“Why?” I asked.
“It was early in the morning, and still dark.”
“Didn’t he hear it?”
“No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing.”
It made a little sense. “All right,” I said. “I’ll find it for you. When do we start?”
“Right now,” she said. “Unless you have another job.”
“No. I’m not doing anything.”
She smiled again. “That’s fine. We’ll go in my car, if it’s all right with you. Will your equipment fit in back?”
“Sure,” I said.
I got my gear and changed into some sports clothes. She handed me the car keys and I put everything in the trunk.
As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary amount of winding around to get out on the right highway. She kept checking the rear-view mirror, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You never knew when some meathead might try to climb over your bumper.
When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful legs. I looked back at the road.
“Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”
I looked around quickly. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”
It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-about-the-waterfront sort of things. It had started with the fact that I’d won a couple of star class races out at the yacht club; that I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; that I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.
Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name during that interview. In fact, I hadn’t used it since I’d left New England.
She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”
“I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.
She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”
“I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”
“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.
It was just a mess but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. Catherine and I hadn’t agreed about my job, my interests in boating or writing – or anything. She’d wanted me to play office politics and golf. We finally divided everything and quit.
I had learned diving and salvage work in the Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless.
She looked at me and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of experience with boats?”
I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed, and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the time I started to school. After the war I did quite a bit of ocean yacht racing, as a crew member. And a friend and I cruised the Caribbean in an old yawl for about eight months in 1946.”
“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you know navigation?”
“Yes,” I said. “Though I’m probably pretty rusty at it. I haven’t used it for a long time.”
I had an odd impression she was pumping me, for some reason. It didn’t make much sense. Why all this interest in boats? I couldn’t see what blue-water sailing and celestial navigation had to do with finding a shotgun lost overboard in some piddling lake.
3
She never did say anything about herself, I noticed, and I didn’t ask. She always kept working the conversation around to me, and inside an hour she had most of the story without ever seeming actually to be nosy.
We went through another small town stacked along the highway in the hot sun. A few miles beyond the town she turned off the pavement onto a dirt road going up over a hill between some cotton fields. We passed a few dilapidated farmhouses at first, but then they began to thin out. It was desolate country, mostly sand and scrub pine, and we met no one else at all. After about four miles we turned off this onto a private road which was only a pair of ruts running off through the trees. I got out to open the gate. There was a sign nailed to it which read: Posted. Keep Out. I gathered it was a private gun club her husband belonged to, but she didn’t say. Another car had been through recently, probably within the last day or two, breaking the crust in the ruts.
We went on for about a mile and then the road ended abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.
It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge, and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning like a mirror in the sun.
She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”
She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness with her smooth blonde head and smart grooming, the slim spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and out into the lake.
“I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at it.”
She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at the end. The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.
“The duck blind is just around that point, on the left,” she said.
I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at all where the gun fell out?”
She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere between here and the point.”
It still sounded a little odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. We might as well get started. I’d like you to come along to guide me from the surface. You’d better change into something. Those skiffs are dirty and wet.”
“I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could change into that.”
“All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It was a comfortably furnished five-room affair. She pointed out a room and I went in to change. She disappeared into another room. She was a cool one, with too damned much confidence in herself, coming out to this remote place with a man she didn’t even know.
Cool wasn’t the word for it. I could see that a few minutes later when she came out on the dock while I was getting the skiff ready. She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondeness of her hit you almost physically. There was something regal about her – like a goddess. I looked down uncomfortably and went on bailing. She was completely unconcerned, and her eyes held only that same open friendliness.
I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.
We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out, kicked to the surface and
swam to the skiff.
Her eyes went wide and she smiled when she saw the gun. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.
I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was sticking up in plain sight.”
She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern. I picked up the gun. It was a beautiful trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of engraving. I broke it, swishing it back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was still watching me.
The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been in the water 24 hours.
I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how bored and how cheap you could get.
4
She pulled us back to the pier. I made the skiff fast and followed her silently back to the car, carrying the diving gear and the gun. The trunk was still open. I put the stuff in, slammed the lid, and gave her the key.
Why not, I thought savagely. If this was good clean fun in her crowd, what did I have to kick about? Maybe the commercial approach made the whole thing a little greasy, and maybe she could have been a little less cynical about waving that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the stuff that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but still it was nothing to blow your top about, was it? I didn’t have to tear her head off.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, the gray eyes faintly puzzled.
This was the goddess again. She was cute.
“Am I?” I asked.
We walked back to the pier and went into the living room of the houseboat. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stood facing me a little awkwardly, as if I still puzzled her.
She smiled tentatively. “You really found it quickly, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. I was standing right in front of her. Our eyes met. “If you’d gone further up the lake before you threw it in it might have taken a little longer.”
She gasped.
I was angry and I stuck my neck out another foot.
“Things must be pretty tough when a woman with your looks has to go this far into left field—”
It rocked me, and my eyes stung; a solid hundred and fifty pounds of flaming, outraged girl was leaning on the other end of the arm. I turned around, leaving her standing there, and walked into the bedroom before she decided to pull my head off and hand it to me. She was big enough, and angry enough.
I dressed and was reaching for a cigarette when I suddenly heard footsteps outside on the pier. I held still and listened. They couldn’t be hers. She was barefoot. It was a man. Or men, I thought. It sounded as if there were two of them. They came aboard and into the living room, the scraping of their shoes loud and distinct in the hush. I stiffened, hardly breathing now.
