Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  “You was in that car when it left?” He peered at me, more puzzled than ever. “Well, I’ll be go to hell. I looked right at it, too, and didn’t even see you. I must be gettin’ absent-minded. And here I was about to walk all the way out there to the barge and tell you that woman called—”

  He broke off suddenly, and then went on with quick concern. “Why, Mr. Manning. What’s wrong with your face?”

  That was the absolute horror of it. There was nothing happening, really. I wasn’t being accused of anything, or tortured by a Gestapo, or given the third degree. I was just being clucked over by two gentle, lonely old men trying to be helpful. They took an interest in me. They had to sit there eight hours a day and guard the goddamned place and I was the only thing in it alive or moving or that you could talk to or from which you could get even the vicarious illusion of still being connected with a world where some day somebody might conceivably do something, so they liked me and took an interest in my comings and goings. That was all it was. And they would remember every word of it.

  “Oh,” I mumbled, feeling my face as if I were surprised at the fact of having one. “I—uh—I was getting something out of the storeroom and fell.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he answered solicitously. “But you ought to put something on them cut places. Might get infected. You never know. I think it’s the climate around here, the muggy air, sort of—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Thanks.”

  Somehow, we were moving again. It was over. At least, that part of it was over. The nightmare itself came right along with me. The driver went on through the shed and stopped at the end of the pier. I got out under the light. It didn’t make any difference now. Nothing made any difference.

  He handed me my change. I tipped him a quarter, and he said, “Thanks, chief.”

  Then he grinned at my face and swollen hand. “Hate like hell to see the other guy,” he said.

  He left.

  I walked over to the big stringer at the edge of the pier and put my foot on it, looking down into the shadows below me, only half conscious of the big diesel tug muscling a string of barges up the waterway ahead of me. Again, it was the simplicity of it that terrified me. It had been nothing but an old man who hated to go back to the four bleak walls of a boarding-house room.

  I tried to think. How much chance did I have now? In a few days he’d float up, somewhere along the water-front, and the police would start looking. One of the first things they’d do would be to question all the guards along the piers—

  Float up? That was it. He couldn’t float up. I had to stop it. I looked downward again, and shuddered. Could I go back into that place once more? Once? It would take at least a half dozen dives to do it, to make him fast with wire to the bottom of one of those pilings. Too much precious time and breath were wasted in going down and coming up. But I could recharge the cylinders of that other aqualung. It’d be easy that way.

  I broke off and just stood there, regarding the ultimate horror. What I was actually looking at was the tug disappearing around the bend above me, shoving its barges in toward the oil dock near the end of the waterway. I was a diver, and yet it had taken me all this time to realize it had just gone by here with its powerful twin screws churning up that muck and silt on the bottom. You could hold a thousand-watt light three inches in front of your eyes down there and it would look like the glow of a firefly.

  The tide was still ebbing. It would be the end of the next flood before you could see your own hand under the pier. And not only that. The churning millrace from the propellers might have moved him. There was no telling where he was now.

  There was just one more thing, I thought, and then we had it all. Carter would be back from New Orleans sometime this morning, here aboard the barge, and I wouldn’t be able even to look.

  I fought with panic. I still had a chance, I told myself.

  They might never connect me with it. After all, there was no identification on him now that I’d shoved the wallet into the muck. They wouldn’t have a picture of him, except possibly one taken as he looked when he came up. Chris might not have had a good look at him when he came in the gate.

  But I wouldn’t know. That was the terrible part of it. I’d never have any idea at all what was happening until the hour they came after me.

  I had to get out of here. I was thinking swiftly now. Quit, and tell Carter I was going to New York. Sell my car, buy a bus ticket, get off the bus somewhere up the line, and come back. Buy the boat, under another name, of course. In three days I could have it ready for sea. We’d be gone before they even came looking for me. If they did.

  It didn’t occur to me until afterward that never once in all of it did I ever consider the possibility of not buying the boat and not taking Shannon Macaulay. That part of it was apparently foregone, and inevitable, so I didn’t even have to think about it.

  Suddenly I had to see her. Why, I didn’t know. I had to get the money for the boat, or make arrangements for it, but that didn’t account for the overpowering desire just to see her. For the first time in a self-sufficient life I was all at once terribly alone, and for some reason I couldn’t define she was the one I wanted to see.

  That reminded me. What had the watchman said? Some woman had called? I looked down, and I was still holding in my hand the slip of paper he had given me. It was a telephone number, the same one she had given me in the bar. Maybe something had happened to her. I turned and ran toward the car.

  Five

  Calling from the watchman’s shack would be quicker, but I didn’t want the audience. I slowed going through the gate, and the graveyard watchman lifted a hand and nodded. I noted bitterly that old Chris had gone home at last.

  I turned right off the dark street, away from the water-front. There was an arterial and a shopping center about ten blocks over. The drugstore was closed, but I saw a neon cocktail glass beyond it and a sign that said Elbow Room. I parked and pushed through a door into refrigerated dimness and smoke and a muted ground swell of “Easy to Love.” The phone booth was at the rear, beyond the jukebox.

