Strongarm (Prologue Crime)

by Dan J. Marlowe

  We started hammering out the miles again. “Are you sorry I’m with you, Pete?” she asked softly after awhile, and continued right on without waiting for me to reply. “I know you are. I know you’d rather be alone.”

  “Now don’t start getting sensitive on me,” I said.

  “It marks you, traveling with me,” she insisted. It did, but I didn’t say anything. “We could fix it if you say so.”

  Was she going to offer to drop off the bandwagon? I was surprised at the reaction I had to the idea. “Yeah? How?”

  “We could drive to Des Moines and pick up Gussie. It would change our whole image.”

  Right that minute Des Moines sounded as far away as San Diego. Besides, I wanted less impedimenta, not more. “We’ll talk about it on board. The most important thing is getting rid of this abortion of a car that labels us. The minute we hit a used car lot in Milwaukee I’ll have us in something else.”

  The conversation died. The car hummed up the road. Beyond Lake Odessa Lynn saw a telephone booth outside a dark filling station. It was almost three o’clock. Why out in the country like this every night sound seemed magnified. In the booth I had a tight sensation in my chest as I gave the Muskegon number. I didn’t relish the idea of heading south to Benton Harbor and Gary, Indiana to get to Chicago. “Hello,” a voice chirped after the third ring, and a heavy load lifted itself from my diaphragm.

  “Two — I mean, you’re sailing at five?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Two cabins.” In my relief I couldn’t think of another word to say.

  “Names, please?”

  “Oh. Yes. Paul Murdoch and niece Ruth — ah — Kline.”

  “You’re driving, Mr. Murdoch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be sure your car is at the terminal gate no later than four-forty-five, please.” The connection was gone. I went back to the automobile six inches taller than I’d left it.

  “They’re sailing,” Lynn anticipated my news. She looked at her watch. “Will we make it?”

  “You’re damn right we’ll make it.” I started the car. “I’m Paul Murdoch and you’re my niece, Ruth Kline.”

  She repeated the names once and was silent.

  She doesn’t like it, Karma. She doesn’t like it at all. So what happens when she finds out you’re an escaped con? Don’t ever forget that not all the money in the briefcase can make it up to her if you bring her down with you. You’ve got to find a place to leave her, and you’ve got to find it fast.

  We blew through Grand Rapids ten miles an hour over the speed limit, and I really laid down on the accelerator the balance of the way up 16. Dawn was breaking but the streets were still dark when we rolled through Muskegon. Following the ferry signs, we made the four-forty-five deadline with eight minutes to spare. I turned in from the street and passed what looked like a coalyard and a railroad freight yard, and up ahead I saw the ferry at the dock, all lighted up, a lot bigger than I expected.

  I stopped the car. “Walk in from here,” I told Lynn. “Tell them we became separated and I have the tickets.” It hardly seemed possible anyone could be waiting for me to drive up to the gate, but just in case —

  She got out of the car. There was no sidewalk, just a rough path. She looked down at herself in the rumpled evening gown. “I wonder if I should try to explain this, Pete?”

  “This is a vacationists’ boat. They’ve seen worse.”

  “Let’s hope so.” She took three steps in the direction of the ferry and then turned and came back to the car. “Come and see me when you get aboard, Pete. When we get our cabins.”

  “Okay.” I watched her move away again. Above the gown her white shoulders were faintly pink in the first rays of the sun. After no sleep and an all-night ride she could still give cards and spades on looks to any woman I’d ever known.

  I put it out of my mind. I drove in, parked to one side and went into the office to pay for our tickets. “Leave the car ticket with the man at the gate,” the clerk said to me, handing it to me separately from the other tickets in an envelope. Out at the car I had just started to climb back in when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned so fast I bumped chests with the man.

  “We’ll park it, Mister,” he said to me, holding out his hand for the ticket.

  “Sure.” I hadn’t breath to say anything more. I surrendered the ticket and received a stub, then stood and watched the car go through a narrow chute before making a sharp left turn and disappearing in the ferry’s belly. The briefcase was in the trunk. I didn’t like it, but there I was.

