The Intriguers

III.

According to the marina records, his name was Joel W. Patterson. At least that was the name written down opposite the registration number of the boat I'd towed in. He came from San Bernardino, California. He had arrived in San Carlos two days after I had. He'd been staying in a pickup camper at the trailer court across the road.

"Yes, senor, I remember him a little," said the young lady behind the counter in the marina office, where you could buy bait and tackle, arrange for dock space, and hire anything from a single rod-and-reel outfit to a large fishing vessel complete with captain and crew. She went on, "He was expecting to meet a friend here, someone from Arizona, I think. He looked through my book of registration here. But I do not think the friend ever came. I never saw him with anyone. He was quite a~ handsome young man, but alone, always alone."

He'd undoubtedly been looking for my name and boat number, to make sure I'd arrived so he could get to work on me. I said, "Well, he's still alone, I guess."

"Si, senor. It is a terrible thing. I have sent one of the party boats out to search, but in the darkness and in this wind there is not much hope. You did not see him at all?"

"No, I was fishing along the shore and I saw something white drifting off the point," I said. "I went out to have a look and there was the boat full of water with nobody on board. I cruised around it a bit, but I couldn't see anybody swimming, so I just grabbed the rope and brought it in." I rubbed my sore hands together. "It wasn't easy. The damn thing towed like a dead whale."

"You did what you could, Senor Helm." She was a very attractive young lady, and she ran the marina operation very efficiently, but what really impressed me was that she turned up for work each morning in a simple cotton dress. A US female in her job with her figure couldn't have resisted appearing in a ducky little sailor-boy pantsuit plastered all over with cute gold anchors, just to show how nautical she was. "You are staying at the Posada San Carlos? The authorities may wish to ask you some more questions, Senor Helm."

"Sure," I said. "I'll be there until tomorrow morning some time-well, if they insist on my staying on, I suppose I'll have to."

"I do not think that will be necessary."

"In that case," I said, "I'll pay my bill and pick up my boat tomorrow. Is there any chance of getting somebody to wash it down for me after I get it on the trailer?"

"Certainly, senor. The price is six dollars. You had better come early while the tide is high so you have plenty of water at the launching ramp… Excuse me."

She turned to take a call on the electronic gizmo behind her, speaking Spanish too rapid and colloquial for me to follow. She put down the microphone and sighed, turning back to me.

"That was the captain of the boat I sent out. He says it is very dark out there, and he has found nothing. I told him to come back in." She moved her shoulders. "If they will insist on taking such little boats out in such bad weather… They cannot be made to understand that this is a big and dangerous body of water, senor. They see it so calm and smooth in the morning and will not believe how it can get rough by evening."

"Sure."

I went back down to the dock to get the tackle I'd left in the boat, although I'd had no trouble with pilferage, and neither had anybody else with whom I'd talked. Gear that would have vanished in an hour from a US parking lot had stayed safely on board week after week, but it seemed unfair to strain some poor Mexican's honesty with a couple of expensive rods and a pair of good binoculars.

After lifting the stuff onto the dock, ready to carry ashore, I checked the lines and rearranged the canvas bumpers so she wouldn't chafe. Then I went over to the aluminum skiff docked astern, still full of water, just the way I'd brought it in but not quite the way I'd found it. I'd taken the precaution, once I'd got it into relatively calm water, to check it over. There had been a soggy box of 7 mm Remington Magnum rifle cartridges, partly used, tucked under a seat. Lashed to one of the braces I'd found a long, soft, black plastic fishing rod case that was arranged a little differently inside from what you'd expect. I'd slipped the cartridge box into the case, for weight, zipped up the case, and dropped it overboard in exactly one hundred and ten feet of water-assuming that the electronic depth-finder on my fancy little borrowed ship was properly calibrated.

Now I frowned down at the registration number on the bow of the skiff, a California number of course, amid debated whether or not to risk a visit to Mr. Joel Patterson's camper across the road, but I couldn't think of anything I might find that would be worth the attention and suspicion I might attract. I found myself wondering how long he'd lasted out there, and dismissed the thought.

