The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  She wiped her eyes angrily and sniffed. “Don’t lie to me, you big ape! I heard you tellin’ Papa that you’re leavin’ in your boat to look for some murderer or somethin’.”

  “Eavesdropping, huh?”

  “Yes!”

  “And you don’t want me to go?”

  She flipped her hair at me and started walking down toward the dock. The big Chesapeake came up beside her, and she scratched his head while he sighed heavily, content. I followed along behind. “Dusky,” she said, “I want you to do anything you want to do. I ain’t one to whine an’ complain like some women. I just worry about you, that’s all.” She stopped by the water and turned to look at me again. “Dusky, I’m just afraid that if you leave on that boat, I ain’t never gonna see you again.”

  “April . . .”

  “No, I mean it, Dusky. I had this dream—three times I had it. I was in a hospital, and you was hurt; hurt real bad.” She lifted her hand and touched my face, and I could smell the jasmine she had held. “You had a bandage wrapped around your head—right here. And I was cryin’ ’cause I knew I was never going to have you . . . never, ever. . . .”

  I took her in my arms, holding the soft warmth of her as she cried. The poor, poor sweet girl. But maybe she was right. I thought about it, standing in the darkness by the water. Maybe it was a little silly to give up all desire for a rational life. And if I ever was to join in marriage with another woman, how could I do any better than April? Lee Johnson? Lee was a good woman, a strong yet tender person, but we came from different worlds. And there was her husband. . . . I turned back to April and for a moment—one long, compelling moment—I considered it. April, a young new wife, a new home and babies again—maybe two more sons. Forget the past and start over. But then I felt the hatred in my brain move from the depths like a slashing pain. And I knew it was futile. I had a new master now. Revenge.

  “April,” I said, “listen to me. Everyone has dreams. Good dreams, bad dreams—but those dreams don’t necessarily forecast what is to be. I’m just going out to the Marquesas for a week—two weeks at the most. For a friend. And if there is to be any rough stuff—which there won’t be—I’m going to go for help so fast it would surprise even you.”

  It was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to put her at ease and make her smile. But it didn’t. She backed away from me and said with great seriousness, “Dusky, please . . . please don’t ever lie like that to me again.” She put her finger to my lips when I started to speak. “I know you’re doing it as a kindness. But if I can’t be your wife, or . . . or your lover, I want to be your friend. You weren’t built for tellin’ lies, an’ I wasn’t built to listen to them.”

  I lifted her face gently and kissed her softly on her full lips. “You’re some woman, April Yarbrough.”

  She smiled for the first time. “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that, Mr. Dusky MacMorgan. Now this time, before you leave, kiss me just once like you really, truly mean it. And promise me you’ll come back. . . .”

  8

  If you want to meet with D. Harold Westervelt, you have to pick your time—and make sure your time coincides with a break in his stern order of habit and discipline. D. Harold Westervelt. Colonel D. Harold Westervelt. He is one of my more unusual friends. We had both survived military life and war, commando raids and espionage missions, but where I had married and found a new life as a fishing guide, Colonel Westervelt could never leave it behind. He loved it all too well. He lives in an ironically peaceful setting: a stucco suburban house near the naval airbase on Boca Chica Key. When he got too old for predawn assaults, the War Department kept him on the Army payroll as a sort of freelance inventor and adviser. They financed his sometimes strange notions and, in return, he produced for them highly sophisticated—although sometimes unusual—weaponry. And when Norm Fizer’s federal agency retained me for an entirely different type of freelance work, Colonel Westervelt had doubled as my friend and armorer. On my first mission, if it hadn’t been for his advice and his weapons . . . well, let’s just say that after one world war, one police action, and then Vietnam, D. Harold Westervelt knows what he is talking about.

