The Handle

by Donald E. Westlake

  He went back down into the cabin, in search of food. He'd left a few crackers, and these he stuffed in his shirt pocket. An empty Jack Daniels bottle would serve to carry water, and a half-full Jack Daniels bottle would serve to carry Jack Daniels. A wedge of American cheese went into his trouser pocket.

  In a closet in the fore cabin he found a yachting cap. A hat would be good protection from the sun; he put it on and went up on deck, carrying the two bottles with him.

  On deck, he changed his mind about one detail and decided it was foolish to carry two bottles, it would just weigh him down. He took three or four swigs from the bottle with the whiskey in it, then tossed it overboard. Water would be more useful this time.

  He clambered with difficulty over the side, waded through the shallow water, having trouble keeping his balance with all the rocks and stones underfoot, and made his first rest stop when he reached dry land.

  The morning sun was still low on the horizon, making the sea gleam like a shield. To walk away from the sea, Grofield should head due west, and this meant keeping his back to the sun. Simple.

  A halo of music. It was a martial air now, with a muted touch of wistfulness in it, a minor key. There'll always be an England, a France, some damn place. Grofield moved out in time to the music, walking on his shadow stretched out in front of him, a thin elongated El Greco silhouette of himself.

  He was somewhat unsteady, both because of the wound and because of the whiskey. Still, he kept due west and he made fairly good time. The shadow of himself he walked on slowly shrank as the sun rose higher in the sky behind him, and when the shadow was no taller than the original he became aware of the heat.

  It was building slowly but steadily. The early morning had been pleasant, if not cool, but now heat was massing on the floor of the world, stacked like woolly invisible blankets through which he had to walk. The sun beat on the back of his neck, and he knew for sure he already had a bad burn there. His left shoulder ached, but not badly.

  He tried to make the water last, but he kept being thirsty, very thirsty. He hummed silently as he walked, and dreamed of other things, different times and places, the faces of people he knew and once had known.

  He found he was walking toward the sun.

  “No,” he said aloud. He turned around, very carefully. The shadow was a dwarf now, bunched up before his feet on the rock-bedraggled ground. He walked again.

  “This was very stupid,” he whispered, and realized he was thirsty again, and held up the bottle to see it was empty. He grimaced at it, disappointed with the behaviour of the damn thing, and let it fall. It shattered on a rock.

  He fell, not too badly, and got up again. He walked on, and fell again, and this time he didn't get up. “I'm sorry,” he whispered into the ground, apologizing to himself.’’ I shouldn't have left the boat.”

  He had been asleep, or unconscious, he couldn't tell which, and then suddenly he was awake again. He rolled over on his back, unmindful of the stones, regardless of the sun's light, and stared into the sky, and he thought he saw Parker coming down out of the sky on a cloud.

  “Sacrilege, Parker,” he said aloud, and smiled, and closed his eyes.

  FOUR

  1

  Parker said, “There's something there.” He pointed down at the ground.

  “I see it,” said the pilot.

  England said, “If that's our man, and he's alive, we have no legal right to take him off Mexican soil.”

  Parker had no time for England's worries. He was staring toward the ground, trying to see suitcases. The helicopter lowered, and he could see it was a man down there, but no suitcases. Then the man rolled over on his back, staring up at the helicopter with its bulging transparent front bubble, the three men in it staring down at him, and Parker saw it wasn't Baron. It was Grofield, and that was impossible.

  Parker had last seen Grofield on the dock by the boathouses back at the island, just before he'd been shot. The bullet had hit him high on the right leg, spinning him around and throwing him to the ground, knocking him cold, but that was the second bullet. The first bullet had hit Grofield; Parker had seen him jerk forward.

  When he'd come out of it, back there on the flaming island, the boat and the suitcases were gone, and a raging petulant England was standing over him, shaking him, shouting that Baron had gotten away. Parker had had no time nor inclination to look for Grofield's body. There had been so many there, he'd just assumed one of them had to belong to Grofield.

