John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 17 - The Empty Copper Sea

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

I checked my personal damage. The slug had gone at an angle through the right gluteus maximus, and it had been so undamaged in transit the exit wound was as small as the entrance wound. I could not get a very good look, of course. It was bleeding, but not inordinately. More of a seepage.

  And it had begun to hurt. A lot. That is the big walking muscle back there. Grab yourself a handful of right buttock your own-and walk a few steps and feel what happens. A lot of clenching and unclenching goes on. I pulled my pants back up and fastened my belt. I looked around for a moment. Stillness. Stench. Hubbard Lawless and Kristin Petersen sat motionless in the jeep, heads bowed.

  For a moment the world veered and tipped, and I had the ghastly conviction Hub would lift his head, give me a sandy and horrible smile, start the jeep, and go roaring down the rough track with the remaining sand spilling out.

  The reserve gas can was chained and locked to the rear bracket on the jeep. I had the momentary image of myself using the shovel to break the lock, then checking the money and burying it in the sand where only I could find it.

  But the lady was breathing, and the rental Dodge was one hundred million miles away. With an enormous effort, I scooped her up. I held her cradled in my arms. I began the long walk back to the car through the increasing blackness of the night, feeling the tickle of blood on the back of my right thigh, feeling the leaden ache of the wound plus the shrill yank of pain with each step. At last I made it and stretched her out on the back seat. I drove slowly to Timber Bay, sitting in a puddle of my own blood. I went directly to the hospital and into the archway reserved for ambulances.

  As I clambered slowly out, an old man in uniform was dancing around me in utter fury, slapping the pistol holstered on his belt, telling me I could not park there. I smiled and nodded and started to try to pull Gretel out of the back seat.

  Then more people came. Helping hands. I did a lot of smiling and nodding, and they paid no attention to me until someone noticed that I was leaving bloody footprints on their shiny gray vinyl floor....

  They did not have to do much to me. Some suturing, antibiotics, observation. Keep me a few days. Find a tall enough crutch so I could take pressure off the ham muscles. It should have been routine. I had been in so many hospitals. I had been hurt so many times. But they disorient you. Their white lights burn all the time. They come by in the night. They change your habits, your hours, your diet, and the climate inside your head. You are an object, subject to their manipulations.

  I wanted to see Gretel. I wanted to be with Gretel. I wanted to hold her hand. Their whole establishment seemed designed to keep me away from her. The red-faced, endlessly weary Dr. Ted Scudder had sutured my butt and had assisted in the emergency surgery on Gretel's skull. He was perfectly willing to tell me how Gretel was and what they had done.

  The injury was consistent with someone's chasing her along the beach and clubbing her in the back of the skull, perhaps with the flat of the blade of a shovel. It had given her a depressed fracture of the occipital bone on the right side of the back of the skull. It seemed almost inconceivable to them that she could have been able to climb the dune.

  "Extraordinary vitality," Scudder said. "We've got a very good man here. Townsend. I assisted. Two and a half hours of very careful work. Freeze those little bleeders. Tiny stitches in the tear in the dura. Fit the pieces where they belonged. Just three. Bit of wire. Considerable traumatic amnesia. Thinks she's in California. Thinks she's missing work. No visitors. Not until she gets herself sorted out better. Avoid emotional shocks. Also, it keeps Hack Ames from bugging her. My orders. Includes you, McGee."

  When bluster doesn't work, when begging is useless, try guile. I lied my way right to her door and put my hand against it to push it open. Didn't. There was already one perilously deep black hole in the middle of my head. I had seen the flies and thought her dead. Never thought of checking. Made the worst possible assumption merely because that seemed to be the way my luck was running, and would run forever. Just one touch on the neck to find the pulse-that was all it would have taken. So, having made an almost fatal blunder of omission, I paused just before the blunder of commission, took my hand away, crutched myself back to the service stairway, and grunted my way down the stairs. I had thought of her... instead of my own dramas and concerns. Could I possibly be growing up? After so long?

