The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Lester Dent (1904–1959) was born in La Plata, Missouri, but grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. While working as a Western Union telegraph operator, he learned that a coworker had sold a story to a pulp magazine for the princely sum of $450. As a reader of the pulps, he decided to try it himself and sold an action story, “Pirate Cay,” to Top Notch for the September 1929 issue. Soon after, he moved to New York for a full-time writing job with Dell Publishing, then had the chance to launch a new series for Street & Smith. After staggering success with The Shadow, S&S hoped to duplicate it with a detective who used various gadgets to fight crime, and Dent created Doc Savage under the house name Kenneth Robeson; the first issue hit the stands in March 1933. The series lasted until 1949, with 181 issues, of which 159 were written by Dent.

After Doc Savage, the character for which Dent received the most acclaim was Oscar Sail, the loner boatman who appeared in only two Black Mask stories, “Sail” and “Angelfish,” which have been relentlessly anthologized as outstanding examples of the hard-boiled pulp detective. He began a third story, “Cay,” but when his editor, Joseph Shaw, left the magazine, he abandoned it. Dent wrote the earliest draft of “Sail” in the spring of 1936 on his schooner, Albatross, while anchored at Miami’s City Yacht Basin — where “Sail” is set. He once told Frank Gruber, a prolific pulp writer himself, as well as a historian of the genre, that he had been forced to rewrite both stories so many times that he did not like the final product.

The story in this collection, “Luck,” is an early draft of that first adventure about Oscar Sail. As there were numerous drafts, it cannot be said with authority that this is the first version, but it is safe to say that it is a very early one, and certainly one that Dent preferred to the published story. Thanks to the novelist and noted pulp scholar Will Murray, the agent for the Lester Dent estate, for the history of this important publication.

“Sail” was published in the October 1936 issue of Black Mask. “Luck” has never before appeared in print.

The fish trembled its tail as the knife cut off its head, then red ran out of it and made a mess on the planks and spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had tried to hold to the dock edge.

Sail put the palm of his own hand in the mess.

The small policeman came from shore. He had shoved through the small green gate with the discreet sign, Private Yachts — No Admittance, at the shore end of the swanky pier, and was under the neat green canopy, tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. His leather and brass glistened in the light. He was cautious enough to walk in the middle of the narrow long pier, but did enough stamping with his feet to show he was the law.

When he reached Sail, he stopped. His cap had a cock. His lower lip was loose on the left side, as if depressed by a pipe stem that wasn’t there. He was young, bony and brown.

He asked, “That you give that yell?”

Sail picked up the hook and wet line. He held the hook close to his left palm. He grimaced at the small oozing rip in the brown callus of the palm. It was about the kind of a hole the fishhook would have made.

“Yeah?” the cop said vaguely. “You snagged the hand on a hook, eh? Made you yell?” The policeman toed the fish head’s open mouthful of snake-fang teeth.

“Barracuda,” he said, but not as if that was on his mind.

Red drops came out of the ripped palm, fattened on the lower edge, came loose and fell on the dock. Sail picked the fish up with his other hand. When he stood his straightest, he was still shorter than the small cocky policeman.

The officer splashed light on Sail. He saw the round jolly brown features of a thirtyish man who probably liked his food, who would put weight on until he was forty, and spend the rest of his life secretly trying to take it off. Sail’s hair might have been unraveled rope, and looked as if it had been finger-combed. Some of the black had been scrubbed out of his black polo shirt. Washings had bleached his black dungarees; they fitted his small hips tightly and stopped halfway below the knees. Bare feet had squarish toes. Weather had gotten to all of the man a lot.

The officer hocked to clear his throat. “They don’t eat barracuda in Miami. Not when you catch the damn things in the harbor, anyhow.”

He didn’t sound as if that was the thing bothering him, either.

Sail asked, “You the health department?”

The little policeman filled Sail’s eyes with light. He said, “If that was a crack—” and changed to, “Was it you yelled?”

“Any law against a yell when you get a hook in your hand?”

The policeman popped his light into Sail’s face again. Derision was around Sail’s blue eyes and in the warp of his lips.

Loud music was coming from the moonlight excursion boat at the south end of the City Yacht Basin, but a barker spoiled the effect of the music, if any. Two slot machines alongside the lunch stand at Pier Six ate sailor nickels and chugged away.

A hundred million dollars’ worth of yachts within a half-mile radius, the Miami publicity bureau said. Little Egyptian-silk-sail racing cutters that had cost a thousand a foot. A big three-hundred-foot Britisher, owned by Lady Something-or-other who only had officers with beards. And in-between sizes. Teak, mahogany, chromium, brass. Efficiency. Jap stewards as quiet as spooks. Blond Swede sailors. Skippers with leather faces, big hands and great calm.

The policeman pointed his flashlight beam at the boat tied to the end of the dock. The light showed the sloping masts, the black canvas covers over the sails, the black, neat, new-looking hull. Life preservers tied to the mainstays had Sail on them in gold leaf.

“What you call that kind of a boat?” the cop asked.

“Chesapeake five-log bugeye,” Sail said. “Her bottom is made out of five logs drifted together with Swedish iron rods. The masts on bugeyes always rake back like that. She’s thirty-four feet long in the water. You’ll have trouble beating a bugeye for knocking around shallow water, and they’re pretty fair sea—”

“Could it cross the ocean?”

“She has.”

“Yeah? My old man’s got the crazy idea he wants to go to the South Seas. He’s nuts about boats.”

“It gets you.”

“This one yours?”

“Yes,” Sail said.

“How old is it?”

“Sixty-eight years old.”

“T’hell it is! That’s older’n my old man. I don’t think he’d want it.”

“She’ll take you anywhere,” Sail defended.

“What’s she worth?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” Sail said.

The policeman whistled. Then he laughed. He did not say anything.

Sail said, “There are some panels in the cabin, genuine hand carvings by Samuel McIntire of Salem. Probably they were once on a clipper ship. That’s what makes her price stiff.”

The cop did not answer. He switched off his light.

“All I can say is you let out a hell of a funny yell when you catch a fish,” he said.

He took pains to stamp his feet while he walked away. By the time Sail got the effects of the flashlight out of his eyes, the officer was out of sight.

Sail held his hands close to his chest, fingers spread, palms in. There was barely enough breeze to make coolness against one side of his face. The music on the moonlit sailboat stopped. The barker was silent. Over in the Bayfront Park outdoor auditorium a political speaker was viewing something with alarm. After he had felt his hands tremble for a while, Sail went to his boat.

The boat, Sail, rode spring lines at the dock end. She had a thirty-four-foot waterline. Twelve-foot beam, two-foot draft with centerboard up, seven with it down. She was rigged to be sailed by one man, all lines coming aft.

The interior was teak, with inset panels of red sanders, fustic and green ebony, all hand-carved by a man who had died in 1811. How Samuel McIntire panels came to be in the bugeye, Sail did not know, but he had been offered a thousand dollars for each year of age for the boat and was hungry broke when he turned it down. It was not a money matter. Some men love dogs.

Sail slapped the fish into a kettle in the galley and, hurrying, put most of his right arm through a porthole, grasped a line, took half hitches off a cleat, and let the line go. The line snaked quietly down into the water, following a sinking live-box and its contents of live fish and crawfish.

Sail looked out of the hatch.

The young policeman had come quietly back to where the fish had bled and was using his flashlight. He squatted. After a while, he approached the dock end, moseying. Too carefully. When his flashlight brightened the bugeye’s black masts and black sail covers, Sail was in the galley, making enough noise cutting up the fish to let the cop know where he was and what he was doing.