  The morning after my dinner with the Yarbroughs I awoke, as always, at first light. Since the death of my family I had abandoned our little house on Elizabeth Street and set up household in my sportfisherman, Sniper. It is a perfect big-game boat: thirty-four-feet of custom-built, long-range, oceangoing craftsmanship. And equipped just the way I wanted it. There’s the Si-Tex/Koden 707 digital readout Loran C, the Furuno FE-502 white-line commercial fish finder, a Konel VHF marine radio, the Si-Tex radar system, and an enormous fuel capacity for a range of over four hundred miles plus safety factor. But as I konked my knee stepping into the head for my morning duties, I realized for the umpteenth time that, as much as I loved my boat, it might not be the ideal home for a guy my size. It was built as a fishing machine, not as an apartment.

  What then? Buy another house? No, never again . . .

  I considered the options as I slipped into soft gym trunks and, with my shaving kit, headed barefooted along the cement dock toward the marina to shower and try to call D. Harold. In the trash cans along the dock, there were carcasses of filleted dolphin and wahoo, green flies already busy around them. As I passed his rickety beige houseboat, Fred Astaire, Stevie Wise hailed me from the forward deck.

  “Hey! Hey, Dusky—you coming to my party tonight?” He wore nothing but white BVD’s, and he already had a mug of beer in his hand. Behind him in a big red garbage bucket was a keg of beer. He lifted his glass to me. “Plenty more where this came from. Stop by if you get a chance.” As he spoke, a sleepy-eyed dishwater blond with nothing but a towel around her poked her head out the door. “Stevie? Where did you say the shower was?”

  Stevie smiled at me and winked. He was happy again.

  After shaving and brushing my teeth, I made my phone call. It’s twenty-five cents in Key West now. When I’m grumpy I blame it on the Arabs. Fifteen rings and no answer. The Bell bandit gave me my quarter back when I hung up. He was working. D. Harold Westervelt always switched his phone off when he was in his lab. I checked my Rolex: not quite seven A.M. and he was already hard at it. People like D. Harold always make me feel even lazier than I am.

  Workout time. I went back to my boat and pulled on my running shoes—the new kind with the yellow blaze stripe and the special foam rubber soles guaranteed to keep your legs from aching. Only my legs always ache when I run—the Japanese manufacturers failed to consider, obviously, the possibility of shrapnel wounds. Down busy Roosevelt Boulevard past the Kangaroo’s Pouch, the floating restaurant where boat people were already filing in for breakfast, turn right on Palm Avenue, across the little causeway. Wave at an old friend at Steadman’s Boat Yard, smile through the sweat and the ache at the early-morning children.

  Look, Mommy! Did you see that funny man wink at me?

  Curve left at Eaton past the old shipbuilders’ houses, then down into the heart of Old Town. Old Town has a case of the quaints these days. Shop owners, in a desperate attempt to please the tourists, are trying to make Key West look like New Orleans—and failing. Too much ornamentation, too many cutesy signs. Avoid Elizabeth Street, avoid El Cacique with its tempting morning odor of espresso, push on, push on, don’t even stop to comfort and scratch the ears of the poor stray dogs. The sun felt good on my shoulders, sweat dripping down into my eyes, and when Roosevelt Boulevard came into view again, I kicked it into high gear, checking my watch before I hit the last mile. Huffing and puffing like an overweight ex-jock at one of those Sunday softball games, I pulled up at the marina. Three seven-and-a-half minute miles and a final seven-minute mile. I punished myself with grim accusations: too fat, too old, too slow, slow, slow. . . . I got a towel from the port locker, got a drink of cold water from the little refrigerator, then punished myself some more with a hundred slow pull-ups, sets of fifteen. The average human spends adolescence getting to know his or her body, the next ten years pri
mping and grooming it, and the final unknown decades alternately abusing it and castigating it. (Just one more whiskey before I go to the hospital to check on this damn liver problem I got. . . .) I smiled at the silliness of us all.

  After showering, I tried D. Harold once more and got my quarter back. I checked my watch. He’d be breaking for lunch in about two hours. So I ambled back to my boat, got an icy beer from the fridge, and sat in a salon chair doing some mental exercise. Fact: one Gifford Remus, after making what was an apparently significant treasure discovery, had disappeared. Question: Did he die accidentally, was he murdered, or was he being held by someone? Fact: A Cuban shrimp boat was in that same area under suspicious circumstances. Question: Was it the staging site for some communist drug-smuggling operation? Was it on some sort of spy mission? Was the disappearance of Remus in any way related to its presence? Or perhaps it was just a shrimp boat honestly, if not innocently, engaged in the common business of fishing outside its own waters.