  On Friday at noon, with me sitting on my inflated rubber ring, Meyer drove slowly and carefully down to the Cedar Pass Marina. He had checked us out of the North Bay Yacht and Tennis Resort and moved our gear aboard the Busted Flush. Home is a good place to be when you hurt. I was so damned glad to see my old-crock houseboat squatting there that my eyes stung and misted. Van Harder was there, giving me that limp, dry, callused handshake so curiously typical of many men who spend their lives out of doors. We went to the lounge, and I got comfortable on the long yellow couch, rubber ring under my aching tail.

  "I took my stuff off this morning," Harder said. "Had a talk with the Sheriff. Should have my license back middle of next month. Once I'm working again, I'll start payments on what I owe. Hack apologized for kicking me. He said he never should have done that, never. And I told him he was right, he never should have."

  "You don't owe me anything," I said. "A bargain is a bargain."

  One long look at him was enough to convince me there was no point in argument. "Okay. Okay. But open a savings account here in your name. And when it gets up to the full amount, let me know."

  He thought that over, nodded, and put some bills and change on the coffee table, along with a piece of yellow paper with figures written on it. "This here is what's left from the expense money bringing her over here. Forty-two seventy-five. It's all writ down. Eleanor Ann made sure the figures add up right."

  "Thanks. She looks great. She really does."

  "I had plenty of time to do this and that. Drains and screens and packing. Some splicing. Stuff like that. I'd rather be busy than setting around." He coughed. "She needs bottom work, and you got a soft spot on the transom, outboard, port. I chalkmarked it. Could be dry rot. Should be looked at."

  I thanked him again and he said I'd be hearing from him, and off he went. Meyer brought me a cold beer and sat on the other side of the coffee table. "I saved the papers," he said. "Over there in the corner. Big sensation in the press."

  "They tried to get to me. Hack Ames had the lid on. Walter Olivera was the only one who slipped by. I told him no comment. Hack's orders."

  He went over and leafed through the stack and brought back a copy, of the Timber Bay Journal. "Did you see this front page?"

  I hadn't. It was a night shot, a floodlit picture of the jeep, the two occupants still in it, Tuckerman still on the ground beside the jeep. It had been taken by somebody who had squatted down in front of and to the left of the jeep, with wide-angle lens. Grisly and effective.

  I had, of course, read and heard the news and the story of the official reconstruction. Hub Lawless's autopsy had shown plugged coronary arteries. Miss Petersen had died of suffocation under the sand after having been struck a terrible blow in the face which had fractured her jaw and cheek and most probably rendered her unconscious. In the original conspiracy, Lawless had gone overboard from the Julie at night opposite the shack. The jeep, with the $892,000 jammed into the big auxiliary gas can, was already there. Tuckerman went out the next morning and found Lawless dead of a heart attack brought on by struggling to get to shore. Either Miss Petersen was with Tuckerman or he went and got her. There was a quarrel about the money. Tuckerman killed the woman and put both bodies into the jeep after driving it to where the dune slope was high and steep. Covered it deep by avalanching enough sand down the slope. Two months later his sister came upon him when he was trying to dig the money out. He had struck heron the head, injuring her seriously. A Mr. McGee, a friend of Tuckerman and his sister; had arrived and had struggled with Tuckerman. In the struggle McGee had suffered a bullet wound, and Tuckerman had died of an injury sustained in a fall. McGee, wounded,
had brought Mrs. Howard in to the hospital and had. informed the Sheriff before undergoing treatment for his wound.

  "I'm never around when things are going on," Meyer said.

  "Be glad. This time, be glad."

  "How lucky it was that John Tuckerman died of a fall."

  "You remind me of the Sheriff."

  "He keeps saying that?"

  "We had four conferences in the hospital. He is a very diligent man. He is a very stubborn man." Meyer peered out through the windows of the lounge. "And here he comes again."

