Big Kiss-Off (11 page)

“Wear your bra or a towel.”

Still dubious, Mimi accepted the yellow trunks. Her big eyes searched Cade’s face. “It — will be all right?”

“Of course,” Cade said.

Mimi patted his arm. “Of course. Forgive me that I ask.”

She carried the shorts to the forecabin. Cade made certain that the anchor was fast and that there was a secured rope dangling overside. Then, slipping into the red trunks, he used the transom of the cruiser for a diving board.

The water was cool, almost cold. Cade dove as deeply as he could, then fought his way even farther down. When he surfaced again, both his sense of immediate need and his headache were gone. He circled the boat in a fast crawl. The cool water and the physical exertion cleared his head. He felt good. He felt fine.

He turned on his back and floated as Mimi climbed up on the transom. She made a pretty picture. She’d knotted one of the galley dish towels and fastened it with a safety pin to form an attractive halter. The yellow trunks were much shorter and tighter on her than the red trunks were on him. Cade was proud of himself. If he got Mimi to Barataria Bay unharmed, Colonel Cade Cain could recommend civilian Cade Cain for a medal, for forebearance above and beyond the call of nature.

Mimi waved gaily, then cut the water in a perfect dive. She dove as well as she did everything else and she had no fear.

They swam for half an hour, racing, up-ending, scrambling up the rope from time to time to use the front of the cruiser as a diving board.

Cade had never felt more tranquil, more at peace. He was resting, floating on his back, when he saw the first dark cloud and realized the wind had begun to blow. There was a perceptible difference in the feel and the look of the water. He turned on his side and called, “We’d best get aboard and up anchor. It looks like we’re in for some wind.”

Mimi nodded. “Whatever you say.”

The cruiser was swinging gently now. The rope that had been dangling to starboard was hanging over the transom. Cade scrambled aboard and leaned down to help Mimi up. As she came up over the varnished wood, the knotted towel caught on the chrome burgee standard and the safety pin opened.

The gesture was instinctive, normal, natural. Cade had taken alt he could. He pulled Mimi into his arms, his free hand cupping her young loveliness, his lips pressed to hers, as they stood straining together, dripping salt water on the deck plates.

The words were a sob in Mimi’s throat. “No. We must not. Thees ees wrong.”

Her fingers tangled in Cade’s wet hair, for a long moment she returned his frenzied kisses, every curve and contour of her young body throbbing with desire. Then she went suddenly limp in his arms. Her flesh was still firm but cold. The cheeks Cade were kissing were salty with tears. The eyes searching his face were big and black and hurt.

She had asked if it would be all right. He had told her it would. Mimi had trusted him. She had even removed her knife.

Cade forced himself to release her, recovered the knotted towel from the burgee standard. The pitch of the anchored boat was much more pronounced now. His voice was as thick as the rapidly gathering clouds.

“I’m sorry.”

Mimi held the towel in front of her. “I’m sorry, too,” she said, quietly. “So ver’ sorry. I weesh I could tell you how sorry.”

Somehow dignified and regal despite the fact that all she had on was a pair of too tight yellow swim shorts, she turned and entered the cabin, closing the door gently behind her.

Cade drained the nearly empty bottle of port he found rolling beside one of the canvas deck chairs. Then, eyeing the windblown clouds, he started his motor and up anchored, just as the first sheet of blinding rain drenched the bobbing cruiser.

The Gulf was no longer green. It was a deepening rain-pocked purple. The swells grew even more pronounced. After setting his course, Cade glanced back. The triangular dorsal fin of a curious twenty-foot shark was crisscrossing the area in which he and Mimi had been swimming.

It had been a foolish thing to do. A dozen things could have happened. It wasn’t his fault they hadn’t. Between lulls in the puffs of wind, he could hear Mimi crying in the cabin. Because he’d gone as far as he had? Because he hadn’t gone farther?

Women.

Cade opened the motor full throttle for the run to the big south mud lump and braced himself as the twin screws bit into the water.

Cade glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes of eight. It would be dark in a few more minutes. The rain and wind had lasted less than an hour but left a vicious chop behind them. The run from the mouth of the pass had taken longer than he had thought it would. Now he was bucking an outgoing tide.