Sail waited four or five minutes before putting his head out of the hatch. The cop had gone somewhere silently.

Sail was still looking and listening for the policeman when he heard the man’s curse and the woman’s cry, short, sharp. The man’s curse was something of a bray of surprise. The sounds came out of Bayfront Park, between the waterfront yacht basin and Biscayne Boulevard. Sail, not stirring, but watching the park, saw a man running among the palms. Then the young policeman and his flashlight were also moving among the palms.

During the next five minutes, the policeman and his flash were not still long enough for him to have found anything.

Sail stripped naked, working fast once more. His body was rounding, the hair on it golden and long, but not thick. He looked at his belly as if he didn’t like it, slapped it and sucked it in. The act was more a habit than a thought. He put on black jersey swim trunks.

Standing in the companion looking around, Sail scratched his chest and tugged the hair on it. His fingers twisted a little rattail of the chest hair. No one was in sight. He got over the side without being too conspicuous about it.

The water had odor and the usual things floated in it. He swam under the dock, searching. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in just a little, so things in the water were not moving away.

The pier had been built stout because of the hurricanes. There was a net of cross timbers underneath, and anything falling off the south side of the dock would drift against them. Sail found what he was seeking on the third dive.

He kept in the dark places as he swam away with it.

The little island — artificial, put there when they dredged the harbor — was darkly silent when Sail swam laboriously toward it. Pine trees on the island had been bent by the hurricanes, and some torn up. The weeds did not seem to have been affected.

Sail tried not to splash as he shoved through the shallows to the sand beach. He towed the Greek underwater. Half a dozen crabs and some seaweed clung to the Greek when Sail carried him into the pines and weeds. The knife sticking in the Greek, and what it had done, did not help. The pines scratched and the weeds crunched under the Greek when Sail laid him down. It was very dark.

Pulpy skins in a billfold were probably greenbacks, and stiffer, smaller rectangles, business cards. Silver coins, a pocketknife, two clips for an automatic. The automatic holster empty under the Greek’s left armpit. From inside the Greek’s coat lining, another rectangle, four inches wide, five times as long, a quarter of an inch thick. It felt like hardwood. The Greek’s wristwatch still ticked.

Sail put the business cards and the object from the coat lining inside his swim trunks, and was down on his knees cleaning his hands in the sand when the situation got the best of him. By the time he finished being sick, he had sweated profusely.

The water felt cold as he swam back the way he had come — under the docks and close to the seawall — with the Greek.

Sail clung to Sail’s chain bobstay until all the water had run off him that wanted to run off, then swung aboard and moved along the deck, keeping below the wharf level, and dropped down the hatch. He started to take the bathing suit off, and the girl said, “Puh-lease.”

She swung her legs off the forward bunk. Light from the kerosene gimbal lamp did not reach all of her. The feet were small in dark blue sandals which showed red-enameled toenails. Her legs had not been shaved recently, but were nice.

Pink starting on Sail’s chest and spreading made his tan look dark and uncomfortable, and he chewed an imaginary something between his large white front teeth as he squinted at the girl. He seemed about to say something two or three different times, but didn’t, and went into the stateroom and got out of the swim trunks. The shadow-wrapped rest of her did not look bad as he passed. He tied a fish sinker to the trunks and dropped them through a porthole into the bay, which was dredged three fathoms deep here. He put on his scrubbed black clothes.

The girl had moved into the light. The rest of her was interesting.

“You probably think I’m a tart,” she said. “I’m not, and I wish you’d let me stay here awhile longer. I have a good reason.”

Sail scratched behind his right ear, raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, stalked self-consciously into the galley, pumped freshwater in a glass and threw it on the galley floor, then stepped in it. His feet now left wet tracks such as they had made when he came aboard. He seemed acutely conscious that his efforts to make this seem a perfectly sensible procedure were exaggerated. His hands upset a round bottle, but he caught it. He set it down, picked it up again, asked:

“Drink?”

She had crossed her legs. Her skirt was split. “That would be nice,” she said.

Sail, his back to her, made more noise than necessary in rattling bottles and glasses and pinking an opener into a can of condensed milk. He mixed two parts of gin, one of crème de cacao, one of condensed milk. He put four drops from a small green bottle in one drink and gave that one to the girl, holding it out a full arm length, as if he didn’t feel well acquainted enough to get closer, or didn’t want to frighten her away.

They sipped.

She said, “It’s not bad without ice, really.”

“I did have an electric ice box,” he told her, as if excusing the lack of ice. “But it and this salt air didn’t mix so well.”

Her skirt matched her blue pumps, and her yellow jersey was a contrast. Her long hair was mahogany, and done in a bun over each ear, so that her long oval face had a pure, sweet look. She drank again. Her blue leather handbag started to slip out of the hollow of her crossed legs and she caught it quickly.

Sail put his glass down and went around straightening things which really didn’t need it. He picked up the News off the engine box. It was in two parts. He handed one part to the girl. That seemed to press the button. She threw the paper down and grabbed her blue purse with both hands.

“You don’t need to be so goddamn smart about it!” she said through her teeth.

She started to get up, but her knee joints did not have strength, and she slid off the bench and sat hard on the black battleship linoleum. Sail moved fast and got his plump hands on the blue purse as she clawed it open. A small bright revolver fell out of the purse as they had a tug-of-war over it.

“Blick!” the girl squealed.

Blick and a revolver came out of the oilskin locker. The gun was a small bright twin to the girl’s. Blick’s Panama fell off slick mahogany hair, and disarranged oilskins fell down in the locker behind him. Blick had his lips rolled in until he seemed to have no lips. He looked about old enough to have fought in the last war.

“Want it shot off?” he gritted.

Sail jerked his hand away from the girl’s purse as if a bullet was already headed for it. He put his hands up as high as the cabin carlins and ceiling would allow. His mouth and eyes were round and uneasy, and the upper part of his stomach jumped a little with each beat of his heart, moving the polo shirt fabric.

Blick gave Sail a quick search. He was rough. His lips were still rolled in, and a sleeve was still jammed up on one arm, above a drop of blood that was not yet dry.

The girl started to get up, couldn’t. She said, “Blick!” weakly.

Blick, watching Sail, threw at her, “You hadda be a sucker and drink with him!”

The girl’s lips worked over some words before sounds started coming. “...was... I... know he... it doped.”

Blick gritted at Sail, “Bud, she’s my sis, and if she don’t come out of that, I wouldn’t wanta be you. Help me get her goin’!”

Blick dropped his sister’s purse and gun in his coat pocket, got his Panama, then took the girl’s right arm, letting Sail look into the little gun’s muzzle all the while. “Help me, bud!”

Sail took his hands down. Sweat wetness was coming through his washed black polo shirt. He watched Blick’s eyes and face instead of watching the gun. They walked the girl up the companion and onto the dock. Blick put his hand and small revolver into a trouser pocket.

“We’re tight. Stagger!”

They staggered.

The orchestra on the moonlit excursion boat was still trying to entice customers for the moonlight sail. Yacht sailors, some of them with a load, stood in a knot at the end of the lunch stand, and out of the knot came the chug of the slot machines. Blick was tall enough to glare over his sister’s head at Sail. His glare was not bright.

“What’d you give her?”

Sail wet his lips. The sweat had come out on his forehead enough to start running.

“Truth serum.”

“You louse!”

Two sailors, one without his shirt, went past, headed for the slot machines.

Blick said, “Bud, I think I got you figured. You’re a guy Andopolis rung in. He’d still try to get a boat and another guy.”

Sail squinted out of one eye. Perspiration was stinging the other.