  The important thing was the money, and it figured the money was with Baron. According to England, Baron was on the boat, headed south.

  Parker couldn't stand then, though he kept trying. “Where?” he said. “Are you on him?”

  “No. In all this wreckage you people caused, we lost him. We know he was heading south, it makes sense he'd try to get to Mexico, Cuba's too far for him to reach, he must know that.”

  “Get on him,” Parker said. “Find him.” He was still trying to stand, still falling back. “And fix this leg,” he said. “Fix it. Fix it. I can't stand on it, fix it.”

  They took him out to a Navy ship on a launch, where a guy in white cut off his trouser leg and somebody else in white, who said he was a doctor, probed around and took out the bullet. “You ought to stay off this,” he said.

  “I can't,” Parker told him. England was still hanging around, yapping in his ear, wanting to know where he'd been the last week, why he'd ditched his tail, why Grofield and Salsa had suddenly turned on the men assigned to watch them at the island. Instead of getting on Baron, England stood around talking about ancient history.

  When Parker told him to shut up and find Baron, England said, “We can't look now, it's the middle of the night, everywhere but on that damn island. It's still burning, do you know that?”

  “When?” Parker asked him.

  “When? Right now. Look at the red on the Porthole, that's fire, man.”

  “When do you look for Baron?”

  “When it gets light. In the morning.”

  Parker said, “Nobody goes to him but me. They don't go to him without me, that's got to be part of it.”

  The doctor said, “Quit moving around. Do you want me to patch you up or don't you?”

  England said, “Why? Why should we take you along. Your part is finished, Parker, don't you know that?”

  Parker told him, “He isn't anywhere you can put a legal collar on him, not yet. That's where you want him, isn't it? Where you can put a legal collar on him. You still need me, to take him from where he is and put him where you can grab him.”

  England didn't like it. He chewed it like a cow chewing its cud, and finally he nodded and said, “We'll see,” and Parker knew that was that. He told the doctor, “I'll sleep till morning if you'll get off me.”

  The doctor was irritated. He left without saying anything.

  In the morning, other people did the searching. “We could do nothing by ourselves,” England said. “We have a hundred men doing the searching.”

  Carey was back with England now, the two of them sitting with Parker on the deck of the Navy ship. Carey said, “All they'll do is find Baron, let us know where he is. Then we'll go get him.”

  Parker still had trouble standing, and almost as much trouble sitting. He was stretched out on his side on a cot set up on deck. He felt like a fool, and he felt impatient. He said, “Your hundred men better be good.”

  But they didn't find anything, not all day long, and after dark they had to quit again. Parker was up by now, limping up and down the metal corridors, raging. “You need a hundred men to zip your fly, you people. You and Karns’ crowd, you're all alike. No one of you can do a damn thing, so you figure a whole crowd of you can do everything.”

  Carey had gone away, and only England was around to listen to it. “We'll find him,” he kept saying. “He must have gone to shore by now, and tomorrow that's where the search will concentrate. Every possible inch of Gulf coastline he could have reached.”

/>   “They'll lose their planes by morning,” Parker said.

  But in the morning they found the boat, run aground on a barren stretch of Mexican coastline about two hundred miles down from the border. “They saw the boat,” England told Parker, “but they didn't see Baron.”

  “The question is, did Baron see them?”

  “They said the boat looked abandoned,” England said. “It looked to them as though he'd run out of gas.”

  “Do we go look?”

  “Surely.”. England nodded his head, showing he was sure. “They're getting a chopper ready for us now.”

  A chopper turned out to be a helicopter, a rickety-looking thing like a cross between a Sten gun and a beanie, with a plexiglass bubble in front where the pilot and passengers sat. Only three of them were going, Parker and England and the pilot. England didn't say anything to the pilot about who Parker was, and the pilot didn't ask.

