Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  There was no outcry behind us. I wanted to step on the gas and flee. Not yet, I thought. Easy. I still hadn’t seen him at all. He was only a dark shadow beside me as we rolled on toward the intersection. Then a cigarette lighter flared.

  I jerked my face around, whispering fiercely. “Put that—”

  “It’s all right,” a smooth voice said. “Just turn at the corner and go around the block, like a good fellow.”

  I saw a lean face, and tweed, and the gun held carelessly in his lap. It was Barclay.

  We turned. I was numb all over and there was nothing else to do. We went slowly up the street behind Fontaine and turned again.

  “Rather theatrical,” he said, almost deprecatingly. “But it was the only way to enlist you without a brawl which might arouse the neighborhood. Please go on around and park at the mouth of the alley, where you were.”

  “Mrs. Macaulay?” I asked mechanically.

  “She’s in the house.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Yes. A little shock, perhaps.”

  I swung around the next corner, and we were on Fontaine, under the big, peaceful trees. “Then you finally killed him?”

  “Oh. Yes,” he replied, almost as if talking to himself. “Quite unfortunate.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but there was no point in asking. I was too far behind now to catch up in a week. We parked at the mouth of the alley. Across the street I could see the red tip of a cigarette in the other car. Bitterness welled up in me. I’d fooled them, hadn’t I? It was wonderful the way I’d fooled them.

  Barclay opened the door on his side. “Go inside, shall we? Ready to leave shortly.”

  “Leave?”

  “Embark. Ballerina does sleep four, doesn’t she? Hope we haven’t been misled as to the accommodations.”

  He stepped aside in the darkness and followed closely behind me. My mind turned the parts of it over and over with no more comprehension than a washing-machine tumbling clothes. Embark? Four of us? Macaulay was already dead; that was what they’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  It was—unless she had been lying all the time. I tried to shove the thought out of my mind. It came back. How would they have known I was coming by in the truck unless she had told them?

  Maybe I could have got away from him in the alley, but I didn’t even try. The whole thing had fallen in on me, and I didn’t have anywhere to go. I wanted to see her, anyway. She had lied about it, or she hadn’t lied about it. I had to know.

  We went in through a rear garden full of dark shrubs and the cloying sweetness of honeysuckle. The kitchen door was unlocked. There was no light inside, nor in the hall beyond, but at the end, through a Spanish archway, I could see the living-room and hear music.

  It was a large room dimly lighted by the one bridge lamp that was turned on. I had a confused impression of beige broadloom, modern furniture, and drapes with bright splashes of color. The music was issuing from a phonograph console at the right end of it.

  There were two men in it besides the one lying on the rug under the edge of the coffee table, but they registered merely as blurs as I swung my face and looked at her. She was on the right, near the phonograph, sitting straight upright on the front edge of a chair. She was wearing a sea-green dress and sandals, and the light gleamed softly on her hair. Nothing moved, and she might have been a well-bred girl listening to some old bore at a party until you looked at her eyes and saw the shock wearing off and could sense the scream running around inside her like a motorcycle riding the rim of a motordrome. I came over in front of her just as her mouth opened and she pressed the knuckles of her right hand against her teeth. Barclay stepped from behind me and hit her across the right side of the face with an open hand. The scream choked off before it could get started, and she whimpered and fell back in the chair.

  I hit Barclay. The two men who had been blurs hit me, one of them with the flat side of a gun.

  I was on my hands and knees, trying to get up with a big ocean of pain sloshing around in my head. The lights went out and then came back on and I tried to focus my eyes. I could see nothing but feet and the rug. Her nylons and gilt sandals were before me, and to one side I could see a pair of huge brogues under gabardine legs. I lunged weakly at them. One brogue kicked my arm from under me, and shoved. I rolled onto my back.

