Pale Gray For Guilt

He wanted help I couldn’t give him. One does not pat a Meyer on the head and give him a lollypop. He had overturned one of the personal stones in my garden too, and I could watch leggedy things scuttling away into comforting darkness.

I said, “You still didn’t figure out why I moved my bishop.”

He sat down and fixed a total concentration on the board. He gave a little nod at last and pushed a pawn one space forward, spoiling the sequence I was planning. He pinched at the bridge of his nose again, then smiled across at me, a hairy Meyer-smile, and said, “You know, I think I must have taken some sort of a dislike to that fellow.”

Two days later, Friday afternoon, Meyer came aboard the Flush at four thirty, just after I got back from the beach. A mass of that arctic air that Canada sends down free of charge had begun to change the day a little before noon. It had come down so swiftly I knew the grove people would be worried. There were frost bulletins on all the broadcasts. An edge in the crisp northeast breeze had cleaned the long beaches of everybody except diehard Yankees and one masochistic beach bum named Travis McGee. I had been taking out all the kinks, in the muscles in both body and brain, of too many sedentary days, swimming parallel to shore, in and out of the surf line, for all the distance, endurance and occasional speed sprints I could manage. It had been hard work to even stay warm, and I had ground away at it, breaststroke, backstroke, crawl, until on my chattering lope back to the Flush I felt as if I had pulled most of the long muscles loose from the joints and sockets and hinges they were supposed to control.

Any persistent idiot, like Hero, can strain away at the door-frame isometrics and build impressive wads of chunky fibrous muscle with which you can lift the front end of any sedan to make the girls say Oooo. But if you want the kind of muscle structure that will move you from here to there very very quickly, that will enable you to slip a punch, snatch a moving wrist, turn a fall into a shoulder roll that will put you back on the balls of your feet, balanced and ready, then you’d better be willing to endure total expenditure over long, active and dogged periods. I was going to be slowed down by time and attrition, and maybe it had begun, but not to a degree as yet for me to notice, nor to a degree to make me doubt myself-and doubt, of course, is more fatal than slowed reflexes.

I had the heat going aboard. Meyer drank coffee and worked on his investment figures while I hotshowered the salt away, dressed in ancient, soft, treasured, threadbare checked shirt, gray Daks, and a pair of Herter’s Two-Point woodsman’s shoes, of oiled, hand-treated bull hide, worn to a condition as flexible and pliable as an Eskimo wife. In the shower I had begun to raise tentative voice in song, but had remembered another day, another shower, when that same song had been interrupted by a lady named Puss handing me in a well-made sample of the drink known as a McGee. So that song clogged and died, and I dressed and made the drink myself and took it into the lounge.

Meyer looked up from his work and said, “You look grotesquely healthy Travis.”

“And your eyes look grainy, and you look tired, and how long do you have to go five days a week and sit and watch the board like a great hairy eagle?”

“Not as long as I thought.”

“Indeed?”

“Sit and listen. Without a glaze in the eyes, please.”

“Proceed. I’ll try to understand.”

“These Fletcher Industries earnings statements. Look, accounting is flexible. There are choices. Each one is legal. However, say there are fifteen ways to handle different things to make earnings look a little bit better. So this outfit uses all fifteen, right up to the hilt. The last published quarter, it looks like they made forty percent more money than the quarter before that. I rework the statement and I come out with earnings not even flat. But down a little, even.”

“So?”

“At fifteen dollars a share it looked as if Fletcher was a bargain for a growth stock, selling at maybe twelve times anticipated earnings for this year. So on top of that which you call the fundamental picture, then there is the technical picture of the stock in the market. This buying pressure improves the technical picture. It becomes very desirable. Big volume attracts attention. Today I saw how it was going, how it was reacting, and so I took the risk, and I committed her all the way. Here is where her account stands. She’s got seventy-four hundred shares. Average cost per share is eighteen dollars. Today it closed at twenty-four and a quarter. So, right now, a short term gain of forty-six thousand dollars.”

“Of what!”

“She holds shares worth right now a hundred and eighty thousand, less the margin account debit. The supply is shrinking and the demand is increasing. It is moving too fast. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a statement from management saying they don’t know why all the big interest in their stock all of a sudden. It got out of hand too fast. I made this projection about where it is going to go next week. I have a used crystal ball an old gypsy gave me. I say a minimum eight points next week, so it will close between thirty-two and a half and thirty-seven. Traders will grab profits and get out. Usually I would wait, buy on the correction, and ride up with it again. But we get a trading suspension, maybe an investigation of corporate books. I think they used all the accounting gimmicks they could, and then they lied a little. It went up too fast and next week will be faster. So I start moving her over into that nice one I found for her to keep.”

“You’re telling me or asking me?”

“Telling you. What else? You are the expert on pigeon drops. I am the expert on the biggest crap game in the world.”

“But you have to talk to her and explain all this.”

“I do? Why?”

“Because she ought to come down here.”

He cocked his head. “Connie suggested?” I nodded. “I should discuss all this with her. It is only fair to her.”

“And she should sign some papers, maybe?”

“Very important-looking documents.” He scratched his chin, tugged at his potato nose. “One part of your thinking I don’t understand. That lousy fellow, that LaFrance, it makes some sense he should go to Santo to see if he can get bailed out by maybe peddling him the option he’s got on the Carbee land. So doesn’t he mention you?”

“If he mentioned me, it’s the same as telling Santo that he was a damned fool. If he admits he’s smashed and trying to salvage something; the price from Santo will go way down.”

“How can you be sure of how that idiot will react?”

“I can’t be sure. I just make my guess and live with it.”

The freeze hit low spots well to the west and north of the To-Co Groves, hit them hard enough so that all the smudge pots and airplane propeller fans and bonfires of old truck tires failed to save the dreams of a lot of the smaller growers. They expected the same on Saturday night, but the upper winds changed and a warm, moist breath began coming up from the lower Gulf and the Straits of Yucatan, moving across the peninsula from out of the southwest, and after some unseasonable thunderstorms, the afternoon was clear and warm and bright on Sunday when Janine Bannon arrived in the car Tush and I had fixed a quarter of a year ago.

I was watching for her, knowing when she had left the groves, and went and took her small suitcase from her and brought her aboard. She had been aboard before, when I had taken the Flush up the Shawana River, back when the Boatel was doing well, and they had told me their plans with an air of pleasure and excitement, so she knew the layout.

She looked trim and attractive in her green suit and yellow blouse, but thinner than she should have been. The difference in her was the way the vitality had gone out of her, deadening her narrow and delicate face, making her move like a convalescent, takIng the range and lilt and expression out of her voice. Even her dark hair had lost luster, and there were deep stainings under her eyes, fine lines around her mouth.

I took her back to the guest stateroom and she said, “I don’t want to be a bother. I should have found a place.”

“Which would be a very good trick right now. No bother. You know that. Get yourself settled in. Meyer will be over in a while for drinks and talk, and then we’ll go out and find some beef, or Chinese, or whatever you feel like.”

“Oh, anything is all right. Trav, it’ll just be for overnight. I have to get back.”

“That will depend on what Meyer has set up for you to take care of.”

A little while later I heard some small clatterings in the galley and the chunk of the refrigerator door. I went forward and found her bending over and frowning into the little freezer. She turned and said, “I’d feel a lot better about all this if you’d let me earn my keep, Trav. Connie has all that help, and they have their own ways of doing things, and I feel like a parasite. You have lots of stuff here. Honestly I like to cook.”

“Never volunteer, lady. Somebody will take you up on it. So you’re hooked.”

She smiled. “Thank you. You know things, don’t you? Like you know what people really want to do. Now go away and let me just potter around and find out where everything is and how everything works, all by myself.”

I went in and looked at the tape labels and picked out one of a lot of classical guitar with Julian Bream and started it rolling, adjusting it to that level that is not quite background and not quite for listening only. It wasn’t until Meyer was aboard and I called Janine in from the galley that it occurred to me that they had never met.

She put her slim hand into his paw, and she had that speculative reserve that women seem to have for the first twelve seconds when confronted with the rather outrageous presence of Meyer.

He peered at her, shaking his head slowly in a disconcerting way and then said, “Tricked again! Janine, my dear, if I had been told you were beautiful, I wouldn’t have been working so hard to make you rich.”

“Beautiful! Now really.”

He turned to me. “See? A fishing expedition even. She protests so she can hear it again. Okay Janine. You are a beautiful lady. I am very sensitive to beauty. A man who makes children run and hide behind mommy is very receptive to beauty.”

“You should see the wolf pack of little kids,” I said, “following this character up and down the beach, listening to his lies.”