  The ship they'd been on had been moving south all night and lay now off the Mexican coast, about forty miles from where the boat had been sighted. Parker and England got there in the helicopter in less than half an hour. The pilot landed near the beach, and waited at his controls while Parker and England went over to the boat.

  Parker could walk on the leg now, but stiffly; he was bruised on that side from hip to knee. A bullet from a Colt .45 punches more than it cuts, and the one that had hit Parker had left him with a leg that operated all right but that ached as though it had been worked over with a baseball bat.

  Walking toward the boat, limping, he wished he was armed. England had a service revolver on him, but it was tucked away in its hip holster now under England's suitcoat. The boat looked empty, but that didn't mean anything.

  The leg gave him trouble, wading the last part out to the boat. England had to help him aboard, and then they searched the boat and found it deserted but odd. The hideaway bed in the main cabin was standing open, without its mattress, which Parker found shoved under a bed in the fore cabin. He and England pulled it out of there gingerly, both of them half expecting to find a body rolled in it, but there was nothing. Just the mattress, no reason, no explanation.

  There were bloodstains on the carpet in the main cabin, so maybe Baron had been hit, though Parker had no idea who might have shot him. There was also evidence that a couple of meals had been eaten down here, and the yachting cap Parker had put on that first day he'd seen the island, when he'd gone out in this boat with Yancy, that cap was now missing.

  So were the suitcases. Man in a yachting cap, carrying two suitcases, probably wounded. “He'd head inland,” Parker said, thinking of the suitcases. “Let's go in after him.”

  “We have no jurisdiction,” England said.

  “That's why you brought me along, remember?”

  England said, “You think you can get him to the States from here? We might be better off asking the Mexican police to pick him up for us. They'll usually cooperate in a case like this.”

  Parker shook his head. “I hear Baron's got connections with Cuba. Mexico still recognizes Cuba, right? Baron contacts the Cuban embassy, Cuba says he's ours we want him, Mexico lets him go.”

  England said, “I never liked this operation, not from the beginning. If things had gone the way you wanted, you'd have doublecrossed us, you'd have taken the money, left Baron, and disappeared.”

  “You wanted us to help,” Parker told him. “But you didn't ask right.”

  “Is that what it was?” England looked at him. “I don't understand you. Why should I trust you now?”

  “Because you don't lose anything. Without me you don't get Baron at all. With me you get Baron maybe.”

  “I've got you now,” England said. “If I let you go, then I don't have Baron and I don't have you either.”

  “You don't want me. Remember? You're a specialist.”

  England said, “So are you. I'm beginning to find out in what.’’

  Parker could visualize the suitcases moving away across the horizon, while he and this fool stood here talking crap. England didn't know about the suitcases, because Parker had let him understand the loot had burned up in the fire back on the island. England had believed it because it satisfied his need for poetic justice. But now there was no justification for Parker being in such a hurry, and if he kept on pushing, England might begin to wonder.

  Still, England himself should be in a hurry. Parker said to him, “Make up your mind. Do you want Baron or not?”

  England shrugged. “All right,” he said, “I'll see it out. I was told to cooperate, I'll cooperate. But if we ever get our hands on Baron through you I'll have a heart attack.”

  They went back to the helicopter and told the pilot what they wanted; their quarry would be heading west, or toward the nearest town, or both. “We don't know how long ago he left,” England said, “so we aren't looking just for him. We're also looking for signs that he's passed a certain way, so we'll be sure which way he's headed.”

  For the next hour and a half they made tic-tac-toe in the sky, north and then south and then west, north and then south and then west, until ahead of them they saw the black man-shape spread out on the ground and Parker pointed forward, saying,” There's something there.”

  The helicopter lowered, and Parker saw no suitcases, and then he made out that the figure on the ground was Grofield, which was impossible.

  The pilot landed twenty yards away, and Parker hurried across the rocky ground, limping, wanting to get there before England, to keep Grofield from saying anything he shouldn't.

