Killer with a Key

by Dan J. Marlowe

  "For different reasons," Mike said complacently, "I felt I had little to fear from either Vic or Lorraine. Oh, the lady here accused me, but I of course denied it, and entangled as she was herself she wasn't quite sure enough about me to make a move herself. She did take to following me, which was inconvenient."

  Johnny sat with hands tightly clenched by his side as the sound of Mike Larsen's voice died away in the back seat; where had he gone wrong? He should have known, but how? Mike was right in one respect; the key pieces in the puzzle, the vital little bits of information had fallen into place too late.

  He leaned forward and began to watch the turn-off signs as the realization came to him that they had been on the parkway for some time. He was in a hurry to get to the boat. "Glen Cove Road is the one we want."

  "I know." Lorraine Barnes spoke for the first time since they had left the foyer of the hotel. Johnny looked curiously at her stiff features, and the white-knuckled hands on the wheel.

  The sedan slowed under her guidance and eased gently down a curving exit road which bore off to the right; on the highway below she turned back left under the overpass. A roadside directional sign picked up in the headlights as they completed the turn Listed the towns in the area with little black arrows pointing--Sea Cliff, Glen Cove, Roslyn, Locust Valley, Lattenburg, Bayville. They rode along the Glen Cove Road, and Johnny could see Lorraine watching for the Sea Cliff turn-off. Mike was right; it was not the first time she had driven this route.

  Salt tang was fresh in the warm air as the car swung sharply left and then right again in a hundred yards and set off on the long diagonal paralleling the water, which could almost be felt. It was not quite ten, but most of the lights in the quiet houses of Sea Cliff were already out. In Glen Cove the lights were on in one restaurant; the first stop light was on the blinking yellow, the second still on the red and green. They by-passed the right angle swing through the center in favor of the little yellow signs proclaiming Direct Route to Bayville.

  Johnny stretched cautiously in his cramped position in the front seat; his voice was soft. "Used to know every inch of this country when I was a raggedy-tailed kid." He looked directly at Lorraine behind the wheel. "You ever been down on the island below Bayville? Centre Island, they call it. Something to see. Estates, mansions, stone walls, high wooden fences. Palaces, they looked like to a kid. I've cut grass on half of 'em, there and over at Oyster Bay. There's at least one boat, cruiser size, goes with each house, and some of the Centre Islanders had channels cut in the rock so they could tie their boats up right under their front porches."

  She took her eyes from the road in one quick flash to look at him sharply, then returned to her driving. The car's pace again slowed; Johnny could see her looking for the unmarked gravel road. At the sudden gap in the trees she braked and turned hard left, and they bumped down off the macadam as the tires crunched in the loose gravel. She tapped the brights and steered down the light-colored ribbon of road between the scrub trees and the tangled undergrowth. They ran out of the tree line, and tall, waving grass loomed up on either side of the sedan, and then the grass grew shorter and less dense and the dark pilings of the dock appeared in the headlights. Lorraine turned the car off onto the weeds and shut off the motor, and for an instant the only sound was the night breeze in the saw grass.

  Johnny turned back to Mike Larsen as something occurred to him. "You sent the note in to Vic?"

  Mike nodded; he was looking out at the pier. "Yes. Not one of my more inspired moments. Can't even think now why it seemed important at the time, except that things were popping a little too rapidly for my liking." He seemed to rouse himself as he looked back at Johnny. "I sent the trio who waylaid you outside of Lorraine's, too. Another little backfire that fizzled. I wanted you to blame Russo for it; he'd already become a headache to me. I thought you'd dismantle him on sight."

  "The first fifteen seconds that I saw him afterward he tried to bet me fifty he could take me even. After sendin' out a losin' goon squad, it just didn't figure."

  He had lost Mike's attention; from the back seat the automatic motioned at Lorraine. "You get out first." She complied, and Mike eased out on Johnny's side of the car, gun leveled. "You, Johnny."

