Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  “Look,” I asked, “this whatever-it-is in the plane. Does it belong to your husband?”

  She nodded. “It’s his.”

  “Which is his real name? Wayne or Macaulay?”

  “Macaulay,” she said simply. “You don’t make it as easy for them as looking you up in the telephone book.”

  “Who is Tweed Jacket?”

  “His name is Barclay. You might call him a killer, though I prefer executioner. It describes his attitude as well as his profession.”

  “And your husband is running from him?”

  “Barclay’s only one of them. Running, yes. In the past three months we’ve lived in New York, San Francisco, Denver, and Sanport.”

  “Couldn’t he get police protection?”

  “I suppose so. But it isn’t much of a way to live.”

  I still hesitated, without knowing why. What was I afraid of? I believed her, didn’t I? Maybe that was it. I was too eager to believe her.

  Suddenly she reached out and put her hand on my arm. The gray eyes were large and unhappy and pleading. “Please,” she said.

  You couldn’t look at her and refuse her anything. “All right,” I said. “But I’d like to have until in the morning before making it definite. Suppose I call you?”

  Three

  She sighed with relief and reached for the ignition key. We started back. I lit another cigarette and thought about it. I still wasn’t too sold on the thing. I was sold on owning that boat and I was practically panting to believe anything she said, but she hadn’t said enough.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to know where he is, or what’s in the plane, as long as it’s really his. We can skip that. But don’t you think you’re asking me to make up my mind with damn few facts to go on? It’s a queer-sounding deal. You’ll have to admit that yourself.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I guess it is. And I can understand your wondering if it’s entirely aboveboard, without knowing any more than you do.

  “But maybe this will help. My husband’s full name is Francis L. Macaulay. He is—or was, rather—an executive in a firm of marine underwriters in New York. The name of the company is Benson and Teen. If you’ll call either them or the New York police they’ll assure you he isn’t in any kind of trouble with the law, and never has been. The only people he’s hiding from are gangsters. I’d rather not go into it any further than that, because it’s his business, and not mine. But that’s what you really wanted to know, wasn’t it? That this wasn’t something that might get you in trouble with the police?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” I said.

  Something still puzzled me a little, though. And that was the fact that hoodlums seldom bothered to hunt down and kill some perfectly innocent law-abiding John Citizen who was hardly aware they existed. As a rule you’d been connected with them in some way, been near enough to have a little of it rub off. But an executive in an insurance firm? That didn’t make sense at all.

  But where did the plane come in?

  “You’d better warn your husband that if he can’t pinpoint that plane crash within a mile he’s just going to be wasting his money,” I said. “It’ll be impossible to find it.”

  “That’s all right,” she said with assurance. “He knows right where it is.”

  “He’s sure, now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was right off the coast. And he was in it when it crashed.”

  “I see,” I said.

  But I didn’t see much.

  Where had he been going? What was in the plane? And how had he got back here, assuming he was here?

  I could tell, however, that she was reluctant to talk about it any more than she had to, so I quit asking questions. There’d be time enough for that when I gave her definite word I’d take it.

  But why was I holding back? It puzzled me. I’d have given my left arm for that auxiliary sloop Ballerina, and here it was being tossed in my lap. The job was easy, the pay was fantastic. I believed she was on the level. What did I want, anyway?

  Of course, I didn’t have any desire to look down the end of Barclay’s gun again, but that was calculated risk, and besides he probably wouldn’t have any reason to connect me with it until it was too late and we were already gone.

  Something kept bothering me, but that wasn’t it. I gave up.

  It was a little after five when we began to get back into the outskirts of the city. We hit the peak of the traffic rush right on the nose and crawled through the downtown district a slow light at a time. After a while she pulled into a parking lot and we walked up to the corner to a cocktail lounge for a drink. That was where the odd thing happened.

  It was one of those too-utterly-utter places I usually avoided, dimly lighted, with blue-leather-upholstered booths and a soulful type who needed a haircut playing Victor Herbert on an electric organ. We sat down in the last booth and ordered Scotch and water.

  After the drinks came she wrote down her telephone number for me. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?” I asked. “They haven’t tapped your phone?”

  “It’s not likely,” she said. “But you never know for sure. Just be careful what you say; tell me you want to see me again, or something like that. I think it’ll be all right if we meet just once more, to give you the money, but beyond that it’s too risky.”

  “Yes, it would be,” I agreed, knowing she was right but still feeling let down about it.

  We both fell silent, listening to the music. A moment or two went by. I was looking at her face when she suddenly raised her eyes and saw me.

  “You’re quiet,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “You,” I said. “You’re probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  It was completely unexpected. I hadn’t intended to say a thing like that. It startled me, and I cursed myself for an awkward idiot.

  She was startled, too, for an instant. Then she smiled, and said, “Why, thank you, Bill.”

  She was probably wondering when they’d flushed me out of the hills and put shoes on me.

  We finished our drinks in silence while I tried irritably to figure out why she affected me that way. God knows I wasn’t a particularly smooth type, but I’d never had this many thumbs and left feet around a woman before. She was married, I had known her exactly one day, and yet in less than four hours I’d managed to insult her and then startle her out of her wits with a piece of off-the-cuff brilliance like that. Maybe it just wasn’t my day.