“Andopolis was the one who didn’t digest the knife?”

“You ain’t that dumb!”

“Was he?”

“You know that was Abel!”

Sail said, “Believe it or not, I’m guessing right across the board. Abel was to do the dirty work while you and the girl hung around on shore. Abel tried to take something from Andopolis on the dock. Abel had something that had something to do with whatever he wanted. He tapped it inside his coat as he talked. Abel got knifed, let out a bellow, and went off the dock into the drink. Andopolis ran after he knifed Abel. You headed him off in the park. He got away and ran some more. You did a sneak to my hooker while the cop looked around.”

“Did you guess all that?” Blick sneered.

They were nearing Biscayne Boulevard and traffic. On the News building tower, the neon sign alternately spelled WIOD and NEWS. Sail took a deep breath and tried to watch Blick’s face.

“I’d like to know what Abel wanted.”

Blick said nothing. They scuffed over the sidewalk, and Blick, walking as if he did not feel as if he weighed much, seemed to think to a conclusion which pleased him.

“Hell, Nola. Maybe Andopolis didn’t spill to our bud, here.”

Nola did not answer. She seemed about asleep. Blick pinched her, slapped her, and that awakened her somewhat.

A police radio car was parked at the corner of Biscayne and Blick did not see it in time. He said, as if he didn’t give a damn, “Stagger, bud! This should be good.”

Sail shoved a little to steer the girl to the side of the walk farthest from the prowl car. Blick shoved back to straighten them up. The result was that they passed close enough to the police machine to reach it with one good jump. Sail shoved Blick and Nola as hard as he could, using the force of the shove to propel himself toward the car. He grabbed the spare tire at the back and used it to help himself around the machine to shelter.

Blick’s revolver went off three times about as rapidly as a revolver could fire. Both cops in the car brayed, and fell out of the car onto Sail.

Blick carried Nola to a taxicab forty feet down the street, and dumped her in. He stood beside the hack, aimed, and air began leaving the left front tire of the police car. The cops started shooting in a rattled way. Blick leaped into the taxi. An instant later, the hack driver fell out of his own machine, holding his head. The taxi took off. The two cops sprang up, and piled into their machine, one yelling:

“What about this one in the street?”

“Hell, he’s dead.”

The cops drove after the taxi, one shooting, his partner having trouble steering with the flat tire.

Sail, for a fat man, ran away from there very fast.

Sail planted his heaving chest against the lunch stand counter, held on to the edge with both hands, and stood there a while, twice looking down at his knees and moving them experimentally, as if suspecting something was wrong with them. The young man, who looked as youths in lunch stands somehow always manage to look, came over and swiped the counter with his towel.

“What’ve you got in cans?” Sail asked him, then stopped the answering recital on the third name. Beer suds overflowed the can before it hit the counter. Sail drank the first can and most of the next in big gulps, but slowed down on the third and seemed tied up in thought. He scraped at the tartar on a tooth with a fingernail, then started chewing the nail and got it down to the quick, then looked at it as if surprised. He absently put three dimes on the counter.

“Forty-five,” the youth corrected.

Sail added a half and said, “Some nickels out of that.”

He carried the nickels over to the mob around the slot machines. He stood around with his hands in his pockets. He tried whistling, and on the second attempt got a good result, after which he looked more satisfied with himself. His mouth warped wryly as he watched the play at the two machines. He took his nickels out, looked at them, firmly put them back, but took them out a bit later. When there was a lull, he shoved up to the slot machines.

The one-armed bandit gave him a lemon and two bars, with another bar just showing.

“You almost made it,” someone said. “A little more and you’d have made the jackpot.”

“Brother,” Sail said, “you must be a mind reader.”

He backed up, waited, still giving some attention to his private thoughts, until he got a chance at the other machine. It showed a bar, a lemon, a bar. Sail rubbed his forearms, looked thoughtful and walked off.

A telephone booth was housed at the end of Pier Four. Sail, when a nickel got a dial tone, dialed the 0, said, “Operator, I believe in giving all telephone operators possible employment, so I never dial a number. Give me police headquarters, please.” He waited for a while after the operator laughed, said, “I want to report an attempted robbery,” then told someone else, “This is Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. A few minutes ago, a man and a woman boarded my boat and marched me away at the point of a gun. I do not know why, except that the man was a drug user. I feel he intended to kill me. There was a police car parked at the corner of Biscayne, and when I broke away and got behind it, the man tried to shoot me, then drove off with the woman in a taxi, and two officers chased them. I want to know what to do now.”

“It would help if you described the pair.”

The man and woman Sail described would hardly be recognized as Blick and Nola.

“Could you come up to headquarters and look over our gallery?” asked the voice.

“Where is it?”

“Turn left off Flagler just as you reach the railroad.”

When Sail left the telephone booth, the youth with the hot-dog-stand look was jerking the handle of one slot machine, then the other, and swearing.

“Funny both damn things blew up!” he complained.

Sail walked off wearing a small secret grin.

Two hours later, Sail pushed back a stack of gallery photographs in police headquarters and said in a tired, wondering voice, “There sure seem to be a lot of crooks in this world. But I don’t see my two.”

The captain at his elbow said heartily, “You don’t, eh? That’s tough. One of the boys in the radio car got it in the leg. We found the taxi. And we’ll find them two. You can bet on that.” He was a big brown captain with the kind of jaw and eyes that went with his job. He had said his name was Rader.

Sail rode back to the City Yacht Basin in a taxi, and looked around before he got out. He walked to Sail. While adjusting a spring line, he saw a head shape through the skylight. By craning, he saw the head shape was finished out by a police cap. Sail walked back and forth, changing the spring lines, which did not need changing, and otherwise putting off what might come. Finally, he pulled down his coat sleeves, put on an innocent look and went down.

One policeman waiting in the cabin was using his tongue to lather a new cigar with saliva. The tongue was coated. He was shaking, not very much, but shaking. His face had some loose red skin on it, and his neck was wattled.

The second policeman was the young bony cop with the warp in the end of his mouth. He still had his flashlight.

The third man was putting bottles and test tubes in a scuffed brown leather bag which held more of the same stuff and a microscope off which some of the enamel was worn. He wore a fuzzy gray flannel suit, had rimless, hookless glasses pinched tight on his nose, and had chewed up about half of the cigar in his mouth without lighting it. The cigar was the same kind the other policeman was licking.

Sail said, “I just talked to Captain Rader.”

The warp got deeper in the end of the young cop’s mouth. He switched his flashlight on and off in Sail’s eyes, then hung it from the hook on his belt.

“What about?”

Sail told them what he had talked to Captain Rader about — the kidnapping, which he said he could not understand. In describing Nola and Blick, whom he did not name — he made no mention of having heard their names — he repeated the words he had used over the telephone.

When it was over, the young cop stepped forward, jaw first.

“All right, by God! Now you can tell us the truth!”

The shaking policeman got up slowly, holding his shiny damp cigar and looking miserable. “Now, Joey, that way won’t do it.”

Joey grabbed Sail’s right wrist and squeezed it. “The hell it won’t! Lewis says there was human blood on the dock along with the fish blood!”

The shaking policeman said, “Now, Joey.”

Joey shouted, “A lot of people heard somebody let out a yip. Even over in the park where I was doing the vice squad’s work, I heard it.”

Sail held out his left hand to show the tear in the brown callus of the palm.

“A fishhook made that,” he said. “You saw it bleed. There’s your human blood on the dock.”

