Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER XV Island Prisoners

Smitty had found himself in a very hot spot after he’d succeeded in hauling himself up on this motor cruiser’s foredeck.

Black water. Black sky. Pitch darkness all around, and the boat was running without lights. But even this scarcely served to conceal the giant.

The boat, a thirty-footer, had eight feet of high fore-deck; then fifteen feet of trim cabin; then rear, open cockpit. The foredeck was only two feet below the top of the cabin. Windows in the front of the cabin, raked the strip of deck.

The unseen two who were controlling the boat were running her from the open rear cockpit, but all they had to do was look hard through the cabin hatchway, through the front strip of glass — and see the giant dark form huddling next to the rail on the deck. It seemed to Smitty that if either so much as lit a cigarette, the glow from the butt would reveal him.

However, neither lit a cigarette. The run was too short.

Smitty had not been in his cramped and perilous position for more than five or six minutes when he sensed more than saw a bulk of land ahead and heard the motor cut to lower speed. They’d timed the dropping of their victims well, with the beacon light square underneath. Less than a mile had intervened between the spot and the place where the unconscious elderly man had splashed into the water.

“This it?” said one of the men in the dark cockpit.

“Yeah,” was the reply, in a more authoritative voice.

“Nice dark spot.”

“It’s got things to help besides darkness, as you’ll find out after you’ve been here awhile.”

The motor was idling, now, and the boat was drifting. Smitty restrained a cry of surprise. The drift was squarely toward the black, sheer face of a low cliff. It was a solid wall of rock against which the boat must surely ram hard enough, even at this speed, to open her seams.

Light glared out suddenly from the top of the rock wall. Blinding, after the sudden darkness, it bathed the boat.

“O.K.,” said a voice by the light. “Just wanted to check and be sure it was you— Hey! Who’s that on the foredeck?”

Smitty moved as if he were a hundred-pound stripling instead of weighing nearly three hundred. He writhed sideways, and had his vast bulk over the low rail so fast that it seemed a mere sliding shadow.

As he dropped to the water, his face was bleak with fury and defeat. To have come this far — actually to the core of the mystery itself — and be discovered! He sank, meaning to swim underwater and away from the boat. But the water was less than five feet deep. At that depth the searchlight could penetrate the water and impale him like a fly on a pin. He charged for the rear of the boat to get behind it. A boat hook shot down and caught him by the belt. It stopped his rush through the clogging water. He whirled, gave one vicious yank on the pole, and saw a form fall headfirst into the water. He started on.

Another boat hook shot down toward him. But this did not reach to catch him. It spanged against the side of his head like an iron-tipped lance. And that was all Smitty knew for a while.

Voices, heard dimly and seemingly from a far distance, came finally to Smitty’s ears. He heard them as though in a dream as he slowly came to his senses.

“We ought to have killed the big gorilla.”

“Orders,” another said. “Farr wants to have a talk with the guy before we put the skids to him. Who is he, anyhow? And how did he get here, at this time of night, at the same time as the old guy they dropped from the plane?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of funny,” a third voice agreed.

“Kind of funny! Is that all you can call it? Here this guy drops in on us. And there’s no boat around, no other plane but the transport’s been over, and we’re too far from anywhere to swim. How’d he get here? It’s the answer to questions like those that Farr wants before we snuff him out. Besides, Farr wants to know if any more guys are around.”

“Maybe the big fella won’t talk.”

“He’ll talk.” The voice was very grim. “You ain’t seen what Farr can do when he really wants answers!”

There was silence. Smitty realized that he was bobbing up and down — being carried. And he had heard three panting voices. It took three men to drag his vast bulk.

He heard hollow steps as he was carried onto a wooden porch, then the bang of a door. He fought to get his strength back, but couldn’t. The sock on the head had been too severe.

He was carried down steps, and there was a clammy, underground feel to the air.

“I don’t like all this,” one of his bearers said uneasily. “I ain’t yellow. You both know that. But I don’t like the smell of this wholesale snatching. All these folks, big shots and a couple bump-offs thrown in, and maybe more to come — I don’t like it!”

“Don’t be a sap!” panted one of the others. “Know what we split on this? A million fish! Roll that under your tongue. One million dollars, twelve ways! And no telling what the guys higher up will take. This is big. Worth takin’ a few chances for.”

