The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  I said, “You never know when a few sticks of dynamite will come in handy.”

  I put the bundle away at the bottom of a nearby locker and stowed the tape in my toolbox, reflecting that from the amount of stuff I’d accumulated in there over the past couple of months, working on the boat, you’d think I was a mechanical genius.

  Ziggy said, “What I really came for was to tell you that Mrs. Bell says she’ll take care of everything if we just get clear and keep going. Oh, and I saw Mrs. Fancher crawl ashore way up ahead of us; she looked like a giant muskrat or something with all that wet black hair. And there’s a siren coming… Well, it’s getting pretty close now.”

  “To hell with the woman. Let’s vacate these premises as instructed. Take in the lines while I fire up the mill.”

  Ziggy didn’t move at once, and I realized that she was waiting for me to start the engine. She obviously wasn’t quite sure that we’d cleaned up the premises; Caselius could, for instance, have shoved one package way up inside the console and then left a second one, more obvious, down below for us to play with. I didn’t think he’d had the time, or was that tricky, but I could be wrong. Well, we couldn’t hang around here forever…

  I made myself reach out deliberately and turn the key. The big diesel rumbled into life beneath our feet with no more noise than usual. Ziggy winked at me and swung herself up to the side deck and down to the dock, managing quite gracefully in spite of her injured foot. Moments later she was back, tossing the last line aboard.

  “Okay, you’re free, skipper, take her away.”

  The approaching siren was quite close now, but as we were gliding away I heard another sound from the shore: an eerie, wild-animal howl that belonged out in coyote country, not in these civilized eastern surroundings. Ziggy, securing the gate in the boat’s rail, heard it, too; she looked around questioningly. I made sure we were headed in a safe direction for the moment, centered the wheel, and joined her out on the side deck where I could hear better.

  The wailing sound came again. I recognized it now; it was a human—a female human—shout of mindless grief. The woman called Ayesha was mourning over the mutilated body of her lover.

  18

  It was the first time on this cruise that I had managed the boat from the upper control station, although I’d watched three different female navigators operate back there. Ziggy, the latest nautical lady to handle the big stainless-steel wheel, had held it while I got into dry clothes, and for an hour more of slow progress—the night mist had thickened into real fog—but presently I noticed that she was trying not to wince whenever she had to make a course correction. I got her to admit that her splinted hand was hurting her, and took over, under her supervision.

  It was tough steering for an inexperienced helmsman. At times I thought the bowsprit was going to disappear completely into the murky darkness ahead, tinted red and green by the boat’s running lights. However, as I’ve said, the canal was illuminated like a city street; the lights, set on wooden posts in the water near the bank, were close enough together that upon reaching one we could generally make out the vague glow of the next.

  Looking on the bright side, any police boat sent after us would have trouble finding us in this thick stuff. Well, with radar, in such narrow waters, maybe not a lot of trouble; but at least the fog should hold off the boys in blue long enough for Mrs. Bell to get them called off altogether.

  “Better come left a bit,” Ziggy said, “you’re starting to lose depth again.”

  “Left, aye, aye,” I said.

  The outside steering station had the advantage of giving the helmsman a clear view; under these lousy conditions of visibility we didn’t need the added handicap of steering from behind glass. However, there were drawbacks. In addition to being totally exposed to the weather—there was no real rain, but we’d both put on oilskins against the penetrating dampness—the upper station lacked instrumentation: no knot meter, no tachometer or engine gauges, no loran, no radar.

  Fortunately, the one instrument that did exist back there, besides a steering compass, was the one that was essential to tell us when we were getting too close to the bank: a depth-sounder. Unfortunately, it had apparently been an afterthought, installed in a space that just happened to be available, quite low on the bulkhead under the wheel. Even Ziggy had had to crouch to read it; with my greater height, I almost had to go to my knees, each time taking my attention off the canal ahead longer than I liked—if the lights of another boat came at us out of the foggy blackness, I’d have to react instantly to have any hope of avoiding a collision. We’d therefore put Ziggy on one of the seats back there that afforded a good view of the illuminated numbers, and given her the duty of calling them out to me.

