"Arvis, Arvis," he said sadly. "It's clothesline. A rat with ninety teeth like razors would have a tough time sawing through them. Ask Noon, he'll tell you the same thing."
She looked at me and so did Serena Savage. I tried a smile I didn't feel. Healey was right, of course, but it is always ridiculous to lie down and die. Nobody at the Alamo did, either.
"Remember George Washington?" I said. "He had false teeth. A special set. Made of iron. Now if we had those I'd say we were in business. But, when there is no wind, you row. Okay, Arvis. Scrunch around to where I can get at your ankles. I'll try anything once."
She let out a happy sigh of relief and began to wriggle and twist her slender body so that she could accommodate me. Harry Healey shrugged helplessly and motioned for Serena to do the same. At least we'd be busy doing something and not sitting around singing the blues about the cold deep Atlantic.
Within a few seconds, nobody was talking and we were busy little beavers. It must have been quite a sight at that. Harry and I chewing savagely at the roped ankles of two half-naked beauties.
He was right as rain. The clothesline might have been made of stone. And all our wet mouths did was make the chewed edges tighter. After a couple of silly minutes, I gave up, gasping. Harry Healey did likewise.
"No use," he almost moaned. "No damn use."
Suddenly, everybody had to stop moving altogether.
It was as if a lightning bolt had catapulted into the tail section and struck sparks and terror.
A shot rang out.
Rang—it thundered. Above the engine roar, the steady drone of flight, somewhere forward in the plane, a tremendous booming noise banged and bammed around the confines of the tail section.
We all stopped.
We didn't hear anything else after the single blast of gunfire. The new silence was ominous.
And then the door to the passageway opened and Leo the chauffeur whose size was mammoth literally blocked the door. He came forward in a half crouch, stooping. He still wore the uniform of his job, but a helmet and goggles crowned the upper half of his face. He had the goggles pushed up on his lumpy forehead and his slitted eyes were expressionless.
Without a word, he reached down and, because she was closest to him, grabbed hold of Arvis Healey by the left shoulder and easily and deftly, as if he were dragging nothing heavier than a light mail pouch, hauled her back through the door which he had left open. First, he untied her legs. He reappeared in an instant and repeated the same routine on Serena Savage. She began to kick and squirm but it was useless. Harry Healey tried to buffet him with his body but it was ditto. Harry cursed and raged and started to yell something about not touching a hair of Arvis's head, but he was wasting his oratory on Big Leo. The man was a Frankenstein's monster. No comments and nothing but brute strength, ordered to do a job and doing it.
Harry was next.
And then me.
When the tail-section door was slammed shut and made secure with dog locks, we were all blinking our eyes in the main compartment of the C-47.
The whole scene telegraphed itself in the winking of an eye. That's about how long it took to get the whole picture, to see what had happened.
Big Leo had lugged us like so many mail pouches down a skeletonized cargo aisle and parked us within easy reach of the main boarding door. Up front, in one of the twin bucket seats for pilot and copilot, I could make out Madame Arla Roti's shapely back stationed at the controls of the plane. Among her many talents, obviously, lay a pilot's license. The Madame did not turn to look at us. She might have been invisible. Or we might have been.
I also saw Artie Sothern.
He was lying on his face, sprawled like a dead man about three feet behind the cockpit. The Mets baseball cap was crumpled down on his head. His outstretched arm was lying across a small black automatic which had just as obviously toppled from his hand. The Basque shirt showed a wide splotchy area of red that was still spreading and turning browner by the second. Even as we looked. Serena whimpered and Arvis moaned in terror. Whatever had happened, Artie Sothern had really lost the deal this time. There was nothing fake or faked about his condition, now.
"Leo," Madame Roti called out over her shoulder, without turning. "The door. Save Mr. Noon for last. I want him to sweat a little before his time comes. I owe him something for his discourteous treatment of a lady in her own automobile."
So that was it.
Operation Drop-The-Unwanted was about to begin.
