Red Heroin

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Red Heroin Page 15

by Jerry Pournelle


  I didn't say anything. It was coming to me that Roger might not know anybody was after him except me, in which case he was just taking me for a ride out in the Sound. His description of what Shearing's boys would do to him would fit me just as well.

  "Didn't Murray talk?" Roger shouted. "Damn it, you went in his house and came out with him limping. You shot him and killed his buddy. Didn't he tell you about me?"

  "He told me you were the one who had the bright idea about getting me to smuggle narcotics into the country, Roger. That's all he told me. I resent hell out of being used that way and I went to see you, that's all."

  "Doesn't matter. I guess it's all over now. That blonde girl you run around with knows. I thought you liked Carole, you know that? I thought you and Carole were real thick. She thought so, that's why I let Murray go ahead. And here you show up with that blonde before they finish cleaning Carole up off the sidewalk. I got to hand it to you, you sure can collect them. You had Carole all sewed up too. I went to see her just before you left on that trip and she wouldn't even talk to me. If she only knew who sent her to you in the first place, she'd have known how important I was. She'd have talked to me then."

  We were a good way out in the Sound by then, heading north-northwest in the general direction of Admiralty Inlet. He made me get his little briefcase affair out for him, watching me so closely I didn't have a chance to do anything else. He took a reel of wire out of it, and after he told me what he wanted I got it attached to a halyard and pulled an end up the mast. There was a microphone and headset in the little leather case.

  "Laurie J, this is Alfred. Laurie J, this is Alfred," he told it. He kept that up for a couple of minutes, then said, "I have transportation. I have excess baggage. Where can you meet me for some real fishing? I have a bait with extra secret ingredients. Over." He listened some more, then put all the gear back in the briefcase. "You be good, Paul, and you can live the rest of the day anyway. They'll meet us before dark off Dungeness, and then I suppose we'll have to sink your boat with you in it."

  "Yeah. Well, if it's all the same to you, Roger, I didn't get to bed last night. I think I'll go to sleep." He didn't say anything, mostly because he didn't believe me. But the one thing I learned in the army was to sleep anywhere, anytime, in any position. I won't say I actually slept soundly, but I managed to get some rest. I figured he'd be waking me up in about three hours, and it was a long way to Dungeness Spit.

  Chapter Eleven

  It didn't take three hours. Roger was running the motor full throttle, and that eats gas. The engine in Witch is like a lot of sailboat engines, there's too much horsepower for the boat. A sailboat has a hull speed, and no matter how fast you run the motor, after it reaches that speed it won't go faster. You just use the extra power making big waves. I had been running low on fuel after the trip, but hadn't bothered to get more because we hadn't needed it. Running at max engine revs, it lasted no more than a couple of hours. I woke up when the engine missed, caught, missed again, sputtered, and died out.

  Roger had a helpless look on his face. I actually felt sorry for him, but not much. "What's the matter with this thing? "he yelled.

  "Out of fuel, I suppose. Ran her pretty low on the trip."

  He looked desperate. When he looked around, then pointed the gun at me, I thought I had better do something.

  "This is a sailboat, and there's a wind. If you'll let me get the blasted sails up, you can still make your appointment. There's a good southeast wind, right off our quarter, and she'll go like a bat. Faster than with the engine."

  He lowered the gun. "Get them up. You try anything and I'll kill you. I need you to get this thing going, but I guess I could figure out how to sail it if I had to."

  I doubted that, but didn't see any point in telling him. He'd find out soon enough. Getting a sailboat under way in a brisk wind, without power to hold steerage way until the main is up, is not so easy. With a complete lubber for a helmsman, it's damn near impossible. The main kept getting fouled on the spreaders, and Roger didn't know how to let her fall off, gather way, and point back up into the wind again. I had to keep shouting at him what to do, and pull the halyard by myself since he wasn't about to put his gun down. I wasn't in too much of a hurry anyway, so it took over fifteen minutes. Once the main was up, we got the staysail and jib set without too much trouble.

  The wind was off our starboard quarter, and it had blown up to twenty knots while we were motoring. There was a good sea running along with us, and Roger found that he simply couldn't steer. The boat kept wallowing from side to side, almost dipping the boom in the water as it rolled, and threatened to broach. After a couple of minutes of this he told me to take the helm.

  Then there was nothing to do but sail. We were making good speed, at least six knots and probably more with surfing down the whitecaps, and it was a lot of fun. Or it would have been a lot of fun if it hadn't been for Roger and his gun. I wasn't all that worried about him now. He needed me to get to his friends, while I could always manage to stop him from getting there. For that matter, once we were in Admiralty I could dive overboard. The boat would roll, Roger couldn't chase me because he couldn't handle her, and it wouldn't be too far to shore. Cold, yes, but I should be able to handle that.

  There was only one trouble. By the time we reached Admiralty Inlet, off Point No Point, my arms were so tired I didn't think I could stay afloat long enough to make shore. Hanging onto the tiller of a sailboat in a following sea is work. I was beginning to believe in wheel steering, although most sailboat men would rather not have them because they aren't sensitive enough or quick enough in emergencies.