Joey yelled, “Mister sailor, we’ve been checking on you by radio. You cleared from Bimini, the customs tells us. We radioed Bimini. You know what? You were asked to get out of Bimini. A gambling joint went broke in Bimini because one of their wheels had been wired and a lot of lads in the know made a cleaning. It ended up in a brawl and the gambling joint owner went to the hospital.”

Joey shook his finger at Sail’s throat. “The British police asked around and it began to look as if you had tipped the winners how to play. The joint owner claimed he didn’t know his wheel was wired. It ended up with you being asked to clear out. The only reason you’re not in the Bimini jug is because they couldn’t figure any motive. You didn’t get a cut. You hadn’t lost any jack on the wheel. You didn’t have a grudge against the owner. It was a screwy business, the British said, from beginning to end. But that’s what they think. I think different. You know what I think?”

“I doubt if it would be interesting,” Sail said dryly.

“I think you outfoxed ’em. You’re a smooth article. That’s what you think. But you can’t pull this stuff here.”

The shaking policeman said, “You haven’t got a leg, Joey,” between teeth clicks.

“I’ll sweat the so-and-so until I got a thousand legs!”

The freezing policeman groaned, “You should have your behind kicked, Joey.”

Joey released Sail’s right wrist to frown at the other officer. “Listen, Mister Homicide—”

The shaking policeman got between Joey and Sail and stood there, saying nothing. Joey frowned at him, then sucked at his lower lip, pulling it out of shape.

“Hell, if you gotta run this, run it!” he said.

He turned and stamped up the companion, across the deck and, judging from the sounds, had some kind of an accident and nearly fell overboard getting from the boat to the dock, but finally made it safely.

The other policeman, grinning without much meaning in it, extended a hand which, when Sail took it, was hot and unnatural. After he held the hand a moment, Sail could feel it trembling.

“I’m Captain Chris of homicide,” the officer said. “I want to thank you for reporting your trouble to Captain Rader, and I want to congratulate you on your narrow escape from those two. But next time, don’t take such chances. Never fool with hop and guns. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything of your attacker and his girlfriend or sister, whichever she was. I hope you have a good time in Miami in the meantime. We have a wonderful city. Florida has a wonderful climate.” He shook with his chill.

The rabbity man, Lewis, who had not said anything, finished putting things in his bag, picked up a camera with a photoflash attachment which had been unnoticed on a bunk, and went up the companion, stepping carefully, as one who was not used to boats. He got onto the dock carefully with bag and camera. Captain Chris followed.

Sail said, “Quinine and whiskey is supposed to be good for malaria. But only certain quinines.”

“Thanks,” said Captain Chris. “But I think whiskey gave it to me.”

They walked away, and young Joey was the only one who looked back.

The tide stood at flood slack, the water still, so that things did not float away. Something bright was bobbing on the water, and Sail got a light. He found five of the bright things when he hunted. Used photographic flashlight bulbs, with brass bases not corroded enough by the salt water for them to have been in long. Sail went below and looked around. Enough things were out of place to show the hooker had been searched. Fingerprint powder had not been wiped off quite well enough.

Sail catnapped all night, sleeping no more than a half hour soundly at any one time. He spent long periods with a mirror which he rigged to look out of the companion without showing himself.

On a big Matthews cruiser tied across the slip, somebody was ostensibly standing anchor watch. Boats lying at a slip do not usually stand on anchor. The watcher did not smoke and did not otherwise allow any light to get to his features. It was dark enough that he might have been tall or short, wide or narrow. The small things he did were what any man would do during a long, tiresome job, with one exception.

He frequently put a finger deep in his mouth and felt around.

Party fish boats making noise on their way out of Pier Five furnished Sail with an excuse to go on deck at about six bells. He stood there yawning, rubbing his head with his palms and making faces. He rubbed a finger across his chest and rolled up little twists and balls of dirt or old skin, after which he took a shower with the dock hose.

The watcher was not around the Matthews in the morning sun. Sail went below to don a pair of black shorts which washing had faded.

Sail’s dinky rode in stern davits, bugeye fashion, at enough of a tilt not to hold seas or spray, and Sail lowered it. He got a brush and the dock hose and washed down the topsides, taking off dried salt that seawater had deposited on the hull. He dropped his brush in the water three different times; it sank, and he had to reach under for it.

The third time he reached under for the brush, he retrieved the stuff which the Greek’s clothing had yielded the night before. The articles had not worked out of the nook between the dock cross braces underwater where Sail had jammed them after swimming back from the island where he had taken the dead Greek.

Sail finished washing down, hauled the dink up on the davits, and during the business of coiling the dock hose around the faucet in the middle of the dock, he worked his eyes. Any one of a dozen staring persons within view might have been the watcher from the Matthews. The other eleven would be tourists down for a gawk at the yachts.

Sail took the Greek’s stuff out of the dink when he got the scrub brush. He went below. Picking the business cards apart was a job because they were soaked to pulp. He examined both sides of each card as he got it separated. One card said Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis of the yacht Athens Girl chartered for Gulf Stream fishing and that nobody caught more fish. The address was Pier Five. I live aboard, was written in pencil on the back.

The other twenty-six cards said the Lignum Vitae Towing Company had a president named Captain Abel Dokomos. The address was on the Miami River, and there was a telephone number for after six.

The piece of board was four by twenty by a quarter inches, mahogany, with screw holes in the four corners. Most of the varnish was gone, peeled rather than worn off, and so was some of the gold leaf. There were a letter and four figures in gold leaf: K9420.

Sail burned all of the stuff in the galley Shipmate.

A man was taking two slot machines away from the lunch stand as Sail passed on his way uptown. Later, he passed four places which had slot machines, and there was a play around all of them. Sail loafed around each crowd, but not as if he wanted to. He walked off from one crowd, then came back. In all, he managed to play three machines. The third paid four nickels and he played two back without getting anything. The slot in a dial telephone got one of the surviving nickels.

He told the operator he didn’t dial as a matter of principle and asked for Pier Five, and when he got Pier Five, asked for Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis of the Athens Girl. It took them five minutes to decide they couldn’t find Captain Andopolis.

After the telephone clanked its metal throat around the fourth nickel, Sail repeated the refusal to dial and asked for the number of Captain Abel Dokomos’ Lignum Vitae Towing Company.

When he heard the answer, he made his voice as different as he could. “Cap’n Abel handy?”

“He hasn’t come down this morning. Anything we can do?”

“Call later,” Sail said.

The woman on the other end of the wire had been Blick’s sister Nola, visitor aboard Sail the night before.

Sail selected a cafeteria which was a little overdone in chromium. The darkie who carried his tray got a dime. There was a small dab of oatmeal on the first chair Sail started to sit on. He broke his egg yolks and watched them run with an intent air. The fifth lump made his coffee cup overflow. He put almost a whole egg down with the first gulp from the force of habit of a man who eats his own cooking and eats it in solitude.

A boy wandered among the tables, selling newspapers and racing tip sheets. He carried and sold more tip sheets than newspapers. Sail took the coffee slowly with the spoon, getting a little undissolved sugar out of the bottom of the cup with each spoonful, seeming to enjoy it. The sugar lumps were wrapped in paper carrying the cafeteria’s advertisement, and he unwrapped one and ate it after he finished everything before him. He put the papers in the coffee cup.

The man in a stiff straw hat eating near the door did not put syrup or anything sweet on his pancakes or in his coffee. And when he finished eating, he poked the back of his cheek absently with a finger, then put the finger in the back of his mouth to feel.

Sail got up and took a slow walk until he came to a U-Drive-It. There was a slot machine in the U-Drive-It. He tried it, and it paid off only in noise. He made a deposit and got a light six sedan. For three blocks, he drove slowly, looking out and appraising buildings for height. He picked one much taller than the others and parked in front of it. After starting into the building, he came back to look over an upright dingus, one of a row of the things along the curb. Small print said motorists could park there half an hour if they put a nickel in the dingus and turned the handle.