In the deepening dusk the big south mud lump glided past to starboard. Cade cut his speed still more and swept the mud lump with his searchlight. The tide was full. Only portions of the lump were visible. The six men he had seen were gone, chum for the crabs and the fishes.

It was tricky business running the mud lumps in the dark. Cade considered anchoring for the night and decided against it. Now he was this close, he wanted to get to the showdown with Janice right away. He wanted to get Mimi out of his hair. He didn’t want to spend another night aboard the boat with her.

Her eyes swollen from crying, Mimi appeared in the doorway of the cabin. She was wearing the dress and hose and high-heeled shoes he had bought her in New Orleans. Her voice was as sullen as her eyes.

“Do you want me to fix you something to eat?”

Cade shook his head. “Don’t bother. We should be inside in another hour.” He felt impelled to hurt her. “Besides, I might be tempted to anchor.”

In the faint glow from the red and green lights on the instrument panel, Mimi looked as if she were about to cry again. “I said I was sorry.”

Cade felt as if he were shouting at her. “Okay. So we’re both sorry. If you’re hungry, fix something to eat. But don’t light any lights and stop bothering me or I’m apt to run us aground.”

He cut the speed of the cruiser until he barely had seaway. The channel was narrow and tricky here, but once he was through Grand Pass he would be in open water again. Jean LaFitte, long ago, had anchored in the Bay. He had even maneuvered his barkentines and cutters through the narrow series of watercourses that helped drain the Mississippi at a point opposite New Orleans. LaFitte had used the inland route to bring his booty to the city.

Mimi gnawed at her lower lip. “Well, don’t shout at me.”

“I’m not shouting,” Cade shouted.

He turned on his running lights, wishing to Christ he’d come into the Bay the short way. Still, if he’d cut through the series of watercourses instead of stopping at Bay Parish, he wouldn’t know he was wanted for murder. Even if he couldn’t do anything about it, it was always best for a man to know where he stood, especially with the law or a woman.

Mimi remained in the doorway of the cabin. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Cade tried to explain and couldn’t. A man could explain sailing on compass. But feeling his way through the dark was something else. It was like flying a jet. A man either could or he couldn’t. It was a combination of things, of having threaded the channel a hundred times before, the sound and the feel of the screws, the color of his wake, an occasional familiar landmark.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “How’s for breaking out another bottle of wine? As long as we’re about to see our respective mates, we ought to celebrate the occasion.”

“Whatever you say,” Mimi said. She opened her mouth to say more, then changed her mind and disappeared into the cabin to reappear a few moments later with an opened bottle of the tawny port that Sal had given them.

As she extended her hand with the bottle the cruiser scraped over a mud bar and Cade, instinctively, held his breath. When he could speak again, he said, “You first.
Saludos
.”

“No, thank you,” Mimi said primly. “I nevair drink on the empty stomach.”

Cade drank from the neck of the bottle. The wine tasted weak and insipid. He wished it was Jamaica rum. He wished he was roaring drunk. He wished Mimi was Janice or that he was James Moran. He could tell himself that Mimi meant nothing to him, that she was just another girl he’d met, but once she went out of this new life he was leading, he doubted if anything would ever be quite the same again. It was more than physical. He liked her.

He took a second big drink, then corked the bottle. If only he’d met Mimi before she’d met Moran. But when Mimi had met Moran, he’d still been married to Janice. Or had he? Not that it made any difference.

He was through the pass now, in deep water again. He could tell by the bite of the screws. There was no wind here, no swells, no chop. The Bay was a sheet of black glass, broken only by the white wake and the occasional phosphorescent slap of a leaping fish. Except for the purr of the motors and the throb of the underwater exhaust, the only sound was the crying of the startled birds roosting in the offshore islands.

The Bay was huge and black and mysterious and somehow sinister, much as it must have been in the days of Jean LaFitte. Its population fluctuated. People came and people left. The moon was still entangled in the trees rising from the wooded shoreline. It was too dark to see, but Cade doubted if the Bay, at least this section of it had changed. Even if it were daylight, all he would be able to see would be a few crude fishing camps, the rare cabins of muskrat and wild rice hunters squatting along the watercourses leading inland.

The thought amused Cade. It could be there were squatters on his land. Seven years of squatting established proprietary rights. If any of them cared to contest the sale the court might decide for them! It would serve Janice and Tocko right.