The one that would hand out halos.
Or spades.
And close the books for everybody who hadn't gone along with the master plan to turn the area of Skeleton Key into a workshop within striking distance of the mainland of the United States of America.
The oldtimers were right.
Money is the root of all evil.
OPERATION
DROP DEAD
IT was nighttime.
The sky, seen through the darkened windows, was splashed with stars. You could hear the slipstream whistling now and somehow I knew the broad inky expanse of the Atlantic couldn't be far below. Big Leo, silently, efficiently and powerfully, had tugged the air door back and there was no contest of air trying to get in. Hardly any pressure at all. It had to be that we were not too far up, that the Madame had slowed down the flying speed to help accomplish her lousy plans for us. There was no other explanation.
But death was close. Closer than the pages of a new book.
Leo fastened his big hands on Arvis who closed her eyes and screamed. Harry Healey threshed helplessly on the floor, trying to roll toward the door to block Leo. And I was doing my damnedest to work my crawl toward the gun near Artie Sothern's dead hand.
"No, wait. . . . " Harry blurted. Leo paused, waiting for another instruction from his dark lady of death. "Tell me—I gotta know—why did you plug Artie?"
Madame Roti's raven-black hair glistened as she laughed. The naked, stripped-down confines of the C-47 shone like a skeleton frame in the dark.
"You still care, Mr. Healey? With death so close? Very well. If you must know—your young friend was a question mark all the way. We never did know when he would suffer the pangs of guilt He was marked for execution. Sooner or later. Now was as good a time as any. When he spent so much time back there explaining the whole project to you, I knew he might get compunctions someday. Or remorse. It doesn't matter. We didn't need him anymore. It is well to get rid of all of you with these means at hand. Leo . . . throw the girl out."
Just like that.
Coldly, dispassionately. The same way you would order a double chocolate malted at the local drug store. Leo grunted something, reset his hold on Arvis and began to sweep her up in his arms. Harry Healey began to cry. He couldn't help it. His daughter was about to be tossed to a watery death and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. And I was still about five feet from the gun lying under Artie Sothern's arm. Serena Savage was frozen into silence. Staring at it all, the scene, the horror, with a sort of dazed fascination.
Arvis was still screaming as Leo lurched toward the open air door with her squirming body. She wasn't heavy but she was making it as hard as possible on him.
I tried to galvanize myself into action. To roll for the gun. To do something. But I was going to be too late for Arvis Healey no matter whether I succeeded or not.
Beyond the air door, the night flashed by. An occasional star burst like a rocket into view and then was gone. There would be no living witnesses to this mass murder on the high seas.
"Let her go!" Harry Healey blurted desperately, past the tears and helplessness. "She hasn't done anything. . . ."
The classic remark that takes all the guilty and the innocent with it. The statement that doesn't mean a thing when the crooked opposition has the upper hand.
Big Leo tried to slug the squirming Arvis but she kept bobbing her head away from him. Angrily, now, he literally whaled her with his body and butted her toward the air door.
I kept o
n going for the discarded automatic but I was seeing things. It wasn't there anymore. It had somehow disappeared. Bewildered, I looked over to where Artie Sothern lay sprawled in death. Unless my eyes were playing tricks and conjuring up mirages I wanted to see, he had moved.
Madame Arla Roti twisted around in her seat, flinging an angry imperious glance at her big chauffeur. He saw the look, growled something in his throat and slowly and steadily urged Arvis Healey to the door. It was only a matter of a second or two now.
Harry Healey kept on yelling.
I kept on looking for the gun.
Serena Savage had not budged an inch. She might have been some frozen solid half-nude adorning a poster that sold cigarettes or bras or panties.
The C-47 rumbled on.
Artie Sothern's dead body twitched ever so slightly. I saw the curl of his arm and watched it, mesmerized. It was like looking at a sleeping snake suddenly stir to life. It doesn't happen all at once. Only by degrees. So barely perceptible it could all be in your mind.