  I had another thing to think about too. Roger didn't know that my boat was paid for by Shearing and Company, so he hadn't thought about the fact that they ought to be looking for me pretty quick, and know just where to look. He evidently thought I was just what I seemed to be, a guy who didn't like dope smuggling and got mad. He was running out because I got to Murray. I made sure by getting him to talk some more.

  "Yeah, Paul, I guess it's all over. After your girl friend gets through talking they'll be looking for me for smuggling narcotics, and it won't take the counterspies long to connect dope and Murray's politics. So even if I can't be convicted in court, they'll get me. One way or another, they take care of people like me. You didn't know that, did you? That there are government people who make people disappear? Well, there are."

  "Where are you going, Roger?" I asked him. "Oh, they'll have a use for me somewhere. There aren't many people who can get them to help when real trouble starts. A fishing boat will get me and take me to another boat, and I'll end up somewhere in Canada. Different name, new passport, it won't be hard to go somewhere."

  "You must be important to be worth all that trouble. If it was me in your fix, I'd worry about my friends drowning me to shut me up. You sure they won't?"

  "Now why would they do that?" There was a trace of fear in his voice, and he started talking to make himself feel better. "I've done a lot for them. I got narcotics into the country, I recruited pushers, I even helped them get rid of some gangsters who didn't want competition. I've done a lot for them. They won't let me down."

  "So had Leon Trotsky," I said. "Oh, excuse me, wrong outfit. Let's see, I'm not up on my Chinese Communism. Who's been purged lately?"

  I didn't hear what he said next, because we were almost swamped by a wake from a big power cruiser that had pulled up behind us. It roared by and the helmsman waved at us in a peculiar way. I didn't get it at first, but then it came to me. He had waved the same way that Shearing had when he signaled Janie, and the same way Janie had summoned Doug. I couldn't make out the features of the three men and a girl in the boat because they were bundled up, a little too bundled up for summer even in Seattle. The only face I had seen at all, now that I thought of it, was the helmsman, and that might or might not have been George, but I would have bet that girl had blonde curly hair under the hood of her parka. So now I had reinforcements. I coul
dn't see how they'd do me a lot of good. Accurate shooting at any range at all would be nearly impossible the way the boats were pitching around in the riptides. Admiralty is famous for the things. They also made it impossible for me to jump overboard until slack water, which wouldn't be for a couple of hours. When I was thinking about jumping before, I hadn't known what the tides would be. So they couldn't shoot Roger from their boat, and I couldn't jump. Come right down to it, they wouldn't shoot him anyway. They'd want him alive.

  Their boat was one of those chrome and mahogany twin-screw power jobs that can make over twenty knots, if you don't mind wasting fuel. They were doing twelve or so now, so it didn't take long for them to get past. We were coming off Bush Point, and it figured that they would go on up into Admiralty Bay and wait to see what we were doing.

  Roger didn't look too good. He couldn't have had a lot of sleep the night before either, since he knew I'd been to Murray's place. I wondered how he knew that. Ron maybe. Didn't think Ron had it in him to put down his bottle after what had happened.

  I could see how I might manage to get Roger's gun out of the way, and with the crew nearby I wasn't too worried about whatever would meet him. The problem now was to hang on long enough to get there. It was a little easier in the Inlet, the wind had shifted more easterly and was now off the beam rather than behind us, but it was still a strain to hold on. I balanced her off a bit with the foresails so I could let go of the blasted tiller once in a while, and talked Roger out of a shot of rum. He had one too, and I thought for a minute that might be the easy way to do it, but of course he wasn't that dumb.

  I got him to fill up a big glass with rum and pineapple juice, and settled down for the long haul. We rounded Point Wilson about four in the afternoon, and headed west toward Dungeness. The wind was dead aft now, and Witch rolled her guts out. Everything in the cabin came loose and flew in the bilges, and the wind kept getting stronger and stronger. We had a foul tide as well, so that the seas built up, and the little tide rips in the banks off Protection, Island were crossways to the seas, so that it got hairy. I should have reduced sail, but in the first place it would have been pretty good reason for wanting the boat as hard to handle as possible.

  "Better break out the life jackets, Roger," I told him. He didn't think much of the idea. "Look, man," I said, "in this weather anything could happen. Ah, forget it." He didn't forget it, though. He put one of the orange horsecollars on. I didn't get one, but then from his point of view it didn't matter anyway. I wanted him to be wearing one for reasons of my own.

  Well up ahead of us, the big powerboat put into the little bay behind Dungeness Light. That got them out of the wind, but it also got them a long way from the action. Of course they didn't know we were getting close to the rendezvous point, and they'd be worried about Roger seeing them. This way we would be past them and they could follow us again.

  I looked to see if Roger had spotted the cruiser, but he was getting seasick. It didn't figure that he would notice anything going on around him. He turned a deathly green, and from the time it happened to me I knew how he felt. I thought I might be able to get the gun once he really got sick, but he kept pulling himself together so I couldn't make a try. An hour and a half of fighting nausea took all the alertness out of him, but it also made him more edgy and desperate than ever.

