This time when I came around I was alone. The only light came from a small bulb in the ceiling. All the parts that had hurt before hurt worse, and in addition I had an aching bruise on the left side of my jaw just in front of my ear. I sat for a while, fighting nausea. There was no movement in the yacht other than the slight toss of the easy swells on which we rode. Through the porthole I could see that it was still dark. Time to stand up. I could do it. Six feet tall, 190 pounds. In top condition. I could just stand right up. I tried to get my legs under me and they felt like seaweed. I compromised by inching over against the wall and slowly sitting up with my back supported by the wall. Even the dim light hurt my eyes. I squinted. Maybe I wouldn’t get up just yet. Instead I’d survey the room, while I rested. There wasn’t much to survey. Whatever light had shone in my eyes was gone, as was all the furniture. There was another flowering tropical plant growing in a big pot in the corner, and two throw pillows that might have been on a couch at one time. Other than that I was in an empty steel room painted ivory, with a porthole too small to squeeze through.
My watch was broken, probably smashed when I fell, I didn’t know which time. I’d been falling so much that it could have happened anytime. There was a smear of blood on my shirt that must have gushed from Simpson’s nose when I’d hit him. I took some satisfaction in that. Painfully, with rest stops often, I got to my feet. The room spun. I hung there for a moment, teetering over the void. Then it stabilized. I was up. I edged along the wall to the door and tried it. It was locked. Surprise! There was no other way out. I looked at the potted plant. It was real, growing in dirt. With a big purple trumpet-shaped flower on it. If you were as rich as Randolph Simpson you could have flowering plants grow anywhere you wanted.
I looked at the plant for a minute and then sat down on the floor again, and held steady until the room stopped spinning, and took off my right shoe and sock. I put the shoe back on my sockless foot and slowly got to my feet again. I was getting the hang of it. Someday I’d probably be able to do it whenever I wanted to. If there was going to be a someday. Carefully I filled the sock about two-thirds full of dirt from the pot. Then I tied a knot in it and slapped it gently across my hand.
It felt about right. I walked to the porthole and opened it and took a couple of deep breaths of cool sea air. Then I went back and stood against the wall next to the door where it latched and with my left hand began to bang on the door.
“Let me out,” I hollered as loud as I could. “Let me out of here!”
I had to holler it several more times and keep banging on the door before I heard footsteps in the corridor and a jangle of keys and the door swung open. The Mexican came in with my gun still stuck in his belt and I laid the dirt-filled sock carefully against the side of his head back of his left ear. Very hard. He grunted and stumbled forward and went to his knees and I hit him again with my homemade sap, square across the back of the head this time, and he sighed and pitched face forward onto the floor. I kicked him hard in the head and then crouched beside him and got my hand under him and pulled my gun loose from his belt. The keys he’d used to open my door were sprawled five feet in front of his outflung hand. I picked them up and went into the corridor and locked the door behind me. I had the reassuring weight of the gun again, and this time I kept it in my hand. So many people had taken it away from me, I barely recognized it.
The corridor was empty and silent. The doors that lined it were closed. I went along the corridor, listening at each door. There were no sounds except snoring in one cabin. There was no way to know who was snoring. I continued along, and at the last door on the port side I heard the familiar giggle. I tried the door. It was locked. I looked at the lock and tried a key that looked like it would match from the key ring I’d taken from the Mex. It fit and I opened the door gently.
Carmen was there all right, and Simpson. The lights were on. He was handcuffed to the bed, facedown, and Carmen, in a condition I was beginning to tire of, was naked as a minnow. She stood over Simpson, giggling her giggle and spanking him with a gold-inlaid ivory hairbrush.
I closed the door softly behind me and stepped into the room. Carmen looked up with her big eyes all iris and smiled.
“I know you,” she said. “You’ve got the funny name.”
“Doghouse Reilly,” I said.
Simpson turned his head to look at me and I smiled at the thick white tape over his nose and the beginnings of a wonderful pair of shiners starting to darken under his eyes. He opened his mouth and I stepped over and put the gun barrel into it.
“Not a peep,” I said.
His eyes widened but he was silent. Without clothing, his soft body was fleshy and white. I looked around the room. On the wall next to the bed, hanging on a hook, was a lacy peignoir. With the gun still in Simpson’s mouth, I said to Carmen, “Put that robe on.”
She smiled at me that loopy void smile that she had and put her thumb in her mouth. As always, it was supposed to make me jump in the air and click my heels. As always, it didn’t work.
“If you make a sound I’ll kill you,” I said.
I took the gun out of Simpson’s mouth and went and got the peignoir off the hook and slipped my gun under my arm while I forced Carmen’s arms through the sleeves and buttoned the two buttons, which didn’t do a very good job of holding the thing together. There was a sash, too, and I tied it around her waist. Then I took my gun out from under my arm again, pulled the sheet and two blankets up over Simpson’s head, took a firm grip on Carmen’s wrist, and went out of the room and into the corridor. As I closed the door behind me I heard Simpson, muffied through two blankets, yell “Help!” Five feet down the corridor I couldn’t hear him.
“Where are we going?” Carmen said. She didn’t seem scared. She seemed excited. Her lips were pulled back over her small white teeth. They were sharp teeth and whiter than teeth had any business being.
“Home,” I said.
We went up the ladder well to the deck, with my gun in my right hand and my left with a death grip on Carmen’s wrist. On deck there was only the boy in the sailor suit at the stern, gazing out over the black water at the shoreline.
“Shhh,” I said to Carmen.
She giggled, her little sharp teeth showing even in the pale moonlight, and screamed as loud as she could. The boy in the sailor suit whirled, clawing at the gun in its regulation holster. I fired once and he yelped and staggered against the rail and then pitched forward. I heard doors open below me and footsteps on the ladder wells. I dragged Carmen to the rail and stowed my gun again under my arm. Behind me I heard the hatchway open and someone yelling, “Over there, by the rail.”
I got my arms around Carmen’s waist and heaved her up. She screamed again and I pitched her over the rail into the darkness, and dove after her. The water stung when I hit the surface and then I was in it and went under maybe ten or fifteen feet before I was able to turn and start up. My wet clothes dragged me back, and the weight of the gun under my arm was no longer comforting. My lungs had already been abused once this evening and they didn’t enjoy further abuse.
At about the time I began to get the panicky feeling that I wouldn’t make it to the surface, I did, and came back into the world in the ebony water and started looking for Carmen. I saw her twenty feet away, floundering. I swam toward her as someone on the yacht began to sweep the water with a flashlight. It must have been one of those long affairs with six batteries, because the beam was strong and the circle of light was large. I reached Carmen, who was giggling and crying and spluttering at the same time.
The flashlight swept by us and started back and then Blondie was there in the skiff and reaching for Carmen. The light hit us and a shot splashed the water near the skiff and then from somewhere in the darkness south of us a chatter of shots sounded and bullets spanged off the hull of the yacht and the flashlight went out and someone yelled, “Get down!” Then Carmen was in, and I was, rolling in over the gunwales of the skiff without quite knowing how I had and Blondie was silently pulling in the direction of the gunfire.
“I never thought I’d be glad to see you,” I said to him.
“Sure,” he said.