“The whole town’s got it,” he complained, and shook the device to see if it would start working without a nickel. It wouldn’t and he put one in.

He said loudly, just before entering one of the tall building elevators, “Five!”

The fifth-floor corridor was not much different from other office building corridors. There were three real estate and one law office and some more.

The man who had felt his bad tooth in the cafeteria came sneaking up the stairs from the fourth floor and put his head around the corner. Sail was set. The man’s straw hat sounded surprisingly like glass when it collapsed, and the man got down on all fours to mew in pain. Sail hit again, then unwrapped his belt from his fist. He blew on the fist, working the fingers.

“I’ve got to rush my friend to a place for treatment,” he told the operator when the elevator cage came.

He thanked the operator and half a dozen other volunteer assistants while he started the rented car. He drove past the U-Drive-It. The proprietor was fussing with his machine.

Sail drove five or six miles by guess before he found a lonesome spot and got out. He hauled the man out. Sail’s breathing was regular and deeper than usual; his eyes were wide with excitement, and he perspired. He wiped his palms on his clerical black shorts and bent over his victim.

The man with the bad tooth began big at the top and tapered. His small hands were callused, dirt was ground into the calluses, and the nails were broken. He had dark hair and a dark face, but got lighter as he went down, finishing off with feet in a pair of white shoes. He smelled a little as men smell who live on small boats with no baths.

His pockets held three hundred in nothing smaller than tens, all new bills, in a plain envelope. There was a dollar sixty-one in silver mixed up with the cashier’s slip for his cafeteria breakfast. In ten or so minutes, he was scowling at Sail.

He said something in Greek. It sounded like his personal opinion of Sail or the situation.

Sail said, “Andopolis?”

“You know my name, so whatcha askin’ for?” the man growled without much accent.

“You’re here because I been getting too much attention,” Sail said. “That oughta be clear, hadn’t it?”

Andopolis felt his head, that part of his cheek over his bad tooth, then got to his feet. Sail took his belt out of his pocket and started threading it through the loops. Andopolis clutched his head, groaned, started to sit down, but jumped at Sail instead. Sail moved to one side, but not enough, and Andopolis hit his shoulder and the impact turned him around and around. Andopolis hit him somewhere else, and the whole front of his body went numb and something against his back was the ground.

“I’ll stomp ya!” Andopolis yelled.

He jumped on Sail with both feet, and Sail was still numb enough to feel only the dull shock. His rounded body rolled under the impact, and Andopolis waved his arms to keep erect. Sail had his belt unthreaded. He laid it like a whip across Andopolis’ face. Andopolis grabbed his face, and was wide open when he sat down heavily beside Sail.

When Andopolis came to, his wrists were fastened with the belt. Sail had his shirt unbuttoned and was examining the damage the other’s feet had done. There was one purple print of the entire bottom of Andopolis’ right foot, and a skinned patch where the other had slid off, with loosened skin tangled in the long golden hairs, but not much blood. He put back his head and shoulders and started to take a full breath, but broke it off in coughing. He sat down coughing, holding his chest, and sweated.

“Yah!” Andopolis gloated. “I stomp your guts good if you don’t lay off me! What you been follerin’ me for?”

Sail looked up sickly. “Followin’ you?”

“Yah.”

Sail, still sitting, said, “My Christian friend, you stood anchor watch on me last night. You haunted me this morning. But still I was following you, was I?”

“Before that, I’m talk about,” Andopolis growled. “You follow me to Bimini in that black bugeye. I make the run from Bimini here yesterday. You make it too. What kinda blind fool you take me for? You followin’ me, and don’t you think I don’t know him.”

“It must have been coincidence.”

“Don’t feed me, mister.”

“It just might be that nobody will have to feed you for long.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“You were walking down the dock toward my boat last night when Abel jumped you. You sort of ruined Abel, and I covered up for you, but that’s not the point. The point is, why were you coming to see me?”

“Aw, hell, I was gonna tell you about followin’ me.”

Sail coughed some, deep and low, trying to keep it from moving his ribs, then got up on his feet carefully.

“All right, now we’re being honest with each other, and I’ll tell you a true story about a yacht named Lady Luck.”

Andopolis crowded his lips into a bunch and pushed the bunch out as far as he could, but didn’t say anything.

Sail said, “The Lady Luck, Department of Commerce registration number K9420. She belonged to Bill Lord of Tulsa. Oil. Out in Tulsa, they call Bill the Osage Magician on account of what he’s got that it seems to take to find oil. Missus Bill likes jewelry, and Bill likes her, so he buys her plenty. Because Missus Bill really likes her rocks, she carries them around with her. You following me?”

Andopolis was. He still had his lips pooched.

“Bill Lord had his Lady Luck anchored off the vet camp on Lower Matecumbe last November,” Sail continued. “Bill and the missus were ashore, looking over the camp. Bill was in the trenches himself, and is some kind of a shot with the American Legion and the Democrats, so he was interested. The missus left her pretties on the yacht. Remember that. Everybody has read about the hurricane that hit that afternoon, and maybe some noticed that Bill and his missus were among those who hung on behind that tank car. But the Lady Luck wasn’t so lucky, and she dragged her pick off somewhere and sank. For a while, nobody knew where.”

Sail stopped to cough. He had to lie down on his back before he could stop, and he was very careful getting erect. Perspiration had most of him wet.

“A couple of weeks ago, a guy asked the Department of Commerce lads to check and give him the name of the boat, and the owner, that carried number K9420,” Sail said, keeping his voice down now. “The word got to me. Never mind how. And it was easy to find you had had a fishing party down around the Matecumbes and Long Key a few days before you got curious about K9420. It was a little harder to locate your party. Two guys. They said you anchored off Lower Matecumbe to bottom-fish, and your anchor fouled something, and you had a time, and finally, when you got the anchor up, you brought aboard some bow planking off a sunken boat. From the strain, it was pretty evident the anchor had pulled this planking off the rest of the boat, which was still down there. You checked up as a matter of course to learn what boat you had found.”

Andopolis looked as if more than his tooth hurt him.

Sail kept his voice even lower to keep his ribs from moving.

“Tough you didn’t get in touch with the insurance people instead of contacting Captain Abel Dokomos, a countryman who had a towing and salvage outfit and no rep to speak of. You needed help to get the Lady Luck. Cap Abel tried to make you cough up the exact location. You got scared and lit out for Bimini. You discovered I was following you, and that scared you back to Miami. You wanted a showdown, and when Cap Abel collared you on the dock as you were coming to see me, you took care of that part of your troubles with a knife. But that left Abel’s lady friend, or whatever she is, and her brother, Blick. They were in the know, too. They tried to grab you last night in the park after you fixed Abel up, and you outran them. Now, that’s a very complete story, or do you think?”

Andopolis was a man who did his thinking with the help of his face, and there was more disgust than anything else on his features.

“You tryin’ to cut in?” he snarled.

“Not trying.”

“Then what—”

“Have.”

The sun was comfortable, but mosquitoes were coming out of the swamp around the road to investigate.

“Yeah,” Andopolis said. “I guess you have, maybe.”

Sail put his shirt on, favoring his chest. “We’ve got to watch the insurance outfit. They paid off on Missus Bill’s stuff. Over a hundred thousand. They’ll have wires out.”

Andopolis got up and held out his hands for the belt to be taken off, and Sail took it off. Andopolis said, “I thought of the insurance when I got Cap Abel. We used to run rum. The Macedonian tramp!”