  I closed the door and fished for a dime. The little fan whirred. I wondered uneasily how long it had actually been since she’d called. Twenty minutes? Thirty?

  It was ringing. It went on.

  Then it clicked. “Hello,” she said. “Mrs. Wayne speaking.”

  She sounded all right. I breathed easier.

  “Manning,” I said.

  “Oh. Bill! I was just hoping you would call—” There was a contralto delight in it that was like the brush of finger tips. Then I remembered what she’d told me: be careful what you say. She was merely cueing me. There still might be something wrong.

  “When am I going to see you again?” I asked.

  “Do you really want to?”

  “You know I do,” I said. “How about right now?”

  “We-e-ll—”

  “Can I come out?”

  “Heavens, not here,” she said, coyly chiding. “Bill, after all—”

  After all, we have to be discreet. There was a strained, uncomfortable feeling in this talking to her as if we were lovers, and I wondered what she thought of having to do it.

  “Where can I pick you up?” I asked.

  “How about meeting me at that same cocktail lounge? In about fifteen minutes?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.

  I was sitting in the car in front of it when she pulled up in the Cadillac and found a place to park. If she was being followed I didn’t want to go inside where they might get a look at my marked-up face. I eased alongside. She saw me, and slipped out on the street side and got in. It had taken only seconds.

  I shot ahead, watching the mirror. There were cars behind us, but there was no way to tell. There are always cars behind you. I was conscious of the gleam of the blond head beside me, and a faint fragrance of perfume.

  “Are you all right?” I asked quickly.

  “Yes,” she said. “
But they searched the house again, while I was gone.”

  I turned and headed for the beach, wondering about that. Why would they search the house? And how would she know they had, if she’d been gone? If they were looking for a man they’d hardly have to pull out the dresser drawers and slice open the upholstery, the way they did in movies. Then I began to get it.

  We passed a street light. She looked at my face and gasped. “Bill! What happened?”

  “That’s what I’ve got to tell you,” I said. I swung the corner and headed west on the beach boulevard. It was beginning to darken now, at one a.m., as the crowds thinned and some of the concessions closed up shop.

  The pug stared at me with his unseeing eyes, just waiting for the buoyancy nothing on earth could stop. Tell her? What kind of fool would tell anybody?

  But how else was I going to explain what I had to do? I had to trust her. We had to trust each other. And the insane part of it was that I did. I considered that, puzzled. I’d known her less than 24 hours, she had never told me one word about herself, and yet I would have trusted her with anything. Maybe they shouldn’t let me out alone.

  I watched the mirror. There were still too many cars to tell. I picked up speed, checking them.

  “Bill,” she said urgently, “tell me. What is it?”

  “That thug, the one who was beating you. He looked me up at the pier, to work me over for slugging him. There was a fight, and an accident. I knocked him off onto the barge—”

  “He isn’t—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. I glanced around at her, and her head was bowed as she looked down at her hands. Then she raised it, and her eyes were bitter with regret.

  “It’s all my fault,” she whispered. “I got you mixed up in it—”

  “Stop that,” I said. “It was nobody’s fault, except his. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

  I told her the whole story. We came down off the sea wall onto the hard-packed tracks going west along the beach. There was no moon, and it was very dark. I could hear the surf off to the left. There were three cars behind us. One of them stopped; I kept watching the other two.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” she said. “But, Bill, won’t they be able to see it was just an accident?”

  “Not now,” I said. “It’s probably never an accident if you’re fighting, and it’s too late for that, anyway. But for God’s sake quit blaming yourself. You didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s about as sensible as blaming General Motors for it because he drove out there in an Oldsmobile.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  I checked the mirror again. The two cars were falling back as I picked up speed. “I’m still trying to get it straight in my mind,” I said. “Legally, I’m guilty. Morally, I don’t feel guilty at all; I don’t think I’m any more responsible than if he’d been killed in an unavoidable traffic accident. And I don’t intend to go to prison or get myself killed by Barclay’s gang for something I couldn’t help—”

  “Of course not,” she said simply.

  “All right. Listen,” I said. I told her what I was going to do. “There’s only one catch to it,” I finished. “You’ll have to give me the money for that boat with no guarantee you’ll ever hear from me again. The word of a man you’ve known for one day isn’t much of a receipt.”

  “It’s good enough for me,” she said quietly. “If I hadn’t trusted you I would never have opened the subject in the first place. How much shall I make the check?”

  “Fifteen thousand,” I said. “The boat is going to be at least ten, and there’s a lot of stuff to buy. When we get aboard I’ll give you an itemized statement and return what’s left.”

  “All right,” she said.

  I looked back. The lights of the other two cars were far behind us. They disappeared momentarily behind some dunes. I slowed abruptly and swung away from the beach, coming to a stop some fifty yards from the roadway. We were in the edge of the dunes with the low silhouette of a line of salt cedars before us, well out of range of passing headlights. I snapped off my own lights before we had even stopped rolling.