  Meyer went and invited him aboard and led him in. He was carrying the solid hunk of canoe paddle with the barnacles firmly fixed to that curved part which was supposed to fit into the palm of the hand of the paddler.

  He sat down and sighed and smiled and accepted a beer. He bumped the paddle gently against his knee. "We got the lab report back McGee. The tissue and blood they got off this thing, off the edges of these barnacles, match Tuckerman's type."

  "So he must have fallen on it!" I said.

  "You claim you missed him clean both times, when you swung at him and when you threw it at him."

  ''Startled him both times and missed him both times."

  "From the shape and location of the wound, the lab people think that it struck the throat, moving from left to sight at high velocity, and tore a hole in the artery and a hole in the windpipe. Are you sure there wasn't some slight little impact when you swung at him?"

  "Positive."

  "McGee, you were defending your life against a madman with a gun. The booze and the PCP had turned his brain to hog slop. You thought the sister was dead and he was going to kill you. And you could see the dead bodies in the jeep. What the hell do you think I am trying to do? Railroad you into Raiford, for Christ's sweet sake? I want to wrap this all up, all the way. I want a grand jury verdict of justifiable homicide. I don't want a file that says Tuckerman fell down onto some barnacles, dammit."

  "He fell down."

  "What's wrong with my saying that you hit him a lucky shot anyway, no matter what you say?"

  "Sheriff," Meyer said mildly, "Travis McGee might find the attendant publicity somewhat constraining in his chosen profession of, shall we say, salvage expert And he would have to be charged, of course, to be exonerated. And in this computerized world, the charge would be a part of his record. Secondly, of course, he is quite interested in Mrs. Howard. If she should recover as fully as they anticipate, she might find it awkward to feel any unmixed emotion toward her brother's executioner. Lastly, sir, McGee and I are accustomed to exchanging confidences, and if there was any doubt at all in his mind about whether or not he missed the deceased when he swung or when he threw that object, I am certain he would have told me. And you have my word of honor that such has not been the case. Oh, and one other possible solution. Were the object wedged into the ground at about this angle, and were the deceased to fall, left side first, he being a tall and heavy man, the wound might look as though-"

  "All right, all right!" Hack Ames said. "You do go on. He fell. The most timely fall in the history of grand larceny and felony murder. You know what I am going to do with this half of a paddle? I am going to hang it on my office wall, and the moral is going to be for me to try not to get too cute." He finished the beer and stood up.

  We both stared at him. I said, "Cute about what?"

  "Remember the way we went around and around about that slide, once you found out the bush jacket was still in his closet at home? Hub's jacket?"

  "It still bothers me," I said. "I can't see Tuckerman being sly enough to work something out like that, aiming the whole search toward Mexico, knowing Lawless was buried in the sand out there, in the yellow jeep."

  "Stop worrying about it. The little lady that sent us the slide turned up. She came over to see us because she was absolutely certain the body we found couldn't have been Hub Lawless if the body had been under the sand ever since March twenty-third. She came over because she had broken up with her boyfriend and didn't have to be careful about talking about Mexico any more. And she wondered if she could cut in on any part of the reward for information in the case. Little bit of a thing. Very excitable and fast-talking. Hops around from this to that. Hard to follow her. Well, it took almost two hours to unravel it. She had gone down to Guadalajara twice. She went down in February with three other girls from the insurance office where she works. A winter vacation. One week. And she met a young Mexican there. An assistant manager of the hotel where they stayed. She went back to see him in April. She took pictures on only one day. Friday, April eighth, when her Roberto was busy and she walked around alone. She had the camera with her. A little Konica range-finder camera with automatic exposure. Had she taken the camera with her the first time she went? Yes. Taken pictures? Yes. Did they get mixed up together? No. Because they were dated. The date of development was stamped right into the cardboard: One batch said F-E-B, and one batch said A -P-R. Did you use the camera between trips to Mexico? No. So then came the key question. Did you take a part of a roll and leave it in the camera between trips? She got real still and stared at me, and those pretty eyes got bigger and bigger, and finally she hit the desk with her little fist and said, 'Boy, am I some kind of dumb!' We walked all around it, McGee. She felt terrible. She apologized and apologized. I told her she had been a big help, really. She had helped us unravel Hub's plan, the one he would have followed if he hadn't had a heart attack. The warning is clear. Don't get too cute. Always think of the simplest solution. Tricky stuff will snarl up your head."