“There’s shoal-water diving stuff aboard my bugeye,” Sail said.

“You don’t get me in no water! Shark, barracuda, moray, sting rays. Hell of a place. If I hadn’t been afraid, I’d have done the diving myself. I thought of that, believe me.”

“That’s my worry. It’s not too bad, once you get a system.” Sail felt his chest. “I guess maybe these ribs will knit in a while.”

Andopolis looked much better, almost as if he had forgotten his tooth. “It’s your neck. Okay if you say so.”

“Then let’s get going.”

Andopolis was feeling his tooth when he got into the car. Sail had driven no more than half a mile when both front tires let go their air. The car was in the canal beside the road before anything could be done about it.

The car broke its windows going down the canal bank. The canal must have been six feet deep, and its tea-colored water filled the machine at once. Sail had both arms over his middle where the steering wheel had hit. So much air had been knocked out of him, and his middle hurt so, that he had to take something into his lungs, and there was only water. He began to drown.

The water seemed to be rushing around inside the car, although there was room for no more to come in. Sail couldn’t find the door handles. The broken windows he did find were too small to crawl out of, but after exploring three, he got desperate and tried a small one. There was not enough hole. He pushed and worked around with the jagged glass, his head out of the car, the rest of him inside, until strange feelings of something running out of his neck made him know he was cutting his throat.

He pulled his head in, and pummeled the car roof with blows that did not have strength enough to knock him away from what he was hitting. It came to his mind to try the jagged glass again as being better than drowning, but he couldn’t find it, and clawed and felt with growing madness until he began to get fistfuls of air. He sank twice before he clutched a weed on shore, after which the spasms he was having kept him at first from hearing the shots.

Yells were mixed in with the shot sounds. Andopolis was on the canal bank, running madly. Blick and his sister were on the same bank, running after Andopolis, shooting at him, and having, for such short range, bad luck. They were shooting at Andopolis’ legs. All three ran out of sight. Sound alone told Sail when they winged Andopolis and grabbed him.

Sail had some of the water out of his lungs. He swam to a clump of brush which hung down into the water, got under it, and managed to get his coughing stopped by the time Blick and Nola came up hauling Andopolis. Andopolis sobbed at the top of his voice.

“Shoot his other leg off if he acts up, Nola,” Blick yelled. “I’ll get our little fat bud.”

Sail wanted to cough until it was almost worth getting shot just to do so. Red from his neck was spreading through the water under the brush.

“He must be a submarine,” Blick said. He got a stick and poked around. “Hell, Nola, this water is eight feet deep anyhow.”

Andopolis babbled something in Greek.

Blick screamed, “Shut up, or we’ll put bullets into you like we put ’em into your car tires!”

Andopolis went on babbling.

“His leg is pretty bad, Blick,” Nola said.

“Hell, let ’im bleed.”

Air kept coming up from the submerged car. Sail tried to keep his mind off wanting to cough. It seemed that Blick was going to stand for hours on the bank with his bright little pistol.

“He musta drowned,” Blick said. “Get that other leg to workin’, Andopolis. You didn’t know we been on your trail all night and all mornin’, did ya? We didn’t lose it when this Sail got you, either.”

Andopolis whimpered as they hazed him away. Car sound departed.

Captain Chris, wide-eyed and hearty and with no sign of a chill, exclaimed, “Well, well, we began to think something had happened to you.”

Sail looked at him with eyes that appeared drained, then stumbled the other two steps down the companion into the main cabin of Sail and let himself down on the starboard seat. Pads of cotton under gauze made Sail’s neck and wrists three times normal thickness. Tape stuck to his face in four places, and iodine had run out from under one of the pieces and dried.

Young bony Joey looked Sail over and his big grin took the warp out of the corner of his mouth.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said cheerfully. “Somebody beat me to it.”

Sail gave them a look of bile. “This is a private boat, in case you forgot.”

“He’s mussed up and now he’s tough!” Joey said. “Swell!”

“Now, now, let’s keep things on an amiable footing,” Captain Chris murmured.

Sail said, “Drag it!”

Joey popped his palms together, aimed a finger at Sail. “You got told about Lewis finding human blood in that fish mess on the dock last night. But try to alibi the rest. There was wet tracks in this boat. That was all right, maybe, only some of the tracks were salt water and the water spilled on the galley floor was fresh. We got the harbor squad diver down this morning. He found a box on the bottom below this boat with live fish in it. He found a bathing suit with a sinker tied to it. And this morning, a yachtsman beached his dink on the little island by Pier One and found a dead Greek. We sat down with all that and done our arithmetic, and here we are.”

Sail’s face began changing from red and tan to cream and tan, although the bandages took away some of the effect.

Captain Chris said, “Joey, you’d make a lousy gambler, on account of you show your cards.”

Sail said in a low voice, “You’re gonna get your snouts busted if you keep this up!”

Captain Chris looked unconvincingly injured. “I didn’t think we’d have any trouble with you, Mister Sail. I hoped we wouldn’t. You acted like a gentleman last night.”

Sail had been seated. He got up, bending over first to get the center of gravity right. He pointed a thumb at the companion. “Don’t fall overboard on your way out.”

“I bet he thinks we’re leaving!” Joey jeered.

A string of red crawled out from under one of the bandages on Sail’s neck. His face was more cream than any other color. He reached behind himself into the tackle locker and got a gaff hook, a four-foot haft of varnished oak with a bright tempered-steel hook with a needle point. He showed Joey the hook and his front teeth.

He said violently, “I’ve got a six-aspirin headache and things to go with it! I feel too lousy to shy at cops. You two public servants get the hell out before I go fishing for kidneys.”

Joey yelled happily, “Damn me, he’s resisting arrest and threatening an officer!”

Sail said, “Arrest?”

“I forgot to tell you.” Joey grinned. “We’re going to—”

Sail asked Captain Chris, “Is this on the level?”

“I regret that it is,” Captain Chris said. “After all, evidence is evidence, and while Miami is noted for her hospitality, we do draw lines, and when our visitors go so far as to use knives on—”

“I’m gonna hate to break your heart, you windbag!” Sail said angrily.

He took short steps, and not very fast ones, into the galley, and took the rearmost can of beer out of the icebox. He cut off the top instead of using the patent opener. When the beer had filled the sink with suds, he got a glass tube which had been waxed inside the can. He held out the two sheets of paper which the tube contained.

Joey raked his eyes over the print and penned signatures, then spelled them out, lips moving.

“This don’t make a damn bit of difference!”

Captain Chris complained, “My glasses fell off yesterday during one of them infernal chills. What does it say, Joey?”

“He’s a private dick assigned to locate some stuff that sank on a yacht. The insurance people hired him.”

Captain Chris buttoned his coat, pulled it down over his hips, set his cap by patting the top of it.

“I’m afraid this makes it different, Joey.”

Joey snorted. “I say it don’t.”

Captain Chris walked to the companion. “Beauty before age, Joey.”

“Listen, if you think—”

“Out, Joey.”

“Mister Homicide, any day—”

“Out!” Captain Chris roared. “You’re as big a goddamn fool as your mother.”

Joey licked his lips while he kept a malevolent eye on Sail, then took a step forward, but changed his mind and climbed the companion steps. When he was outside, he complained, “Paw, you and your ideas give me an ache.”

Captain Chris sighed wearily while he looked at Sail. “He’s my son, the spoiled whelp.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t want to cooperate?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“If you get yourself in a sling, it’d be better if you had a reason for refusing to help the police.”

Sail said, “All I get out of this is a commission for recovering the stuff. Right now, I need that money like hell.”

