Go Home, Stranger

Eighteen

Patricia gasped. Reno tried to sit up, his hand involuntarily reaching for the gun in front of him; then he froze. It was hopeless; he could see nothing at all except that malevolent light.

“Friends,” Griffin’s amused voice continued, “on your right you’re looking into the wrong end of a Luger, so let’s don’t have any old college try. Just maintain the attitude, Reno. And, honey, you can reach over and take that roscoe in your warm little hand and drop it over the side.”

She stared at Reno helplessly. “Go ahead,” he said quietly. She lifted it from the grating and let it fall into the water.

The end of a line fell across the boat. “Come alongside,” Griffin said. Reno stared wickedly at the light for an instant; then he thought of Patricia. He caught the line and pulled. The skiff bumped against the side of the cruiser.

“All right, get aboard,” Griffin said crisply. “We haven’t got all night.”

Patricia climbed onto the stern. Reno made it with difficulty, the ankle throbbing. They still stood in the glare of the light, which had retreated to the forward end of the cockpit.

“Now,” Griffin went on, the disembodied voice issuing from somewhere behind the light, “tip that skiff up. Let it fill with water, then turn it upside down.” The voice chuckled. “Let ‘em drag for you down here. It’ll keep ‘em happy.”

Reno turned and faced the light, his face savage. “Why the delay? Why not there in the skiff, the way you did Counsel? Or in the back of the head, like McHugh?”

Griffin laughed easily. “Friend Robert got a little trigger-happy. And he thought I wouldn’t shoot because I still didn’t know where the stuff was. Only time I ever knew Marse Bob to make a bum decision.” He paused, then went on briskly. “But get with it. Dump that boat. I picked you up because I can use you, but if you want to commit suicide your lady friend can do the job.”

Reno stared with cold deadliness; then he sat down on the stern. He pushed down on the edge of the skiff until it began to fill with water. When it was awash he caught the other edge and heaved it over.

He faced the light again. “What job?” he asked.

“Just a minute, pal. Got to get these running lights on.”

A switch clicked. In a moment the powerful light went out, but it was replaced at the same instant with a lesser one, still shining in Reno’s eyes.

“Don’t get any happy ideas,” Griffin warned. “The Luger’s still looking at you. And remember, if I have to kill you, Pat will do.”

“Do what?” she asked. Her voice was calm now. She sat down in the stern beside Reno. “I won’t do anything.”

“Come now, honey.” Griffin chuckled. “That’s an obstructionist attitude. Don’t puzzles fascinate you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked coldly.

“Look down at your feet.”

The light dipped a little and they looked down. In the desperate bitterness of defeat Reno had forgotten the thing Griffin had been dragging for, but now it came back to him and he stared, completely mystified. This was what had caused the death of Mac, and of Counsel and Pat’s brother and a man named Charles Morton—but what was it?

It lay on the flooring of the cockpit still wet and plastered here and there with the black silt of the channel bottom, and for an instant he could make nothing of it except a welter of very thin, flexible steel cable. Then he began to see what it was. There were two net pouches, or bags made of this flexible wire and they were tied together by a short length of it, possibly fifteen or twenty feet. But it was the two objects in their respective pouches that made his eyes narrow in wonder. They were about the size and shape of small watermelons, and had a metallic sheen as if they were covered with lead.

“What’s in those things?” Patricia asked defiantly.

“A very interesting question, honey,” Griffin replied. “And that’s exactly why I had to put on a larger staff. You ever hear the old wheeze about the electrician who told his helper to take hold of a wire? And when the poor joker did, he says, ‘All right. Mark it. But don’t touch the other one. It’s got 20,000 volts in it.’ You see, you just got to have help to figure out things like that.”

“You mean you don’t know?” she demanded.

“Well, let’s put it this way. It’s a little question of trying to outguess our friend Robert. You might say I know what’s in there, but I’m a little hazy as to what else there might be, and how it’s distributed—” He broke off, and gestured with the flashlight. “But never mind. We’ll go into that later. Right now we’ve got to get out of this channel. This way, friends.”

He opened the door going forward. A switch clicked, and the engine compartment was flooded with light. Griffin backed into the other corner of the cockpit.

“All the way forward, men,” he ordered. “Into that locker in the bow.”

Patricia glanced coldly in the direction of the flashlight and entered the engine compartment. Reno followed her, limping awkwardly and supporting himself by holding onto anything he could reach. Bent over, they went past the idle engine and into the locker. It was no more than a triangular cubbyhole right in the prow of the boat, half filled with coils of line and paint pots, with no room to stand upright. They sat down on the deck, squeezed together, with their backs against a sloping outboard bulkhead.