  Johnny got out a little stiffly; he stood erect and stretched leisurely. He looked up at the sky; the earlier haze had disappeared, and the night was clear. He fixed the stars in his mind; he knew now what he had to do, but he didn't know how much time he had in which to do it. Mike Larsen did not intend that three of them should return from this boat ride. Or even two of them, whether Lorraine Barnes realized it or not.

  The beam of a flashlight came on in Mike's hand; he moved in a semicircle around Johnny and handed it to Lorraine. "You lead."

  The loose fill grated under their feet, and the weeds whispered damply. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the pier's timbers until they stood dockside to Ye Olde Beaste. Beneath their feet there was the faint hiss of water and the occasional slap of a slightly larger wave against a piling.

  Against the night light of sky and stars the stubby masts of the moored boats danced in shadowy disorder.

  "You first, Johnny, into the boat," Mike decided. "Drop down and take off the tarp. You keep the light on him, Lorraine, and if I see you going for a spanner, Johnny, that's it, right there." The white of his teeth showed in the blur of his features. "You could probably dive under the pier and get away; I know you're a fish in the water, but I think you'd rather get your hands on me."

  How right you are, Mike Larsen, Johnny thought to himself as he swung down the piling ladder and reached for the deck with his feet. And I know how I'm going to do it. In the beam of light directed down at him from the pier above he knelt and loosened the ties on the tarp, bundled it and tossed it amidships.

  "Take off the engine cowling." Mike's voice sounded right at his elbow; sound carried in the night. Johnny slid off the metal casing and stood it up in the stern. "Lorraine's coming down now. I'm watching you."

  Johnny watched her cautious descent of the ladder; was it more typically feminine to be afraid of falling from the ladder between the creaking, barnacled pilings and the dark water line than of the gun in Mike Larsen's hand? He stepped up from the cockpit to the deck, scooping up an air-filled seat cushion as he did so. He reached up and lifted her down from the ladder, and with her body as a shield pushed the cushion under her arm, his whisper a breath in her ear. "Hang onto this." He released her; she made no sound, but her arm gripped the seat cushion.

  Mike's carefully contrived face-forward descent, flashlight under an armpit and the gun in his free hand, was a strain on him. Explosive relief was again evident in his tone as he dropped the final three feet to the deck planking. "Now!"

  Johnny smiled tightly to himself. He thinks he's crossed his last river. He doesn't know his white water is still ahead of him.

  Mike pointed with the gun to the opposite side of the cockpit from his own station at wheel and throttle. "You, Johnny. Over there. Carefully." He groped in a locker cupboard behind him and tossed a fish knife to Lorraine. "When I say so cut the lines."

  The cockpit sprang to trembling life as the engine roared, and Mike gunned it a time or two to make sure it had fully caught. A flip of a switch and the port and starboard red and green lights came on, and the masthead running light.

  "Cut the lines!" Mike had to raise his voice over the engine sound; he waited as Lorraine cautiously picked her way from stern to bow. Mike eased back delicately on the bar throttle as they inched away from the pier. In a boat as over-engined as Ye Olde Beaste slow speed was nearly as ticklish as high; long ago Mike had wound a strip of tape, now dirty and discolored, around the throttle bar at the point beyond which it was not safe to advance the lever arm.

  Around them Long Island Sound glimmered black and slick as Lorraine came back and sat down to Johnny's left. They moved out beyond the point, and as the shoreline disappeared behind them a faint swell manifested itself even in the flat calm. An occas
ional wave slapped lightly under the bow and hissed along the water line; Mike touched the throttle bar and the engine took on a deeper note. The stern-heavy Ye Olde Beaste settled even more deeply in the water as the powerful propeller took hold, and the bow rose correspondingly steeper in pitch.

