The Intimidators

by Donald Hamilton

  “Don’t be delicate,” said the lady across the table. “Of course I slept with him, why not? But only once. He was too damned respectful; he made me feel old as the hills. Who the hell goes to bed to be respected, for God’s sake?”

  I grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Anyway, at last the boat was ready and Harlan Rockwell shoved off on his great voyage. Weeks passed. Suddenly a little blonde girl with long hair turned up, concerned about her brother, who apparently hadn’t filed a flight plan with her. It seems that communications between Rockwell brother and sister weren’t really as good as I was led to believe in Nassau. They led pretty separate lives; the girl was busy at her job up north; she’d only known Harlan was staying here from a casual postcard. Then she got another card from Nassau saying the circumnavigation was finally underway, and he’d drop her a line next time he hit terra firma. Followed a long time of nothing. Getting worried at last, and feeling guilty, I suppose, about not having looked after her kid brother more carefully, the girl had taken leave from her job and come down here to see if, before leaving, he might have told somebody the detailed plans he hadn’t confided to her. She was steered to you. The two of you were seen together. Okay?”

  “Yes, the girl was here. I talked with her on board my boat. As you say, she was worried about her brother. I told her as much as I knew of his intentions.”

  “Which was plenty,” I said. “And at this point, things get kind of complicated. Following the trail of her missing brother, Miss Lacey Rockwell leaves the Florida Keys. Miss Lacey Rockwell appears in Nassau, only it’s not the same Miss Rockwell at all. Well, we know what happened to Female Rockwell Number Two, the imposter. She’s buried in a Nassau cemetery, terminated by a slug from a big old Webley .455 just as she was trying to put a nasty little 9mm projectile into me. The question is, where did Female Rockwell Number One get to, the genuine, original article? Obviously, she was taken out of circulation somehow, so the imitation Rockwell would have a clear field. I’m hoping she’s still alive. If she isn’t, you’re at least an accessory, and we’ll have it that much harder keeping the cops off you, assuming you give us a motive for trying.”

  There was another silence. At last the woman facing me said: “The girl is alive. I may even be able to get her released. I don’t think she’s been allowed to see or hear enough to make trouble for anybody except Renee Schneider, who talked with her; and Renee, as you say, is dead. But why, darling, are you interested in a fairly boring little blonde who, aside from her brother, can’t seem to think or talk about much of anything except saving the oceans of the world from pollution. I’m not knocking it, but I shouldn’t think it was one of your major interests.”

  I laughed. “To be honest, Hattie, aside from a sort of general, kindly humanitarianism, I’m not really concerned about the fate of Lacey Rockwell. However, the fact that your associates couldn’t find the brother and his boat out there in the Atlantic and take him out of circulation, too, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead. It’s a big ocean. The kid may still turn up and come looking for his sister. You’re the last person known to have been seen with her. For your own sake, I think it would be a lot smarter if you did get her turned loose, eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  I said, “Well, right now I’ll admit Miss Rockwell would be kind of an embarrassment, complaining hysterically to the authorities about her mysterious kidnaping and cruel imprisonment. She might even make some trouble for you if she’s halfway bright. At the moment, I wouldn’t like that. I need you trouble-free. Or, let’s say, the only troubles I want you concerned with are my troubles. So just tell her jailers to keep her well fed and blindfolded until we get the rest of these people taken care of.”

  “That’s a pretty callous attitude, isn’t it, Matt?”

  “Callous?” I said. “Hell, who’s holding her prisoner, you or I? Who had an innocent young girl kidnaped in the first place, so a substitute could impersonate her in Nassau and commit cold-blooded murder on a fine, upstanding government agent named Matthew Helm? Or was she supposed to decoy me here so you could do the job? Anyway, don’t talk callous to me, Captain Robinson.”

