“Yeah. Sure. That’s fine,” I told her.
She pulled to the side of the road and handed me an opened bottle of rum. Then, the same devil who was pushing me lighting twin candles in her eyes, she kissed me, hard. “Okay. Until then. You drink and dream, I’ll drive . . .”
It was afternoon when we reached the cabin. We’d stopped twice to eat. Once in Gainesville and once in Cross City. I’d also picked up another bottle of rum. After being away from it so long, it hit me almost as hard as Zo’s kisses.
The cabin, when we reached it, was a pleasant blur in a stand of slash pine on an isolated section of the shore. A rutted sand road led back to it. As nearly as I could tell, the nearest house was a mile away. The gulf looked the same as it always had, blue and endless and inviting.
It gave me an idea. If I wanted to stay with the party, I had to get some coffee in and some water on me. I told Zo, “I’m going to dunk the body. Put some coffee on, will you, babe?”
She laughed. “You’re out of training, honey. But go ahead. You do just that. I figured you might want to swim and you’ll find some trunks in the bedroom closet.”
She got busy at the stove and I staggered on into the bedroom. Zo had told me we’d be alone, but as I closed the bedroom door I could have sworn I heard someone say:
“You got him, eh?”
I opened the door and asked her, “Who was that?”
At the time it didn’t seem important. I closed the door again and tried to hang up my coat but I was so high I hung it upside down and an envelope fell out and skittered across the floor. I recognized it as the envelope the warden had given me along with my discharge papers and what money I had coming. Sitting on the bed I tore it open, and two tens and a five dollar bill fell out. Forcing my eyes to focus, I read:
Sweetheart,
I’d be there when you get out if I could possibly manage it but I have to hang on to my job. So, as a substitute, in case you are broke, I am enclosing my last week’s salary for train fare. I love you and I’m waiting.
We’ll start all over.
Beth
It was the type of letter Beth would write. Beth loved me and she was waiting. And here I was all mixed up with Zo again. I was still so long that Zo called:
“What’s the matter? You aren’t sick, are you, honey?”
I told her the truth. “Yeah. Plenty.” I got a grip on the rum and tried to do some straight thinking. With Beth out of my life forever, nothing would ever be right again. The money and excitement and Zo were poor substitutes for what I really wanted. Beth was my wife. She was my life. I loved her.
I fished my coat from the door and staggered back into the living room. “So I’m a heel,” I told Zo. “I’m sorry. But you and I are washed up as of now. I’m going back to Palmetto City and my wife.”
She wanted to know if I was kidding.
I said I was never more serious.
She wasn’t so pretty now. Her black eyes narrowing to slits, she spat, “You’re either drunk or crazy. How much can you make commercial fishing or running a charter boat?”
I said, “Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six redheaded kids and be disgustingly honest.”
Her eyes opening wide, she screamed, “No. Don’t!”
I thought she was screaming at me. She wasn’t. The blow came from one side and behind me. I turned in time to see a blur of white face through the fog of pain that was reaching up to engulf me. Then the leaded butt of a gaff hook used as a club landed a second time, and I floated out into space on a red tide.
Just as I passed the last buoy marking the channel of consciousness I thought I heard the flat slap of a pistol. Then a black roller swept me under.
2. Sprouting Wings
The tarpon was huge, two hundred pounds or more, the largest I’d ever hooked. He broke water a dozen times while I was playing him. I was bathed in sweat. My arms and shoulders felt like they had been pounded with a mallet by the time I got him within ten feet of the boat. Then he really went crazy.
With a series of high-powered jolts like the current they were going to shoot into Swede, he lashed into a flurry of frenzy that almost tore the rod out of my hands. I eased the star drag too late. He didn’t want any part of where he was and streaked off into the blue, snapping the wire leader as if it had been string.
I looked over the edge of the cruiser to see what had frightened him. A twenty-foot shark looked back. I was still trying to figure out who had tied the shark under my boat, when he tried to climb into the cockpit with me and I beat at him frantically with my fists.
It was the sharpness of the pain that knifed the fog away. With the first of returning consciousness I lay, gasping, looking up into the dark, thinking what a screwy dream it had been.
The tied shark was an old gag. All of the guides on the waterfront had used it at one time or another to give their charter passengers a thrill. A six-foot shark tied under a cruiser could make a two-pound trout fight like a fifty-pound blue marlin.
Then, one by one the shattered pieces of reality began to fall into place like the curlicues of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
I was lying on the floor of the cabin on the shore of Dead Man’s Bay. I’d just read the letter from Beth and told Zo I was going back to my wife when an unidentified party, presumably male, had popped out of nowhere and beaten me half to death with the loaded butt of a gaff hook.
It didn’t make sense to me. I had no illusions about Zo. She’d never sprout any wings. I hadn’t asked her how she’d lived during the three years I’d been in prison. It hadn’t mattered. A jealous boyfriend was the obvious answer. But why in the name of time should he pop up and try to beat in my brains when I’d just announced I was going back to my wife?
Then I thought of the voice I’d heard when I’d gone into the bedroom.
“You got him, eh?”