Detectives? Wayne himself? Suddenly I remembered the way she’d doubled all over town getting out on the highway and how she’d kept watching the rear-view mirror. I cursed her bitterly and silently. This was wonderful. This was all I lacked – getting myself shot, or named co-respondent in a divorce suit. And for nothing, except having my face slapped around under my ear.
I looked swiftly around the room. There was no way out. The window was too small. I eased across the carpet until I was against the door, listening.
“All right, Mrs Macaulay,” a man’s voice said. “Where is he?”
Mrs Macaulay? But that was what he’d said.
“What do you want now?” Her voice was a scared whisper. “Can’t you ever understand that I don’t know where he is? He’s gone. He left me. I don’t know where he went. I haven’t heard from him—”
“We’ve heard that before. You’ve made two trips out here in 24 hours. Is Macaulay here?”
“He’s not up here, and I don’t know where he is—”
Her voice cut off with a gasp, and then I heard the slap. It came again. And then again. She apparently tried to hold on, but she began to break after the third one and the sob which was wrung from her wasn’t a cry of pain but of utter hopelessness. I gave it up then, too, and came out.
There were two of them. The one to my left lounged on an armchair, lighting a cigarette as I charged into the room. I saw him only out of the corners of my eyes because it was the other one I wanted. He was turned the other way. He had her down on the sofa and off balance with a knee pressed into her thighs while he held her left wrist and the front of her bathing suit with one hand and hit her with the other. He wasn’t as tall as she was, but he was big across the shoulders.
I caught the arm just as he drew it back again. He let her go. Even taken by surprise that way, he was falling into a crouch and bringing his left up as he stepped back. But I was already swinging, and it was too sudden and unexpected for even a pug to get covered in time. He went down and stayed down.
I started for him again, but something made me jerk my eyes around to the other one. Maybe it was just a flicker of movement. It couldn’t have been any more than that, but now instead of a cigarette lighter in his hand there was a gun.
He gestured casually with the muzzle of it for me to move back and stay there. I moved.
I was ten feet from him. He was safe enough, and knew it. I watched him, still angry but beginning to get control of myself now. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d walked into, except that it looked dangerous. I couldn’t place them. They weren’t police. And they obviously weren’t private detectives hired by her husband, because it was her husband they were looking for. Somebody named Macaulay, and she’d told me her name was Wayne. It was a total blank.
The one I’d hit was getting up. Pug was written all over him. He moved in on me clearing his head, cat-like, ready. He was a good six inches shorter than I was, but he had cocky shoulders and big arms, and I could see the bright, eager malice with which he sized me up. He was a tough little man who was going to cut a bigger one down to size.
“Drop it,” the lounging one said.
“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh and urgent.
The other shook his head indifferently. He was long, loose-limbed, and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. I couldn’t tab him. He might have been a college miler or a minor poet, except for the cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had something about him which told me he knew his business.
“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some more?”
I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch for very long without losing your head, and with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.
Tweed Jacket’s eyes flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, not with her boyfriend. Check the rooms, though; look at the ashtrays. You know his cigarettes.”
The pug went out, bumping me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was mutual.
There was silence in the room except for Shannon Wayne’s stirring on the sofa. She sat up, her face puffed and inflamed; her eyes wet with involuntary tears. She clutched the torn strap of her bathing suit, fumblingly, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. Tweed Jacket ignored us. The pug came back.
“Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”
He looked at me hopefully. “How about Big Boy? Let’s ask him.”
“
Forget it. Stick to business.”
There was no longer any doubt as to who was boss, but the pug wanted me so badly he tried once more. “This is a quiet place to ask, and he might know Macaulay.”
Tweed Jacket waved him toward the door. “No,” he said. His eyes flicked over the girl’s figure again coolly. “It’s Mrs Macaulay he’s interested in.” They left.
In the dead silence I could hear their footsteps retreating along the pier, and in a moment the car started. I breathed deeply. Tweed Jacket’s manner covered a very professional sort of deadliness, and it could easily have gone the other way. Only the profit motive was lacking. He simply didn’t believe Macaulay was here.
I turned. She was still holding the front of the bathing suit. “Thank you,” she said, without any emotion whatever, and looked away from me. “I’m sorry you had to become involved. As soon as I can change, I’ll drive you back to town.”
5
It wasn’t until ten, that night, that I said goodbye to Shannon Macaulay. We’d driven back to town and stopped at a cocktail lounge. She’d cleared up some of the questions that had been hanging in my mind. She did know where her husband was. He had been an insurance executive for a marine underwriters outfit in New York. He wasn’t in trouble with his firm or the police. I could check that by calling them, she said. The Tweed Jacket, whose name was Barclay, represented some syndicate who were looking for her husband. Why? She evaded that one. I wasn’t satisfied with that, but I went along.
And where did I come in? Easy. The phony dive act was necessary because Shannon had to sound me out. See what kind of a guy I was. Check my experience against that article she’d read about me.
They needed more than a diver. Specifically, they wanted me to buy and outfit a boat and take them off the Yucatan coast to recover something from a sunken plane. Then I was to land them secretly in Central America. That explained her questions about my navigational experiences in the Gulf and the Caribbean. What was in it for me? She’d said, “The boat is yours. Plus five thousand dollars.”
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 5