  Johnny looked at the silvery wisps of spray filtering in over the stern, then up at the stars. With the toe of his right shoe he forced his left shoe off and in an unhurried movement picked it up in his toes and lifted it to where he could reach it with his hand without bending down. He placed it gently on the thwart beside him; he had a feeling it would not be long now. The gun should be no problem; Mike wanted no bullet holes. When Mike went for a spanner, or next attempted to position Johnny differently, possibly...

  Mike Larsen moved out a step from his helmsman post, his left hand negligently on the wheel behind him. The gun which had dangled at his side in his boat-handling preoccupation swung up and around in deliberate presentation. Mike's voice was crisp; his face was calm. "Sit still, Lorraine. Johnny--" His left hand left the wheel and groped in the locker beside him, and in the second his eyes veered fractionally Johnny stood up, picked up his shoe and threw it at the throttle bar.

  At the short range of the crowded cockpit he scored a direct hit on the lever arm, and Mike Larsen yelled hoarsely as the arm jumped the restraining tape and jammed at the full-speed end of the bar. Johnny crouched as the engine boomed in a long unused explosion of power, and Ye Olde Beaste jumped forward beneath them. The engine sound was fantastic; the stern flattened, and the bow canted higher. The boat began to shudder uncontrollably, and Mike Larsen by main strength clawed himself off the cockpit rim against which he had been flung and stared wild-eyed at the water shipping in over the stern. Beneath their feet a deep grinding noise punctuated splintering sounds as the hull began to disintegrate under the pounding of the water, and a high-pitched whine filled the air.

  The white-faced man dived for the throttle as black water spurted through the sprung seams; his frantic grab jerked the lever arm from full speed to zero, and Johnny leaned forward, picked up Lorraine Barnes and threw her over the side. Behind him the stern rose like a cork; the high-canted bow dipped deeply and plunged its blunt nose into an oncoming swell like a fat man stabbing his toe into the ground in the middle of a hundred-yard dash. There was a shivering crash; Mike Larsen screamed shrilly as the heavy stern rose inexorably in a monstrously grotesque cartwheel while disintegrated planking flew like popcorn.

  Johnny went over the side in the deepest dive he could manage as the boat stood on its nose; he hit the Sound's unyielding bottom with an impact that nearly stunned him. His ears rang both with the concussion of his own dive and the nearby cataclysmic dull thunderclap of sound as Ye Olde Beaste pounded back into the water, upside down. He struggled back up in a frenzy of arms and legs, surfaced and roughly sleeved the water from his eyes. The night was filled with a hissing, bubbling noise, and seventy yards ahead a black blot that bore no resemblance to a boat disappeared altogether in a leisurely curving arc.

  Johnny swam to the spot in a thrashing scramble. He criss-crossed back and forth through the gaseous bubbles and the little pieces of flotsam that popped to the surface all around him. No man could possibly survive such an impact, but still he swam. The bubbles weakened and died, and the flotsam drifted away; the only sound in Johnny's ears was the water awash on his shoulders as he plowed stubbornly on his course, until he was sure.

  No man had survived.

  He turned and swam in the opposite direction. He bored into the chop, breasted it and trod water while he scanned the surface of the Sound. A faint sound to his right sent him strongly in that direction, riding high in the water. He saw her, finally; Lorraine Barnes rose and fell in the inky swell, her upper body across the air-filled cushion to which she clung like grim death. She sobbed when she saw him; her hair was like wet seaweed all over her face, and her nose was bleeding from the force with which she had struck the water.

  "M-Mike!" she choked, and Johnny reared up alongside her, unbelieving.

  "I ought to leave you out here, you fool!"

  She didn't even hear him. "Mike, Mike, oh, Mike!"

  The thick surge of anger swelled in his throat and then died. This was Vic's wife. Mike had tried to frame her twice and would certainly have killed her tonight, and still she could call for him. This was Vic's wife, about as wrong as a woman could be, but he had to get her back to shore. "Shut up and listen to what I tell you."