  It occurred to me suddenly that I’d done a very foolish thing in coming out here at all. We should have stayed downtown on a lighted street. If they were following her, all they’d seen was a quick transfer from her own car to one they didn’t recognize. I might even be Macaulay for all they knew.

  She started to light a cigarette. “Not yet,” I said. One of the cars went by, and then the other. Their red taillights began to recede down the beach.

  When they were gone, I said, “All right,” and lit her cigarette. She took the checkbook out of her bag and held it open on her thigh. I snapped the lighter again so she could see.

  “Pick a name,” I said. “How about Burton? Harold E. Burton.”

  She wrote out the check. I held it until it dried, and put it in my wallet. “Now. What’s your address?”

  “One-oh-six Fontaine Drive.”

  “All right,” I said, talking fast. “I should be back here early the third day. This is Tuesday now, so that’ll be Thursday morning. The minute the purchase of the boat goes through and I’m aboard I’ll mail you an anniversary greeting in a plain envelope, just one of those dime-store cards. I don’t see how they could get at your mail, but there’s no use taking chances. Other than that I won’t get in touch with you. I’ll be down there at the boat yard all the time. It’s in another part of the city, and I won’t come into town at all. I’ve only been around Sanport for about six months, but still there are a few people I know and I might bump into one of them. I’ll already have everything bought and with me except the stores, and I’ll order them through a ship chandler’s runner—”

  “But,” she interrupted, “how are we going to arrange getting him aboard?”

  “I’m coming to that,” I said. “After you get the card, you can get in touch with me, from a pay phone. It’s Michaelson’s Boat Yard; the name of the sloop is Ballerina—”

  “That’s a pretty name,” she said.

  “It’s a pretty boat,” I replied. “I’m just hoping I can get her. She was still for sale last night. But if something happens and she’s already sold by the time I get back, I’ll make that card a birth announcement instead of an anniversary greeting, and give you the name of the one I actually do buy. There are several down there. All straight?”

  “Yes,” she said. She turned a little on the seat and I could see the blur of her face and pale gleam of the blond head. “I like the whole plan, and I like the way your mind works.” She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, “You’ll never know how glad I am I ran into you. I don’t feel so helpless now. Or alone.”

  I was conscious of the same thing, but probably in a different way than she’d meant it. There was something wonderful about being with her. For a moment the whole mess was gone from my mind. The sea wind blew past the car, and behind us in the night I could hear the surf.

  “You were good on the phone, too,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”

  In other words, keep your distance, Buster. It was stage money, so don’t try to buy anything with it. I wondered why she thought she had to warn me. We both knew it was only an act, didn’t we?

  Maybe I was always too aware of her, and she could sense it. I lashed out deliberately at the spell, shattering it. “All right. Now,” I said curtly. “That still leaves the problem of getting him aboard. I’ll have to work on that. He’s there in the house, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know?”

  “Guessing, mostly. You said they’d searched it while you were gone. They wouldn’t have had to tear it up much, looking for a grown man. So maybe he told you they had.”

  “You’re very alert. He heard them and told me.”

  “Why is he hiding there? And how?”

  She leaned forward a little with her elbow on the back of the seat, and took another puf
f on the cigarette. “I’ve been wanting to get to this. Here’s the whole story, briefly.

  “About three weeks ago my husband saw one of them on the street and knew they’d caught up with us again. But for some time he’d been working on this plan for getting to Central America and losing them completely, for the last time. It was about completed. I won’t go into it in much detail except to say it involved a man who’d been a close friend of my husband’s in college. He lives in Central America, in Honduras to be exact, and is very wealthy. He owns a number of large plantations, and has considerable political influence. He’s also a rather passionate flying fan. He’s always buying planes in the States and having them flown down to him, and my husband was to take this one to him. It would get him out of the country without any trail they could follow, you see? He’d merely take off without filing a flight plan, and disappear. Of course, landing down there would be illegal, but as I say, this friend of his had quite a bit of political power.

  “The only trouble, however, was that he had to go alone. It was a light plane and its cruising radius with the maximum amount of fuel was still a little short, so he’d added an extra tank. That meant I had to come later, making sure I wasn’t followed. We had that arranged, however. I was to do it over the Memorial Day week-end, and it involved about five different zigzagging commercial flights with the reservations made considerably ahead of time. On a long holiday like that they’d be sold out, you see? If they were trying to follow me they might catch a no-show at one or even two of the airports, but not all of them. There was more to it than that, too, but I won’t bother you with it.

  “But he had engine trouble, and the plane crashed off the coast of Yucatan. My husband got off in a rubber boat, and was picked up by some snapper fishermen. And they brought him, of all places, right back into Sanport. Fortunately the boat docked at night and he managed to slip off and get out to the house without being seen. It was just two days before I was supposed to leave.