Then I deliberately brought it back out and examined it, because if you're going to do it you'd damn well better be able to look it in the eye. I have no respect for these remote-control killers who can happily push a bomb release in a high-flying airplane as long as they don't have to see the blasted bodies hundreds of feet below; but who can't bear to pull the trigger of a.45 auto and produce one bloody corpse at ten yards.

There was a chance that he'd made it ashore or would still make it. I'd known men who could have, but I didn't think he was one of that select group of amphibious humans. His specific gravity had been too great, for one thing: he'd had too much bone and too little fat for adequate flotation. I've got the same problem myself. He'd looked like a lean, tanned, swimming-pool hero to me, good only for impressing the bikini babes with a couple of smoking-fast laps between drinks, not the chunky, buoyant, durable fish-man type it usually takes to survive in stormy waters a couple of miles offshore.

I stood there a moment longer, feeling baffled and irritable. In my line of work, I have killed several people; in fact you might go so far as to say that is my line of work. However, I'm usually given a few compelling reasons why the touch, as we call it, is necessary for the continued welfare of the human race and the United States of America. In this case I'd been struck at, and had struck back, without having any idea what the hell it was all about.

The sound of a motor made me look up quickly. A boat was coming through the narrow entrance of the yacht basin with running lights on; I'd seen it before. It was the snub-nosed I/O runabout that had gone out to test the big waves earlier in the day and come racing back in again. When it came under the marina lights, I saw that spray was crusted on its windshield and that the five kids on board were pretty wet. There was a short-haired girl, two long-haired girls, amid two long-haired boys. They were laughing and joking and passing cans of beer around as they coasted up to an empty dock space some distance away.

I picked up my rods amid tackle box and carried them up to the station wagon that had been part of the package I'd picked up in Tucson: a big Chevrolet with a monstrous 454-cubic-inch engine. The mill was fairly sluggish for all those cubes; the best that could be said for it was that it worked pretty well on the low-test gas that's all that's readily available in Mexico.

The wagon itself was one of those delectable styling exercises whipped up by the butterfly boys to make the salesmen happy, and to hell with the customers who'll eventually have to live with it. It had a lot of tricky features to generate sales appeal-a vanishing tailgate; vanishing windshield wipers-but big as it was it had no leg-room at all, certainly nowhere near enough for my six feet four. I'd had to have the front seat moved back several inches to make it just marginally inhabitable. Furthermore, although it had seats for six passengers and space for a mountain of luggage, it had springs stolen from a baby carriage designed for very light babies. I'd had to have the rear suspension drastically beefed up to keep the tail from dragging in the road-with a load of just me, one suitcase, a little fishing tackle, and a relatively light boat trailer with a tongue weight of considerably less than two hundred pounds!

Add to these major aberrations various minor, uncorrected new-car ailments that I'd had to have put right, and you can see why I wasn't unreceptive to the idea, once it had occurred to me, that I might be the first person to use the outfit, regardless of what Mac had told me. To be sure, there had been several thousand miles on the odometer when I got the heap, but that can be arranged by the specialists we keep handy, without moving the car out of its tracks. Apparently my superior had gone to sonic trouble to have the boat and motor checked out-I'd had no trouble with them-hut he'd kind of taken for granted that a new ear was bound to be satisfactory, which showed how much lie knew about modern cars. Well, it was nice to know he wasn't infallible in all areas.

I threw my stuff into the wagon through the trick tailgate and started the thing by fighting the trick starter switch that locked the shift lever, locked the steering wheel, and bawled you out if you left your key behind-it did everything, in fact, except start the car easily. I drove to my hotel a mile away. It was an attractive, rambling collection of low buildings on a beautiful curving beach at the head of a spectacularly beautiful bay. Of course, I couldn't see it in the dark, and I wasn't really in the mood for scenic beauty, anyway.

I stopped by my room to make a quick change from my fishing clothes into something respectable. Then I went into the lounge-the place had no real bar as such-found a big chair near the fireplace in which nothing was burning this late in the spring, and took a grateful slug of the martini that was brought me promptly. Presently I was aware that somebody had sat down in the chair to my left. I looked and saw that it was the short-haired girl from the runabout I'd just seen docking.

She said softly, "So you couldn't leave it alone, Mr. Helm. You couldn't just give thanks for your escape and leave it at that. You had to go after him and drown him!"