Zo had denied there was a voice. But there obviously had been. In the light of what had happened, it began to look like she had contracted to deliver me to the cabin on Dead Man’s Bay like so much beef.
On the other hand, she had screamed, “No. Don’t!” just prior to the first blow.
I gave up trying to think and got to my feet. The interior of the cabin was as black as a fish wholesaler’s heart. I tried to find the light switch and, failing, struck a match instead.
According to the alarm clock on the mantel I had been out for hours. It only lacked a few minutes of midnight. The rum bottle was standing on the table. I rinsed my mouth with a drink. Then, striking another match, I walked on into the bedroom – and wished I hadn’t.
Zo was lying on the bed, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. But they weren’t seeing anything. I struck another match and looked closer. She was cold. The flat slap of a pistol I had heard had been meant for her. She had been dead as long as I had been unconscious.
I lighted a third match and looked around the room. The sense of unreality persisted. A chair had been tipped just so. A shattered rum bottle lay by the side of the bed. Another had drained out its contents on the rug.
Catching sight of a dark object in her hand, I bent over the bed and looked at it. It was the leaded gaff hook with which I had been slugged.
I walked out into the other room and found my coat. The pistol with which she had been killed was in my right-hand coat pocket.
I could see the scene as described by the papers. A recently released con and his moll had rented the cabin to celebrate his release. A drunken brawl had ensued and during it I had killed her.
There was a metallic “pong” as the alarm clock on the mantel passed the hour. A hundred and some odd miles away, in Raiford, Swede was taking the big jump. He knew all the answers now.
“Here. And I mean right here,” he had told me.
Swede had been right about a lot of things. If only I’d listened to him. If only I’d opened the letter from Beth before I had met Zo.
The match burned down and burned my fingers. I didn’t feel it. This was murder and I was tagged. I walked out the door and stood on the screened-in porch. The night was black but filled with stars. The tide was out and the sweet-sour smell of the tide flats filled the air. I’d never wanted so much to live or felt I had so much to live for. I thought of what I’d told Zo.
“Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six red-headed kids and be disgustingly honest.”
That was a laugh. The only place I was going was back to Raiford. A half-dozen guards had seen me get into the jeepster. The waitresses at both Gainesville and Cross City would testify that they had seen us together and I had been drinking heavily.
The jeepster was still in front of the cabin. The smart thing for me to do would be to drive to the nearest phone and call the state patrol and get it over. No one would believe my story. I couldn’t describe the guy I’d seen. He was as vague as my testimony concerning Señor Peso.
The big veins in my temple began to pound. Señor Peso. The guy was beginning to haunt me. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d still be operating the Beth II out of Bill’s Boat Basin as a deep-sea charter cruiser. It had been his voice on the phone the time I’d been behind in my payments that had started off all of the fireworks.
“This is Señor Peso, Captain White. How would you like to make a quick five thousand dollars?”
How would I like to drop a mullet net around ten ton of pompano? All I had to do for the money was meet the Andros Ancropolis, a converted sponge boat, eighty miles out in the gulf and bring in a few small waterproof packages that fit easily in my bait well. I didn’t know what was in them. I was afraid to ask. I needed that five thousand bad.
That had been the beginning. A trip to Veracruz had followed. Then one to Pinar del Rio. Then one to Havana where I’d met Zo. After that I was in so deep it hadn’t mattered. I met who I was ordered to meet, took what I was ordered to get, and brought it back to various points ranging from drops in the Ten Thousand Islands as far north at Palmetto City with a few trips up the bay to Tampa.
I only made one restriction. I refused to run wetbacks. I hadn’t spent three years of my life in the navy fighting for the so-called American way of life only to turn around and smuggle in for pay the very guys who were trying to destroy it.
After the one proposition along that line, Señor Peso hadn’t mentioned the subject again. All of the Coast Guard boys knew me. The older officers had known my father. I never had any trouble getting clearance papers. No one ever stopped me. Until that last time.
Then only my good service record, a purple heart, all the cash I had in the bank, the confiscation of my new boat, and me pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon during the fracas that followed the boarding, had saved me from a long Federal rap. That trip, my bait well had been filthy with forty grand worth of Swiss watches and French perfumes on which no duty had been paid.
But I still hadn’t ever met Señor Peso. All my instructions had come by phone. My money came in the mail, in cash. And once the law had laid its arm on me, he had run out on me cold. When the prosecution had asked me for whom I was running the stuff, all I could offer was a mythical Señor Peso. It was a wonder I hadn’t gotten life.
Not that it mattered now. Zo was dead and I was tagged. And if he hadn’t come forward before, I couldn’t expect Señor Peso to come out in the open now. Staring up at the stars, I remembered the dead girl’s words at the prison.
“And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup.”
It sounded logical. He’d made good to the tune of $36,000.00. Zo with her talk of Havana and a converted sponger putting in had obviously been under instructions that – if they had been carried out – would have proven profitable to me. No. I couldn’t blame Señor Peso for this. This was a personal affair between the dead girl and myself and the man who had killed her.
The night was cool. I put on my coat and lighted a cigarette just as a pair of headlights turned off the highway a quarter of a mile away and bounced down the rutted sand road toward the cabin. I kicked the screen door open and walked out and stood with my hand on the butt of the gun in my pocket, in the shadow of a big slash pine fifty feet from the wooden porch.