  He looked down at me with a bleak grin, a big cottony blond with a flat slab of a face and gray eyes set wide apart. The other one had backed away and was on the other side of the table, holding the gun in his hand as if it were an extension of his arm. He was a mean-looking slat about six feet tall, wearing a white linen suit and a Panama hat. His face had the human softness of a hatchet blade.

  He pointed with the gun. “Sit down in that chair.”

  I looked at him and at the other one and slowly got to my feet with the two of them watching me. My legs buckled and I slid into the chair. Barclay got up, felt his jaw, and brushed casually at his clothes.

  The telephone was on a stand at my left. Barclay saw my glance and shook his head. “I shouldn’t try it,” he said. “They’re looking for you, anyway.”

  “You’ve killed Macaulay,” I said. “What do you want now?”

  “Mrs. Macaulay, obviously.”

  “Why?”

  He gestured impatiently. “Later, Manning.” He walked over to the other end of the room and stood looking around like a director inspecting a set for a scene he was going to shoot.

  I could see the man lying under the edge of the coffee table. He was wearing slacks of charcoal gray and a dark-blue sport shirt, and his shoes had crepe soles. He had been ready to go when they killed him. My mind was still numb, but it could encompass that much. He was lying on his stomach with his face turned to one side, and a little blood had run from under his chest. It looked black against the rug. The face, what I could see of it, was slender, and his hair was very dark and needed cutting. I was conscious of the crazy thought that I’d been wondering for days what Macaulay would be like when I met him, and this was what he was like. He was a dead man who needed a haircut.

  I turned my face and I could see her. She was slumped forward with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. What if she had told them I was coming by in the truck? They had ways of making you talk. But what did they want with her? And with me, and the boat? The whole thing was one big blank. I sat there, feeling sick.

  “You cleaned your prints from everything you touched?” Barclay asked.

  The thin one nodded.

  “Very well,” Barclay said. “Who has the keys to her car?”

  “Here.” The big blond fished them from his pocket.

  “Give them to Carl,” Barclay directed crisply. “You’ll go with us in the truck.”

  He shifted his gaze to the thin man. “Take the Cadillac downtown and park it. Meet us on the southeast corner of Second and Lindsay. We shall be going east, in a black panel truck, Manning driving. Get in the front seat with him. When we go in the gate at the boat yard Manning will tell the watchman you’ve come along to drive the truck back to a garage. If Manning tries a trick of any kind, don’t shoot him; kill the watchman. As soon as we’re all aboard the boat, take the truck to some all-night storage garage and leave it, under the name of Harold E. Burton, and pay six months’ storage charges in advance. Then pick up the Cadillac, drive it to the airport, and abandon it. Take a plane to New York, and tell them we should be in Tampa in three weeks to a month. Tell them how it was with Macaulay, but that we have her and it’s well under control. You have all that?”

  “Check,” Carl said. He took the keys and went out.

  I could see a little of it now. They were hanging it on her quite neatly. The police already wanted me, and now they’d be after her, too, for killing Macaulay. I didn’t know what Barclay wanted with her, but he had her from every angle. There was nowhere we could run.

  Nine

  “Here, George.”

  Barclay took the handkerchief from the breast pocket o
f his jacket and tossed it, waddled into a ball, to the big towhead. “Put that in her mouth, so she doesn’t cry out in the alley.”

  George tilted her face up and rammed the handkerchief into her mouth. Then he tied his own across it and around her neck to hold it in. She was crying softly and offered no resistance.

  “Go, shall we?” Barclay said.

  I saw him through dancing flickers of rage. My head was splitting and I was helpless and weak as a cat, nothing seemed to matter. “Suppose I don’t”? I asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he answered crisply. “Would you like to have her knocked about a bit to convince you?”

  There was nothing else to do. I stood up. George gave me a bright, hard grin, and led her past. As they started out through the archway she pulled suddenly away and tried to fall to her knees beside Macaulay. George cursed and yanked her back. Barclay watched me with his hand in the pocket of his jacket. He shook his head warningly.

  “Your boy’s good,” I said.