  I turned and walked up the long, inclined ramp to the gangplank. There were a lot of travelers, some of them carrying sleepy children, most of them in crumpled clothes. I stopped worrying about Lynn’s evening gown attracting attention; around me at the ticket-taker’s station the women were dressed in everything imaginable, including pajamas. I explained to the ticket taker about my separation from my niece. He just nodded and waved me on.

  I went into the lounge to find an armchair until the crush around the cabin reservation desk thinned out, but it was too hot and sticky inside. Lynn was nowhere in sight. I left the lounge and climbed two flights of stairs and an iron ladder to the boat deck and sat down and relaxed in a deck chair. Only a couple of children in the charge of a tall man with gray hair were up there. Ashore it was still too dark to see much. I closed my eyes to rest them for a second, and must have dozed right off. The blast of the ferry’s whistle as we pulled away from the dock brought me up standing. My nerves were in fine shape.

  I stood at the rail and watched the silhouetted pines slip by on either side of us as we eased through the inlet to Lake Michigan. Beneath my feet the deck trembled from the thrust of the engines. A dawn breeze blew softly across the water, carrying the scent of the pines. As the ferry turned, the rim of the sun was scarcely above the water’s edge behind us; the early morning atmosphere was still gray and ghostly, with only a hint of gold.

  I went below to the reservation desk. “Oh, yes, Mr. Murdoch,” the skinny little steward said when I presented my tickets. “You’re in 42. Miss Kline is in 38. Both are down that passageway.”

  “Thanks. Any chance for breakfast?”

  “Sorry, not till seven-thirty. There’s coffee in a machine on the main deck off the dance floor.”

  I found the machine, teased two containers out of it with coins and carried them down the dark passageway with its headhigh rows of life preservers to the door of Cabin 38. Lynn opened the door a crack at my knock. She was in her slip. The cabin was tiny but there were two single beds in it. The only illumination was a wall lamp that looked to be all of forty watts. I set the coffee down on a postage-stamp-sized table and made straight for the farther bed. I stretched out on it on my back, and the feeling of relief was all-pervading. In five hours I might be running again, but right now I could breathe deeply and enjoy it.

  Lynn pushed my legs to one side and sat down on the edge of the bed beside me. She reached down and untied my shoelaces and slipped off my shoes. In the murky light her features were quietly serious. She leaned up over me and unbuttoned my shirt down to the beltline, then unbuckled the belt and unzipped the trousers. I bridged myself between heels and shoulders and she pulled the trousers down, then off, and dropped them on the floor.

  She stood up from the bed and removed her slip. My eyes followed her as she moved about the cabin making other dispositions. She came back to the bed and bent down over me, every ounce of her pure cream, the beautiful tip-tilted breasts swinging free. She placed her hands on the waistband of my shorts, and I bridged myself again. She yanked them off, and as I sank back on the bed she flowed down against me, the whole soft, warm, cool, long, lovely, nude length of her.

  It’s the last thing in your mind, man, I told myself as I realized what was happening to me. It’s the last thing in your mind.

  In the cabin the vibration of the ferry’s engines was just a whisper. The only other sound was Lynn’s wordless murmur, her
lips against my ear. Her knuckled right hand kneaded my ribs in long, even strokes; her left gripped my thigh. I ran my palms down the broad expanse of her back and cupped the swelling flesh below the sturdy waist. Her sharp teeth nipped at my ear.

  We exchanged positions in a kind of frantic ballet. She was all knees. I was all elbows. Sorted out, we coupled as surely as only long and ardent practice can guarantee. Her delicate, strong hands held and shaped me. There is nothing so right when it is right; the climb back to reality was monumental.

  When our breathing quieted, I slipped from the bed. Lynn muttered a sotto voce protest, drawing up her knees and huddling herself together for warmth. I took the spread from the other bed and placed it over her. She smiled without opening her eyes. I stood there watching her for a minute before I realized she’d drifted off to sleep.