  “Well, I’m not actually holding—”

  “Now you’re quibbling,” I said. “Anyway, as I’ve said, I’m not really worried about Lacey Rockwell except in a vague, sentimental way. I just brought her up so we’d have all the cards on the table. You and I both know that the girl and her brother have nothing to do with the rest of this business. We know that those two kids were just part of an independent, murderous plot dreamed up by you—with the help of some interesting friends—after you saw me here in the Keys and decided your vengeance had waited long enough. The only connection between your endeavor and all these other vanishings is that you may have got your idea, in part, from the Phipps disappearance. So, let’s put Lacey Matilda Rockwell in the hold file for the moment. What we want to concentrate on is two or three Phippses, one Marcus, and one Lavalle. How about it?”

  Harriet Robinson shook her head quickly. “You’ve just answered that yourself, darling,” she said. “You just admitted that the Rockwell angle is the only one I know anything about. I read about Phipps when he turned up missing, of course, and you may be right that it gave me some ideas, but this Sir James and Baron Henry—all right, Onree—I never even heard of.”

  “It’s been kept quiet,” I said, “while search-and-rescue teams churned the oceans to froth, without success.”

  “If they failed, how can you expect me to find—”

  I leaned forward. “They don’t have the connections you have,” I said harshly. “And they don’t have the motive you have.”

  “Motive? What motive?”

  “Survival, my sweet,” I said.

  “You’re blackmailing me to help you—”

  “Wonderful! I’m gradually getting through to the lady!” I sneered. “You’re goddamned right I’m blackmailing you, Captain Harriet Robinson. I’ve got a lousy job to do, and I’ve been sent down a dead-end street to do it, and you’re going to find a way out for me, or you’re going to jail! Is that clear enough for you, doll?”

  “But how—”

  I said angrily, “Damn it, don’t pull that helpless act on me! This is Matt, honey, the guy you just tried to have killed for the second time. I know you’re just about as helpless as a cobra, a very bright cobra. Get the old reflexes working, doll. If I fail, you’re sunk; get that through your head. So get hold of the same people you called in when you had this brilliant notion of having me murdered. If they don’t have the information I need, they can get it, I’m sure. They know whom to ask and how to get the answers. At least they can get enough that we can figure out the rest, you and I, with the help of your special knowledge.”

  “Special knowledge?” Her eyes were narrow. “What special knowledge?”

  I said, “Hell, you know boats and the sea, don’t you? This is a seagoing caper, but nobody seems to have really studied it from the nautical point of view. You’d think, the way folks talk, that all these people had vanished from the New York Thruway instead of the Atlantic Ocean.”

  She seemed relieved. “Well, if you think a little seamanship will help, I’m perfectly willing to—”

  “And then,” I said deliberately, “there’s that very, very specialized knowledge you’ve got that should be of great assistance to us: your knowledge of the only place in this part of the world where they can possibly be if they’re still alive. The place you were planning to go if things got too hot around here.”

  There was another extended silence. Harriet shook her head quickly once more, and her voice was flat and hard when she spoke at last: “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I saw the boat, doll,” I said. “It’s lying right over there by the phony lighthouse. That big, innocent-looking, shoal-draft fishing boat, with a mere two-hundred horsepower on the stern—only it’s actually three hundred or more, isn’t it? Three-hundred-odd horses and fifty-
odd knots; and when you open her up wide, which you’re careful not to do where anybody can see you, there isn’t a boat around short of the all-out ocean racers that can catch her, is there? An eighteen-gallon auxiliary gas tank in the cockpit in addition to the standard fifty-gallon job under the floor—”

  “Sole.”

  “What?”

  She said quietly, “Boats don’t have floors, darling, at least not the kind you walk on. You may properly refer to it as the deck, but technically it’s known as the cockpit sole. And the main tank under it holds fifty-one gallons.”

  I regarded her with respect. She was still in there pitching; she hadn’t forgotten her nautical duty to the human race. They’re all alike, these seagoing, geniuses. There isn’t a one who’ll ever let you get by with calling any part of a boat by the wrong name, even if the world is coming to an end, and they’ve got to keep St. Peter, or the other guy, waiting a little longer while they set you straight.

