The Scarlet Ruse

by John D. MacDonald

  I decided it better be you from then on, not Frank. It was the only way I could keep the whole thing. Poor Frank. By now, from the way I ran, he's figured out that I killed Jane and I've got the goodies. He knows that Fedderman will probably yell swindle and report me missing.

  And there is no way in the world Frank can keep from being brought into it. Even if he keeps it quiet that he even knew me outside the bank, he is going to have to explain where all that cash came from. I guess he can, but he's going to look like a very dumb person. I don't think Hirsh is going to have to pay him back. I don't think Frank will live that long. I guess I love you, Mcgee. Do you love Mary Alice?"

  "Immeasurably."

  "Well... now you can prove it. With Oh, goddammit, you're gone again.

  What the hell is the matter with you?"

  "I think I know what woke me up."

  "I can tell you something that didn't."

  "You can't set a trap to catch a trap."

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "I can't very well surprise your chum by getting to him a lot earlier than scheduled, because that is exactly what he is doing. This is important to him. Why should he give a stranger a schedule and stay with it? Besides, if he is a marksman, why should he come in at dusk, with night coming on? Dawn is better. And not far away. Welcome, Frank boy."

  I was thinking aloud.

  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, damn it. 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, damn it! 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 Rifle. 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."

  Twenty.

  It didn't take too long to prepare the major elements of the scene. I warned Mary Alice to hang on when I backed the Flush o
ff and then rammed her up into the mangroves, with a great crunching, crackling, settling, listing. I took the Munequita away from the island over to water the right depth, and pulled her plug. She had enough floatation so she would stay up completely awash, but I didn't want her drifting, so I put her on the edge of a sand bar.

  She ended up with water almost covering the pilot seat, the other seat canted up and out of the water. I smashed her windshields with a wrench.

  I had taken the Winslow Me raft out of the hatch. I fitted the paddle together, popped the yellow raft as fat as the air from the cartridge would inflate it. I had to be very careful walking on the bar. It was love time for the sting rays, and they were thick, almost buried in the sand and matching it in color.

  They averaged eighteen inches across. There is never a bit of trouble if you scuff your feet They shake themselves out of the sand and go skimming off, underwater fliers with leathery wings.

  Halfway back to the Flush, I stopped paddling and looked at the Munequita. Her plight touched my heart.

  She was abandoned, a derelict. The sun had changed from deep red to orange to a blazing white just above the horizon, promising a blistering day.

  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 spilling 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 fish rod 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 crawl way 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."