You could hear the plunging roar of the plane as it raced over the ocean. And Big Leo got to the door with the struggling load in his arms. Arvis was kicking and screaming.
"Do it, Leo," Madame Roti ordered from the bucket seat without turning around. "I'll have to gain altitude soon."
Leo growled and shoved Arvis toward the open door.
And on the floor, Artie Sothern's hand suddenly loomed upward, clutching the small black automatic. It coughed in his hand. A spitting, splat of sound. Big Leo let go of Arvis, losing all interest in the girl, and Healey's slender daughter scattered over the floor. Leo stared down at his uniformed chest as if trying to find out where the bullet had gone in. The C-47 abruptly clawed upward and that did it. Leo went backward, arms outflung, surprise contorting his face into a bewildered clown-mask of fear. And then he was gone. Falling through the air door and whipping out of sight into eternity. He didn't even have time to yell.
Madame Roti wasn't deaf.
She whirled in her bucket seat. A long-nosed pistol jutted from her slender hand. Probably the same weapon with which she had shot Artie Sothern. She saw him on the floor. She saw his face. We didn't. I could only see his twitching, spasmodically flexing legs and arms. He tried to bring the gun up again. To center it on her blurring face. He must have been looking at that lovely kisser through a veil of blood. He should have been dead already, but somewhere inside of him, where men can hang on in spite of the grim realities, he had mustered up enough strength to save Arvis Healey from destruction.
Madame Roti's lovely face contracted in a fierce smile. Carefully, quickly, she fired the gun in her hand. Once, twice, three times. The third shot must have gone wild. Because the first two thudded into Sothern's dying body and he shuddered just once more and then was still forever. But Madame Roti's third shot spanked dangerously far over our heads, rattling around the metal rooftop of the cabin.
It had all happened too quickly. We didn't even hear Artie's gun.
Artie Sothern coming back to life, the death of Big Leo and the shoot-out between the upper members of the hierarchy that wanted to mine some gold hoard under the ocean at Skeleton Key. Madame Roti's unforgettable face disappeared in a spurting flash of blood and ruin and her body fell backward across the controls. Artie Sothern's last statement on this earth was a dead shot right on target.
The world turned upside down.
The big plane, a leftover from World War II, suddenly heeled over, flattened out and then dipped into a dive. It dropped like an elevator and the four of us, Harry Healey, Arvis, Serena and myself, began to roll around loosely within the cabin. The engines picked up in intensified volume. The universe cannonaded with noise. Artie Sothern had taken us out of the frying pan and dropped us directly into the fire. But he was really dead and gone, now. For all time.
We were going down. There wasn't a thing we could do about it.
We were still tied up for overseas delivery. There still wasn't a thing we could do about that
We were still going to drown at sea.
It would just take a little while longer.
There was an eternity of nobody speaking, a thin hairline of terror that united all our thoughts and souls in one massed block of hypnotic unreality.
The Angel of Death kept us company.
The interior of the lumbering cargo plane seemed like a coffin, now. A coffin with no markings or identification and not even the human touch of a discarded magazine or empty coffee container to lend the vicinity any semblance of humanity.
The wind whistled.
Struts and joints and hinges creaked.
Arvis Healey hung onto a jutting hump of cabin structure and I saw her terrified young face and wondered if she had ever known a man. Any man besides vagrant fathers, tough killers and private eyes.
Serena Savage rolled helplessly down the length of the aisle until Artie Sothern's dead body, jammed up against the back of the empty bucket seat, kept her from rolling any farther. She grabbed desperately at Artie's inanimate shoulders and hung on.
Harry Healey, still cursing, his rugged face a mask of anger and fear, had locked his legs around a protuberance at the air door and was hanging on with all he had.
Up front, Madame Roti's smashed face had slammed forward into the instrument panel. She hung limply there, swaying back and forth like a pendulum. Streaming blood stained the back of her neck and shoulders.