  “Have it your way,” I said. “Cockpit sole. But you really don’t need a hell of a lot of extra gas for a one-way trip, do you? It’s only a little over a hundred miles from here to Cuba, isn’t it? Why aren’t you there already? Why didn’t you point that nautical buzz-bomb south the minute you heard your friends in the Bahamas had failed and I was still alive?”

  13

  Afterward, I walked her back to her cruiser. We’d spent some time over our drinks, and it was getting dark. We were friends once more, or reasonable imitations thereof; and I was taking her out to dinner. She stopped at the short gangplank bridging the gap between the concrete seawall and the big boat’s varnished mahogany transom. Turning, she held out her hand.

  “Just give me time to get into some civilized clothes,” she said. “Matt?”

  I held her hand for a moment, and released it, feeling that I’d missed a cue. I should have bowed over it and kissed it. Even in her mannish Cap’n Hattie costume, she was that kind of a woman.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You were guessing, weren’t you? Guessing, and bluffing like hell.”

  “Sure. Some of it was guesswork and some was bluff. I didn’t really know you’d had those motors souped up. Only, I remembered a little boat my chief provided me with not long ago. Eighty-five horsepower it said on the motor cover; and when I cracked the throttle we practically went into orbit. He’d had them switch the markings on a one-twenty-five. It seemed like a logical thing for you to do, under the circumstances.”

  “They don’t really put out three-hundred horsepower,” she said. “Only about a hundred and forty apiece, which was about as much as you could get out of them reliably when I got them; you can do better than that now, but I figured it was enough. She’ll do over fifty knots in calm water; real knots, not Madison Avenue miles-per-hour. The real souped-up deep-vee jobs will pass her, but not much else.”

  I said, “Of course, partly I merely exercised that cold and remorseless logic for which I’m renowned.”

  She smiled. “Well, I never did like modest men,” she said. “It’s too bad.”

  “What is?”

  “I’ve had such fun hating you all these years. It’s not very nice of you to turn out to be just an ordinary, conceited, male human being after all, instead of the devil with horns. Don’t forget to bring the charts.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  I left my rental car where it was, parked at the waterfront, and walked the short distance up the paved driveway to my cabin, feeling pretty good. I mean, it was one of those times when the world and the people in it seemed totally predictable and I had the whole thing all figured out and knew exactly what everybody was thinking, and what they’d do next and why…

  They jumped me from the trees, just across from the bungalow with the right number. There were two of them. They grabbed my arms, one from each side. I went limp between them instantly, dropping to the ground. It brought one down on top of me, still hanging on. The other let go and stepped back. Fortunately, the arm that was still in hock was the left, not the right; the knife was in my right-hand pants pocket. I’d got it back from Fred in Nassau, who still didn’t like me. There seemed to be a lot of such people around. I’d also got my gun back, but this wasn’t the place for a lot of noise.

  I flicked the knife open one-handed, usually a show-off stunt, but convenient here. The flash of the blade towards his face caused the man on top of me to release his grip and roll away.

  “Look out, the crazy hombre’s got him a shiv—”

  The standing man stepped in and aimed a kick to disarm me and missed. Then I had his foot. I made a neat surgical incision in the proper place, just above and behind it. The keen edge didn’t hurt very much, not enough to elicit a scream, just a gasp of surprise.

  “Goddamn it, he cut me—”

  He didn’t get any farther with that sentence, falling flat on his face. He’d put his weight on the foot in question, but there was nothing to hold him up with the Achilles tendon out of business. The other man was scrambling to his feet and starting to run; but I wasn’t any slower getting up, and my legs were longer. He wasn’t very big. I caught him just around the corner of my cabin and threw myself into him, slamming him against the building. I had my arm across his throat, and my knife-point in his back before he could recover.

  “Who?” I panted.

  “Listen—”

  I was mad. My neat little all-figured-out world had fallen apart. Nobody was supposed to be laying for me here, now, in this clumsy fashion. The only man I was supposed to have to worry about was Morgan, the dead girl’s friend and possible avenger; and Morgan, if he came, would come alone, and like all avengers, he’d want to talk before he struck. I’d miscalculated somehow and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

  “You have three seconds from the time I stop talking,” I breathed. “The name of the person who sent you or comes it four inches of steel. Talk!”