Suddenly her dark eyes looked lively. “Meyer, you too are beautiful. I do not know how you are doing It or why you are doing it even, but if you are making me rich, I will be very pleased and grateful.”

“I am doing it because McGee nags me. That is a good guitar to drink by. And how long do we stand around with no drinks?”

She cooked up a great kettle of a delicious thing that she called “Sort of Stroganoff.” I found some red wine that, for a change, Meyer approved of. After she had cleaned up, she and Meyer went into a huddle at the desk over the papers he had brought over. I eat on the yellow couch, reading and digesting, hearIng them with half an ear.

At last she came over and plumped down beside me, sighing. I put the book aside. “That fantastic man keeps telling me fantastic things, Trav.”

“Meyer is like that.”

“He says you are supposed to tell me where so much money came from to start with. I know you somehow tricked Mr. LaFrance into paying such a price for our place. But there’s a lot more.”

“He made a donation, Jan. Press LaFrance made a nice gesture.”

“But… if you stole it from him, I don’t-”

“Meyer, did he give you that money willingly?”

“Willingly!” said Meyer. “He could hardly wait to get rid of it. That is the truth, dear lady.”

“Okay. I give up. But apparently I might end up… Tell him, Meyer.”

“It’s an estimate only. At the end of this year, after all taxes are paid, you should have, I think, about two thousand shares, free and clear, of G.S.A., General Service Associates, worth seventy dollars a share now, and more then. The dividend income will be six to seven thousand a year. All your eggs in one basket, but a very nice basket. Great ratios, great management, fantastic promise. Meyer will have his eye on the basket. With little kids, and you a young woman, you need growth and income. Tomorrow we see some people, start setting up some basic living trust structures.”

“I have to stay over another night,” she told me.

“Or more,” said Meyer. “Depending. A three-year program and you will be on a five-figure income with a nice reserve, with insurance trusts maturing for the college expenses. The boys grows up, get married. You can go abroad, go to Spain, rich and foolish, marry a bullfighter, buy fake paintings. I’ll be right here. A little trembly old man, feeling terrible because I ruined your life.”

And I wondered if it was the first time she had laughed loudly and long since Tush had died.

Sixteen

ON THE following Tuesday night at ten thirty, after Janine had once again fed us well, I strolled with Meyer back to his boat to check on the strategy.

“A piece of genius,” he said, “that call from Connie.”

I had arranged it earlier with Connie, while Meyer was taking Jan to mysterious appointments with lawyors and trust officers, and Connie had called back et six and asked Jan if it was all right if she took the boys with her for a few days. She would take Marguerita with her to look after the kids. There was an Association meeting in Tampa, and then she wanted to go up to Tallahassee for a few days, and stop and visit some other growers on her way back. She’d be gone a week, and why didn’t Jan stay right wliere she was?

“Once she gave in,” said Meyer, “you noticed the relaxation. You noticed she ate better too? You noticed she laughed a little?”

“Conspiracy.”

“The best kind,” he said. “Today I unloaded a thousand shares of Fletcher at thirty-one and moved the funds into G.S.A. It’s the critical time right now. I don’t know how high the rocket goes. Ninety-two thousand shares traded today. Suppose in the morning I call her and tell her the men we have to see will be available Friday morning. No. Saturday morning. So you should move that hunk of ugly luxury before it congeals to the slip. A nice little cruise someplace.”

“I’ll try it. Don’t count on it.”

I went ambling back and went aboard and into the lounge. Janine was standing in the doorway at the forward end of the lounge, the companionway dark behind her.

“Trav?” she said, and her voice was all wrong. It was a sick sad scared voice, and the belt she was wearing was a sinewy, sun-reddened forearm. “Trav? I’m… sorry.”

A knuckly hand appeared at her left side, at waist level, aiming a short barrel of respectable caliber at my middle. “I’m sorry about this, Mr. McGee,” he said. I could make out a tallness behind her, a relative pallor of the face against the gloom behind her.

“Freddy?” I asked.

“Yes sir.”

“I’m sorry about this too, Freddy.”

“Just you stand quiet,” he said. The arm left her waist. A set of regulation handcuffs arched toward me, gleaming in the light, and fell on the lounge carpeting with a jingling thud.

The arm quickly clasped her waist again. “Now you move all the time like slow-motion movies, Mr. McGee. You get down on your knees and take those cuffs there slow, and you edge over slow and reach both arms around that pipe thing and put them on and press them nice and tight.”

“Or?”

“I think you know the corner I’m in, Mr. McGee. It has piled up on me, and no way to stop it or change It. I couldn’t stand being locked up anyplace even for une month without being turned into some kind of tuoimal. So I’ve got no choice. I’m sorry about everything, but sorry doesn’t help. So do it right now, start II mving, or I’ll lay one slug right through your forehead, Mr. McGee.”

Freddy had been worn thin. He was on the edge, ami the truth was in his voice. It made me very obecьwt. Very humble. I moved the way the specialists move when they are lifting the fuse out of a bomb. I snapped the cuffs snugly, taking a faint remote comfort in the knowledge that given ten seconds alone in the lounge I could brace myself, wrench the stanchion loose and get my hands on the revolver in the desk.

He walked Janine out of the doorway and into the lounge. As he put the handgun away, I heard him sigh with the release of tension. He released her and gave her a little push. She stumbled forward, her body slack, head bowed in her despair. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice.

His hand went to his hip pocket, then reached out toward her quite casually. There was a barely audible sound of impact, a hairsoftened, leathery little thopp. She took half a broken step, face emptying. She started to lift her arms to break the fall, then pitched onto her face, jelly-slack, with a tumble of cushioned bone against the lounge carpeting.

I had seen something odd in his face just as he had flicked the lead against her skull. It had been a moment of change and revelation, showing a pleanure of erotic dimensions, of sensual pleasure. It is not an unusual way for the mind of a man to turn rancid. Cops fall in love with the hickory nightstick. Prizefighters forget to pace themselves, going for the sweet knockout. It is a pull that takes some twisted ones into anesthesiology, or into preparing the dead for burial, or into scut-work in asylums. They are the dark brothers of the slackened flesh, turned on in some soiled way by a total vulnerability.

He looked down at her, stepped over her and sat in a chair just out of my reach. He yawned hugely. There was a faint family resemblance to LaFrance. He was a big, stringy, slope-shouldered boy, and he looked stone tired. He held the spring-handled tranquilizer in his right hand and gently bounced the leaden end off the open palm of his other hand. It was of black leather, intricately woven, greasy with much handling.

The only other time I had seen him was when he and another deputy had backed up Sheriff Burgoon when he had picked me up in the lobby of the old hotel.

I sat and hitched around to where I could lean my back against the bulkhead, the stanchion between my flexed knees, forearms resting on my knees.

“Why did you come here, Freddy?”

He was so exhausted his mind was moving slowly. “I remembered two days ago my Uncle Press telling me about this houseboat of yours. I was trying to sneak aboard one of the freighters heading out of Tampa. They watch them too close. I figure I can get out of the country somehow, I can get myself all sorted out and get some time to think what to do next.”

“What you ought to do next is pick up that phone over there and call Sheriff Burgoon and tell him where to come get you.”

“Too late for that.”

“You’ve got a lot of friends in Shawana County. They’ll work things out for you. They think you were defending yourself from Bannon and hit him too hard and got scared. They’ll make sure that old couple where you got the clothes and car won’t press charges.”

“I tell you, Mr. McGee, it’s too late. I had some more bad luck. That’s the only kind I’ve had lately. There’s a woman I killed, not meaning to, over west of Dade City. I tunked her perfect, light and easy and just enough, and she took two steps more than she should have been able to, and when she fell, it was right on a garden rake acrost her throat, and no way in the world to stop all that blood. God, there was a lot of blood! He run into the brush and I don’t know If I winged him at all. Anyway, I couldn’t find him and I had to get out of there. No sir, it’s too late for anything but running and hiding. Things start to go wrong, they just seem to keep right on.”

“How did they go wrong with Tush Bannon?”