  We passed Dungeness Light a little before six, and Roger told me to follow the spit. Dungeness Spit is a five mile sandbar sticking northeastwards from the Olympic Peninsula. It's about twenty miles east of Port Angeles, and there's absolutely nothing on it but sand. In fact, there's nothing around there at all. Old Dungeness and the Indian village of Jamestown are on the east side of the base of the hook, and you can't see over the spit from ground level, even though the thing's only about thirty feet out of the water. The light is at the end of the spit and there may be a light tender to take care of the radio beacon, but I don't know. It's certainly not an observation post. I think they take care of it by boat from Point Wilson twenty miles to the east. The area west of Dungeness, where we were headed, is absolutely wild. At the base of the spit the land rises fast so that there's a bluff at the edge of the water. All you can see at the top of the bluff is trees. In the right season, you can cruise around in this area and not see a living soul for weeks. It's never got too many boats near the land anyway, because the big ships coming to Seattle stay to the middle of the channel. If you want to commit a murder, Dungeness Spit is as good a place for it as any.

  It happened that I had been out there not too long before which was why I knew so much about it. The fact that I had sailed a lot in these regions was probably the deciding factor in my client getting me, but at any rate he was putting in a summer house and wanted me to design him a pier that could take the pounding weather. I did, but it cost him a lot of money. His place was up on the cliff above the water, a summer house, and while I was out inspecting the pier he was trying to clear out some of the trees. They were huge things, with stumps rooted deep in the ground, and I showed him how to dynamite them once the trees were cut. Bulldozers are wonderful, but you couldn't get one to his place. There was no road whatever, and he didn't want one. You reached his place by water, putting in at the pier I designed, and went up a steep stairway to the top of the forty-foot cliff. In addition to dynamiting his stumps, I'd rigged a hoist for him so he could get his building materials up to the level of his house. He'd always wanted to build his own house, and this was going to be it.

  It was a long way from blasting stumps to fighting the tiller with a gun pointed at me. Roger was beginning to feel better now that we were taking the seas off the quarter, and I was getting nervous. This was where his friends would be; now where were mine? I didn't want to look behind me much, but I mumbled something about what kind of seas were building up back there, and turned around. There was no sign of the powerboat, but off the starboard quarter a fishing boat was coming up on us. It was a standard Seattle fish boat, big tubby thing made out of two layers of three-inch planking, huge Diesel engine, and two big fishing poles with hydraulic gurdies. They have aft cockpits where you can control the boat as well as from the wheelhouse, because the same man handles the fish as well as steers. One or two men go out on these things and stay all season, going to port only long enough to unload the fish and get more ice and fuel. If they don't make a good catch, they don't go in.

  It isn't that unusual to see one in the Straits in summer, but they aren't common either. The owner-captains like to be out where the fishing is, and they won't come in farther than Neah Bay unless there's repairs to make that can't be done on the coast. This one being here at the time Roger was expecting somebody was a little too convenient.

  Those fishing boats don't do much more than eight or ten knots, and we were making better than six, so it would take him at least half an hour to close the two miles between us. That was all right with me, it gave Janie and her friends time to be on the scene. Not seeing them, though, I was beginning to have some doubts about whether or not it was really them. It should have been them. It would take some time to find my car where I left it, but even if Shearing didn't want to broadcast an alarm for Roger he could give the police my car's description. Once they knew we weren't in the automobiles, it shouldn't have taken him long to check the fact that the boat was gone and send somebody out. He might even have come himself. That all sounded great, and there had been that arm signal, but it looked awful lonesome out on the Straits.

  Roger finally saw the fishing boat. It took him long enough, but I put that down to the green in his complexion. When he saw it, he asked me, "How do you turn on the lights in this thing?"

  I tried to stall, but he got that desperate look and demanded again.

  "Right down there below where you're sitting, on the side of the bridge deck," I told him. "Yeah, that's the switch."

  He turned the lights on, checked to see they were lit, and blinked them three times. The red port bow light of the fish boat flashed, and Roger said, "Slow
this thing down. Here, get the sails down."

  This was it, I figured. "Hang on a second, I have to turn in front of the wind. You want to take the tiller while I get the sails off? Sailboats don't stop in a high wind, you know—if you just let go of the tiller she'll roll over and dismast herself."

  He didn't know what to do. He believed me, because it had scared him when the boat rolled and put the boom nearly in the water back in the Inlet, so he knew if he shot me before the sails were off there was a chance bad things would happen to him. While he was making up his mind I got the wind right aft, and let her roll a bit. "If I let go of this thing now you'll sink before your buddies ever get close," I shouted. "Get back here and take this if you want us to go slower. I can't slow down with all this sail up."

  It was blowing hard, and the seas were building up behind Witch. She'd surf down one, shooting ahead, and climb up the next. Each time she'd surf she'd go as fast as the water, and the rudder wouldn't bite, so I'd lose control for a second. The sails would drive her toward the wind, and I'd have to strain to bring her back on course. It was exciting, and it was also a bit dangerous. I'd have reefed the main and brought in the jib if I'd been alone, but I wanted things as hairy as possible when the moment came.

 

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