  We walked back to the car. She offered to drive me out to the pier, but I vetoed it. “You’d better stay away from places like that,” I said. “They’re not safe with those people following you.”

  She nodded. “All right.” We shook hands, and she said quietly, “I’ll be waiting to hear from you. You’ve got to help me, Bill. I can’t let him down.”

  I watched her drive away. Restlessness seized me, and I didn’t want to go back to the pier. I went into another bar and ordered a drink, nursing it moodily. Twice I started to the phone to call one of the girls I knew for a date; both times I gave it up. I tried to think calmly back over the day, to pull it into perspective, and I kept bumping into Shannon Macaulay at every turn. She ran through it like a brilliant silver thread through a piece of burlap.

  Look, I asked myself, what was with Shannon Macaulay? I didn’t know anything about her. Except that she was married. And her husband was on the lam from a bunch of mobsters. So she was tall. So she was nice looking. So something said sexy when you looked at her body and her face, and sweet when you looked at her eyes. I had seen women before, hadn’t I? I must have. They couldn’t be something entirely new to a man 33 years old, who’d been married once for four years. So relax.

  I left the bar.

  I remembered after a while I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner. When it came I wasn’t hungry.

  It was an easy job. It probably wouldn’t take a month a
ltogether, if he really knew where that plane was. A month—Just three of us at sea in a small boat. I shook my head irritably. What the hell difference did that make? It was just a job, wasn’t it?

  I’d own the Ballerina. After I landed them I’d sail her across to San Juan. I’d go to work for the Navy, at least until the hurricane season was over, and then cruise the West Indies. Why, with that much money I could sail her around the world. I’d try writing again.

  I pushed the food back and looked around for a phone booth. I dialed the yacht broker’s office. There was no answer. It went on ringing. At last I remembered to look at my watch. It was nearly seven.

  I went out in the street and bought a paper, standing on a corner while I rustled impatiently through it to the classified section. She was still listed among a dozen others in the broker’s ad. 36 ft. aux, slp. Ballerina. Slps 4. Now there was a description, I thought sourly. The poet who dreamed it up would probably call the Taj Mahal an oldr. type bldg, suitbl. lge. fmly.

  I walked out to the beach and prowled for miles along the sea wall. It was after ten when I finally caught a cab and went back to the pier. The driver stopped at the watchman’s shanty.

  “This will do,” I said, and got out.

  While I was waiting for my change the watchman came out. It was old Christiansen, who was always eager for a chance to talk. “Fellow was here to see you, Mr. Manning,” he said. “He’s still out there.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I put the change in my pocket and the cab left.

  “Maybe he’s got a diving job for you, eh?” Christiansen said. “That’s what he said, anyway.”

  “I suppose so,” I answered, not paying much attention. “Good night.” It was late for anybody to be coming around about a job, but maybe he’d been waiting for quite a while.

  I crossed the railroad spur in the darkness and entered the long shed running out on the pier. It was velvety black inside and hot, and I could hear my footsteps echo off the empty walls. Up ahead I could see the faint illumination which came from the opened doors at the other end. There was a light above them on the outside.

  I wondered what kind of man Macaulay was. There was no picture of him at all. An executive in a marine insurance firm who was being hunted down by a mob of gangsters didn’t make even the glimmerings of sense. I thought of being hunted that way, of never knowing when some utter stranger might shoot you in a crowd or when they might get you from behind in the dark. It had never occurred to me before, but I began to realize now how helpless and alone you could be. Sure, you had the police. But did you want to live in a precinct station? What was left? They could catch and prosecute the man after he’d killed you, if that was any comfort, but they couldn’t arrest him for wanting to.

  Then I thought of something else. The girl herself. He must love her very much. If you were trying to hide, having her around would be like carrying a sign with your name on it, or a lighted Christmas tree. And in Central America? Murder. Any kind of scrawny, washed-out blonde led a parade down there, and she’d stick out like the Chartres cathedral in a housing development.

  But maybe that didn’t matter so much. It wasn’t as if they were running from the police. A mob looking for them wouldn’t have any connections that far away, and if they got out of the country without leaving tracks they should be all right.

  Then, for no reason at all, I remembered the thing she’d said when we had parted there at the car. “I can’t let him down.” At the time it had seemed perfectly normal, the thing any woman would say if her husband were in trouble. But was it? I can’t let him down. It puzzled me. There was an odd ring to it somewhere. He was her husband; presumably she was in love with him. And from the little I’d seen of her I knew she wasn’t given to stating the obvious. There wouldn’t be any question of letting him down, nor any necessity for mentioning it. When you put it into words, even without thinking, it wasn’t love, or devotion. It sounded like obligation.

  I came out the doors at the end of the shed. Off to my left, just at the edge of the illumination from the small bulb over the doors, I could see the ladder leading down onto the barge. Only a little of it stuck above the level of the pier now, and I remembered absently that the tide had been ebbing about three hours.