“I was patrolling and seen him at just about first light walking the shoulder of the road, carrying a suitcase. I stopped and he said he’d come in on the bus and phoned out to his place and no answer at all. He was worried about Miz Bannon. It’s easy to know later on what you should have done. My daddy had said Mr. Bannon was sure a hard man to discourage. I should have taken him in where we were holding the stuff his wife left and the letter from his wife, and told him his place was all foreclosed and Koaled up with the notices and all. Uncle Press had to have that ten acres, and he was sure going to get it. It had been a real quiet night, so I decided what I’d do was run him on out there so he could see with his own eyes, without me telling him, how he’d lost the whole works for good. I think I wanted to do that because he didn’t act whipped at all. He acted like he had some way out of the mess he was in. So I said maybe the phone wasn’t working and took him out. We got out there and he got ugly when he figured out I had to know that he’d been all foreclosed. Then I told him his wife had left him and left his stuff and a letter with the sheriff and he called me a liar. He walked at me, half yelling at me and I tunked him on the skull. It should have taken him down, but it just bent his knees some and he shook his head and kept coming. So I knew he had a hard skull, and he was big, and he felt ugly, so I made sure the next one would take him down. I put a lot of wrist in it and I figured to lay it right onto his forehead, but he was quick for a big man like that, and he tried to snap his head back.” He sighed. “It hit him right square on the bridge of the nose, Mr. McGee. That’s a real bad place because it drives two little thin bones right back into the brain. I squatted there beside him in the morning light, sweaty and cold, and held my fingers on his wrist, and felt his heart go slower and slower and softer and softer and then it stopped all the way and he shivered sort of, and after a while I figured out it would seem likely he had enough troubles to want to kill himself, and figured out how to make it look like he did and at the same time cover up the places I’d tunked him. You see, I knew if I had to tell what happened, I’d get run out of police work for good, maybe, and it’s the only way I feel good, with the uniform and people listening when you tell them something.”

“But Arlene Denn saw you.”

He shook his head slowly. “All those weird kids. I thought I was in the clear on Bannon. Then she said she watched. I stood out there in the night trying to think of some way I could kill all of them. Like tunk them all on the head and an overdose or something. Or a fire. But I was on the dispatch book because they gave me the complaint. I had those pictures, and I had that stuff I took off them. She didn’t want trouble. I could give her a lot. So when she was off her high and made sense, I asked about maybe if Mrs. Bannon was playing around, or if there was some friend she could say she saw instead of me. So… ”

There was a stir beyond the yellow couch, a grunting sigh. Freddy got up quickly and went to Janine. When he bent down over her, he was out of sight. I heard the tone of his gentle voice but not the words. It sounded as if a lover were murmuring to his beloved, comforting her fears. I heard the tiny thud once more.

When he came back and sat as before, I said, “That isn’t going to do her any good, Deputy.”

“Or no harm, Mr. McGee. I know just where and how hard. It just kind of puts a jolt onto the brain, with hardly even a headache afterward. I’ll be thinking on what I should do so I can get some sleep without worrying about either one of you. You know, if you’d only been right here on this boat when Shawana County made the request to have you picked up and held, everything would have been all smoothed over.”

“Don’t count on it. No matter how good you make it look, Freddy, the people I was with at the time you killed Tush would have come forward and cleared me and left you with a lot of explaining.”

“By then there would have been no Arlie to change her story. It maybe would be a big mystery, but there’d be no way to get me mixed up in it.”

“So Tush was an accident, and the woman with the rake in her neck was an accident, but Arlie Denn was going to be on purpose.”

“You get pushed so far there’s only maybe one little narrow way out of the corner. I better get you two…”

I awakened lame and sore, with no knowledge of time or place. Daylight came from overhead, around the edges of a hatch cover that did not fit as well as it should. I had what I thought was a hangover headache, and when I realized that I was in the forward bilge area of the Flush, curled close to the anchor line well, the old frame members of the hull biting into my side, I thought that only a sorry drunk would pick that as a place to sleep. But when I tried to bring my right hand up and rub my face, it stopped with a jolting clink of chain. I turned my head and saw that my right wrist was handcuffed to one of the forward braces made of two-inch galvanized pipe, braces I had installed long ago to give her more forward rigidity in rough water. And I wasn’t going to yank one of those loose, not without a chain hoist and a power winch.

I fingered my skull with my left hand and found a tender area above the right ear and a little behind it. I could not remember being “tunked,” or where the conversation had stopped. My thinking gear was sluggish. It took me a long time to realize that my houseboat could not be moored at Bahia Mar. The motion was wrong. She was at rest, bow into a gentle swell, lifting and falling. Sometimes she would get out of phase with the swell and I could feel the soft tug of the anchor line snubbing the soft of the bow.

I sat up and shifted and found a better place to stretch out, where no white oak ribs dug into me. I kept telling myself that Janine was perfectly all right. There wasn’t a thing in my pockets of any earthly use to me. And there was nothing I could reach. I managed to doze off a few times. The motion was restful. At eleven fifteen by my watch I awoke and heard the latch on the small hatchway entrance to the forward bilge click.

Freddy Hazzard came crawling through, wearing a pair of my fresh khaki pants and a clean T-shirt. He nodded and reached back through the hatch and lifted a half bucket of water through and put it within reach. He reached again and brought in a brown paper bag and put it beside the bucket. “Mr. McGee, there’s milk and bread and cheese in the sack and a roll of toilet paper. You’ll have to make out best you can with a bucket, because I’m not about to let you loose until there’s a good reason.

“Where’s Mrs. Bannon?”

“She’s just fine. I found some chain and a padlock, and I got her chained in the head by one ankle, and I took her some food first.”

“Where are we?”

“Anchored in the flats just off Sands Key, way east of the channel, maybe twelve mile south of Miami. I had me a time working this thing out of that big marina. The wind takes it. I fished commercial about every summer I was a kid in school. Mr. McGee, I found your fuel tables in the drawer next to the chart rack. With the fuel aboard it figures out to maybe four hundred miles range. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Why should I tell you anything, Freddy?”

He squatted on his heels, balancing easily to the motion of the hull. He looked at me in a troubled way. “I got that little runabout boat in tow. That’s what gave me fits getting clear of the boat basin. I’ve been checking her over, and I think she’s got maybe three hundred miles in her because the tanks are topped off full. Cuba would be easy, but I’ve got the feeling it would be another kind of jail. I’ve been checking weather and there’s a good five-day forecast. I think I could just about get to the Caicos Islands. There isn’t much of any red tape or government there because, like a friend explained to me, they used to belong to Jamaica and when Jamaica went independent, the Turks and Caicos Islands weren’t in that deal. I’ve got your papers and I can scorch them up some like this boat burned, and leave enough to read so I can pass for you where nobody knows you. I’m sorry about the way it has to be, but if I’m going to be you, I’m going to have to leave you and her fastened tight to this thing when she runs out of fuel and I open her up and let her go down. I thought of all other ways and there just isn’t a one. Now, I’m telling you this, how it’s going to be, but I’m not telling her because she’d come all apart. And you won’t be telling her because you and she aren’t ever going to see each other again. It’s the only chance and I’m sorry about it, but I have to give it a try. Now you want to know why you should tell me anything. It’s because when the time comes, I can lay one on your skull bone and hers too and you’ll drown without knowing a thing about it. And I’ll make you comfortable as I can meanwhile. Her too. But every boat has cranky ways, and when this thing isn’t acting right, I want to ask you what to do and you tell me right. If you don’t, you aren’t either one of you going to be comfortable hardly at all. And you should know that when I was carrying her into the head and getting that chain fixed on her leg, I thought about how full-grown women like that always made me feel dumb and clumsy and afraid to even think of touching them. But since she’s going down to the bottom anyways, it wouldn’t matter what happened to her beforehand. I might mess with her and I might not I couldn’t say right now, but there’s not so much chance of it if you act right. So right now I want to know just where to put those tacs to get the top range out of this thing.”

“It isn’t going to work.”

“It’s the only chance I’ve got. What rpm, mister?”

“Eleven hundred.”

“Where’s the switch on the automatic pilot?”

“Up on the topside controls, under the panel, over on the port corner.”

“Where’s your compass correction card?”

“Pasted to the inside lid of the box where the rule and dividers are.”

He nodded. “I got a nap, but I need a lot of catching up. I’m going to sleep out the rest of the day and move on out of here about dusk. I’ll bring you down some blankets so you can rest better, Mr. McGee.”

“Don’t knock yourself out with favors.”

He left. It was just a wild enough idea to work, if I’d been alone aboard. But Meyer would know Janine had been aboard, and so would Connie Alvarez. They would never quit, not until they found out what happened. Small comfort.

So this had to be the time. During this long afternoon. Don’t count on his getting careless later on. Because even when pooped, he wasn’t careless. He’s been on the run. His two shipmates are latched up tightly. The bed is deep and soft. The sea rocks him. He may never sleep as deeply again.

So get to it, McGee. Get something working, mostly your dull head. Nothing in the pockets. Escape needs tools. Like a belt buckle? Ah yes. A careful young man. The old jail training. Belt and shoelaces were gone. What have you got that’s made of metal, fella? Well, you have a corroded old bucket and you have a wristwatch, and you have some fillings in the fangs, and that is it.