The car was blue and white, a state patrol car, with two uniformed troopers in it. They skirted the yellow jeepster and parked in front of the porch.
Getting out, one of them said, “It looks quiet enough to me. Probably a false alarm.”
“Probably,” his partner agreed. He flicked the car’s searchlight around among the trees, missing me by inches. Then he pointed it at the shoreline. “Lonely sort of place, though.” He was a bit impatient with his partner. “Well, go ahead. Bang on the door. Wake ’em up and ask ’em if anyone screamed.”
His partner banged the screen door. “State Police.”
When no one answered, he opened the screen and walked in, sweeping a path before him with his flashlight. A moment later I heard him whistle. Then the lights in the bedroom came on and he shouted to his partner:
“Hey. Come in here, Jim. That fisherman who called the barracks wasn’t whoofing. Some dame was screaming all right. But she isn’t screaming now. She’s dead.”
So much was clear. The man who had killed Zo had waited as long as he could, hoping her body would be discovered. When it wasn’t, he’d called the State Patrol. He really wanted to pin this thing on me and he didn’t want me to get too far away before the law stepped in.
I hoped the trooper would leave his keys in the car. He didn’t. Sliding out from behind the wheel, he clipped his keys on his belt before drawing his gun and striding into the cabin.
I inched over toward the jeepster. A few minutes before I’d been considering calling the State Patrol and turning myself in. Now I was damned if I would. I didn’t want to go back to Raiford. I didn’t want to die. At least not without seeing Beth and telling her I was sorry.
The ignition key was still in the jeep. Keeping it between me and the cabin, I walked the length of the patrol car, raised the hood as quietly as I could and yanked out a handful of wires. Then I walked back and climbed in the jeepster, crossed my fingers and kicked it over. Over the roar of the motor, I heard one of the troopers say:
“What the hell?”
Then I’d spun the jeepster in a sharp U-turn that threw up a screen of sand and was bouncing down the rutted road with both troopers shouting after me and spraying the back of the car and the windshield with lead.
I made the highway without being hit and into a little town on the north bank of a river. I had, at the most, a five- or ten-minute start. I’d put the patrol car temporarily out of action, but their two-way radio was still working. It would only be a matter of minutes before roadblocks would be set up and every law-enforcement officer in Dixie, Bronson, Alachua, Marion and Citrus counties would be alerted for a killer driving a new yellow jeepster.
A tired-looking tourist driving a mud-splattered ’48 with Iowa license plates was just pulling out of the town’s only filling station as I passed it. I drove on to the edge of town and the bridge across the river. There was a small gap between the black-and-white guard rail and the bridge.
Pointing the jeepster at the gap, I rammed down the gas and hopped out. It hit the gap dead-center and disappeared with a splintering of wood and a screech of metal. A moment later there was a great splash. The ’48 behind me braked to a stop and the tourist stuck his head out the window.
“Holy smoke,” he said. “What happened, fellow? Did your car go out of control?”
“No,” I told him. “I did.” I opened the door on the far side, climbed in beside him, and rammed the nose of the gun that had killed Zo in his ribs. “Look,” I said, “I have a date with a roadblock where this road joins US 19. That is, unless I get there first. How fast will this crate go?”
H
e looked at the gun in his ribs and swallowed hard. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve had it up to ninety. And my foot wasn’t all the way to the floor.”
I said, “Then put it there. As of now.”
3. Close Call
It could be the law would figure out I was in Palmetto City. If it did, it wasn’t my fault. I’d left a trail only a snake with Saint Vitus dance could follow. I hadn’t doubled back once but I’d done a lot of twisting and changing of means of transportation. I’d kissed the Iowa tourist goodbye at Inglis after giving him the impression I had a boat waiting for me in Withlacoochee Bay. From there I’d picked up a ride on a fruit truck as far as Dunnellon and US 41. I’d taken a bus from there to Tampa and spent most of the day buying new clothes piecemeal.
When I’d finished buying slacks and a sport coat and a loud gabardine shirt and washing the blood from the back of my head, I looked a lot more like a northern tourist than I did a local boy who’d spent most of his life on the water.
The Tampa papers were filled with the thing. The headline on the evening paper read:
EX-CONVICT MURDERS SWEETHEART
The story was about as I expected. The way the law figured it, Zo and I had staged a drunken party to celebrate my release. During it, we had quarreled and I killed her. I was, variously reported, seen north near Tallahassee, boarding a forty-foot sloop in Withlacoochee Bay, and hopping a south-bound freight at Dunnellon.
But the law was merely confused, not stupid. Once they sifted out the false reports, the net would begin to tighten. And Beth was in Palmetto City. The chances were there was a stake-out right now on the house in which she was living.
I’d taken a plane from Tampa to Palmetto City. But I didn’t dare take a cab from the airport to the return address she had given on her letter. I had been born in the town. I’d lived there most of my life. I knew all the cab drivers. All of them knew me. I also knew the law. Ken Gilly, a kid with whom I had gone to school, was now a lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 31