The big plane picked up flying speed, gathering all its downward power in one concentrated powerful thrust of aerodynamics.
And me.
I huddled my arms around my head and shoulders, burrowing into one small corner of the fuselage, and tried to make myself as small as is humanly possible. Impact meant the difference between living and dying.
The engines whined, the slipstream was a high piercing score of mad unchecked descent. All time halted. Memories stopped, thinking died.
The moment held.
But only for a second.
That second that sometimes seems longer than life itself.
With a stunning suddenness and quickly demoralizing cessation of all falling sensations, the big old plane came down into the ocean with a thunderous, cataclysmic crash of noise, pancaking like a dropped elephant, plowing forward through the waves with the force of the biggest log spill in the universe.
With some impossibly lucky law of physics, Madame Roti's dead body had rammed against the controls and somehow forced the control wheel back enough to pull out of a direct dive. She had been cruising along at a level of barely two hundred feet with a flying speed of one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour before Artie Sothern changed all her plans.
Still, I was mad. Madder than hell.
"Keep your heads down!" I shouted above the motors' roar. "Tuck your neck in and go limp. Stay as loose as possible. You'll feel it less. . . ."
Big deal. Like whistling past the graveyard or humming tunelessly when the world all around you is about to go smash. But it was something, anyway. The something you always have to do when your chance of living past the next five minutes is as remote as a snowstorm in the tropics. Or Red China forgetting all its plans for world domination and tossing in the sponge and making like Good Neighbors for the duration and six. Or is that really dreaming the impossible dream?
But we came down like the end of the world, anyway.
The universe of water, plane, sky and night collided into nightmare.
The wind howled, broken metal screeched, crushed fuselage howled like the hounds of hell and the ocean buffeted and battered and belted the C-47 around like it was a child's toy.
I felt myself picked up, slammed down, picked up and slammed down again. I couldn't see what was happening to everyone else. All that now mattered was the bucking bronco we were all riding over the bounding waves.
The big metal plane dropped like a rock.
All the way down.
Falling like the dead weight it was.
The outside world thro
bbed and thrummed like a mammoth guitar gone berserk. We were hearing angel music and there was nothing anyone could do about that. The elements were scoring us all the way down to a watery graveyard.
The Big Drink.
The Atlantic Ocean, thank you.
But no thanks.
It was the deep six. And out.
There was a roaring sound, as if the world was a boiler factory with a million hammers going full blast. The night screamed. The air thundered. Somebody cried out. Moaning in agony. Somebody else moaned. More pain or terror. Or both.
And then, suddenly, the ocean stopped roaring, the metal stopped crunching and the big old plane shivered to a full stop, bobbing like a mighty cork.
Beyond the metal body, the ocean began to lap vigorously, licking, biting, swallowing. Just about that time, I wouldn't have given a plugged peseta for our chances.
The night had a million eyes.
And every one of them was watching us.
Including, hopefully, the vaunted peepers of the sometimes troublesome but always reliable Federal Bureau of Investigation.
They had not been sleeping on the job, I prayed.
The C-47 didn't sink.
Miraculously, incredibly, it remained afloat.
And four battered, bruised beaten people, still alive for all the terrible banging around they had taken, waited to sink, for ten minutes, then half an hour . . . At last we saw them. . . . We were picked up by Air-Sea Rescue, with the cooperation of the U. S. Coast Guard. Four frightened live people.
And two dead ones.
Madame Roti and Artie Sothern.
Frederick O'Malley had been very busy after he excused me from his office in New York. The Madame and I had been followed to the airport at Linden. O'Malley's men, whom I hadn't spotted once in seven days of surveillance, had radioed ahead. A Government plane had trailed us from old New Jersey after picking up the air race in the skies over Maryland.
They had seen us go down in the night.
The rest had been a matter of radio messages to Air-Sea Rescue and the nearest Coast Guard unit. Sometimes we taxpayers are well served by the things we pay for. This was certainly one of those times.
Death Dives Deep Page 14