And if you had metal, what could you do? You might try to pick the lock on the cuff. Think nothing of the fact that they are designed to be pickprooЈ Or if you happened to have a very thin and fairly narrow piece of spring steel, you could maybe work it into this little aperture where the cuff clasps together and maybe free the ratchets somehow. Except the good sets, like this one, have little knurled places designed to keep you from doing just that.

The hatch latch clicked and it opened and he shoved two blankets in far enough for me to reach them and slammed it again. Nice gesture, fella. Thanks a lot.

More appraisal. The cuff would slide along the heavy pipe bracing. They were in the shape of the letter X laying on its side, and I was cuffed to the one with its low end on the starboard side, the high end on the port. They did not quite touch at the center of the X. There was room to get the cuff between them. I could stand up, if I kept pretty well hunched over. I gave myself very good grades in the handyman department, at least in that bracing chore. I had hacksawed them to fit snugly, then slipped the collars over them, each with a base about four inches across with four, big bolt-holes. Even with the biggest wrench aboard, I would have had trouble. The rust looked as solid as the steel.

Suddenly I remembered that they were just friction collars. They were not threaded on. And the lip was about one inch deep. So, if a man could put his back into it, and put enough of a bend in one of them to make it an inch shorter, it would slip out of the bolted collar and that intelligent fellow would be free.

I made a blanket pad to protect my back. I hunched under the cross pipe, got myself nicely braced and tried to bend it. I tried until the world turned jet black with little streaks of red flickering through it. I tried until my ears were full of blood roar and my jaws ached and the pipe was grooving my bones, but it did not bend a quarter of an inch, if that.

I sat down and panted for a time. My eyes stung with sweat. Impasse. The only possible way I could get myself loose, other than chewing my hand off at the wrist, was to bend the pipe brace. And I couldn’t bend it.

Give me a lever and a place to stand, somebody said. Or was it a fulcrum? Anyway, he was going to move the earth. If a reason had been given, I had forgotten it.

Sure. With a lever or a winch or a truck jack, no problem at all. I drank some milk and ate some cheese. Okay McGee. Sit here and make yourself a truck jack out of some bread, cheese, a watch, a pail and two blankets. The old know-how.

And something went skittering across the back of my mind so swiftly I didn’t catch it. A frail ghost of some kind of a frail idea. I lay back and tried to think of nothing at all, and when it appeared again I grabbed it. I shook it but it didn’t have anything to tell me. It muttered something about a turnbuckle and I let it go.

There are two ways to move something. Push it or pull it. I sat up and looked at my equipment. I took one blanket and, starting at one corner, I rolled it as neatly and tightly as I could. There was a squat thick short timber brace on the port side near the bulkhead, but it was a foot beyond my best reach. I soaked the ends of my blanket rope in the water bucket. I took off my shoes and socks and stretched out and fumbled the end of the blanket rope around the brace and clapped it between the soles of my feet and pulled it through and toward me. I looped the other end around the pipe brace to which I was fastened, and pulled it as tightly as I could manage and knotted the wet ends together. I poured the water out of the bucket, put my boat shoes back on and trod upon the bucket until the side seam parted and the seam that held the bottom on tore loose. Then I stomped and folded and grunted and sweated until I had a clumsy metal club about two and a half feet long. I wrapped that up in the other blanket as tightly as I could and tied it with strips torn off my shirt. Then I stuck six inches of the padded lever between the two strands of the blanket rope and began winding.

It was easy-at first. The blanket began to twist and knot like the rubber band in a toy airplane. The timber brace made alarming creaking sounds. Each full wind took more effort. I had wrapped my lever in the blanket to try to keep it from bending. But as I began to have to hold it right out at the end to get enough leverage, it began to take on a curve. When I noticed that the pipe brace was taking on a curve too, I began to worry about what might happen when all that accumulated force was released. The sweat ran. I turned my lever. The blanket was so taut I could imagine I could hear it humming. What is the breaking strength of the average blanket?

Suddenly it was like being dropped in the middle of a threshing machine. The pipe sprang out of the collars and banged me on the shoulder. The lever spun free and hit me on the elbow and numbed my forearm and hand. The pipe spun and rang against my skull and knocked me down and tried to twist my arm off by the cuffed wrist. It was an ungodly din, and Freddy was going to come charging down. I slipped the cuff off the end of the pipe. I clawed the shirt strips off my lever and knelt by the hatchway with the raw, flattened chunk of bucket held high, silently begging him to stick his head in, and wondering if he was on the other side waiting for me to stick my head out.

So I went creeping cautiously out, holding the loose cuff in my right hand with enough tension to keep the chain from clinking. I went up through the other hatch forward and moved silently aft. I stopped every few steps to hold my breath and cock my head and listen. At the mouth of the corridor I heard a buzzing snore, deep and slow and regular. The door of the master stateroom was ajar. The door to the head was closed, and I could hear a faint clinking of chain.

Procedure: -Go to the lounge. Get the weapon from the desk. Go charging in and blow one of his kneecaps off just to be on the safe side. Liberate the lady. Head for Dinner Key and radio the police to meet us.

But again he was careful. He had shaken the place down. No 38. I checked the pilothouse and the shark rifle was not in the spring clamps where it belonged.

Revised procedure:-Silently liberate the lady and get her the hell out of there and into the Munequita and when we had drifted far enough, start her up and leave in a big hurry.

Chain. So the quickest, easiest way would be with the great big nippers, a brute set with handles a yard long. And they were right where I hoped they would be, in behind the tool locker, wedged in place.

I enjoyed his snoring as I moved like a ghost past the door to the master stateroom. I opened the door to the head slowly. She was sitting on the floor. She snapped her head around and looked at me with a madwoman’s face, eyes and mouth wide and round, breath sucking to scream. But comprehension came just in time and I eased in and closed the door just as silently as I had opened it. She had found some greasy medication in the medicine locker and she had greased her bare ankle and foot and had been trying to work the chain off of it. She had gouged through the skin and her greasy ankle and the floor was speckled with blood.

I slid one jaw of the nippers under the ankle chain and applied pressure. The jaws bit through and the chain fell away, rattling on the deck. I put the nippers down and helped her up. She clung to me. I whispered to her and told her he was asleep and we were going to go aboard the Munequita and release her tow line and drift away. She bobbed her head in violent agreement.

When we had crept to within two feet of the partly open door we had to pass, I suddenly knew what was wrong. I couldn’t hear him snoring. So I took her by the arm to try to make it a fast run, but the door swung open and there he was. I shoved her along the corridor and in the same violent effort I tried to jump him. But a big soft hot red hammer hit the meat of my left shoulder and that much impact at that close range spun me and drove me back through the open door of the guest stateroom. The spinning tangled my legs and I fell heavily, remembering as I went down an old lesson painfully learned long ago. When you are shot,.you are dead. Bang, you’re dead! So be dead, because it might be the only chance you have left in the world.

I heard him come in to stand over me. “You damn fool!” he said. “You sorry pitiful damn fool.” And he put his toe against my hip and nudged me to see how slack I was. I swung both legs and swept his feet out from under him and clawed my way onto him, yelling at the same time to Jan to get off the boat, swim ashore, run like hell.

It was very busy work. My left arm wasn’t part of me, and he kept trying to work that revolver around to get it against me, and I kept trying to stay behind him and get the cuff chain around his throat. He managed to struggle up with me, which was a demonstration of an impressive amount of wiry strength, but I yanked him off balance and toppled back on the bed with him. It had taken only a very few sec onds. I gave up the chain bit and got my right forearm across his throat, but he kept his chin tucked down well. I got the gun wrist with my left hand, but the left arm was getting worse by the moment, and slowly, slowly he was turning the muzzle to where he could be sure of putting the next slug in my head without even having to look back at me.

It was then that Janine came through the door screeching, and bearing on high, in both hands, the small red fire extinguisher she had apparently yanked out of the clips on the corridor wall. Screeching, face contorted, she ran directly at us, starting the great descending blow when she was at least three steps from the bed. He wrenched the gun wrist free and there was the great slamming sound of a shot in an enclosed place, and I saw her head wrench sideways as she struck her fearful blow, then a jostle of great weight made such a sickening pain in my shoulder and arm, the world shrank down to a little white thing and winked out.