“You’d still get it if we helped each other.”

“Maybe. But I’ve cooperated before.”

Captain Chris shrugged, climbed three of the companion’s five steps, and stopped. “This malaria is sure something. I could sing like a lark today, only I keep thinking about the chills due tomorrow. Did you say a special quinine went in that whiskey?”

“Bullards. It’s English.”

“Thanks.” Captain Chris climbed the rest of the way out.

When the two policemen reached the dock, Sail came slowly on deck and handed Captain Chris a bottle. “You can’t buy Bullards here.”

“Say, I appreciate this!”

“If my day’s run of luck keeps on the way it has, you’ll probably find your knife man in a canal somewhere,” Sail said slowly.

“I’ll look,” Captain Chris promised.

The two cops went away with Joey kicking his feet down hard on the dock boards.

There was a rip in the nervous old man’s canvas apron, and he mixed his words with waves of a pipe off which most of the stem had been bitten. He waved the pipe and said, “My, mister, you must’ve had a car accident.”

Sail, holding to the counter, said, “What about the charts?”

“Yeah, there’s one other place sells the government charts besides us. Hopkins Carter. But if you’re going down in the keys, we got everything you need here. If you go on the inside, you’ll want thirty-two-sixty and sixty-one. They’re the strip charts. But if you take Hawk Channel, you’ll need harbor chart five-eighty-three, and charts twelve-forty-nine, fifty and fifty-one. Here, I’ll show—”

Sail squinted his eyes, swallowed and said, “I don’t want to buy a chart. I want you to slip out and telephone me if either of certain two persons comes in here and asks for chart twelve-fifty, the one which has lower Matecumbe.”

“Huh?”

Sail said patiently, “It’s simple. You just tell the party you got to get the chart, and go telephone me, then stall around three or four minutes before you deliver the chart, giving me time to get over here and pick up their trail.”

The nervous old man put his pipe in his mouth and immediately took it out.

“What kind of shenanigans is this?”

Sail showed him a license to operate in Florida.

“One of them private detectives, huh?” the old man said, impressed.

Sail put a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

“That one’s got twins. How about it?”

“Mister, if you’ll just describe your parties. That’s all!”

Sail made a word picture of Blick and Nola, putting the salient points down on a piece of paper. He added a telephone number.

“The phone’s a booth in a cigar store on the corner. I’ll be there. How far is this Hopkins Carter?”

“Two blocks.”

“I’ll probably be there for the next ten minutes.”

Sail, walking off, was not as pale as he had been on the boat. He had put on a serge suit more black than blue and a new black polo. When he was standing in front of the elevator, taking a pull at a flat amber bottle which had a crown and a figure 5 on the label, the old man yelled.

“Hey, mister!”

Sail lowered the bottle, started coughing, and called between coughs, “Now” — cough — “what?”

“Lemme look at this again and see if you said anything about the way he talked.”

Sail moved back to where he could see the old man peering at the paper which held the descriptions. The old man took his pipe out of his teeth.

“Mister, what does that feller talk like?”

“Well, about like the rest of these crackers. No, wait. He’ll call you bud two or three times.”

The old man pointed his pipe at the floor. “I already sold that man a twelve-fifty. ’Bout half hour ago.”

Sail pumped air out of his lungs in a short laugh which had no sound except the sound made by the air passing his teeth and nostrils. He said, “That’s swell. They would probably want a late chart for their X-marks-the-spot. And so they’ve got it, and they’re off to the wars, and me, I’m out ten percent on better than a hundred thousand.”

He had taken two slow steps toward the elevator when the old man said, “The chart was delivered.”

Sail came around. “Eh?”

“He ordered it over the telephone. We delivered. I got the address somewhere.” He thumbed an order book. “Whileaway. A houseboat on the river below the Twelfth Street causeway.”

Sail put a ten on the counter. “The brother.”

He was a fat man trying to hide a big face behind two hands, a match and a cigar. He said, “Oof!” and his dropping hands dragged cigar ashes down his vest when Sail prodded him in the upper belly with a fingertip.

Sail said, “I just didn’t want you to think you were getting away with it.”

The fat man turned his cigar down at an injured angle. “With what?”

“Whatever you call what you’ve been doing.”

“There must be some mistake, brother.”

“There’s been several. It’ll be another if you keep on trying to tail me.”

“Me, tailing you! Why should I do that?”

“Because you’re a cop. You’ve got it all over you. And probably because Captain Chris ordered me trailed.”

The plainclothesman sent his cigar between two pedestrians, across the sidewalk and into the gutter. “Mind telling me what you can do about it?”

Sail had started away. He came back, pounding his heels. “What was that?”

“I’ve heard all about you, small-fat-and-tough. You’re due to learn that with the Miami Police Department, you can’t horse—”

Sail put his hand on the fat man’s face. The fingers were spread, and against the hand’s two longest fingers, the fat man’s eyeballs felt wet. Sail shoved out and up a little. The cop did not yell or curse. He swung a vicious uppercut. He kicked with his right foot, then his left. The kicks would have lifted a hound dog over a roof. He held his eyes. The third kick upset a stack of gallon cans of paint.

Sail got out of there. He changed cabs four times as rapidly as one cab could find another.

Whileaway was built for rivers, and not very wide rivers. She was a hooker that couldn’t take a sea. A houseboat about sixty feet waterline, she had three decks that put her up like a skyscraper. She should never have been built. She was white, or had been.

Scattered onshore near the houseboat was a gravel pile, two trucks with nobody near them, a shed, junk left by the hurricane, a trailer with both tires flat, windows broken, and two rowboats in as bad shape as the trailer. Sail was behind most of them at one time or another on his way to the riverbank. There was a concrete seawall. Between Sail and the houseboat, two gigs, a yawl, a cruiser and another houseboat were tied to dolphins along the concrete river bulkhead. Nobody seemed to be on any of the boats.

Sail wore dark blue silk underwear shorts. He hid everything else under the hurricane junk. The water had a little more smell and floating things than in the harbor. He kept behind the moored boats after he got over the seawall, and let the tide carry him. He was just coming under the Whileaway bow when one of the square window ports opened almost overhead.

Sail sank. He thought somebody was going to shoot or use a harpoon.

Something large and heavy fell into the water and sank, colliding with him, pushing him out of the way and going on sinking. He had enough contact with it to tell the first part of it was a navy-type anchor. He swam down after it. The river had two fathoms here, and he found the anchor and what was tied to it. The tide stretched his legs out behind as he clung to what he had found.

Whoever had tied the knots was a sailor, and sailor knots, while they hold, are made to be easily untied. Sail got them loose.

It would have been better to swim under the houseboat and come up on the other side, away from the port from which the anchor and Nola had been thrown, but Sail didn’t feel equal to anything but straight up. His air capacity was low because of his near drowning earlier in the day.

He put his head out of the water with his eyes open and fixed in the direction of the square port. No head was sticking out of the port. No weapon appeared. The tide had taken Sail near the stern of the Whileaway and still carried him.

He got Nola’s head out. Water leaked from her nose and mouth. Sail got an arm up as high as he could, clutching. He missed the first sagging spring line, got the second. The rope with which the anchor had been attached to Nola still clung to her ankles. He tied one of her arms to the spring line so that her head was out.

Sail went up the spring line with his hands until one foot would reach the window sills. From there to the first deck was simpler.

Nola began to gag and cough. It made a racket.

Sail opened his mouth to yell at her to be quiet. She couldn’t hear him yet, or understand. He wheeled and sloped into the houseboat cabin.

