Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  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 rearview mirror. I cursed her bitterly and silently. This was wonderful. This was all I lacked—getting myself shot, or named correspondent 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.

  “Well, it’s the scenic Mrs. Macaulay,” a man’s voice said. “You don’t mind if we look around, do you?”

  Mrs. Macaulay? But that was what he’d said.

  “What do you want, now?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, and it was scared.

  “The usual,” the man replied easily. “Tiresome, aren’t we?”

  “Can’t you ever understand that I don’t know where he is?” she said passionately. “He’s gone. He left me. I don’t know where he went. I haven’t heard from him—”

  “A bit tiresome yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. We’ve heard the routine. But to get back to the present moment—we found your making two trips out here in twenty-four hours rather intriguing, and thought we’d look into it. Might even take up nature study ourselves. Now, where’s Macaulay? Is he up 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 explosive impact itself. 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 the arm of an overstuffed chair, 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 was after. He was turned the other way. He had her backed up against one end of 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. It was utterly methodical, efficient, and sickening.

  I caught the arm just as he drew it back again. He dropped her. She fell across the sofa. He was blazingly fast, and 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 was still moving back and off balance when it landed, and he kept going. He bounced off the arm of another overstuffed chair, and rolled. He brought up against a three-legged wall table near the door. It fell over on him.

  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. There was something about him.

  He smiled. “Damned dramatic,” he said, almost approvingly. “Hell’s own shakes of an entrance.” Then he looked boredly at the gun in his hand and dropped it back in the right-hand pocket of his jacket.

  I was ten feet from him. And I remembered how fast it had appeared in his hand before. He was safe enough, and knew it. I watched him, still feeling the hot proddings of anger but beginning to get control of myself now. I’d come out without even stopping to think because I couldn’t take any more of the noises coming from in here, and 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, in the way he hitched up his trousers with his wrists and the heels of his thumbs, shook his head to clear it, and began advancing catlike on the balls of his feet with his hands out. 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 almost indifferently. He was long and loose-limbed and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. It was impossible to tab him. He might have been an intercollegiate miler or a minor poet, until you ran into that cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had that indefinable something about him which enables you to tell the master craftsman from the apprentice in any trade, whether you know anything about it or not. There was something British about his speech.

  “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 amused gaze flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, under the circumstances, unless the rules have changed. Might go through the rooms, though, and have a dekko at the ash trays. You know his brand of cigarettes.”

  The pug went out, managing to bump against me and push 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. The whole side of her face was inflamed and her eyes were wet with involuntary tears. The bathing suit was one of the old ones with shoulder straps and one of them was torn loose so the front of it slanted downward across a satiny breast. She fumbled at the strap, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. The button was gone. She held it together and went on enduring.

  Tweed Jacket apparently found us tiresome in the extreme. He crushed out his cigarette, whistling a fragment of the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffman. The pug came out of the last room.

  “Water haul,” he said, spreading his hands.

  Tweed Jacket’s eyebrows raised. “Beg pardon?”

  “Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”

  “Right.” Tweed Jacket unfolded himself languidly and stood up.

  The pug looked at me, his hazel eyes bright with wickedness. “How about Big Boy? We better ask him, hadn’t we?”

  “Rather unnecessary. I’d suggest you stick to business, old boy.”

  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. “Quite unlikely,” he said. His eyes flicked over the girl’s figure again with that same cool amusement. “I’d say his interest in Macaulay was vicarious, to say the least. Vive le sport.” They went out.

  In the dead silence I could hear their footsteps retreating along the pier, and in a moment the car started. I breathed deeply. I was pulled tight and soaked with sweat. Tweed Jacket’s urbane 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 a
s I can change, I’ll drive you back to town.”

  I walked over in front of her, so mixed up now I didn’t know anything. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I wonder if you’d tell me what this is all about? And why you threw that gun in the lake?”

  She looked through the place I’d have been standing if I had existed. “Really,” she said coldly, “I thought you had that all figured out.”

  She was about as beautiful when she was angry as at any time. I tried to filter that out of my mind and look at her objectively. It wasn’t easy.

  What had changed the picture? Nothing had really happened to prove I was wrong about it, but I was suddenly very ashamed of myself. It was odd, especially when I still didn’t know why she’d done it, or why she had told me her name was Wayne while they’d called her Macaulay. All I was sure of was that I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said. “I’d like to apologize, if it’s worth anything.”

  Her face brightened a little. Then she smiled. With the eyes still full of tears that way, it could catch hold of you right down in the throat.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s my fault, anyway. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid as not to realize that was the way it would look. What else could you think?”

  I was uncomfortable. “I’d like to forget it,” I said, “if you could. But what in the name of God did you do it for?”

  She hesitated. “I’d hoped I would have more time to make up my mind before I told you. If I told you at all. But you were too observant.”

  “Make up your mind about what?”

  Her eyes met mine simply. “About you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She stood up. It was obvious she was under a strain. “Would you—excuse me a minute? I’d like to change, and maybe if I had a chance to think—”

  “Sure,” I said. She went out. I sat down and lit a cigarette. There was no use trying to guess what it was all about, or what she really wanted. I thought of the two men who had just left. There was something deep and probably quite dangerous going on under the surface here, but I couldn’t see what I had to do with it.

  I switched back to her, and as usual I couldn’t get my thoughts sorted out. I was conscious of being happy about something, and in a moment I realized it was simply knowing I’d been wrong about the whole thing. That made no sense at all, of course. Maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist, I thought sourly.

  She came out in a few minutes, dressed and looking as smooth as ever. She had put on fresh make-up, and the ugly redness was gone from the side of her face. She touched it gently.

  “I want to thank you again,” she said. “I don’t know how much more of it I could have taken.”

  I stood up. “Then you do know where he is?”