I don’t know how long I was out. Thirty seconds, fifteen minutes. I came struggling up aware of great urgency, aware of being pinned under great weight. Freddy Hazzard seemed very heavy. I fingered his slack throat with my right hand and couldn’t find a thing. I wormed parlway out from under him and saw one good reason for the weight. Janine lay spilled across us, supine, the small of her back across his loins, her dark head hanging back over the edge of the bed.

I squirmed out from under both of them and stood up. I did not want to feel any more dead throats. The left side of her head was toward me. Her hair was clotted heavily with blood. I stared at her and when I saw the rise and fall of her chest, I risked the finger on the throat, found a place going bump, bump, bump.

Then I looked at him. Nobody was going to be able to feel any pulse. He had a grooved head. Diagonal. From one temple across to the opposite eyebrow. A groove as wide as the fire extinguisher and maybe an inch deep. The eye bulged with a blank astonishment greater than any astonishment in the living world.

The faintness came over me and faded away slowly. I stood three stories tall and I would sway in the slightest breeze. Toy fellow made of broomstraws and flour paste. My left arm hung there, and I looked down and saw the blood dropping busily from my fingertips.

Things to do, McGee. Got to take care. Got to tidy ship. Grab the buckets and brooms, men. Clean sweep fore and aft. So start moving, because you don’t know how much time you have, and it might not be enough. I fingered Hazzard’s pockets and found the cuff key and managed to turn it with numb fingers and get my right wrist free. The metal had rubbed it raw.

I could not make myself hurry. I felt thoughtful. It was a kind of faraway game. Amusing and not very important. I might be able to do what might keep me from falling off the edge for good, and I might not. Interesting.

On my slow way to the head I ripped my shirt off. I turned my left side toward the mirror. The entrance hole was three inches below the top of the shoulder and on the outside of the upper arm, but deep enough so that I couldn’t tell if it had done bone damage. The slug had tumbled apparently, and torn one hell of a hole on the way out. I lifted my left arm with my right hand, braced the left palm against the wall and locked the elbow. I took my time putting the gauze pads on the wounds, winding it very neatly, tearing the surgical tape with my teeth.

“Nice,” I heard myself say in a voice that seemed to come from the next room. “Very neat.”

So I went floating blissfully to the galley. Shock. Loss of blood. Replace fluids. Use stimulants. There was a quart jar of orange juice in the icebox. I found an unopened fifth of Wild Turkey in the liquor locker. I put them on the booth table and eased into the seat and wondered what a good name would be. An Orange Turkey? A Wild Screwdriver? The white mist began moving in from the edges and I realized nobody was going to come along and serve me. I picked my left arm up by the wrist and put the arm on the table. It wiggled its fingers when I sent the message down the nerves. I drank a third of the quart of juice. I took four long swallows of the bourbon. Second third of the juice. Another deep drag on the liquor. Polish off the juice. Then enough bourbon to just begin to tickle the gag reflex.

Come on, white mist. Take another shot. Here is McGee.

But it had edged so far back I couldn’t see it anymore out of the corners of my eyes. I got up without thinking of my arm. It slid off the table and flapped me on the leg. And I thought about Janine, and she had a slug in her skull, and the bump, bump, bump would be over. I picked up my left arm and turned it and looked at my watch. How had it gotten to be three in the afternoon?

Go find out. You have to find out sometime. So go take a look at her.

The throat was still knocking away like a good little engine. I tugged at her and got her off Freddy and straightened her out on the bed. I did not want to move her too much. But I did not want to take the chance of her waking up all of a sudden and finding herself right there side by side with what had been Freddy.

I got an old tarp and put it on the floor beside the bed, on his side, reached beyond him and got hold of the bloody sheet and yanked it out from under her, and tugged on it until it rolled him off and he fell onto the tarp with a lanky thudding, face-down. I left the sheet on him and flipped the ends and side of the tarp over him. I turned on the bright reading light and fingered her crusted hair apart and found where the bullet had grooved her skull in an area an inch and a half long and the same distance above her left ear. There didn’t seem to be anything you could pull together or sew together. It had punched out a strip of scalp meat, hair and all, and had clotted over and stopped bleeding. I soaked gauze in antiseptic and patted the wound very delicately, then tied the pad in place with more gauze.

Then, in a moment of pure genius, I got a piece of sheeting and made a sling for myself, so my arm would stop swinging around and flapping at me. It was much better. I didn’t want her to wake up and look in that tarp. I found the fire extinguisher in the corner where it had rolled. I wiped it off and put it back in the clips. I sat on the floor and put both feet against the tarp and shoved Freddy half under the bunk where he was less noticeable.

I went above decks. We were riding well at anchor. Sea calm. Skies clear. I went below and stripped and cleaned myself up. I wasn’t bleeding through the gauze. Good sign. I put a robe on. The empty sleeve flapping was less troublesome than the empty arm.

I made two giant peanut butter sandwiches and yonked them down and washed them the rest of the way with a quart of cold milk. What every healthy American kid needs after being shot.

At four thirty, after some mental practice, I warmed up the set and got through to Miami Marine and put through a credit card call to Meyer aboard his boat. She told him she had a call for him from the motor vessel, the Busted Flush.

“Travis? Say, I see you must have talked her into it without too much trouble, huh? Over.”

“It was spur of the moment, Meyer. Crazy wild kids taking off on a magic adventure. Over.”

“Are you maybe a little smashed, old friend? Listen, I can’t talk about the other thing, not with half this transmission open for anybody who wants to listen. Tell her things are going well. How about the next time you call me, make it from shore and I can tell you the news. Over.”

“Will do. I don’t know how long we’ll cruise around. Maybe I can keep her out a couple of weeks. Over.”

“It will be great for her, Travis. And it won’t hurt you. Have some fun. Catch fish. Sing a little.”

As soon as I signed off, the reaction began. Somehow you do what you have to do, and somehow the machinery accepts the abuse. But when you’ve forced your way through it, all the gears and wheels start to chitter and grind and wobble around on the pinions. I felt icy cold. I knew it was all sour. She would never come out of it. Something would be bleeding in her head and that would be the end of it. Or somebody had seen him coming aboard, or seen him taking the houseboat out. My arm would start to rot. The hook would pull out of loose sand and we’d drift aground.

I went back below and looked at her and went into the master stateroom and slipped out of the robe and into the giant bed and wished I wasn’t too old to cry myself to sleep…

I heard her saying my name for a long time before

I let it wake me up. She sat on the edge of the bed, facing me. She wore a short beach robe and she had fashioned a turban affair out of a pale blue towel. It was night. The light was behind her.

“Trav? Trav?”

“Mmm. How’s your head, Janine?”

“I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right. Trav, how badly are you hurt?” She had bared my shoulder and she was looking at the bandage.

“It’s just a scratch.”

“Please. How bad is it?”

“I don’t think it’s too bad.”

“I want to look at it.”

“Let me wake up. I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”

“Get waked up, then. I’ll be right back.”

She came back with a towel, a first-aid kit and a basin of hot water. I rolled onto my right side. She went to the other side of the bed, spread the towel and equipment out, and snipped the bandage off.

I heard her insuck of breath, and said, “That bad?”

“I… I think it looks worse than it is. I’ll try not to hurt you.”

She busied herself. She was very gentle. “Travis?”

“Yes, Jan.”

“He was going to kill us both, wasn’t he?”

“Maybe.”

“I know he was. From the way he looked at me. After he… I thought when you came in and snipped me loose, it was him coming back.”

“Did he give you a bad time?”

“Sort of. After he chained me up, he hit me on the head again. Very very lightly, and it was just enough so everything seemed to go far away and I couldn’t move or speak or see. I wasn’t awake or asleep. I could feel what he was doing. Just with his hands. Sort of… to see what a woman was like there. And when I could move, I grabbed his hands and pushed them away. And he looked at me and blushed and then sort of half smiled and shrugged and I knew he knew I wouldn’t ever be able to tell anybody about whatever he decided to do to me. I knew he’d come back… but it was you. And then I was sure he’d killed you like he killed Tush and… I knew I could kill him. I knew he couldn’t stop me. And so… I did.”

“You didn’t quite make it, honey. I took care of it.”

“Don’t try to be sweet and protective and all. I looked at him in there. I had to touch him and turn him over to make sure. I even felt it in my hands when it hit him, a kind of looseness, the way his head went. I’m not proud of it or full of joy or anything. But I can live with it… There. I think that’s better than the way it was, Travis.”

“Thanks,” I said and rolled onto my back. She took the basin and towel and gear away.

When she came back, she stood at the foot of the bed and said, “What do we do now?”

“I called Meyer while you were still out.”

“And told him about this?”

“No. I said we might cruise around for quite a while.”

“You did?”