  “Listen, you-all cain’t get away with—”

  It was just too damned bad. He’d used up his time; and will they never stop telling people with knives or guns what they can’t get away with? The blade went in easily, all the way. I felt a little blood, not very much, warm my knuckles. The man I held pinned against the cabin started to gasp, scream, protest, curse, or otherwise indicate his disapproval of my crude behavior. He stopped and was very quiet instead.

  “Hell, I warned you,” I said in his ear. “Now give me the name, fast, or I’ll twist the goddamn thing around in there.”

  His voice was a shocked whisper. “Haseltine. Cabin 7A. The sonofabitch. He didn’t tell us he was sending us after a pro. Go… go easy, partner.”

  “Haseltine?” For a moment, I couldn’t even remember where I’d heard the name. Then the whole thing began to make some kind of sense, if you could call it sense. “Oh, Christ,” I said to nobody in particular. “Oh, Jesus, how stupid can you get? Be brave, now, little man, it’s coming out.” I gave a quick jerk and the knife came clear. The man groaned and went to his knees, resting his forehead against the cabin wall. I said, “Stay there. Don’t move. Tell your partner to stay where he is. Somebody’ll be coming for you in a minute…”

  There was a light in cabin 7A. I heard somebody get up at my knock and walk to the door, a big man by the sound. The lock rattled.

  “Okay, bring him in,” said Big Bill Haseltine’s voice.

  I kicked the door hard as it started to open. Haseltine jumped back to avoid catching it in the face. Then I was inside with the door shut behind me. We stared at each other for a moment or two. His gaze shifted to the red knife in my bloody hand, and stayed there.

  “Tell me,” I said softly.

  “What?”

  “Tell me I can’t get away with it,” I whispered. “Tell me what a big man you are and how many umpteen million dollars you’ve got and how you can send your cheap oilfield roughnecks to drag anybody you want anywhere you want any time you want them. Tell me, Mr. Haseltine. Tell me all about it. Shit!” I tossed th
e knife into the air, caught it the other way, and drove it into the table by the door, like an icepick. It quivered there. We watched a little blood run down the blade to form a tiny pool around the imbedded point. “You dumb Tejano bastard!” I said.

  “What happened?” His voice was flat and dead.

  “You’ve got one punk who needs crutches, and one who may be in the market for a coffin if he isn’t lucky and doesn’t get patched up soon. What the hell kind of a juvenile game do you thing you’re playing, you half-ass Comanche?”

  “You were supposed to be working for me,” he said in the same flat voice. “You were supposed to be working for me, Helm, not getting shot up playing secret agent in the Bahamas, or having cozy drinks with a handsome babe who runs some crummy boats down in the Keys. The deal was, you were working for me!” His big hands closed into tight fists at his sides.

  I grinned at him nastily. “Come on, Big Boy. Teach me a lesson. Teach me to respect the great brainless Haseltine. Slap me around. You’ll have five .38 Special slugs in your belly before you ever touch me, but come right ahead, give it a try. Just don’t tell me I can’t get away with it. Your punk said that, and he’s out there in the dark with a leaking liver, or maybe it’s a kidney. My knowledge of anatomy just isn’t what it ought to be. Sorry.”

  “Damn you, Helm, they were just going to—”

  “Just going to grab me from behind. Just going to rough me up a little. Just going to haul me in here and dump me at the feet of their imbecile boss so I’d know whom I was working for. Christ, Haseltine, do you think a guy in my line of work survives by stopping to ask people who jump him whether they’re really planning to hurt him or just muss him up a little?” I drew a long breath. “Okay, that’s enough histrionics. Get in your car and drive around to my cabin and pick up anything you see lying around. Be sure to kick dirt over any blood you spot; we don’t want people asking a lot of questions, come morning. I’ll go to the office and make a phone call from their public booth. Stop in front and I’ll join you. I assume you do have enough sense to hide all casualties from sight. Okay, on your way.”