“If you stop, if you even think of slowing down, if you let her settle at all, you’re dead,” she said. “You’ve got just about a seven-mile run through the shallows on that course, before you hit deep water. With a little luck you can make it. She’s on the big side for it; but on this tide I think she’ll clear everything if you just keep her planing right on top, really screaming. And the chances are they won’t have anything out there small and shallow and fast enough to chase you across the flats. They’ll have to go the long way around, following the channel and the edge of the reef, and by that time you’ll have a nice big lead. If you can’t shake them after that, with the speed you’ve got, to hell with you.”
She started to turn abruptly toward the nearby cruiser. I said, “Hattie, thanks.”
She looked back. I saw her grin crookedly in the dark. “Now you can have lots of fun deciding whether I’ve really given you the straight dope, or whether I’m running you onto a sandbar so they can shoot you to pieces. Try flipping a coin; maybe it will help.”
Then she was gone. A moment later she was up on the Red Baron’s flying bridge; and men fore and aft were taking in the docklines at her command. Anyway, if manpower would help, she had crew enough to run a Roman war galley. The red boat seemed to blend into the darkness a few moments after it pulled away from the dock. I couldn’t help remembering that I was blessed with a light-colored craft that a blind man could spot in a Nantucket fog. I was also blessed with a couple of passengers playing some kind of childish tag out in the dark, on an island that was going to be just a big hole in the ocean in just about thirty minutes…
He came in lugging her, with a minute to spare before the deadline I’d set myself. After all, even in Hattie’s nautical rocket, I had to give myself a little time to get clear. Having had to transport a few human bodies myself, from time to time, I could appreciate the strength of the big guy, marching in like that with a substantial young human female slung over his shoulder. One hand held her in place; the other carried something. As he came up, I saw that he had a pair of satin bedroom slippers there. Unique as Miss Phipps might be, and I certainly hoped she was, she apparently shared with her fellow-women the inability to stay in her shoes when the going got rough.
“Dump her in the stern and let’s go,” I said; but Haseltine placed her gently on the starboard seat, and put her footgear in her lap. I gave a shove, and threw the motors into gear as the boat slid away from the dock. I said, “Miss Phipps, your job is to hang on. This bucket will toss you overboard if you give it half a chance, once we’re up to speed, so grab a piece of that handrail and don’t let go for anything. Bill, if you don’t mind, get over here to port and brace yourself against the console. The choppers and clips are on the seat up there where you can reach them. I don’t suppose the lady knows how to reload a Thompson, so you’ll have to keep switching between them, feeding in new clips as you get the chance.”
“You sound as if you expect a real firefight,” Haseltine said, taking his post and reaching for a weapon. “Who’m I going to be shooting at?”
We glided past the ancient, rotting pier and the ugly stumps in the water. I said, “Does it matter, as long as they’re shooting back? When we get into the channel, I’ll hit the throttles; don’t get left behind. We’re not going to have time for any man-overboard drills tonight. A hundred yards, and there’ll be a sharp right turn; be ready for it. That should put your targets well off to port. Try for the lights; to hell with the guns and personnel. Okay?”
“If you say so, Admiral. Maybe Loretta should lie down—”
“That’s up to the lady. She’ll be safer down, but at the speed we’ll be going she’ll take an awful beating, bouncing around on that Fiberglas deck. How about it, Miss Phipps?”
“I… I’ll stay here, thanks.”
“Okay,” I said. The spoil bank was slipping past to starboard. The jungle had taken it over, but you could still see, after all the years, that the material beneath hadn’t got there naturally. It was the wrong shape. I made the turn into the channel and reached for the throttles. “Everybody ready? Here we go.”
They were out there, all right. Nothing happened at first, as we picked up speed; but then we came out of the shadow of the shore, and there were suddenly more searchlights ahead than you’d see at an old-fashioned Hollywood premiere. We were barely on plane before the Thompson was hammering at my left ear. Standing at the controls for a better view, I kept my eyes from the glaring lights, watching the black water rushing toward us as she came up and out. The Plexiglas windshield twanged loudly as something went through it. Lions one; Christians nothing. The nearest searchlight flamed out. One and one. Haseltine was cursing, or praying, in a language I’d never heard as, one gun empty, he reached for the other.