  I dressed with a minimum of noise. I had a cabin down the corridor and a briefcase in the hold of the boat. It was time I got them together. In a few hours I was going to need ready cash to outfit Lynn and me, and to get us a new — or at least different — automobile. On the way out I noticed the two containers of cold coffee sitting on the table. I had to smile looking at them. I closed the cabin door quietly from the outside. I walked down the corridor fit to spit in a lion’s eye. Twenty minutes before I had walked up it a jittering neurotic. So much for man without woman.

  On the main deck I looked for a way down into the hold. The only door I could find that looked promising opened on a narrow flight of rickety-looking stairs leading down into inky blackness. “You don’t want that door, mate,” a young voice said behind me. “It only goes down to the hold.”

  I turned to see a husky, tow-headed deck hand with a rubber-handled flashlight stuck through his belt. “That’s where I want to go,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not allowed. Insurance regulations, or the cap’n’s, or someone’s.”

  I moved closer to him, my right hand folding a bill in my pocket. I handed it to him with my thumb hiding all of it but the numeral. “I’d much rather go up against your captain than tell my wife she can’t have the toilet kit she forgot,” I told him. “This cover the loan of the light in your belt and the turn of your back?”

  “Pitch the light in a corner if anyone catches you so they won’t know where you got it,” he said, handing it to me.

  “These crossings usually smooth?” I asked him.

  “Mostly. About every second or third month we catch us a blister.” He said it with pride. “Never been a real bad one in my time, but ol’ Lake Michigan can sure turn herself inside out. The mate says he was out here one time in ‘23 it got so bad they jettisoned the automobiles.”

  “I’ll bet the insurance companies loved that,” I said. “I’ll leave your light just inside the door here when I come back up.”

  I went down the enclosed wooden stairway with one hand cautiously grasping the splintery railing and the other shining the light at my feet. The stairs were both worn and steep. A damp, marshy smell drifted up from below. Halfway down, the blackness lifted as another source of light appeared; the enclosure vanished on the left-hand side of the stairway, and the circular “well” visible down below contained a thin light filtering down from half a dozen scattered light bulbs high in the vaulted arch of the timbered ceiling. The well was two-thirds filled with parked cars.

  On the floor of the hold itself it was deep twilight, but I could see. I switched off the flashlight and stood for a moment listening to the whishing sound of the waves against the outside timbers of the ship, about head high to me as near as I could judge. A subdued creaking and groaning came from all around me. The air was dank and steamy. It was an eerie sensation standing in the bowels of the old tub knowing that only a few inches of planking stood between me and Lake Michigan.

  I turned on the flashlight again to look for my car. Although a third of the storage space was empty, on the rest cars were jammed together front-bumper-to-rear-bumper. The spaces between rows were hardly more than aisles. I moved down an aisle, flashing the light from side to side hoping to see the familiar outline.

  And then I heard a noise that wasn’t a part of the ferry timbers’ creaks and groans. I cut the light and crouched between two rows of cars, my head swiveling to the stairway above and behind me. Another flashlight was two-thirds of the way down the stairs, descending steadily. I crouched lower, hoping the reflection of my own light from metal and glass hadn’t been seen by the newcomer. Apparently it hadn’t; from the bottom of the stairs he proceeded directly to the parked cars, moving confidently with no attempt at concealment. In the semi-darkness I couldn’t see his face, but he had a rugged-looking figure. Despite the heat he wore a jacket.

  My first thought, that he was a car owner who had bribed his way down as I had to retrieve some forgotten article, died a-borning when I saw what he was doing. He started across the rows of cars laterally, jumping up on the parked-together bumpers and flashing his light from left to right, moving from aisle to aisle. He wasn’t looking at the cars; he was looking at the license plates. How many cars on a ferry had license plates that would interest anyone? I crept up the aisle, my head never more than radiator high, to a point where I thought I could cut him off as he crossed over. I wanted to intercept him before he found my car.

  I didn’t make it.