  “Good, you’re back to twelve feet,” she said.

  The digital instrument, clearly a later, high-tech American addition to this Finn-built boat, also differed from the old-fashioned rotary flasher in the deckhouse in that it did not read in meters.

  Ziggy’s voice came again: “I… I want to apologize.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I guess I’m just not used to seeing mangled bodies— well, besides my own. But considering the way I’ve spent months thinking of the gruesome deaths I’d inflict on that sadistic bastard if I ever got the chance, I can’t believe that I acted like such a sentimental jackass… But why do it like that? I’m not criticizing,” she added hastily. “I’m just curious. I don’t think that you, unlike Mr. Hassim, go around mutilating people for fun.”

  I said, “Well, those .22-caliber holes you put into him weren’t necessarily fatal. We had to be rid of him permanently, for one thing because he was the visible leader of this Arab terrorist gang. With him gone, Dorothy Fancher, the unseen partner up to now, can’t hide behind him anymore; she’s got to come out of the closet and take control. That’ll make Mrs. Bell’s job easier. And my job is Caselius. Dorothy didn’t seem very impressed with him and his DAMAG outfit when she talked with me. Now that she’s in charge, she might have fired the whole crew—but not now, not after the crummy way I finished off her boyfriend, not a chance. She’s going to join the Hate Helm Club, of which Caselius is a charter member, and keep him around to help her feed the vengeance fires; there’s nothing like a common enemy to make a couple of people bosom friends.”

  “I see… Nine feet. Better come left a little.”

  “Left, aye, aye.”

  We glided through the murk for a while, in silence except for Ziggy’s voice calling out the soundings; at last she raised her head and looked around.

  “I do think it’s clearing a bit.”

  I realized that, although we hadn’t reached the next light, I could see the one beyond it; I could also see ghostly trees and bushes along the shore to starboard in the diffused light of dawn. There was a sound astern. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a large yacht coming out of the mists, gaining on us rapidly. It was another junior-grade cruise ship in the sixty-foot class, like the one I’d seen docked at Schaefer’s. I’d read somewhere that while little boats were hard to get rid of these recession days, big ones were still selling pretty well.

  Apparently the vessel astern had been, like Lorelei III, creeping cautiously through the fog from light to light; but now that the visibility was improving she was putting on speed, swinging out toward the middle of the channel to pass us. Unlike the one at the canal house, which had had a cabin aft, this vessel had a rather low cockpit back there, in the middle of which was set a large and elaborate fish-fighting chair. It seemed like a hell of a lot of boat to take out trolling for little fish, or even big ones, and I’d have hated to be the captain who had to maneuver all thirty-some tons of her when the owner hooked into something energetic.

  She was really a floating skyscraper; not only was there a flying bridge above the deckhouse, but there was another control station way up in the tall tuna tower above that, reached by a rudimentary ladder that made me dizzy just to look at it. However, the helmsman wasn
’t up in the spindly tower this morning; he was apparently satisfied with the visibility from one story down. The flying bridge was actually a little plastic greenhouse, reasonably well protected from the elements by transparent curtains all around, a common sight this uncertain time of year. The helmsman, kind of blurred in his elevated cellophane box, gave us a friendly wave as he went by. Gulf Streamer, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  The fog had thinned to the point where I could now see both sides of the canal, which was widening as we entered the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. Soon it was no longer a canal, just a buoyed channel through a widening estuary. I ran the throttle forward; it was a real pleasure to feel the old girl come to life again after the endless hours of barely making steerage way. Suddenly, miraculously, we ran out of the fog altogether and found the morning sun shining brightly. We shed our foul-weather gear and shifted control to the lower station.