“Until we’re both healed up enough so people won’t ask questions. If we go back, we make statements. Everybody will want to see how much front page space they can get, how many times they can get their pictures taken with us. What good will that do you or your kids?”

“No good at all.”

“Or do Freddy’s people?”

“They might as well think he’s alive in the world, somewhere.”

“And I couldn’t take that kind of hot publicity, Jan. I can’t start wearing a public face. It would put me out of business. I don’t need a lot of official interest. There’s a little bit now. All I can handle. So we deepsix him and say nothing. Not a word, Jan. Not ever, to anyone. Can you handle that?”

Her face was quiet, her eyes thoughtful. In the seanight there was the tangible presence of death aboard. A head-knocker whose luck turned very bad, who’d never make it to the Caicos, who’d had something rancid going on in the back of his mind, some warped thing all mixed up with darkness and helplessness and sexual assault. The sickness had begun to stir and move under stress, had begun to emerge, but his life had stopped before it had gone out of control.

She said, “What if you don’t heal right? What if we have to find a doctor?”

“We have a story. We were potting at beer cans with a thirty-eight. The kick startled you. It slipped out of your hand, went off when it hit the deck.”

“Does… anyone but us know he was aboard?”

“Not likely.”

She nodded. “I’ll be all right, Travis. I’ll be fine.” I got up and went on deck and discovered I had completely forgotten the anchor lights. We were well away from any course a small boat might take, but a darkened boat at night invites investigation. I put us back onto legal status. We were riding well. The night was soft, the stars slightly misted. Miami was a giant blow to the north.

I stayed topside a long time. When I went below, she was curled up on the yellow couch in the lounge, sound asleep. I looked down at her and hoped that she would have enough iron in her to help a one-armed man with some curiously ugly chores. She had dark patches under her eyes. I turned off the small dim lamp nearby and felt my way through dark and familiar spaces back to the master stateroom.

I didn’t really know if she could last, if she could handle it, until the neat morning when I sat on the edge of the freshly made bed in the guest stateroom and watched her using the curved sailmaker’s needle and the heavy thread, sewing Freddy into his sea shroud. She had cleaned and dressed my wound afresh. I had wired a spare anchor snugly to the deputy’s ankles, and tucked his gun and cuffs and the black leather sap in beside him.

When she ran out of the hank of thread, and clipped it off and took a fresh end from the spool and moistened it in her lips before threading the needle again, she looked up at me for a moment. It was a flat, dark look, and it made me think of old stories of how warriors dreaded being taken alive and turned over to the women.

At the end of day she wrested the anchor free when I ran the Flush up to it, and brought it aboard. We ran outside, creaking and rocking in the swell. I put it on automatic pilot at just enough speed to hold it quartering into the sea, and together we clumsied him up and out onto the side deck. She held the book and tilted it to catch the light from where the sun had gone down, and she read the words we thought would be appropriate to the situation.

She laid the book down and with my one arm and her two, we lifted the stiffened body upright, and as she held it propped against the rail, I bent and grasped the tarp at the feet and lifted and toppled it into the sea. It sank at once. And then I took the wheel and came about and headed for the buoy that marks the pass back into Biscayne Bay.

Seventeen

ONCE SHE accepted the need to stay by ourselves, to heal in order to avoid questions, a strange new placidity came over her. She had long times of silence, and I could guess that now that she knew what had happened, and how it had happened, part of it was over and the part about finding an acceptance of Tush’s death had begun.

She began to eat well and spend some of the sun hours basting and broiling herself to the deep tan her skin took readily, and she began sleeping long and deeply, gaining the weight that softened her bone-sharp face, that filled out the long concave line of the insides of her thighs, that made her fanny look a great deal less as if it had been slapped flat with a one by six.

I called Meyer from shoreside phones. I wore the arm out of the sling for longer periods each day, reslingfng it when the knitting muscle structures began to ache.

She phoned Connie when the trip with the kids was over, and Connie accepted the notion that a little more time cruising would do her good. She talked to each of the boys. They were fine. They missed her. She missed them.

Meyer eased out of the last of her holdings in Fletcher on the Wednesday, the last day of January, at a good price, and when we talked again the following Monday evening-I had phoned him from Islamorada-he said with undisguised glee that Fletcher had gotten up to forty-six dollars a share at noon, and the Exchange had suspended trading in it fifteen minutes later, pending a full investigation of a tip that the earnings reports had been misstated, that a syndicate of speculators had been boosting the price, and that the company officers had been quietly unloading all their own holdings at these false and inflated values. The word on the Street was that it might be another Westec case, and it was rumored that a Florida-based speculator named Gary Santo was deeply involved in the artificial runup of the price.

“If they ever approve it for listing again,” Meyer said, “it will open at about six dollars, and even that is more than a realistic book value per share.”

The next morning the Flush was tied up at the marina dock at Islamorada, and after breakfast I had Jan peel the final dressing off the wound. The entrance wound was a pink dime-sized dimple, vivid in the middle of the surrounding tan. She made careful inspection of the exit area, held the back of her hand against it to check for any inner heat of infection and said, “This last little piece of scab is going to come off any day now. If we could have had it sewn up, there wouldn’t be so much scarring, Trav. It looks as if… somebody stabbed you with one of those wood rasp things.”

“I got through the whole day without the sling yesterday. And I can hold that smallest sledge out at arm’s length for fifteen seconds. And so I keep a shirt on till the scars bleach white and match the old ones.”

“You would make a very low-grade hide,” she said. “They might find three or four sections that would make nice little lampshades, but they’d have to throw the rest away.”

“Just accident-prone, I guess. And you pass inspection now, lady. Keep it combed that way and you’re fine.”

“You see, I was aboard this funny houseboat and it got rough and I lurched and took this great gouge out of my scalp on some kind of sharp thing sticking out.”

‘We can head back so Meyer can help you count your money.“

Late that afternoon she went below and came up with two cold uncapped bottles of Tuborg and sat close beside me and said, “A sort of an announcement, Travis McGee. There won’t be another chance to talk, probably. I wish to announce that you are a dear, strange, ceremonious kind of guy, and I didn’t like you very much at all before Tush died and didn’t know why he liked you, and now I do, maybe.”

“Tell me. Maybe I can use it.”

“It made me jumpy to be alone with you, because the way I had you all figured out, you were going to comfort the little widow woman. Life goes on and all that. Let me bring you back to life, darling. A woman always knows when a man finds her physically attractive, and I am flattered that you so do.”

“I so do.”

“I expected some of the gooey rationalizations of the chronic stud, including how Tush would approve, and besides it’s so healthy. But you have been very stuffy and proper and dear. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Maybe I would have gone along with it, out of some kind of self-destructive impulse. I don’t know. I don’t know if I was a one-man gal. I sort of think so. Maybe that part of me-the privacy part will come alive again. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t give me a chance to make any choice. Physically I’m a lot better than I was. Better nerves. But I’m still half a person. And so damned lonely, and the world is so… flattened out.” She reached up and kissed me under the ear. “So thanks for not trying to be God’s gift to the bereaved, dear.”

“You’re welcome aboard anytime. You wear well.” She smiled a bitter little twisty smile and, eyes wet, took my hand and clenched it tightly. So we were a couple of kids in an abandoned barn and the big storm was hammering down, and we held hands for comfort. Tush was her storm, and perhaps Puss was mine.

On another Wednesday, the day of the Valentine, Meyer came over at high noon and interrupted my project of cutting and laying some Nautilex that was a clever imitation of bleached teak on a portion of the afterdeck.

“So I am here and I have brought you a Valentine,” said he.

“Sometimes, Meyer, when you act like Porky, you make me feel like Pogo.”

“Read the Card.”

I put down the knife I was cutting the vinyl with and thumbed his card open. Homemade. He had drawn a heart pierced by an arrow, with a dollar sign dangling from the end of the arrow. His verse said, “Roses are red; violets are blue. Unadulterated, unselfish, unrewarded efforts in behalf of even the grieving widow of an old and true friend are not like you.”

“It rhymes,” he said.

Inside the folded card was his personal check made out to me for twenty-five thousand dollars.

“What the hell is this?”

“Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It’s short-term. It’s a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It’s a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair.”

“And you are comparatively large but fair.”

“I think of myself that way. Where did the check go? Into the pocket so fast? Good.” He looked at his watch. “I am taking a lady to lunch. Make a nice neat deck there, Captain.” And away he went, humming.