  Fact . . . question . . . fact . . . I sat drinking my beer in the fresh morning heat building plausible and complex schemes which would explain it all. But as Watson’s detective once said, it is a capital mistake to hypothesize before all the data are available. So I let it rest. At lunchtime I would go to see my friend the colonel, announced or unannounced. He would have more information. And it was too important to wait.

  Just as I was locking up the Sniper, ready to head off toward Colonel Westervelt’s home, I had a visitor. A stock blond young man, about twenty, dressed in khaki shorts and T-shirt, came up and knocked on the piling at the stern.

  “Mr. MacMorgan?”

  “Dusky MacMorgan. That’s right.”

  He was a nice-looking kid—the kind you see on the cover of Boys’ Life. And polite, too. You don’t see many polite ones anymore. I think they went out with radio theater. “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

  “Sure. Absolutely.” I checked my watch. “But I’m afraid I can’t give you much time.”

  “It won’t take long, sir.” He stepped down onto the deck nimbly and offered me his hand. Firm grip but not overbearing. Dry palm. I had seen him someplace before, and it took me a moment to place him. El Cacique. He had been with Jason Boone, the amateur underwater archaeologist, when the lethal fight had broken out.

  “How’s your friend Jason doing, ah . . .”

  “Wayne, sir. My name’s Wayne Peters.”

  “And my name’s Dusky, not ‘sir.’ So how’s your friend doing, Wayne?”

  He cleared his throat a little uncomfortably. “It was awful, what happened, sir . . . I mean, Dusky. Jason’s not a violent man; not since he accepted Christ as his savior, anyway. He’s real religious, you see. In fact, God is the only thing that he takes more seriously than his work. So you can imagine what a blow it was to him.”

  “He seemed pretty upset.”

  “Well, he’s a little better now. For a while there, he was talking about calling off the whole field trip and heading back to Iowa. Boy, I’d have hated that. I’m new to the group and all, and this is my first trip to the Keys, but I love it here. And between you and me, that Abbey character was one mean human being. If anybody deserved killing, he did.”

  “I take it you’re not the devoted Christian that Jason is?”

  He smiled the way old friends smile when they are conspiring. He had bright blue eyes and a fine, angular, Nordic face. “Well, I’m not as serious about it as some of the others. Besides, the Bible says, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ One evening on the boat, just off the Marquesas, I heard someone shouting up on the deck. I ran up and there was Abbey with one of those old Winchester .30-’06’s—I recognized it because I used to use a rifle like it for deer hunting. Well, you know how porpoises will come and play around your boat when you’re anchored? There were porpoises around our boat that night, and Abbey was shooting them just for sport. It made me sick.”

  The thought of it made me sick, too. I said, “I think I would have been tempted to stick that rifle up Mr. Abbey’s ass.”

  Wayne smiled. “That’s exactly what I told him I would do if he didn’t stop.”

  “And?”

  He lowered his eyes, suddenly embarrassed. “Wrestling’s the state sport in Iowa, Dusky. By the time I was seventeen, I was an All-American at a hundred and sixty-five pounds. Abbey thought he could bully Jason because he’s so religious, but he knew better than to mess with me. He stopped.”

  I listened to this kid and knew I liked him, but I was in a hurry. I checked my watch again.

  “Look, I don’t want to hold you up,” he said hastily. “The reason I’m here is, Jason sent me. He wanted me to thank you for being so kind to him after the fight, and he wanted to invite you out to our motel. He said you were interested in underwater archaeology. We’re staying at the Key Wester Inn. You know where it is?”

  I nodded. “I’ll probably be out in the morning. Okay?”

  “Sure. We’re headin’ back out to sea in the afternoon, but the morning will be fine.”

  We shook hands again, and Wayne took his leave: broad-shouldered farm kid looking strangely out of place on this, the island of pirates. Before he got into his rental car, he called back over his shoulder, “I look forward to talking to you again sometime, Captain MacMorgan. I’ve heard a lot about you in the last couple of days.”