  Chesapeake Bay turned out to be a navigational nightmare. The U.S. armed forces were ganging up on us. Lori had warned me that the loran might not work properly here because of the navy’s powerful radio station at Annapolis, and it didn’t; but she hadn’t mentioned that the Coast Guard had scrambled practically all the buoys on the bay—at least this upper end of the bay—so that their numbers, and sometimes even their locations, didn’t correspond with what was printed on my charts. Without a navigator, I might have been in serious trouble; however, Ziggy knew the area, and eventually, in spite of the obstructive efforts of the U.S. government, we found our way into open water.

  By late afternoon we’d motored under the impressive spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge—it’s actually two separate bridges, eastbound and westbound—and entered the Severn River a few miles below it, passing the navy antennas that were scrambling our loran, a real forest of them on the point. We docked in Annapolis where, years ago, I’d really commenced my nautical career by submitting, with a dozen other eager young agents from carefully unidentified agencies, to a short course in small-boat seamanship designed for spooks who might have to get their feet wet.

  Today, my docking maneuver was performed quite smartly, if I do say so myself; a credit to my Naval Academy training, all two weeks of it.

  “I think we’d better have another fender here… No, a little farther aft. There, that does it.”

  When I heard the familiar voice, I’d just finished adjusting Lorelei III’s dock lines with Ziggy’s help. I hadn’t really studied my surroundings except to mark down in my mind, as I always do, the potential danger sectors from which a sniper could operate, and to note that we’d been directed to pull in astern of the oversize sportfisherman that had passed us earlier in the day. Now I looked that way, to see a small figure on the dock giving instructions to a red-haired young man on the yacht’s deck above; he was securing an inflated rubber fender— we salty seamen don’t refer to them as boat bumpers— roughly the size of the Goodyear blimp. I moved that way. With the problem solved to her satisfaction, Lori Fancher turned to greet me.

  I said, “I didn’t recognize you, hiding up there behind all that plastic, when you passed us this morning.”

  “And you were probably calculating just how far you should lead me if you had to shoot me,” she said dryly.

  “Natch, what else,” I said. I looked at the impressive powerboat. “A delivery job?”

  Lori was wearing skinny, faded jeans and a loose blue sweatshirt, neither very clean. There was a smudge of grease on her cheek, but she was still a very attractive little girl, and I knew a moment of regret. Well, there are always the ones who make you wish you were a better person and had led a better life; and there’s never a damn thing to be done about it.

  She nodded in answer to my question. “It was on the answering machine when I got home. They want her in Lauderdale for the winter, so I got hold of Billy, who’s sailed with me before—” She indicated the young man now hosing down the decks, “—and took off.” She looked past me at Ziggy, who’d come up to join us. “Hi, I’m Lori Fancher.”

  “Ziggy Kronquist.”

  The two girls didn’t shake hands, which didn’t mean anything; girls often don’t. But there was a moment of wary appraisal, while Ziggy obviously wondered just what my relationship with this salty, grubby, tanned little female might be, and Lori just as clearly wondered where I’d found this lanky beat-up specimen and had I slept with her in that big aft bunk on Lorelei III—not that Lori gave a damn, heavens no; it was just something a girl kind of liked to know about a man she’d slept with herself.

  “That’s quite a boat you’ve got there,” Ziggy said, nodding toward the big sportfisherman.

  “As I was just telling Matt, I’m delivering her to Florida,” Lori said. “Yes, she’s not a bad boat, if you like big powerboats and are in a hurry… Oh, this is Billy Barstow.”

  Red-haired Mr. Barstow looked sloppy and comfortable in threadbare jeans cut off raggedly above the knees and a knitted green sport shirt with paint on the front and a rip at one shoulder. He was a chubby, freckled young fellow; and with that curly bright hair and a truly sweet and friendly grin he was seemingly just the kind of happy crew member you’d want to have on board—but like an attractive blond girl I’d met not too long ago, also an ideal shipmate at first glance, he was just a little too good to be true.