  “He’s efficient.”

  “Don’t overmatch him and get him hurt,” I said. “He might lose his confidence.”

  George glanced back over his shoulder at me. Barclay said, “Let’s not be heroic, Manning. Suppose you follow them.”

  I followed them. Barclay followed me. As we went through the kitchen I could hear the phonograph softly playing Victor Herbert for a dead man, and then we were outside in the darkness and Barclay eased the door shut. I could see nothing but the pale gleam of her head, and that very faintly. Barclay had taken the gun from his pocket and was holding it against my back as we walked slowly through the garden and out the gate. At the end of the alley George stopped and I bumped gently against her. He stepped ahead to peer up and down the sidewalk. I put my hand on her arm and let it slide down until I had her hand in mine. I squeezed it, but there was no answering pressure. All her lines were down.

  “All right,” George whispered.

  We moved ahead across the walk. There was no one in sight. It was just another peaceful evening in an upper-middle-class suburb where the only violence was on 21-inch screens. George opened the door of the truck and tipped the seat up. He helped Shannon Macaulay into the back and got in himself.

  “Get in,” Barclay whispered to me. I slid under the wheel and he sat beside me. “You know where to pick up Carl. Don’t attempt anything foolish.”

  They couldn’t get away with it, but they did. We rolled downtown through increasing streams of traffic. I counted three police cars, and once one stopped beside us at a traffic light almost near enough to touch. It was like a nightmare. Every turn of the wheels was taking her farther beyond the reach of help by anyone. There was nothing in the house to indicate the others had ever been there, and when the police found her car abandoned at the airport they would be sure she had done it and fled.

  Just before we reached the corner of Lindsay and Second, Barclay climbed over the seat and sat on the floor in back with the others. I stopped. Carl got in. We went on, going out of town now. Nobody said anything. I thought of their three guns. It was like driving a nitro-glycerin truck over a rough road.

  Traffic thinned out. We were driving through dimly lighted streets. I made the last turn and stopped before the gates of the boat yard. I beeped the horn. The old watchman swung them open. I pulled inside and he stood by my elbow.

  “I’m going to get under way in a few minutes,” I said. “This man will drive the truck back to a garage for me.”

  He glanced at Carl. There was dead silence from the rear of the truck. I could hear my own breathing. Carl nodded.

  “Okay, Mr. Manning,” the watchman said. “You need any help down there at the dock?”

  I shook my head. “No. Thanks.”

  We rolled ahead.

  At the lower end of the yard I swung the truck in a circle and backed it up against the end of the pier. The watchman was settling down with his magazine again, in the pool of light at the gate. Everything was black behind us.

  “Get out and open the rear door, Manning,” Barclay said softly.

  I stepped out. Carl slid behind the wheel. I went around in back and pulled the door open. They stepped out. “Give us two minutes,” Barclay whispered to Carl. “Then drive on out.”

  I led the way down the pier with Barclay close behind me and then George and Shannon Macaulay. It was intensely dark and I had to keep my eyes averted from the glow of lights over the city off to the left in order to make out the form of the pier and the clots of shadow which were the craft moored to it. Beyond in the channel the buoy winked on and off and the bell clanged restlessly in the night. Then the tall stick of the Ballerina was above us, shadowy against the stars. I felt my way aboard and stepped down into the cockpit.

  “Stand clear,” Barclay whispered. “Move to the aft end of the cockpit and sit down.”

  He was taking no chances of our being scrambled too closely together in close quarters in the dark. I stepped back. I could have jumped over the side and possibly escaped, but he knew I wouldn’t. I had nowhere to go, with the police looking for me, and I couldn’t leave her. They helped her down into the cockpit.

  “Take her below and stay there with her,” Barclay said quietly. “I’ll watch Manning.”

  I could hear the soft scraping of shoes on the companionway and two shadows disappeared. “Start your auxiliary, Manning, and cast off,” Barclay said. “Let’s go to sea.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you a course when we’re outside. Now, step to it.”