The narrow channel hampered them a bit. Without shooting each other’s ears off, only a few could have fun at one time. What they were, is anybody’s guess. They didn’t seem to be very big, but they had lots of firepower. In any case, I was trying very hard not to look at them and their damned lights and muzzle flashes. I was trying to concentrate on a stick protruding from the water ahead, nicely silhouetted by the glare. Haseltine opened up once more, in tidy little bursts.
“Hang on!” I yelled at him above the noise. “I’m coming right… now!”
I swung the wheel. The outboard leaned hard into the turn, shaving the stake. I said a quick little prayer of my own, and rammed the throttles forward. I’d thought we were moving pretty well already, but the burst of power was like a kick in the pants. The boat leaped ahead, just as everything landed where she’d been. Even with my eyes focused on the compass, I was aware of the ocean being turned inside-out astern.
The night was full of noise and flashing lights. The big outboards were howling out their eerie, banshee, full-throttle war song. Haseltine was reloading, cursing, and firing. Standing at the helm, I found my eyes watering in the fierce blast of air over the top of the windshield. There was no need for that now, I realized. I didn’t need the extra height now. All I had to see was the compass, for seven miles; and I could watch that sitting down. I sat down, out of the direct slipstream, holding her grimly on course.
We’d taken some more hits. I couldn’t tell where, but I’d felt them; but we were still afloat, still hurtling across the calm shallows with so little water under us that the depthfinder was giving no indication at all except for occasional crazy flashes all around the dial. The steering felt peculiar, as Harriet had said it would; and once in a while, as the props grazed something harder than water, the high scream of the motors would waver for an instant, only to come right back up to pitch once more. Still there were no hidden rocks to wreck us, no sandbars to bring us to a grinding halt, no coral heads to rip the bottom open.
I was aware that the black silhouette of the island was getting lower and more distant off the starboard quarter. Presently I realized that the searchlights astern were going out and the guns ceasing to fire back as we rocketed out of range. I saw that Haseltine had stopped shooting, presumably because a .45 slug won’t carry more than a hundred yards with any kind of accuracy. He sat down on the seat forward of the console. Steering by compass, I didn’t really need to see what was ahead, since I wasn’t going to stop for it anyway; but it seemed a funny place for an experienced seaman to pick, right in the helmsman’s line of vision. As the thought came to me, the big guy collapsed and slid to the floor—excuse me, Hattie, the cockpit sole.
Momentarily distracted, I remembered where I was and what I was doing, and brought the flying craft back on course once more. Loretta Phipps, her long hair and sheer garments whipping wildly in the fifty-knot gale of the boat’s motion, made her way behind my chair, moving sensibly from one handhold to the next. I remembered that the girl had, after all, done a reasonable amount of yachting. She knelt, beside Haseltine, just as there was a great burst of light astern. I saw the kneeling girl look up, startled. I saw that Haseltine was unconscious, bleeding from a wound just above the belt. T
here wasn’t a boat visible within a couple of miles of us. The light had almost faded when the concussion hit us.
Afterward, I glanced at the depthfinder. It read fifty feet, dropping fast. We were off the shallow Cuban coastal bank. We were home free. Well, almost free…
27
They never caught up with us; and if they sent planes after us, they never found us. I held on to the east and north until I found a rain squall to hide in. With the gusty accompanying wind, it got too choppy to maintain any speed, so I just shut down everything and let the boat take care of herself while I struggled to erect the canvas—well, vinyl—spray hood forward and move Haseltine into its limited shelter, working with the girl’s help in the wind and pouring rain. It was daylight by this time. Loretta made her way aft through the downpour and returned clutching a first-aid kit. Apparently, she sometimes slipped and let herself betray signs of intelligence. I didn’t take it too seriously. The idiot performance she’d put on earlier, as far as I was concerned, still left her far down near the bottom of the minus column.