The moon rose from the branches of the trees and seemed to spotlight the white cruiser. The night wind was cool on his cheek, like soft black velvet threaded with silver.

As he rounded a vaguely familiar landmark, a spit of land, Mimi spoke for the first time since she had handed him the bottle. “You are ver’ good sailor.”

“Thank you,” Cade said. He wished he hadn’t drunk the wine. It hadn’t helped. What he wanted didn’t come in bottles.

“We are almost there?”

Cade searched the moonlit shoreline. “I’d say we’re abreast of my property now, but it’s been some time since I’ve been here.” He located a pin prick of light. “That should be the camp dead ahead.”

“There is a building?”

“A shack. My father and I used it maybe three or four times a year.”

“How many rooms in the shack?”

“One.”

Mimi wet her lips with her tongue. “Oh.”

The pin prick of light brightened and became a shaded high-watt bulb outlining a substantial pier extending out into deep water. There was a fast-looking single-stack cutter tied to the pier and several smaller boats in the slips leading into it. Whatever use Janice had found for the acreage came under the head of big business.

Cade warped the boat into an empty slip. The shack he and his father had built was gone, replaced by a substantial two-story log lodge with a half-dozen small cottages flanking the main building. Back of the lodge he thought he could see a landing strip. Only the lodge was lighted.

He cut his motors and made fast.

“You said it was a shack,” Mimi pouted.

“Yeah, it was,” Cade said.

He started to step up on the pier and Mimi stopped him. “You are so anxious to see your Janice you are going ashore like that?”

Cade ran his hands down his sides and realized he was still wearing the red swim shorts. They and his cap were all he had on.

He put on his last clean shirt and white pants. The heavy .38 caliber pistol made an uncomfortable bulge in his hip pocket. Cade transferred it to his side pants pocket and slipped his bare feet into his sneakers. Mimi was waiting in the cockpit. He helped her up on the pier, then stepped ashore.

The pier was new. The smell of freshly milled lumber and the reek of creosote was strong. The cross planks were laid but still had to be spiked. Cade stood, his cap on the back of his head looking up at the lighted lodge.

Mimi was impatient with him. “For why are you waiting?”

“Just wondering,” Cade told her.

“Wondering what?”

“If I’m walking into a trap.”

He looked from the lighted lodge to the dark mat of vegetation rising back of the narrow beach. Seemingly, the pier and the beach were deserted. The only sounds he could hear were the whispering of the wind, the night noises in the swamp and the rhythmic
thud thud
of the gasoline power plant supplying the juice for the lights.

“Trap?” Mimi puzzled.

Cade didn’t bother to answer. Janice had sold him out. She’d dirtied his name with Tocko. She was doing the same with Moran. She knew he had been released. She had good reason to fear him. It seemed logical to assume that she would expect him to catch up with her and she would prepare some defense against him.

The something he’d heard or seen in Bay Parish continued to nag at his mind. Suddenly he remembered what it was. Of course. He’d heard the sound of a small plane warming up. Moran was a flyer. It was only a few minutes by air from Bay Parish to where he stood. If Moran had been in Bay Parish he knew that Joe Laval was dead and that Tocko had signed a warrant charging Cade with the murder. All Janice had to do to protect herself was to have the local sheriff waiting.

Mimi swatted at a mosquito. “I am uncomfortable here. The bugs are biting me.”

“Besides, you’re anxious to get to Moran.”

“After all, he is my ‘usban’.”

“Sure,” Cade said. “Before you let Jeem touch you, you insisted he take you to the priest and also the registrar.” He cupped one of Mimi’s elbows. “Okay. Let’s go see what’s what.”

His sneakers made no sound but the loose planks rattled under his weight. The click of Mimi’s high heels sounded unnaturally loud in the moonlit silence.

Along with the other improvements, a beach had been pumped in and they had to wade through two hundred feet of loose sand to reach the wide porch of the lodge. The cypress-paneled foyer was huge, with a natural stone fireplace at each end. The furniture was new, oversized and leather. A deeply tanned youth wearing oil-stained slacks and a clean white seaman’s skivy was standing behind a small hotel desk, tinkering with the star drag on a deep-sea reel. He didn’t look like a hotel clerk to Cade.