairs. I was sure he’d head down for the boat, and I wanted to catch him before he could get it moving. The thought that he might get away now was unbearable. Instead, I ran right into him, head-on, at the top of the stairs on the landing.

  I didn’t know why he had stopped. I didn’t have time to think about it. Suddenly he just appeared in front of me. He had stopped just below the landing of the staircase down to the cove, and then run back up. I caught a momentary glimpse of deep confusion, and deep rage, on his face. He seemed undecided whether to commit himself to the boat, or take a chance on trying his luck in the hills. Nobody but a tinhorn would think of going for the hills on a tiny island like Tsatsos.

  I was trying to slow up, and get my feet under me, and get my arm cocked for a punch.

  Sonny jumped in the air, and took two
steps toward me. I threw the punch in mid-stride and missed. Sonny, whining high in his throat like some animal, grabbed me just above the waist with both hands and lifted me, and threw me down on the stone patio on my back.

  I weighed 180 pounds. It was an impossible physical feat. Even Kirk wasn’t that strong. I knew Sonny wasn’t.

  I lit flat out, and the wind whooshed out of me. My bad side seemed to burst open like a melon. Pain knifed through my chest like a jolt of electric current. It was as if someone had thrust a red-hot saber in, between my bad ribs and shoved it through me till it pushed against the skin on the other side.

  He could have killed me then. All he had to do was stomp me. Or kick in my head. Instead, he turned and ran down the long staircase to the boats. As if I had made up his mind for him which way he wanted to go.

  I rolled over and got to my feet like a crippled bird with a broken wing, cursing weakly. I had gone feeble all over. My left arm was clamped against my screaming side and felt paralyzed. I had to go after him. I had to get him. But what the hell. In this kind of shape, what the hell was I going to do with him when I got hold of him? I couldn’t stand the thought he might get away, now.

  I started down the steps one at a time. Even one at a time was an effort. They seemed about a mile down, down there. I couldn’t go faster. I kept my left arm clamped against my side. I was still cursing. I could clench and unclench my fist, but I couldn’t seem to lift the arm. I worked on flexing and unflexing my hand. Down below I could see Sonny scrambling out across Polaris, and untying the lines from the Daisy Mae. He ran to the helm.

  For a long moment he looked up at me, his head thrust back, his neck corded, his mouth a black hole. The whites of his eyes seemed enormous in his face. I crimped on down, trying to run. There was no point in hollering anything at him. He knew what I was after.

  From the stairs his face was a study in planes and angles. It wasn’t even the same face. There were no curved surfaces or lines in it. Even his eye holes seemed squared off into rectangles.

  He started the motor as I was just about down. I jumped the last three steps.

  I was beginning to move a little better. But the jar of the jump hurt me. I started to run across the bottom of the U of docks for the Polaris. I could move my left arm a little now. The motor’s roar came across to me. Up on the bluff they wouldn’t even be able to hear it, or just barely.

  The thought that he might get away was intolerable.

  There was one thing in my favor. He was going to have to turn the boat to get out. And it was going to take him a little time. The space was narrow. He was going to have to back right past and around Polaris’s higher stern. The only other choice was to back right out into the sea swell that was coming in at an angle and kicking up waves at the narrow angled entrance.

  I didn’t think anybody would back a boat out into that swell. In here, it packed an enormous wallop when it burst against the unmoving rocks at the entrance.

  Daisy Mae’s nose was already swinging wide of the Polaris when I got to her. Too wide to jump. I didn’t bother to cross her deck. I ran aft along the starboard rail for the stern.

  As I reached her stern, Sonny swept back past me in a stately way, his eyes glaring above his black hole of a mouth. There wasn’t anything he could do to change her movement, now. He didn’t say a word, I didn’t either.

  When his midships passed me, I jumped down onto her coach-roof and grabbed the awning.

  That jump hurt me, too. Worse than the first. It was as though an exploding fireball went through my side. But my blood was up now. I started aft after him along the boom.

  Sonny was having his troubles. He was trying to maneuver the boat, watch the rocks at his rear and me in his front, all at the same time. I was unhampered by any such concerns. I gave him a grin. With his strangely planed and angled face he gave me a snarling glare. Neither of us spoke. I jumped the gap from the coach-roof to the motor housing and went for him.

  He had already put the engine in neutral, but momentum was still carrying Daisy Mae backward toward the rocks. As I jumped he shoved the gear lever forward into forward gear and at the same time picked up a spanner wrench he must have kept in the motor well, for the engine. It was a heavy spanner.