With three of us inside, the boat’s little instant tent-cabin was crowded with humanity. I wasn’t sure it was good seamanship to have all that weight forward on a small vessel in the middle of a squall. However, it was just a junior-grade thunderstorm; and although we did considerable rocking and pitching as the seas built up, we didn’t seem to be shipping anything except rainwater that ran right out again through the cockpit drains—all right, I’ll call them scuppers if you insist. I pulled out Haseltine’s wet shirt to look at the hole. It wasn’t very big and it wasn’t bleeding very much, at least not out where we could see it. Inside was probably a different story. I taped a large gauze pad over it for something to do, knowing it was just a formality. I might as well have used a band aid, or left the wound uncovered. The big guy opened his eyes.
“Hell of a cruise ship you run, Admiral,” he whispered.
“If you’d just shot out all those searchlights like I told you, nobody’d have got hurt,” I said. “I can’t help it if folks can’t obey simple orders.”
He grinned faintly. “You bastard,” he said, and licked his lips. “Loretta?”
The girl had parted the drenched, darkened blonde hair that had washed down her face; she was tucking the dripping strands behind her ears. “Yes, Bill?”
“I’m sorry—”
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Don’t talk. It’s all right. I… I lost my head for a few minutes, back there; but it’s really all right. We’ll talk about it later.”
“That’s a lot of bull,” Haseltine breathed. “Later’s a lot of bull. Now is all there is; and I want you to understand. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to, God knows I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’m not built like that. It was as simple as that.”
“Of course, Bill. Just be quiet and—”
“Cut it out. Don’t give me that of-course-Bill crap. And don’t give me that be-quiet-Bill crap, either. I’ve got forever to be quiet in, don’t I, Admiral? Starting pretty damn soon.”
I said, “Well, I don’t know—”
“The hell you don’t. I know.” His attention went back to the girl. “You’re still mad, aren’t you, Lorrie? You think I should have paid up the minute I was asked, don’t you? Just like that. You think I’m just a lousy Texas cheapskate. You think I was worried about the lousy money; that’s why I… I tell you, I just couldn’t do it, Lorrie! Couldn’t let those bastards hold me up like that. A million bucks or one buck, makes no difference. Spend every cent I’ve got to find you, to get the sonsofbitches who… But ransom, no. I don’t pay ransom. You’ve got to understand. I don’t operate like that. I can’t.”
“Of course I understand—”
He went on, as if unaware that she’d spoken: “Don’t care who’s snatched, even you. They can’t pry it out of me like that. I don’t pay off on a deal like that. You let one guy get away with it, they’ll all be in there trying, every lousy get-rich-quick jerk with a gun or a knife and somebody to point it at. That bastard Leo, you’d have thought he’d have known how I felt, often as we’d sailed together. You’d have thought he’d have known I wouldn’t play. Well, we never did get along. He always had the idea that, where I came from, I just had to be prejudiced against anybody who talked Spanish and, hell, maybe he was right. But I think maybe Leo just wanted to stick it into me, as much as he wanted that million-dollar ransom to finance the crummy military operation his wild-eyed Latin relatives-had suckered him into… You’ve got to understand, Lorrie. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t…”
The squall was diminishing to a drizzle; the wind was dropping as fast as it had built up. I found a tarpaulin to spread over him, reflecting that I had, at last, an explanation for the curious, ambivalent attitude the man had shown: the trouble he’d gone to to get me on the job, for instance, and the reluctance he’d then shown to give me vital information, even going to the extent of misleading me in some instances. Believing that the girl and her family had been killed as a result of the stand he’d taken, he’d wanted to find and deal with the murderers; but he’d also been aware that many people would condemn him if the story got out. Maybe he hadn’t, been quite as sure of himself and his actions as he’d wanted us to think. Maybe he’d even had a few twinges of guilt, leading him, instinctively, to try to cover up what had happened even while he was putting me to work to uncover it. Well, his secret was safe now.