  If you looked hard, you realized that he wasn’t chubby at all; what was there was two hundred pounds of solid muscle. If you looked even harder, and knew what to look for, you could see that the nice-boy-next-door grin was belied by the cold and unsmiling and watchful gray-green eyes. I knew what to look for, and I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be happy with cheerful, friendly Billy Barstow behind me, even if he was supposed to be one of the good guys. I mean, I’m supposed to be one of the good guys, too—well, kind of—but Mac sometimes gives us some pretty weird instructions. How did I know what kind of orders Mr. Barstow was operating under?

  “If you want to go out and have something to eat with your friends, I’ll keep an eye on the boat, skipper,” he said to Lori after the introductions. “Nice to meet you, Miss Kronquist, Matt.”

  He swung himself back aboard Gulf Streamer in a rubbery, effortless way, and grabbed his hose and long-handled brush, and went back to washing down the hull. It’s a compulsion with powerboat people, I’ve noticed; they start scrubbing the minute they tie up to a dock. Sailboat folks don’t seem to be quite so obsessed with getting the salt off soonest; and as a matter of fact the real sailors, the ones who cross oceans, apparently don’t have this terrible fear that a little residual seawater is going to eat big holes in their boats, perhaps because, after thousands of sea miles, it hasn’t.

  Ziggy said, “I want to check the engine, Matt. It was a fairly long day’s run. Anyway, I haven’t even seen our power plant yet, and I’d better learn how to get at it.”

  Mindful of her broken hand, I started to offer to help her with the heavy hatches, but checked myself, realizing that (a) she was being nice and deliberately giving me some time alone with a girl she saw I liked, and (b) she wouldn’t thank me for calling attention to her infirmities by acting solicitous.

  Lori said, “Well, Matt, since things seem to be under control on both our ships, suppose we important sea captains hike over to a nice restaurant I know down along the creek, just a few blocks from here…”

  I told Ziggy not to work too hard while I was playing hooky; and Lori waved farewell to Billy, very industrious with hose and brush.

  I asked Lori, “Where did you find that one?”

  “Billy? Oh, Billy’s always somewhere around. I’ve used him on other deliveries. He’s a doll.”

  “Unlike me?” I said.

  She glanced at me sharply. “Definitely unlike you, Matt. You’re a lot of things, some bad, some good, but a doll you are not.”

  I asked, “How long is always?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just curious. How long has Mr. Barstow always been somewhere around?”
<
br />   She hesitated. “Matt, I…”

  I sighed. “I hate to call a nice girl a liar, Lori, but I do not believe that bouncing redhead is just a helpful chap you’ve known since the two of you shared pacifiers in the playpen. After a moment, I went on. “You showed good sense by walking out on this screwball operation after completing the short delivery that was all you’d really contracted for. I wish you’d continued to stay the hell out of it. You almost got killed once associating with nasty people like me, wasn’t that enough?”

  She spoke dryly: “There’s nothing that makes a girl’s day like having a man act overjoyed to see her.” When I didn’t respond to that, she went on. “I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say, Matt.”

  I said, “I’m trying to say, and saying, that William Barstow, Esquire, is definitely not a doll, any more than I am. Do you think we don’t know each other, sweetheart? Do you think a wolf doesn’t recognize another wolf? Do you think a rattlesnake doesn’t recognize another rattler? I could smell that guy in the dark.”

  She started to speak quickly, and stopped, saying, “Here we are.”

  It was a big, bulky, gray-painted wooden building, apparently a converted boat shed of some kind, set on pilings out over the creek, so-called, a tributary of the Severn. In arid New Mexico we’d have called that much water a river in its own right. There was a dock out front for customers arriving by boat. Inside, the place had a very high ceiling; far up there, the old beams and rafters were visible. The light was medium dim, pleasant after the strong fall sunshine outside. There were red-checked tablecloths on the heavy wooden tables.

  After being seated, Lori said grudgingly, “All right, I really haven’t known Billy very long, but he seemed nice enough… I guess I’ll have a vodka and tonic.”

  “And one vodka martini,” I said to the waitress. To Lori, I said, “I’m not trying to run the guy down.”