  Grofield had his eyes closed, and very faintly he was smiling. He looked as though he'd been wandering out here for a week, with dirt caked on his face, with his lips dry and cracked, his clothing filthy. Parker knelt beside him and said, low and fast, “England's with me. Keep mum on the money.”

  Grofield opened his eyes as England came running up. Grofield said, “Come off it, Parker, you're a mirage.”

  Parker said, “Where's Baron?”

  “Ahead of me. I don't know.” Grofield's voice was husky and he was out of breath, but the words came as though he were fully conscious and in good shape. “I hid on the boat,” he said. “Passed out. I don't know how far he is ahead of me.”

  Parker said, “How's he travelling? Light or heavy?”

  “Heavy.”

  England said, “We'd better get this man back to the ship.”

  Grofield said, “No. I'm happy in Mexico.”

  Parker straightened up, said to England, “You got no jurisdiction here, remember?”

  “This man's hurt,” England said. “He needs medical attention.”

  On the ground, Grofield said, “Mexico has doctors.”

  Parker looked westward, across the flat land toward the horizon, and then he looked down at Grofield. He had too many things to do at once. It was no good leaving Grofield for the law, but it was also no good standing around here while Baron got farther and farther away.

  He said to England, “We got a radio in that helicopter?”

  “Of course.”

  “We got a map of this area in there?”

  “I think so.”

  “Let's go look at it. You wait here, Grofield.”

  Grofield smiled some more, lying there on the ground. He looked very sick. “I won't move,” he promised.

  Parker and England went back to the helicopter and looked at a map. According to the pilot they were at a spot about twenty miles south of a coast town called Pesca. About fifteen miles west of them was a dirt road heading north and south, and that road, taken through a number of villages, would lead finally to Ciudad Victoria, about eighty miles away, the nearest city of any size.

  Parker said to England, “You get on that radio of yours, you arrange for a jeep to come here from Ciudad Victoria. Then you and the helicopter leave. Grofield and I, in the jeep, we'll get Baron for you. Tell them we want to keep the jeep a while, maybe a few days, maybe a week. We'll turn it in when we go back across the border.”

&nb
sp; “I don't know if I can work that,” England said. “You don't seem to realize how complicated that would be, getting—”

  “Then why don't you try it, see what happens?” England said, “I stay with you.”

  Parker looked at him. “You got no jurisdiction here.”

  “I won't be here officially. I'll just be with you, observing.”

  Parker shook his head. “No.”

  “It's the only way I could get a car, if it's checked out to me. They'd never allow me to give a car to you.”

  “Jeep.”

  “Jeep, yes. And I ride with you.”

  Parker thought a few seconds. This was wasting time, and he could see he wasn't getting anywhere. All right, he'd unload England when he had to. “Good,” he said. “You come with us.”

  “I'll get on the radio right away, England said.

  2

  Grofield said, “Mother, in my last moments I was thinking of you.”

  Parker looked over at him, and Grofield was sitting up. They'd put him in the shade under the helicopter while waiting for the jeep, and now he was sitting up, holding to a strut with his right hand, smiling out at the world.

  Parker went over to him and said, very low, so England wouldn't hear it, “Lie down, you moron. When that jeep gets here, I want you able to walk to it.”

  Grofield said, “Why?”

  “Are you awake or asleep? Or maybe you think going to a hospital would be a good idea. If you're well enough to walk to the jeep we can justify you staying at a hotel. If we have to carry you, England will ship you to a hospital and there's nothing we can do about it, and from the hospital it's one step to the Mexican law, and they turn you over to our law, and I'll see you in fifteen, twenty years.”

  Grofield blinked. “Oh,” he said. He lay down again, carefully. “I'm sorry, I'm not thinking. I'll be all right now.”

  “Good.”

  Around on the other side of the helicopter, England said, “Here it comes. Here comes the jeep.”

  Parker walked around and looked westward and saw the dust cloud. Beneath it something small and black was bouncing.