After a while, the girl got up and moved away to sit miserably on the fish-box in the stern of the boat. Her thin, soaked, clinging bedroom finery, trailing soggy ruffles ripped loose by bushes and whipped loose by wind, didn’t seem adequate for either warmth or modesty. I started to take off my windbreaker to put around her, but she waved it away irritably.
“I’m not cold,” she said. “Why do you men always have to be wrapping us up in your damned old clothes. I’m fine. There’s nothing I love like sloshing around the Gulf Stream in my wet lingerie.”
I almost laughed, knowing from whom she’d inherited that attitude; but it was no time for laughter. I said, “I just wish we were in the Gulf Stream. We’re way to the east of that; and we’re almost out of gas. The radio’s shot to hell. It looks as if we’re going to have to do some drifting until somebody finds us, I hope.”
It didn’t seem to register. Anyway, it didn’t serve as the distraction I’d intended. “I killed him, didn’t I?” she said flatly. “If I hadn’t acted like a crazy spoiled brat, running off to hide like that, to teach him a lesson, he’d have gone in the other boat, wouldn’t he? And he’d have been alive now.”
I said, “This is Big Bill Haseltine we’re talking about? Do you really think he’d have let himself be shipped off to safety with the women and children—at least I hope they’re safe-—while somebody else played decoy for him?”
“Maybe not, but I… All those weeks that we were waiting to die just because he’d refused… When I saw him, I guess I just went mad a little, remembering all the agony we’d gone through in that place because he wouldn’t… I mean, it was just money, after all; and Daddy would have paid him back, if that was what worried him.”
“It wasn’t,” I said.
“I know that now. But at the time it just seemed so incredible and unnecessary that we were all going to be killed because… We almost were, you know. I’ve never been so scared in my life. They were talking, right in front of us, about how we weren’t worth anything to them any more, and how they should just shoot us and throw us in the sea. It was Leo who saved us. He sold them on the wild notion of making a much bigger deal of it since they couldn’t get anything out of Bill; of keeping us alive and kidnaping those others and using us all to get real military help, not just money, for their nutty cause or movement or whatever… Do you know something? I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Matt,” I said.
“I’m Loretta Phipps,” she said. “At least I used to be a lovely thing they called Loretta Phipps, but I was never
quite sure… A lovely, sheltered, stupid thing… Do you want to know something, Matt? Being lovely isn’t really difficult, if you’ve got a little money and the right heredity; but being stupid is very hard work.”
“Why would you want to work at it?”
“Somebody’s got to be stupid around the place, if everybody else is so terribly bright and beautiful, don’t they?”
It seemed like an odd conversation to be holding on a shot-up, almost-out-of-gas boat drifting far out of sight of land with a dead man up forward; but at least we were off the subject of Haseltine. Loretta shivered slightly.
“I guess I will take that jacket, please,” she said. “Why should I sit around practically naked just because Mommy always made fun of… You’ve met my mother?”
“I’ve met your mother.”
Putting her arms into the sleeves of the jacket I held for her, she gave me a sharp glance over her shoulders. “Oh, like that, huh? She still bowls them over, doesn’t she? But I’d think she’d be a little too old for you; although I admit she doesn’t look it.”
“Miaow,” I said.
Loretta laughed. “Well, how would you like having had to compete with that ever since you were a baby? I’m not me, not really. I’ve never been me. No matter how hard I try to break the goddamn mold, I’m still just movie-star Amanda Mayne’s daughter… She was never really a star, you know. Oh, hell, I shouldn’t have said that. What does it matter; and she’s really very nice. I mean, if she were a horrible bitch, now, and I could feel justified in hating her lovely guts…” She stopped, shrugged, and went on: “Well, when I find out who I really am, I’ll let you know.”
“You do that,” I said.
She gave me that sharp, searching glance once more, and grinned abruptly. “You know, I don’t think you take my identity crisis very seriously, Matt.”
I said, “Well, whoever you are, I think we can wait to find out until we get ashore. If we get ashore.”
The Intimidators Page 22