  Two aisles away he stopped, jumped down from his bumper highway, and with his light examined a familiar-looking car. Well, I thought, he found it for me, anyway. I put my change and keys in a corner of a handkerchief and knotted it tightly so it wouldn’t jingle when I moved. On hands and knees I crawled over the intervening two aisles of sharp bumpers so I could come up behind him. It wasn’t any too soon. He was at the back of the car, and he had a shiny-looking tool in his left hand.

  There was about eight feet between us when I wormed my way into his aisle. I closed in with a rush, and because up close he looked bigger than I expected, I put a little extra force into the roundhouse swing with which I laid the rubber-cased handle of my flashlight behind his ear. His hands flew up in the air as he gave a choked cry. The shiny-looking tool clanked to the floor; his own light sailed off to clatter against somebody’s brightwork. He fell face forward onto the back deck lid and started to slide off. He wasn’t out, but he was plenty fuzzy.

  I pinned him to the car with my knee and half-rolled him over to shove my hand inside his jacket. I wasn’t happy at what I found. I dropped his short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 special in my pants pocket at the same time my eyes took in his webbed harness and shoulder holster. The combination spelled out one thing: lawman.

  He moved under my knee, and I flopped him back on his stomach. I had his right arm pinned to his side with my knee; his left hand was clawing feebly at the trunk he was spread-eagled on. He was shaking his head, trying to clear it, and mumbling. I had to bend down to get what he was saying. “This — your car?” His voice was weak.

  “Does it have to be my car when I see a car thief at work?” I answered a question with a question. “Don’t move, buster, or I’ll give you an ingrown skull the next time I swing this thing.”

  He didn’t move. “Got — talk t’ — you,” he got out through a mouthful of marbles. “Not — what you — think, see?”

  “I don’t need to think,” I told him. “I know what I saw. I’m going to tie you up and go for a cop.”

  “W-wait!” He tried to get his legs under him and subsided as I tapped him with the light. “I’m a — well, not really a — cop. From Washin’ton.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said with heavy sarcasm. “I always wanted to meet an FBI man.” Internally I experienced a sinking feeling.

  “Not — FBI.” He was breathing hard under my knee. “Gov — gov’mint. Listen. Briefcase in car. Right?”

  “How would I know? It’s not my car.”

  It stopped him only for a second. “Jus’ one man — should be watchin’ — attempt on this car,” he decided logically enough. “Don’t know — what inv
olved in, mister. Valuable papers. Turn ’em in. Be — good citizen.”

  Did they for God’s sake think I hadn’t opened the briefcase? Valuable papers! “I think that rap on the head’s knocked you loose from your moorings, man,” I said. “I’m going for a cop.” Before he could get out anything more I measured him and let him have it with the flashlight again. It put him out cold. I eased him down to the floor, then started opening the nearest car doors looking for something I could tie him up with. In the fourth one I found an old trenchcoat on the floor of the back seat. I grabbed it, took out my knife, and slit the bottom of the coat into thin strips. I tied my nosy acquaintance hand and foot, gagged him with a “bridle” gag made from half a handkerchief, and tested his breathing. It was slow but steady.

  I went back down the line of cars again. I needed a station wagon with the rear unlocked. The first one I found was no good; the back was fitted out so children could ride in it. I found another, stuffed with bags and blankets and packages. I opened up the tailgate, with difficulty because of the closeness of the cars, cleared a space at the rear, and went back and dragged my bundle down to the wagon. I boosted him up over the tailgate and slid him in, covered him up with a blanket, and added a few parcels. While closing the tailgate, I thought to look at the license. It said Minnesota, Land of Lakes. That was a bonus; with luck the extra passenger was due to cover a few miles he wouldn’t see.

  I hustled back to my car, unlocked the trunk and took out the briefcase. I tossed in the remnants of the slashed trenchcoat, and locked it up again. Halfway up the creaking stairway I turned for a final look. The roofs of the cars below shimmered in the misty light. The sucking sound of the water against the ship’s sides was less pronounced. The air was appreciably cooler than down in the well of the hold.