  I started over toward it, and then suddenly remembered old Chris had said somebody was waiting out here to see me. I looked around, puzzled. My own car was sitting there beside the doors, but there was no other. Well, maybe he’d gone. But that was odd. Chris would have seen him. There was no way out except through the gate.

  I saw it then—the glowing end of a cigarette in the shadows inside my car.

  The door swung open and he got out. It was the pug. There was just enough light to see the hard, beat-up face, and the yearning in it, and the bright malice in the eyes. He lazily crushed out his cigarette against the paint on the side of the car.

  “Been waiting for you, Big Boy,” he said.

  “All right, friend,” I said. “I’ve heard the one about the good little man. And it’s put a lot of good little men in the hospital. Hadn’t you better run along?”

  Then, suddenly, I saw the whole thing over again, saw him holding and hitting her like some vicious little wasp systematically destroying a butterfly, and I was glad he’d come. A cold ball of rage pushed up in my chest. I went for him.

  He was a pro, all right, and he was fast. He hit me three times before I touched him. It was like one of those sequences in an animated cartoon—boing-boing-boing! None of the punches hurt very much, but they sobered me a little. He’d cut me to pieces this way. He’d close my eyes and then take his own sweet time chopping me down to a bloody pulp. These raging swings of mine were just his meat; I didn’t have a chance in God’s world of hitting him where it would hurt, and they only pulled me off balance so he could jab me.

  His left probed for my face again. I raised my hands, and the right slammed into my body. He danced back. “Duck soup,” he said contemptuously.

  He put the left out again. I caught the wrist in my hand, locked it, and yanked him toward me. This was unorthodox, and new, and when my right came slamming into his belly it hurt. I heard him suck air. I set a hundred and ninety-five pounds on the arch of his foot, and ground my heel.

  He tried to get a knee into me. I pushed him back with another right in his stomach. He dropped automatically into his crouch, weaving and trying to suck me out of position. He’d been hurt, but the hard grin was still there and his eyes were wicked. All he had to do was get me to play his way.

  He was six or eight feet in front of the car, with his back toward it. I went along with him, lunging at him with a looping right. He slipped inside it, pounding that tattoo on my middle. He slid out again, as fast as he’d come in, only now he was three feet nearer the car. I crowded him again. He didn’t know it was there until he felt the bumper against the backs of his legs.

  I moved in on him fast. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and he was already too far back and off balance to swing. I caught his wrist and the front of his shirt and leaned on him. The right crashing against his face had an ugly, meaty sound in the night. This was exactly the way he had held and beaten the girl. I slammed him again, savagely, punishing him.

  “Different when you’re catching, huh?” I said. I rocked him again.

  He twisted away at last, but he was a little groggy now and his timing was off. A trickle of blood ran out of his mouth, and my hand hurt. I was conscious I had blood on my own face, too, because it was getting in my eyes. There was no sound except the labored breathing and the rasp of our feet against the concrete of the pier. He circled me, a little more warily now, and we moved out of the cone of light above the doors. He slashed in suddenly and made my head ring with a hard right to the jaw, but left himself open long enough for me to counter. He rocked back on his heels. I swung again. He dropped. I looked down at him. There wasn’t even any satisfaction in it now. “Better beat it while you can,” I said, gasping for breath. “I’m too bi
g for you. I lean on those arms a few more times, they’re going to weigh three hundred pounds apiece. And when they come down, the lights go out.”

  He had no intention of quitting. His eyes hated me as he got up. I was a bigger man, and I’d knocked him down when he was off guard; there could never be any peace for him until he’d humiliated me. He retreated evasively, trying to stay out of reach until his head cleared. I crowded him, but I could never hit him solidly. He was too much the pro for that. We were farther away from the light now, near the ladder going down onto the barge. He was beginning to recover a little. He came in suddenly, jabbing at my face. I tied his arm up and swung at his middle again. It hurt him. His hands fluttered helplessly. I swung once more, moving in with it.

  He shot backward, trying to get his feet under him. His heels struck the big 12-by-12 stringer running along the edge of the pier and he fell outward into the darkness, cartwheeling. I heard a sound like a dropped cantaloupe and jumped to the edge to look down. The deck of the barge lay in deep shadow. I couldn’t see anything. I heard a splash. He had landed on the afterdeck and then slid off into the water.

  I jumped, taking a chance of breaking a leg. It was a good eight feet down to the deck at this stage of the tide. I landed safely, and clawed in my pocket for the keys. Then I remembered. The aqualung was in the trunk of the girl’s car. There was another in the storeroom, but the cylinders were empty.

  It didn’t matter. I could do it without diving gear, but I had to have a light. I ran to the storeroom door, frantically jabbing at the lock. I got it open at last, wild with the necessity to hurry, and plunged inside. I was sweating. I bumped into something, and cursed. My hands located the big underwater light and its coil of cable. I ran aft, groping for the plug at the end of it. Holding that in one hand, I threw the rest over the stern into the water. It took only a second to plug it into the receptacle and turn the switch. I could see it glowing faintly thirty feet below on the mud. I ran back to the storeroom for a diving mask, kicked my shoes off, and dropped over the stern. I didn’t know how long it had been now. All I knew was that if he was knocked out he’d drown almost instantly.