And not over four minutes later a half-familiar voice said, “McGee?” I looked up from the tricky bit of fitting the vinyl at the hatch corner and saw the three of them lined up on the dock staring at me without much affability or enthusiasm. Gary Santo on the left. Mary Smith in a bright orange mini-tent and a little-girl hat standing in the middle. A stranger on the right, medium tall, of that hunched, thin pallor that looks like sickness, even to the little watermelon pot, with a face like a bleached mole, glasses with massive black frames, a briefcase in hand.

“Howdy do there, Gary boy,” I said. “Miss Mary.”

“And this is Mr. D.C. Spartan, one of my attorneys. May we come aboard?”

“Why, surely. Please do.”

I took them into the lounge. There was no handshaking going on. I excused myself and went and washed the grime off my hands, pulled the sweaty T-shirt off, swabbed chest, neck and shoulders with a damp towel, put on a fresh white sports shirt and rejoined them, saying, “Coffee, folks? Booze?”

“No thanks,” said Santo.

Spartan said, in a voice like a talking computer with a slight honk in the speaker system, “It might be advisable for you to have your attorney present, if you could reach him quickly.”

“Now what would I need lawyers for? Somebody suing me?”

“Don’t get so damned cute!” Santo said. His face looked slightly mottled and puffy, as if the facials’ weren’t working well lately.

“Please, Mr. Santo,” Spartan said. “Mr. McGee, we are facing what might shape up into a very exhaustive investigation of Mr. Santo’s role in the speculation in Fletcher Industries. And it may well become necessary to have you testify as to your part in bringing this… uh… investment opportunity to Mr. Santo’s attention.”

“There seems to be an unfounded opinion that Mr. Santo knew of the precarious condition of Fletcher Industries and conspired to run the stock up, and then short it, and that this scheme was interrupted by the suspension of trading in Fletcher common. To show Mr. Santo’s good faith, we will have to subpoena your trading records and show that you had taken a position in Fletcher and then went to Mr. Santo to elicit his interest, and that Mr. Santo then made a cursory investigation of the company’s condition before beginning a very active trading in the common stock.”

I shook my head. “Mr. Spartan, you lost me there somewhere. I never bought a share of Fletcher. I don’t own any stock at all. Never have.”

“Come off it, friend,” Santo said in an ugly way. “You better be able to show me you took a real good bath in Fletcher. You better be able to show me you got stung.”

“I’ve never owned a share of stock in my life!”

Spartan looked sad. He dug into the briefcase. He took out the stapled Xerox copies of the fake margin account with Shutts, Gaylor, Stith and Company. “Come now, Mr… McGee! Surely you know that your account records can be subpoenaed from the brokerage house.”

I looked at them and handed them back. “I’d say that’s going to be a very confused bunch of brokers, folks. If I had to guess, I’d say these were Xerox copies of some kind of forgery, or there’s somebody else with my name. I just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“But Miss Smith can testify to what you told her and to you giving her the originals to Xerox. Do you actually want to deny that you went to Mr. Santo’s offices and talked about this whole matter to Miss Smith?”

“Oh, I went there all right. I didn’t have any appointment, and I had a hard time getting to talk to anybody, even this pretty little quail. Now, I suppose whatever we said was taped, just as a matter of convenience, you know, for reference. But I don’t think you can introduce that kind of a tape, and even if you can, it would have to be the whole tape, not just some edited parts of it.”

“There is a tape, of course,” Spartan said. “And we can prove it predates Mr. Santo’s interest in Fletcher common.”

“Spartan,” said Gary Santo, “I think this son of a bitch is too cute. I think he was working for somebody. I think he was setting me up.”

“Sometimes I work for people,” I said. “But not for long. Mary, you remember the long talk we had about that Gary’s parcel he holds up there in Shawana County under the name of Southway Lands, Inc.?”

“What?” she said. “There wasn’t anything like that.”

“But, honey, you confirmed the rumor that Southway was going to sell out to Calitron for a nice price, if a fellow up there by the name of LaFrance could assemble the rest of the acreage.”

“But what are you trying to do to me?” she asked.

“Say! If I’ve spilled the beans and gotten you into some kind of trouble or anything… I guess we didn’t talk about it up in the offices. That was later, honey.”

“We never talked about that!”

I shook my head. “But you told me how Bannon got through to you, and you had a drink with him at the airport, and he told you how he was being squeezed and wanted Santo’s help, and you decided you couldn’t take a little thing like that to Mr. Santo and waste his time with a little guy who got caught in the middle.”

She caught her little lip in her teeth the same way she had when talking to Tush.

I continued. “Remember, honey? You said that you thought Mr. Santo had mentioned how, up in the hotel penthouse in Atlanta, LaFrance had tried to get Santo to buy Bannon out and Santo told LaFrance that it was his problem and he should handle it? That was the same night you told me you’d give me a clean bill with Santo.”

I moved just fast enough. Santo got up and got over to her and got his hand back for a slap that would have loosened her teeth. I caught his wrist. The position gave me very nice leverage. I swung the wrist back and over and down and ended up in about the same position as a pitcher after letting go of his best fast ball. Santo boomed into the yellow couch hard enough to snap his head back and then bounced forward onto his hands and knees on the rug.

“Now just a minute. Gentlemen! Just a minute?” Spartan said.

Santo shook his dazed head. I picked him up by the nape of the neck and sat him on the couch.

I stood in front of him and said, “Fun time is over, Gary baby. I didn’t get a damned word of this from pretty-bit over there. She’s devoted. She’s energetic. She just never got a chance to get close to me. I made sure of that. Tush Bannon was a damned good friend. Your pressure, second-hand, drove him into the ground. And it went a little wrong up there and they went further than they had to and killed him.” He stared up at me, very attentive.

“I squashed LaFrance. I would have squashed you too if I could have figured a way. But you’re too big and too spread out. All I could do was sting you a little.”

“A little?” he said wonderingly. “A little? You cut my venture capital right down to the nub, friend. You fixed me so I’m associated with any new stock issue and it never gets off the ground. Sting me a little! God damn you, I might never take up the slack you put in me. And all of this was over some… dreary little smalltime buddy of yours?”

I leaned over and slapped his face sideways and backhanded it back to center position.

“Manners,” I said.

I moved back to give him a chance to come off the couch. He thought it over. Then he took out a frostywhite handkerchief and patted the corner of his mouth and examined the dappling of blood.

I turned to Spartan. “Tell him how he stands if it checks out that I’ve never owned a share of Fletcher.”

“Well… it would eliminate one possible way to ease the present situation.”

I turned back to Santo and looked for that tinge of gray under the barbered, lotioned, international complexion. Saw a little. Not like LaFrance. Saw enough of it, and enough slump of resignation. He dabbed at his mouth again and got up.

“Come on, Spartan,” he said. He stopped so close in front of Mary Smith’s chair there was not room for her to get out of it.

“You’re fired, you stupid bitch!”

“But you heard him say I didn’t-”

“You didn’t do what you’re overpaid to do, which is to stick close and check every little thing out. You could have saved me going into the tank for enough to buy five thousand of you for a lifetime. And that makes you too damned expensive. I’ll have your office stuff packed and dropped off at your place. I’ll have your check mailed. I couldn’t look at you again without feeling sick.”

“Gary, you just don’t know how mutual that feeling is.”

His arm came halfway up. “Uh uh!” I said. He lowered it and left swiftly. Spartan hurried behind him, and gave me a single despairing glance as he left.

She slumped in the chair. “Hooo, boy.” she said wearily. “They told me there’d be days like this.” She gave me a look through the emerald lenses. “Thanks heaps, McGee.”

“I didn’t exactly intend it that way Mary Smith.”

“But that seems to be the way it is. In many respects that was a very very very nice job, lad. It did have its cruddy intervals. You know, I didn’t realize how much enjoyment I’d get out of seeing the great Gary Santo get clouted around. Funny. In three years he’s popped me in the face three times. And I told myself that one more time, brother, and that’s it. Would I have quit, though? I wonder? I am going to believe I would.”

“Will he send any muscle around to teach me I can’t do that?”

She looked at me, head cocked, wearing a little frown. “I’d say not. I mean if he thought you were absolutely alone in this, I think he would. But when he thinks it over, he’s not going to believe that a person of your type could con him so completely. He’ll think you’re a front man, and I think he’ll leave well enough alone. Besides, he’s got a lot to think about.”

“Do you think I’m a front man?”

“I am inclined to doubt it somehow. How about buying an unemployed girl a drink and then some lunch? You know. Like no hard feelings. You know, this is quite a setup you’ve got here, McGee. I couldn’t tell much from the outside that time.”

“Bourbon straight, water with no ice on the side?”

“Exactly.”