  “I’ll have to light the running lights first. Is that all right with you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I just wanted to be sure I had your permission.”

  He sighed in the darkness. “I assure you this is no game, Manning. It should have penetrated before now, but in case it hasn’t I’d like to call your attention to the fact that your position is very poor, and Mrs. Macaulay’s is even more dangerous. What happens to her depends on the way the two of you co-operate. Now suppose you take this sloop away from the dock before the watchman hears us and comes down here to investigate.”

  Getting the watchman killed would accomplish nothing. “All right,” I said. As soon as the running lights were burning I started the engine and cast off the lines. We moved slowly away from the pier. I took her straight out toward the channel and swung hard over as we cleared the buoy. The twin rows of the channel markers stretched ahead of us, going seaward between the long dark lines of the jetties. There was no other traffic.

  Barclay sat down across from me in the cockpit and lit a cigarette. The tip glowed. “Neat, wasn’t it?” he asked, above the noise of the engine.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “If killing people is your idea of neatness.”

  “Macaulay? It was unavoidable. We were afraid of it.”

  “Of course,” I said coldly. “It was an accident.”

  “No. Not an accident. Call it calculated risk.” He paused for a moment, the cigarette glowed redly, and then he went on. “And speaking of that, perhaps I’d best brief you now as to your part in this expedition. You’re also a calculated risk, for the reason that—quite frankly—I’m not a navigator and neither is Barfield. I can handle small sailing craft well enough to take this sloop across the Gulf, but I couldn’t find the place we’re looking for. Therefore we need you, and while we both have guns and are quite expert in their use we won’t kill you except as a last resort. Score yourself one point.

  “But before you start plotting a mutiny, try to imagine a bullet-shattered knee, complicated by gangrene, with a medicine chest which probably consists of aspirin tablets and Mercurochrome. Not an enchanting picture, is it? And while you’re about it, you might consider how unpleasant life could be made for Mrs. Macaulay if you don’t co-operate with us.

  “One of us will be watching you every minute. Do as you’re told and there’ll be no trouble. Try to get out of hand, and both you and Mrs. Macaulay will be badly hur
t; we’re not amateurs at this sort of thing. Is it all clear, Manning?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Except you keep telling me this is no game, so there must be some point to it. Would you mind telling me where you think you’re going, and what you’re after?”

  “Not at all. We’re looking for an airplane.”

  I stared at the end of his cigarette. “You mean the one Macaulay crashed in? You’re going to try to find it after you’ve killed the one person on earth who knew where it is?”

  “There’s one more who knows,” he said calmly. “Why do you think we brought her?”

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t be stupid. He was alone in it when it crashed. How could she possibly know?”

  “He told her.”

  “You’ll never find it in a million years.”

  “I think we shall. He knew where it was, obviously, and was certain he could go back to it, or he wouldn’t have tried to hire a diver and a boat. Therefore it has to be near some definite location, such as a reef or promontory. And if he knew, he could tell her. All she has to do is tell us. In fact, she has already given me the general location. It’s to the westward of Scorpion Reef. You know where that is, I presume?”

  “It’s on the chart,” I said curtly. I swung the tiller a little to line up the channel buoys again. “Listen, Barclay. You’re stupid as hell. Even if you found the plane, that money’s not recoverable. I didn’t tell her, because the main thing they wanted was to get away from you and your damned thugs, but that currency’s pulp by now. It’s been submerged in sea water for weeks—”

  “Money?” he asked. There was faint surprise in his voice.

  “Don’t be cute, for Christ’s sake. You’re not looking for that plane just to recover the ham sandwich he probably had with him.”

  “She told you there was money on the plane? Is that it?”

  “Of course that’s it. What else? They were trying to get to some place in Central America so they could quit running from you and your gorillas—”

  “I wondered what sort of story she gave you.”

  “What do you mean?”