  Before I could ask him where he had heard about me and what, he was in the car, headed out of the marina parking lot, down Roosevelt.

  D. Harold Westervelt was eating his spartan lunch of salad and unsweetened iced tea when I arrived. He was wearing swim trunks, and there was a towel around his neck. Every day, twice a day, he swims a strong half mile in the narrow, twenty-five-yard business-only pool beneath the bug screen on his patio. The blue water was still roiled as I took a seat across the table from him.

  “So! You have another mission. I envy you.” He made a sweeping motion with his right hand. “I’ve become a hermit here. When I was younger, I never took the time to think how boring it must be to be an old soldier.”

  Colonel Westervelt looked like anything but an old soldier. He has icy blue eyes, the body of an Olympic-class gymnast, and a shaved head which makes his cranium seem disproportionately large—the general impression being that his brain is of the same quality as his body. An accurate impression, too. At some fifty-odd years of age, he is an impressive specimen.

  I said, “I’ve always thought you were too busy to be bored, Colonel.”

  He gestured with his shoulders. “True, true. Yes, I have my laboratory and my work. But we are similar end products from different generations, Captain. There are a few of us left, but not many. You must understand how it is. Once you have had a mission, once you have seen combat with men under your command, everything else, in comparison, seems rather . . . bland.”

  I understood. All too well. And I wondered what I would be like if I lived to be D. Harold’s age. Restless, lonely, and bored, bored, bored.

  “Captain Fizer said you would have more information for me about our project.”

  “Of course.” He finished his tea in a gulp, and I followed him down the hallway to the steel firedoor and his lab. He bolted the door behind us. Except for one wall lined with a marble workbench, there were chemicals, strange chunks of wood and plastic, and locked gun cabinets and relics from the Second World War everywhere. In the far corner, in an oblong glassed frame, his many decorations were pinned on blue velvet. The past and present of the consummate warrior all in one small room. As I looked about, D. Harold walked to the wall and pushed an unseen button. A small patch of workshop floor slid away with a cool hydraulic hiss, revealing a large gunmetal-colored floor safe. He twisted the dial, pulled the door open, and retrieved a brown folder marked “Top Secret” in bold type.

  “Have you recovered from your last mission?” he asked as he leafed through the folder.

  “Yes,” I said. “Completely.”

  “That was a rather nasty head w
ound you had.”

  It was nasty all right. The spot was still tender, but the dizzy spells were less frequent now. “It’s fine, sir,” I said.

  He pulled a workbench stool up and motioned for me to sit. “You know, after your assault on Cuda Key, there were people in high places who wanted to see you tried for mass murder.” He smiled coldly. “But there were others who thought you ought to be decorated. I am continually amazed by the fools our voters put into office. The politicians don’t realize that times of peace require the most relentless warfare of all. If you don’t fight continually to preserve freedom, it slips away from you a grain at a time, leaving, in the end, a nation utterly drained and helpless.”

  “Have you—our people, I mean—heard anything more about the men who got away from Cuda Key?”

  “That northern Senator, you mean.”

  Yes, I meant the Senator. He was the one who had masterminded the whole complex drug army I had helped destroy. It was he who was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of my friend, my wife, and my sons. And I would hunt him until the day I died.

  “The Senator has escaped to Argentina, I’m afraid. Strange country, Argentina. They have Nazis there, escaped dictators, revolutionary socialists in hiding, all living, apparently, healthy, wealthy, and wise. Strange bedfellows, most certainly.”

  I felt my knuckles whiten as I gripped my chair. I tried to make my voice flat, businesslike. “So there’s no chance of extraditing him?”

  “Oh, they’re working on it through diplomatic channels, but I wouldn’t put much faith in that. Frankly, there was some talk of sending one of our people over there to, ah . . . loosen things up.”

  “If you’re looking for volunteers, I’d be happy—”

  “All in good time, Captain. One mission at a time.”

  “But doesn’t it seem a little silly for them to send me out to observe the habits of just one Cuban shrimp boat when I could be working on something really important like this—”