  She nodded quietly.

  I began to understand then what she had been trying to make up her mind about. But I still didn’t see why. What did they want with me? We went out. She locked the door and we walked out to the car.

  She got behind the wheel, but made no move to turn on the ignition. She slipped around facing me, with her elbow on the back of the seat. It was very quiet, and her face was deadly serious. She had made up her mind.

  I gave her a cigarette and lit it, and lit one for myself. I dropped the lighter back in my pocket.

  “There’s one thing,” I said. “Maybe I don’t want to know where he is.”

  She gave me a quick glance. “You don’t need a lot of explanation, do you?”

  “It was just a guess,” I admitted. “But I’m still not sure I want to know anything Tweed Jacket is trying to find out. I don’t like that efficient look of his.”

  “You won’t have to know,” she said. “At least, not until we’re ready to go. I’m just offering you a job.”

  “Before we go any further,” I said, “what kind of jam is he in? Not the police?”

  “No. You’ve seen two of them. They didn’t look like police, did they?”

  “Hardly,” I said. “But what does he want with me?”

  “He needs help. Specifically, a diver.”

  I took a puff on the cigarette and looked out through the moss-hung dimness of the trees. “The world is full of divers. They run into each other nowadays, spearing fish.”

  “A diver is not quite all,” she said. “Remember—”

  I began to get it then, all the questions about boats and offshore sailing and navigation. He needed several people, actually, but in a thing like this the fewer you told, the better.

  “So that’s why the gun business?” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ll admit it was rather theatrical, but you understand, don’t you? When I read that story about you in the paper I thought you were just the man we were looking for, but I had to be sure. Not only that you could handle the job, but also just what kind of man you were.

  There are a couple of reasons why a mistake could be absolutely fatal. That seemed like a good way to do it. It would give me most of the day to size you up, and in a place where we wouldn’t be seen together. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. I knew I was being followed, but I thought I’d gotten away from them. However—” She blushed slightly and looked away from me in confusion. “I don’t think there was too much harm done, since he took it for something else—”

  I was ill at ease myself. Tweed Jacket hadn’t been the only one.

  “What is it you want me to do?” I asked. “Don’t forget, I’m merely an employee of a salvage company. Any job negotiations are supposed to be handled by the owner—” She shook her head emphatically. “No. That’s out. We don’t want a corporation, or a committee, or an expedition. It has to be one man, and one man only, and it has to be one who’ll keep his mouth shut for the rest of his life. If you do it, you’ll have to quit your present job, giving some other reason, of course—”

  “It doesn’t involve breaking any laws?”

  “No,” she said. “But I’ll warn you. It could be quite dangerous. Even afterward, if they found it out.” She stopped suddenly, frowning a little. “No. Wait. Since you’ve brought up the question, I’ll be perfectly frank with you. There is one aspect of it that probably isn’t quite legal. That is taking a boat into the waters of a foreign country and landing two people secretly. But there’d be no chance of your getting caught, and it doesn’t sound like a particularly reprehensible crime—”

  “Depends on what they were being landed for,” I said.

  “Simply,” she said, her eyes somber, “so they could live in peace. And go on living.”

  I nodded, thinking about it. I had a hunch she was telling it to me straight. She and her husband were running from Tweed Jacket and God knew how many more for some reason, but somehow I couldn’t connect her with anything criminal. Of course, I didn’t know anything about him at all, but I was beginning to like her very much. I tried to warn myself. It hadn’t been twenty minutes since I’d gone off halfcocked in the other direction. Maybe there was just something about her that precluded objective appraisal, at least as far as I was concerned. “What is the deal, specifically?” I asked. She took another drag on the cigarette, and crushed it out very slowly in the ash tray. She looked at me. “Just this,” she said. “That you buy and outfit a seaworthy boat large enough to accommodate three people but which can be handled by one seaman with the help of two landlubbers. We’ll furnish the money, of course, but the whole thing is to be done under your name or an assumed one, and we have no connection with it, for obvious reasons, until the very hour we go aboard. Secretly, and without being followed. That isn’t going to be easy, either. Sail us to a place off the coast of Yucatan and recover something from a private plane which crashed and sank—”

  “Wait,” I said. “In how much water? Do you know?”

  “Just roughly,” she replied. “About sixty feet, I think.”

  I nodded. “That’s easy. The depth, I mean. But finding the plane is something else. You could spend years
looking for it, and still never locate it. Planes break up fast, especially in exposed positions and shallow water.”

  “I believe we can find it,” she said. “But we’ll go into the reasons for that later. After we recover what my husband wants from the plane, you sail us to a spot on the coast of a Central American country and land us. That’s all.”

  “What Central American—” I started to ask, and then stopped. The vagueness had been intentional. “I land you? What about the boat?”

  “The boat is yours. Plus five thousand dollars.”

  I whistled softly. There was nothing cheap about this deal. Then two thoughts hit me at exactly the same time like two slugs of Scotch. The boat is yours was one of them, and the other was Ballerina. It was like hearing somebody had left you a million.

  “Wait,” I said eagerly. “How much do you plan to spend for a boat?”

  “Could we get an adequate one for ten thousand?”

  “Yes,” I said. I considered swiftly. The last I’d heard they were still asking twelve thousand for Ballerina, but they might go for an offer of ten cash. Sure they would. And if not I’d add the rest myself out of the five thousand.

  Then I thought of something else. “You mean, I just land you on the coast of this country, whatever it is, and that’s it? You realize, don’t you, that without papers you’ll be picked up and deported inside a week?”

  “That part is all taken care of,” she said.

  It was none of my business. She could even say that nicely.

  We were both silent for a moment. I turned, and she was watching me. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  Manning of the Ballerina, I thought. I could see the lines of her. But, still, what about this? I didn’t know anything.