  "You do the tricky stuff pretty well, Sheriff," I said. "Like that expensive painting the Petersen woman left behind."

  He shrugged again. "I'd counted her dead before that. John Tuckerman took her keys after he'd killed her, drove in after dark, packed her stuff, loaded it in the red car, and drove it to Orlando. That was before he was so far gone. His head was still working. Remember your guess? I think he bought a plane ticket to somewhere. Maybe Miami. Checked her baggage through and tore up the ticket. So it's in an airline warehouse somewhere. Left the car in a rental car space. Probably took a bus right back to Timber Bay."

  After he left, Meyer said, "I don't think John Tuckerman was sane from the moment he came back with Kristin and found Hub Lawless dead or dying. He'd given his life to Hub. Clown, errand boy, hunting companion. And probably the woman turned her back on Hub lying there and demanded the jeep and the money. Or just the money. So he hit her and buried them both, and that was the end of him. Maybe on a half-conscious level his relationship to Hub was something he couldn't admit to himself, something a good ol' boy is not ever supposed to feel."

  "Thanks for helping with the Sheriff."

  "Just don't tell me whether you did or didn't."

  "I don't plan to."

  Epilogue

  ON A July afternoon, late, we came trundling down the Gulf in the Busted Flush, just the two of us. We came down the length of Longboat Key, where the condominiums stand tall off Sarasota, and when we passed St. Armands Key, I told her about the famous shopping circle there and promised her I would take her to it and buy her something ridiculously expensive. It would be something useless and important and would have to do with some of the slice of the recovery awarded me by the committee headed by J. Devlin Boggs.

  Some days we made good miles, some days zero. She had fallen deeply in love with the old houseboat, had learned how to cope with the trickeries of the galley and the cranky plumbing in the head. She wasted fresh water in long showers when we had it and did without when we didn't. She learned how to read the charts and operate the radio and the RDF, synchronize the diesels, and cook up Chili Meyer.

  On this uncounted day in July, we came into Big Pass at dusk, on a tide so low I had to creep through the shoaling waters, bumping lightly twice. The charter boats were coming in off the Gulf. The sun was a forest fire in the west, and the distant downtown windows winked red in response. I chugged slowly by Sand Dollar Island and over to an anchorage
area I had used before, happy to see no other craft there swinging on their hooks. We were well out of the channel, in about seven feet of water and about a hundred and fifty feet off a sandy beach, when I put down the two bigger Danforths, cut the power, swung on the lines, tested them, and found them firm.

  While I made drinks, Gretel checked the larder and said she'd better make out a list in the morning. We had both spent all day in a sun so hot, so burning bright, that we radiated heat. Her brown hair had grown out to about an inch and a half. She had been shaved bald as an ostrich egg, and had given me no glimpse of her skull during the bristly time. Now it was revealed. Crowning glory, she called it. The constant sun was baking it lighter. You might end up with a blond person, she told me. She thought it made her look like a boy, hair that short. I told her that from the eyebrows up, in a certain light, at a certain angle, she might look somewhat like a boy. But include any other parts of her, and the illusion was lost. Smashed-all-to-hell-and-gone lost. That kind of lost. She asked if I was trying to call her, hippy. I said she was hippy, busty, waisty, lippy, throaty, that she was all thighed, bellied, eyelashed, ankled, all ladied up just fine. Today she had been quieter than usual, and I knew she had been thinking about the life I wanted for us.