As I was fixing the drinks Johnny Dow hallooed and stuck my mail under the corner of the deck mat. I gave her her drink and went out and brought the mail in, flipped through the customary junk and came upon an airmail one from Chicago in Puss’s broad, round scrawl.

“Excuse a little mail-reading?”

“Sure. I’ll just sit here and plan my future.”

Old dear darling, I said one time that I would write it down to get it straight for you, and so I have and even have the eerie idea you might be able to read all the words between the words. The name was right. I lied about that. But the town wasn’t, and Chicago isn’t the town either. And there was no divorce. And I love Paul very dearly and have all along, and love you too, but not quite as much. That lousy Meyer and his lousy Law. Get a pretty girl to kiss Old Ugly and tell him he was absolutely right. You see, my dear, about six months before you met me on the beach with that living pincushion stuck into the sole of my foot, they took a little monster out of my head, maybe as big as an English walnut almost, and with three stumpy little legs like a spider. Half a spider. And the men in white dug around in my head to try to find every little morsel of the beast, because he turned out to be the bad kind. So… I got over confusions and got my memory all straightened out again, and my hair grew back, and I pinned an old buddy of mine to the wall of his office and he leveled because he has known me long enough to know I have enough sawdust to keep me solid. His guess was one chance out of fifty. No treatments possible. Just go off and get checked every so often, bright lights in the eyes, stand and touch the tip of your nose with your fingertip while keeping the eyes closed. That stuff. And pens drawing lines on little electric charts. I could accept it, my dear, because life is very iffy and I have busied up my years in good ways. But I could not accept the kind of life that went with the waiting. Dear as Paul is, he is a sentimental kraut type, and we had the awareness of the damned time bomb every waking moment. So life became like a practice funeral, with too many of our friends knowing it, and everybody trying to be so bloody sweet and compassionate during a long farewell party. I began to think that if I lucked out, I’d be letting them down. So I finally told Paul that if it was the end of my life, it was getting terribly damned dreary and full of violin music, and I am a random jolly type who does not care to be stared at by people with their eyes filling with tears. So I cashed in the bonds for the education of the children I’ll never have, and I came a-hunting and I found you. Was I too eager to clamber into the sack? Too greedy to fill every day with as much life as would fit into it? Darling, I am the grasshopper sort, and so are you, and, bless you, there were dozens of times every day I would completely forget to sort of listen to what might be happening inside my redheaded skull. Be glad you jollied and romped the redheaded lady as she was coming around the clubhouse turn, heading for the tape. She loved it. And you. And how good we were together, in a way that was not a disloyalty to Paul! He is one of the dogged and steadfast ones. Can you imagine being married, dear, to Janine, great as she is, and having her know you could be fatally ill? She would mother you out of your mind until you ran. As I ran. But there was the little nagging feeling I was having it all too good. I kept telling myself, Hell girl, you deserve it. And then hairy old Meyer and his damned Law about the hard thing to do is the right thing to do. I suppose you have been wondering about me and maybe hating me a little. I had to run from you exactly when I did and how I did, or I couldn’t have left at all. You see, the dying have a special obligation too, my dear. To keep it from being too selfish. I was depriving Paul of his chance of being with me, because it is all he is going to have of me… all he did have of me, and I was forgetting that I had to leave him enough to last him long enough to get him past the worst of it at least. The darling has not done the interrogation bit, and if he thinks or doesn’t think there was a man in the scene, I couldn’t really say. You would like each other. Anyway, the female of the species is the eternal matchmaker, and I have written the longest letter of my life to Janine, all full of girl talk, and about living and dying, and I have, I hope, conned her into spinning a big fancy pack of lies about the Strange Vacation of Puss Killian, because I am leaving her name and address with Paul, saying that she could tell him how I was and what happened among people who didn’t know. It is a devious plot, mostly because they would work well. He is a research chemist, and perhaps the kindest man alive. Anyway, last week all of a sudden the pupil of my big gorgeous left eye got twice as big as it should, and they have been checking and testing and giving me glassy smiles, and I am mailing this en route to the place where they are going to open a trap door and take another look. So they may clap the lid back on and say the hell with it. Or they may go in there and without meaning to, speed me on my journey, or they may turn me into a vegetable, or they may manage to turn me back into me for another time, shorter or longer. But from the talk around the store, the odds on that last deal make the old odds seem like a sure thing bet. Do you understand now? I’m scared. Of course I’m scared. It’s real black out there and it lasts a long time. But I have no remorses, no regrets, because I left when I had to, and Meyer got me back in good season. Don’t do any brooding because if I can try to be a grownup, you ought to be able to take a stab at it. Here’s what you do, Trav my darling. Find yourself a gaudy random gorgeous grasshopper wench, and lay aboard the Plymouth and the provisions, and go fun-timing and sun-timing up and down the lovely bays. Find one of good appetite and no thought of it being for keeps, and romp the lassie sweetly and completely, and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is…

Puss, who loved you.

“Is something wrong?” a voice said.

I looked at Mary Smith, realizing that it was not the first time she had asked me.

“Wrong? No. Just a letter from an old friend.”

“You looked funny.”

“I guess it was… because the old friend decided to cancel an old debt.” I got up and got the bottle and refilled her shot glass.

She lifted it in toast. “Here’s to vacations without pay. Oh, Christ, that was such a great job! Such a sweet lush life, dear. But you know, sometimes you get an instinct. I think other things are going to go bad for Santo. I think he’s going to strain too hard to catch up, and he’ll choke, and he’ll lose his style, and in a couple of years he’ll be one of those whatever-happened-to people.”

Puss’s letter said, It’s real black out there and it lasts a long time.“

I could feel my heart fall. It dropped a certain distance and there it would stay.

I could look at Miss Smith as if I’d never seen her before. She sat with a little inward smile of satisfaction, thinking of what she wished for Gary Santo. She dipped at the shot glass for her little butterfly sips. The edge of the minitent came to mid thigh. Exquisite legs, honey-tan and matte finish, were crossed. The light of early afternoon came through the window ports, highlighting the lustrous brown-auburn fall of hair, a healthy pelt. The secretive lashes half veiled the vivid plastic green, the secret half smile curved the corners of the plump mouth.

She got up and wandered over to look at the titles on the sleeves of the records on the shelf by the player. “Do we get music with the booze?” she asked.

I went over dutifully and when I stood beside her, I realized she had suddenly fixed her attention elsewhere, so totally that she was unaware of me and unaware of the music. She was standing looking diagonally through the starboard aft port toward the dock, and following the direction of her intent gaze, I saw Hero ambling along, looking for fresh game, the meat of his shoulders slowly rolling, one thumb hooked into the tightness of the broad leather belt.

I looked down at her face, saw that the lips, now parted, looked almost swollen. Breathing deeply and slowly through parted lips, eyelids heavy, head nodding slightly, she watched Hero.

Then she turned to me and it seemed to take her a moment to remember who I was. In a voice pitched lower than usual, and with a huskiness, she said, “Darling, forgive me if I uninvite myself for lunch? Thank you for drinks and entertainment Thank you for saving me from a shot in the mouth. I think I’ll… look up those friends I have here. Some other time, dear. You have a lovely boat.”

She put on her huge black sunglasses and put the empty shot glass down, and smiled and left. I went out on the afterdeck and watched her go hastily in the direction Hero had taken. Swing of the purse. Quick clip-clap of the sharp little heels on the cement. Rapid bouncing of the weight of the rich brown mane. Unseen, tented hips swinging. And, I could guess, a crawly butterfly awareness of the silky brushing of the softening thighs together, awareness of the prickling tickle of erectile tissues, of labial weights and thickenings, and a feeling of being unable to take a breath quite deep enough-as she went tocking and bobbing in her scurry to fall under the brutalizing, tireless, impersonal hammer of the Hero, to be once more the bed-beaten shoat, to be spent and lamed and emptied as before.

So I walked slowly to Meyer’s boat and sat on the bunk with my head in my hands while he read Puss’s letter. He finished it and coughed and honked and wiped his eyes. So I told him that we were going to take his little cruiser because it could take more sea than a houseboat, and we were going to take the Munequita in tow, and we were going to go as far down the Exuma Cays as the range of his boat would allow, and then we were going a lot further down in the Little Doll. I told him I was sick unto death of miniwomen, miniclothes, miniloves, minideaths and my own damned minilife. I wanted empty cays, gaudy reefs, hot sun, swift fish, and maybe some talk when it was time for talking.

And Meyer said, “So give me a hand with the lines and we’ll take this crock over to the gas dock and top off the tanks.”

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Travis McGee #9 Pale Gray For GuiltJohn D. MacDonaldPALE GRAY FOR GUILT2000 = $100,000