  I had no choice but to go in into the wrench. I figured the less time I gave him to get set the better. I wasn’t going to let a spanner wrench stop me at this stage of the game. It was easy enough to see coming, as I dove. He drew it back and hit me with all his force. I hunched and took most of it on the pad of muscle on my left shoulder and rolled my head with it but it slid off upward and hit my cheekbone and the whole left side of my face went numb. But I managed to grab his sleeve with my left hand. It would have killed me if I had taken it straight.

  The force of the blow was so great it knocked me sideways in mid-air. My feet hit the bulwark, and I scrambled them against it and dove in again, still holding onto the sleeve. Sonny went down under me, and I rolled my back into him and got my other hand on the arm and began working on the hand holding the wrench. Behind me Sonny was snarling and cursing and whining in his throat, and punching me in the side of the head as hard as he could with his left hand. Blood was pouring down the left side of my face past my mouth. His fist kept slipping in it. Then he bit me in the back as hard as he could bite.

  But I’d found the tendon in his wrist, and shook the wrench loose and pushed it overboard. I tore my back loose from his teeth and rolled on around and hit him in the jaw with my right.

  It was as hard as I could hit. It should have knocked him out. It hardly fazed him. He hit me with his right and left, from down under me, and made my head ring. I hit him back repeatedly with my right. My left wasn’t much good, but I used that too, and hit him on both sides with all the punches I could throw.

  But I couldn’t put him out. He punched back and rolled and squirmed, and fought with what seemed to be four times his strength. He fought like a madman. Which, at least at that moment, I guessed he was. But I was turning into a crazy man myself. Then, by accident, he hit me under the arm on the left side in the ribs.

  Everything went white in front of me. For a long moment, I thought I was going to faint. When I could see again, everything was blurry and milky. The pain was just about the worst I thought I had ever felt. If he had hit me there again, I was sure I would faint. But Sonny didn’t notice, and kept hitting for my head.

  But then I thought I wouldn’t faint. If he hit me there again. If he hit me there a dozen times, I wouldn’t faint. I seemed to swell up inside with some force in me that couldn’t be licked. Not by him, anyway. And I was happy.

  Anyway, to faint, here, in these circumstances, was to be dead. The thought of him getting away from me, even if I was dead, was still intolerable.

  I got him by the throat with my good hand, and grabbed him by the hair with my weak one, and moved to let the blood still pouring off my face run down into his eyes, and began to choke him and bounce his long-haired head on the deck. If I couldn’t choke with my weak hand, I could guide with it.

  His punches got slower and feebler and stopped. I stopped banging his head. When I let go his throat, his right arm jerked up and tried to hit me. I banged his head again. That seemed to do it.

  I got up shakily and looked around. Everything looked different. Everything looked washed, and strange and new and as if on a different planet. The boat was in no danger. The helm had been pushed hard over to starboard, and the Daisy Mae was turning in slow tight circles to port. The wind was blowing her slowly toward the far dock, but she wouldn’t hit for a while. I stepped and got a hank of waxed seizing and tied him up before he could come around. I tied his hands behind him, and tied his feet, then ran a loop between them and cinched him up tight. He wouldn’t be getting loose from that. Then I turned to take care of the boat.

  Up on the bluff Kirk and Jane Duval were standing on the edge of the patio, watching. They had had center box dress circle seats for the thing. I waved to them jaun
tily.

  Sonny was still out when I tied up to Polaris. But his breathing was regular. I left him there.

  I went below and got a handful of gauze compresses to stop the bleeding from my cheek. In the little mirror I saw it had been laid wide open. It was still numb. It would take eight or ten stitches to close it properly. I would have a nice scar, for about a year.

  Also, I had barked two knuckles and sprained one thumb. I couldn’t see my back. But any kind of real assessment at the moment was ridiculous. I could hardly take a breath because of my side, which seemed to be burning with fever.

  I left the boat pressing the compresses to my cheek.

  It was a long, hard climb up those stairs again. I tried to make it look like it was easy for me.

  Chapter 58

  “BY GOD. THAT WAS some fight,” Kirk said, as I came up onto the patio.

  There was a nice breeze blowing under the pine trees up there on the bluff. I sat down on a stone bench and let it blow me.

  The dappled shade was pleasant. But my side was killing me. Kirk came over.

  “I was all ready to shoot him,” he said. “If he whipped you.” He held up his big Smith & Wesson. He seemed to be all over his big scare. He handed me my two .38s. He didn’t seem to be mad at me over my little trick.

  “Thanks.” I stuck the guns in my belt. “You mean before he killed me? Or after?” My side was really ruining me.

  “Well, I couldn’t hardly shoot that close to you while he was killing you. I might have hit you.” He grinned.

  Jane Duval followed him over, as if she did not want to get far away from him, and stood beside him not saying much. She was still shocked. She was back in her Mother Hubbard. It had not dawned on her yet that soon she would probably be in control of a good part of Sonny’s money.