The furnishings might have been something once, but that had been fifteen years ago. Varnish everywhere had alligatored.

Sail angled into the galley when he saw it. He came out with a quart brass fire extinguisher which needed polishing, and a rusted ice pick. There had been nothing else in sight.

Nola got enough water out to start screeching.

Beyond the galley was a dining room. Sail had half crossed it when Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis came in the opposite door with a rusty butcher knife.

Andopolis was using a chair for a crutch, riding its bottom with the knee of the leg which Blick and Nola had put a bullet through. Around his eyes — on the lids more than elsewhere — were puffy gray blisters about a size which burning cigarettes would make. Three fingernails were off each hand. Red ran from the three mutilated tips on the right hand down over the rusty butcher knife.

Sail had time to throw the fire extinguisher and made use of the time, but the best he did was bounce the extinguisher off the bulkhead behind Andopolis.

Andopolis said thickly, “I feex you up, mine fran!” and deliberately reversed the butcher knife for throwing.

Sail threw his ice pick. It stuck into Andopolis’ chest over his heart. It did not go in deep enough to bother Andopolis. He did not even bother to jerk it out.

Sail jumped for the door, wanting to go back the way he had come. His wet feet slipped, let him down flat on his face.

Feet came pounding through the door and went overhead. Sail looked up. The feet belonged to the plainclothes detective who had been in the hardware store which sold marine charts.

Andopolis threw his knife. He was good at it, or lucky. The detective put his hands over his middle and looked foolish. He changed his course and ran to the wall. His last steps were spraddling. He leaned against the bulkhead. His hands did not quite cover the handle of the butcher knife.

Andopolis hobbled to Sail on his chair. He stood on one leg and clubbed the chair. Sail rolled. The chair became two pieces and some splinters on the floor. Sail, still lying on the floor, kicked Andopolis’ good leg. Andopolis fell down.

As if that had given him an idea, the detective fell. He kept both hands over the knife handle.

Andopolis used the two largest parts of the chair and flailed at Sail. On all fours, Sail got away. His throat wound was running again. He got up, but there was no weapon except the bent fire extinguisher. He got that. Andopolis hit him with the chair leg and his left side went numb from the belt down. He retreated, as lopsided on his feet as Andopolis, and passed into the main cabin.

Nola was still screaming. A man was swearing at her with young cocky Joey’s voice. Men were jumping around on the decks and in the houseboat rooms.

Blick sat on the main cabin floor, getting his head untangled from the remains of a chair. His face was a mess. It was also smeared with blue ink. The ink bottle was upside down under a table on which a new chart was spread open. A common pen lay on the chart.

Andopolis came in following Sail. Andopolis crawled on one knee and two hands.

Blick squawked, “What’s Nola yellin’ for?”

Andopolis crawled as if he did not see Sail or Blick, had not heard Blick. A tattered divan stood against the starboard bulkhead. Andopolis lay down and put an arm under that. He brought out a little bright pistol, either Blick’s or his sister’s.

Captain Chris jumped in through the door.

Andopolis’ small pistol made the noise of a big one. Blick, sitting on the floor, jumped a foot when there seemed no possible way of his jumping, no muscles to propel him upward. He came down with his head forward between his knees, and remained that way, even after drops began coming out of the center of his forehead.

Captain Chris had trouble with his coattails and his gun. Andopolis’ little gun made its noise again. Captain Chris turned around faster than he could have without some help from lead, and ran out, still having trouble with his gun.

Sail worked the handle of the fire extinguisher. The plunger made ink-sick! noises going up and down. No tetrachloride came out. There was nothing to show it ever would. Then the first squirt ran out about a foot. The second was longer, and the third wet Andopolis’ chest. Sail raised the stream and pumped. He got Andopolis’s eyes full and rolled.

Andopolis fired once at where Sail had been. Then he got up on one foot and hopped for the door. His directions were a little confused. He hopped against a bulkhead.

Andopolis went down on the floor and began having a fit. It was a brief fit, ending by Andopolis turning over on his back and relaxing.

The wall had driven the ice pick the rest of the way into his chest.

Outside, Nola still screamed, but now she made words, scatteredly.

“Andopolis... killing Blick... tried... me... Andopolis... last night... Abel... knife... we... him... tell... broke loose... me... anchor... Blick...”

Sail ran to the table. The chart on the table had two ink lines forming a V with arms that ran to landmarks on Lower Matecumbe, and compass bearings were inked beside each arm, with the point where the lines came together ringed.

Sail left with the chart by the door opposite the one which he had come in by, taking the chart. He found a cabin. He tore the V out of the chart, folded it flat and tucked it under his neck bandages, using the stateroom mirror to adjust the bandages to hide the paper. He threw the rest of the chart out of a port on the river side.

Captain Chris was standing near dead Andopolis. Torn coat lining was hanging from under the right tail of his coat, but he had his gun in his hand.

“Where’d you go to?” he wanted to know.

“Was I supposed to stick around while you drew that gun?”

“The fireworks over?”

“I hope so.”

Captain Chris put his gun in his pants pocket. “You’re pinched. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Young Joey came in, not as cocky and not stamping his feet. Two plainclothesmen followed him, then two uniformed officers walking ahead of and behind the old man who sold the charts in the hardware store.

The old man pointed at Sail and said, “He’s the one who asked about the feller who ordered the chart. Like I told you, I gave him—”

“Save it.” Joey glared at Captain Chris. “We still ain’t got nothing on this fat sailor, Paw. The girl says Andopolis is a party fisherman whose anchor pulled up part of a boat.”

The girl had told about everything. Joey kept telling the story until he got to, “So Sail yanked the dame out, and now what’ve we got to hold him on?”

Captain Chris, looking mysterious and satisfied, told Sail, “Get your clothes on or we’ll book you for indecent exposure along with the rest.”

“What rest?”

“Get your clothes on.”

Sail dressed sitting on the hurricane wreckage, brushed off the bottoms of his feet and put on socks and shoes. He looked up at Captain Chris as he tied the shoestrings.

“Kidding, aren’t you?”

“Sure, sure!”

Sail bristled. “You’ve got to have a charge. Just try running me in on an INV and see what it gets you.”

“I’ve got a charge.”

“In a gnat’s eye.”

Captain Chris said with relish, “You’ve been playing the slot machines which are so popular in our fair city. You used a slug made of two hollow halves that fit together and hold muriatic or something that eats the works of the machines and puts them on the fritz. We found a box of the slugs on your boat. We have witnesses who saw you play machines before they went bad.”

Sail wore a dark look toward the squad car. “This is a piker trick.”

Captain Chris tooled the car over a bad street. “You put that gambling joint in Bimini on the bum, too. What’s the idea?”

“Nuts.”

“Now, don’t get that way. I’m jugging you, yes. But it’s the principle. It’s to show you that it ain’t a nice idea to football the cops around. Not in Miami, anyway. You’ll get ten days or ten bucks is all. It’s the principle. That, and a bet I made with Joey that if he’d let me handle this and keep his mouth shut, and you beat me to the kill, I’d jug you on this slot machine thing. Joey wanted you jugged. Now, what’s this between you and slot machines and wheels?”

Sail considered for a while, then took in breath.

“I even went to an institution where they cure things, once,” he said. “Kind of a bughouse.”

“Huh?”

“One psychologist called it a fixation. I’ve always had it. Can’t help it. Some people can’t stand being alone, and some can’t stand being shut up in a room, and some can’t take mice. With me, it’s gambling. Can’t stand it. I can’t stand the thought of taking chances to make money.”

“Just a lad who gets his dough the safe and sane method.”

“That’s the idea,” Sail agreed, “in a general way.”