Griffin appeared in the engine compartment behind them. “Sleep tight,” he said. “Big day as soon as it’s light.” He closed the door, and they were in total darkness. Reno heard the rattle of a hasp; then a padlock clicked shut.

Griffin rapped on the door. “Lot of turps and paint-thinner in there,” he said, “so think it over before you try to smoke.”

Neither of them gave him any reply. They heard his footsteps going back toward the cockpit. Reno realized that she was shaking violently. She was making no sound, but he knew how desperately she was fighting to keep her nerves from breaking.

He put his arms about her and pulled her head against his chest, holding her very tightly. With his face softly brushing her curls, he whispered, “Pat, I’m sorry. I should have made you stay.”

She drew in a shaky breath. “And let you face it alone? I’m all right, Pete. I’m not much afraid, with you here.”

“We’ll be all right,” he said, trying to make it sound convincing. “Griffin can’t get way with it.”

The starter growled, and in a moment the noise of the engine filled the compartment. The boat vibrated, gathering speed. I had him, Reno thought; I had it made, and still I lost it.

“Pete,” she asked softly, “what did he mean about outguessing Robert Counsel? And why doesn’t he know what’s in those things?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he said, lying. He was beginning to see why, and thinking about it gave him a chill.

But what were the lead containers supposed to have in them, to make them worth all the lives they had cost so far? He knew what Griffin suspected, and why the redhead had abducted them instead of killing them on the spot, but he still couldn’t guess what made the things so valuable. Griffin’s probably right, too, he thought; he’s no. fool. He outguessed Robert Counsel before, and let Pat’s brother and Morton get blown to hell while he played it safe. It was a savage game of double-cross and double-double-cross and maybe Robert Counsel would still have the last laugh.

But that wasn’t important now. The only thing in the world that mattered now was getting out of here before it was too late. Unless they could stop Griffin, every minute was bringing them nearer death. The redhead couldn’t turn back now, even if he wished; he had to kill them, as he had killed McHugh. And it would mean the end for Vickie. With them would vanish forever any evidence against Griffin. It swept over him all at once, and he fought for calmness. If he lost his head now they had no chance at all. Griffin would hear it and be waiting with the gun. They had to do it silently. Maybe with his knife he could cut out the section of the door that held the hasp.

He opened the knife, and ran the blade along the crack until he felt it strike the hasp. Marking it with a finger, he began whittling. It was impossible to see anything at all. There was no way to tell whether he was even cutting in the same place half the time. He hacked his fingers. The knife blade broke off at the point. He kept on, sweating in the heat, and hurrying.

Once the boat appeared to come up against a dock for a few minutes, but the engine continued to idle and they could not be sure whether Griffin was still aboard. Then they were moving again.

They lost all track of time. That blade of the knife finally snapped off altogether, and he switched to the small one. It lasted only a few minutes, and when it broke off next to the handle he wanted to put his head down in his hands. He sat still then.

After a while the engine throttled down until they had bare steerageway, and ran that way for a long time. Once or twice Reno thought he heard branches scrape along the hull. They must be up in the bayous, far off the ship channel.

Then, finally, the engine stopped. They bumped gently against something, and he heard footsteps over their heads. Griffin was tying up. They heard him moving around aft for a while; then there was silence except for the sound of frogs and once or twice an owl hooting. Reno held Patricia in his arms and waited out the hours until daylight. Once she slept for a while, fitfully, making little whimpering sounds that stirred the hatred inside him.

* * *

He sat up, listening. Griffin was unsnapping the padlock. The door swung open and he motioned with the gun. It was dawn now, and light was pouring into the engine compartment.

Griffin chuckled. “Say, you’re a rugged-looking character, with that blood all over your head. I’d borrow your face for Halloween, if you were still going to be around.” Reno looked hungrily at the gun. “One of us won’t be.”

“Pal, you’re so right. Now, let’s get aft, shall we?” They went single file back to the cockpit, Reno hobbling as best he could, Patricia white-faced and ignoring Griffin with icy contempt, and the latter bringing up the rear with the gun and humming under his breath. Reno looked around, blinking at the light. It was a lovely setting. The cruiser was tied up at a rotting old dock on a narrow arm of the bayou. Big trees hung out over the water except at the landward end of the dock itself. There had been a building there at one time, but it had burned down and nothing remained except the chimney and fireplace. Beyond it lay an open field of several acres, brown with dead grass.

“Robert Counsel’s so-called fishing lodge, or what’s left of it,” Griffin said behind them: “Now. Sit down, both of you.”

He sat down himself on the leather seat across the cockpit from them, stretched out his legs, and lit a cigarette. The gun lay carelessly in his lap; but his eyes watched Reno. He grinned at them, and nodded his head toward the after end of the cockpit. “Beauties, eh?” he asked.