  A stinging little wavelet slapped her in the face, and she spat a mouthful of chop. "We'll d-drown!" She strangled. "Drown!"

  "Not in this pond." Johnny reached down and pulled off his other shoe. "I could swim it both ways, if I had to." He pulled the belt out of his slacks and peeled them off. He ripped and tore at shirt and T-shirt until he felt a blessed freedom. He looked up at the stars, orienting himself, and then turned back to the sobbing woman. He pulled her clothes off in great, bunched handfuls.

  He bounced erect in the water for another look at the stars, then settled back. "Put your left hand on my right shoulder," he told her curtly. "Hold the cushion in your right armpit. Don't fight it; let it balance you. And hang onto me."

  He set out at a steady beat and in three hundred yards had made the adjustment for the drag on his right side. He bored persistently through the rising swells, with head turned to one side to breathe deeply between onslaughts. Twice he paused to check the stars again and altered course slightly; the only noise he heard beside the roar of water in his ears was an occasional animal-like sound from his companion.

  He swam strongly, thinking not at all of time or distance, and was surprised when the dark mass of the shoreline blotted out his waterlogged horizon. He had thought they were farther out; he shook his head to clear his ears of the benumbing water pressure and tried to listen. If the noise he heard was surf, and not just the roaring of his own ears, then he had missed the target. Surf meant rocks, and rocks meant trouble. He turned and swam parallel to the thickening blur of the shoreline, and between two waves he lifted his head and saw the little forest of masts. Again he laboriously shifted course and doggedly carved out his watery path until a blacker shadow in the variegated darkness transformed itself into the lee side of a cabin cruiser. He worked his way around to the stern and transferred the nearly limp Lorraine back to her cushion. He pulled himself up to cockpit level on the boat, then set his teeth and brutally muscled his heavy body over and in. The dead-weight lift after all the time in the water was nearly more than he could manage; from the chest down he felt as though he weighed a ton.

  He waited for his chest to stop heaving and looked down for the woman bobbing below him. "Watch yourself coming aboard; I'm too pooped to lift you clean." He didn't know if she had heard him; he braced himself, reached far over, grabbed her under the armpits and lifted until the blood hammered in his ears. She scraped her thighs coming over the side and moaned as she tumbled in a white lump in the bottom of the boat.

  Johnny stood up when he could breathe again; he didn't know why he still felt driven, but he couldn't take the rest that common sense urged upon him. He twisted the hasp from a locker and rummaged inside. He threw handfuls of clothing at the white body and found a pair of paint-stained trousers for himself. He could hear her crying as he straightened up wearily, the deep sobs of exhaustion. For an instant he didn't realize she was trying to say something. "--make it up to V-Vic ... I w-will--I will!"

  He spat salt spume and another taste and walked up to the bow. He jumped heavily to the deck of the next moored boat and again to the one beyond. When he reached a piling ladder he slogged his way up it, the rough timbers reminding his stockinged feet that he should have scouted the ransacked locker for shoes. He was too tired to go back.

  He hauled himself erect on the splintered pier topside and automatically turned to look once more out over the Sound. Unconsciously his hands hooked into claws. How could you do it, Mike? We were friends, you and I. And Vic.
I hope Vic never knows that you've left him with very nearly as little as you left me.

  He started the long trek out to the road; the car keys were at the bottom of Long Island Sound, and they needed transportation. And the police had to be notified. The police he grimaced wryly. He stumbled off the dock timbers onto the gravel, and his heels bit stingingly as his weaving walk jarred him from side to side. His ears still sang from the water-wash, and his bare arms and shoulders were encrusted with a film of sticky salt. He tried to concentrate on steering a straight course on the lighter colored gravel road which led up to the highway and renounced it in favor of putting one foot before the other. The swash in his ears died out gradually, and he could hear the high-pitched whisper of the night breeze in the scrub pines, mournfully persistent.

  He put down his head and walked on.

  The End