Smitty heard another door open and stirred feebly.

“Hurry it up!” snapped one of the men. “The guy’s waking up. And I don’t want to be around when he does — if he’s still loose!”

Smitty was dumped to a cold concrete floor. He heard a woman’s suppressed scream, and the sound of more men’s voices. He opened his eyes. Pain from the lump on his head blurred everything. He shut his eyes again.

Cold metal clamped on wrists and ankles. Then one of the men laughed, and he heard three sets of footfalls as they went away, and the slam of a door.

But still after these three had gone, he heard the frightened babble of men’s voices.

Smitty had come very close to concussion of the brain with that vicious jab of the boat hook. Over half an hour more passed before he had even a shadow of his normal strength. Then, when he could open his eyes without having the light hit them like sharp knives, he looked around.

He was in the large basement of what seemed a standard, though old, house. There was a rusted furnace in the center. The light was subdued, because the only illumination was a single small electric bulb, near the furnace. The light showed two small basement windows, heavily barred.

There were five people in the basement besides himself — four men and a woman.

Of the four men he recognized his former employer, lying white and still on the floor. Over him bent a burly man with graying hair and iron-gray sideburns whom Smitty faintly recognized after a while as an acquaintance of his ex-boss, Lawrence Hickock, nicknamed Old Ironsides.

The other two men, though Smitty did not know them by sight, were Stephen Vincent and Harry Andrews.

Hickock shook his leonine head.

“They’re animals — not men!” he growled. “Leon is apt to die, without attention. But they don’t care — if they get his signature first. The murderers!”

At a little distance, the woman coughed and shivered as she stared, white-faced, at the still-unconscious Leon.

“And there’s Mrs. Martineau;” said Hickock savagely. “Apt to get pneumonia from being held in this cold, damp cellar. But do these men care? No. They’ve got what they want from her. Let her die.”

Vincent spoke up, lips a thin, firm line in his harried face.

“That’s why I’m refusing to sign,” he snapped. “I will not allow brutes like them to get away with it!”

Hickock stared at him moodily.

“There’s a time for heroics,” he said, “but this isn’t one of them. They’ve got us. Might as well face that fact. I’d rather lose some money — a lot of money — than my life. And I think you would, too, when you think it over a little more logically.”

“No man with a spark of courage—”

“Oh, don’t be a fool!” snapped Hickock. Evidently the imprisonment here had worn nerves and tempers raw. “Look at Mrs. Martineau. A few days more in this hole may kill her. Look at the rest of us. At the mercy of these yapping dogs. If just one refuses what they want, we may all die. Can’t you understand that? It took me about two hours to get over my noble courage. Then I signed. If you have sense, you’ll do it, too.”

Vincent chewed at his lips. “Maybe you’re right.”

Smitty had found that he was lying right against a wall. He tried to get up now, and heard chains jangle and felt himself jerked to one side.

He was chained to the stone wall of the basement. The men were taking no chances with his great size and strength. Iron bands were around wrists and ankles, with lengths of chain the size of the cross links on tire chains going from the bands to iron loops sunk in the stonework.

The woman and Hickock and Andrews and Vincent stared at the sound of the chain links.

“Who are you?” said Andrews. “Do you own stock in Tap & Die, too?”

Smitty shook his head — and wished that he hadn’t. The pain was still enough to be sickening.

“Are you out to rescue us, then? Are there others near?” said Hickock eagerly.

“I came alone,” said Smitty.

Hickock sighed. And the four relapsed into apathy. On the floor, Leon stirred a little and moaned.

Smitty looked around more carefully, in the hope that he would see a woman with tawny-gold hair and soft-brown eyes, and a little girl. But if his chief’s wife and child were here, at least they were not in this part of the house.

Smitty began rubbing his manacled wrists, behind him, against the rough cement wall. Rubbing, rubbing, with the others not even bothering to look. Mrs. Martineau, forty and frail-looking, coughed with a premonition of deathly illness soon to come if medical attendance weren’t provided quickly.

The slow night passed. Daylight swelled through the heavily barred basement windows. Smitty rubbed his chains against the wall behind him.