The steel cable and mesh bags had been thrown away, and the two lead watermelons lay side by side. The mud had been washed from them and they had a smooth, fat, and somehow deadly look in the early light. They’re a little like bombs without fins, Reno thought. Then he turned to look at Griffin.

“They’ve killed four men,” he said softly.

“Right.” Griffin took a drag on the cigarette. “That is, if you count McHugh. He was more or less a by-product.”

The yearning to kill was very strong inside him now. He could feel the crazy foaming of it, and tried to reason with himself. The thing to do was wait, and play it out. There’d always be that one desperate lunge at the end, if everything else failed.

“What’s in them?” he asked, his face showing nothing.

Patricia was leaning forward, staring with fascination, while they waited for Griffin to answer. Reno was conscious of the same suspense. Here was the thing they had trailed so long; the thing that had killed Mac, and had set off this chain reaction of death and disaster. And in the end it was two fat, lead-sheathed, watermelon-shaped objects lying harmlessly in the cockpit of a boat.

Griffin pushed the white cap back on his head and shrugged. “Somewhere around a quarter million dollars and/or enough high explosive to blow us all to hell and halfway back.”

Reno slowly expelled his breath. “Quarter million dollars worth of what?”

“Heroin. The pure McCoy. Uncut. And not grains, or ounces, but pounds of it. Sweet, huh?”

Reno leaned back against his seat. “So that’s why they never could find out what he did with the money? Counsel, I mean. When they court-martialed him.”

Griffin eyed him speculatively. “So you found out about that?” Then he went on. “That’s right. Robert was buying dope and stashing it away in a hiding place he had. Packed it in cans and evacuated the air. He had a vacuum pump. We weren’t sure how long it’d be before we could come back after it, or how much it deteriorated with age.”

“But why dope?”

Griffin shook his head, grinning. “Robert. You have to understand him. He was a genius, with a nasty sense of humor, and a flair for embroidering a theme. He took a dim view of any kind of authority, and resented being shoved into the military. So what could be better than stealing from the U.S. Army and using their money to buy dope to smuggle in? The Army was financing his operations against the Narcotics Bureau. And then there was the money, too. Tremendous profit this way.”

“But none of the rest of you knew where he had it hidden?”

“Yes. We did. But he moved it on us. The night before he was arrested. There’d been an argument with Morton and Devers, and. He thought they had squealed on him, or were about to.”

Reno nodded, his eyes harsh. “So when Counsel got out of prison and went back to Italy after the stuff, Morton and Devers went out to pick it up out of the channel but you didn’t go. Why?”

Griffin smiled. “Little matter of understanding friend Robert. I began to smell a rat. You see, we didn’t tell them. After all, why split it four ways? But the night the Silver Cape arrived off the bar, they showed up in my office down there on the dock. They’d found out all about it.

“At first they were going to rough me up for double-crossing them, but they cooled down after a while and I managed to find out now they’d got wind of it. That’s when I wised up. It seems Robert had run into an old girl friend of Carl Devers in Italy and had started shooting off his mouth, and she had written Carl all about it. And the funny thing was, he also ran into an old flame of Chappie Morton, and told her, too. Just chummy, you see.” Griffin broke off and grinned at them. “You begin to get it now?”

Reno felt a chill along his back. So that was the kind of mind they’d been up against. He nodded.

“Well, it was simple, then,” Griffin went on. “Just elementary stuff. I played it real yokel and let them throw down on me with that silly Italian gun they had. They tied me up and locked me in the office, and shoved off with the boat. And in just about an hour I heard it let go, like a refinery blowing up, and knew I’d been right. So I untied myself and called the Sheriff and Coast Guard and reported the boat stolen. Then I warmed up one of the tugs and pulled their car off into the channel.”

Reno glanced sidewise at Patricia. She was pale, and her eyes were sick with horror. He reached for her hand and held it. There was nothing else he could do.

Griffin smiled. “So now you see the enchanting prospect. There are two of these lead pigs, and either one of them is big enough to hold the stuff. Or isn’t it? Can’t you just hear the bastard laughing? He was going to get all three of us with that other one, but just in case he didn’t— Catch on, pal?”

“Right,” Reno said coldly. “But how do you think you’re going to make me open them?”

Griffin smiled again.. “That’s easy. Your lady friend here. You’ll have one of the pigs, and we’ll have one. If you don’t open yours within ten minutes, we’ll dig into the other. A quarter million’s a lot of money, and nobody lives forever.” He broke off and winked at “Patricia. “We’re not chicken, are we, honey?”