Big Kiss-Off (17 page)

“You can’t make it stick.”

“I think I can.”

Cade felt cold sweat start on his spine. “But I don’t give a damn about the land. I’d almost forgotten I owned it.”

Tocko shrugged. “Unfortunately for you, we are not concerned with your feelings. Alive, you are a very serious obstacle in the wheels of progress.”

“With who turning the wheel, Sun, Shell, Sinclair, Standard Oil, Sunoco?”

“You’re shrewd.”

“I saw the cutter at the pier.”

Janice sucked in her breath and exhaled slowly. “Gee-Sus. I never knew there was so much money in the world.”

Tocko continued to beam. “The amount of money involved at the same time complicates and simplifies things for us all.” He looked across the table at Moran. “To give Jim credit, he was the first to see the possibilities, once the new state’s tide law had passed. He also saw the advisability of interesting certain local politicians so there wouldn’t be any legal complications to hurdle.”

Moran poured himself another drink. “So here I am.”

“Wrapped in cotton,” Tocko assured him. “As I have been telling you since morning, as long as we agree I am the head man and certain domestic problems are resolved, there is plenty for us all. You are a good man. I admit it. If you hadn’t been I wouldn’t have engaged you in the first place.”

Moran gulped the drink he’d poured. “Thanks.”

Cade looked at the larger table. None of the men at it were paying any attention to the conversation. All they were interested in was the individual sums they had been promised. He asked, “And the landing of the ’copter and the gun fight on the strip this morning?”

Tocko’s smile returned. “Was merely a successful attempt on my part to resume a pleasant and profitable business and physical association. Also, shall we say, a club.”

Cade’s sunburned face felt uncomfortably warm. His cut feet and raw palms pained him. The whiskey failed to ease the constriction in his throat. He said, “Just as a matter of curiosity, let’s see if I have this right.”

“By all means,” Tocko smiled.

“You met Moran shortly after his discharge from the Army. Still posing as an officer, he spent some months flying in aliens your boats had collected in La Guaira. It was for that purpose, as a drop, that you built this lodge.”

“That is correct.”

“While in Caracas, Moran met Mimi. We know that angle.”

Mimi’s eyes grew more sullen.

Cade continued. “Shortly after that, Janice showed up in Bay Parish and you bought or thought you bought the old Cain house and the acreage here on the Bay. As lagniappe, you insisted on certain favors from Janice — and grew to like them.”

“Very much,” Tocko admitted. He ran a plump hand down the small of Janice’s back and patted her. The thought seemed to amuse him. “I might even marry her. Because outside of these favors of which you speak, she is the most unscrupulous woman I have ever met. We should go far together.”

“Is that a nice thing to say?” Janice asked, but she was smiling.

There was an open package of Camels on the table. Cade offered the package to Mimi, put one in his mouth and lighted both cigarettes. “Meanwhile,” Cade waved out the flame of the match, “Moran returned to Bay Parish and used the possibilities in the recently passed tide law to pry Janice out of your arms.”

“It wasn’t difficult,” Moran said, thickly.

Janice scowled at him over her glass. “You keep your dirty tongue off of me.”

Moran began an obscene reply and thought better of it. Cade looked from one flushed face to the other and realized both of them were drunk, that they had probably been drinking since morning. The chances were, the same was true of the men at the big table. It was a love feast, but an armed one. Janice and Tocko were sitting with their backs to the wall. Cade looked over Janice’s shoulder at the open screened window behind her and the big veins in his temple throbbed visibly.

If he could create a diversion, if he could get them to quarreling among themselves, if he could get out of the room for five minutes, it might just be he could do what he had hoped to accomplish in the first place — with Janice and Tocko thrown in for
his
lagniappe. It was at least worth trying. He and Mimi had nothing to lose.

Tocko suggested suavely, “Suppose we leave personalities out of this.”

Cade shook his head. “We can’t. After leaving Bay Parish, Janice and Moran went to New Orleans together and spent several months getting to know and greasing state and city politicians who might be useful to them. As a cover they talked about a swank fishing lodge, a cheater’s paradise in an unspoiled wilderness; but Janice also let it be known in the right places that she was sole owner of several thousand acres of tideland on a deep-water basin in the Bay. A basin with a deep ship’s channel leading to the river and the city — a perfect spot for a storage dock or a refinery, not to mention the submerged potential oil land that went with the acreage. One of the larger oil firms was interested; interested enough to advance her sufficient money against possible future royalties to complete and furnish the lodge; to build a pier; to build and equip a radio shack with which they could keep in touch with their mobile test outfits working the Bay and Gulf.”

“You son-of-a-bitch,” Janice said. “You should have been a fortune teller instead of a flyer. You’d have gone a lot farther with a crystal ball than you did with a Sabrejet.”

The men at the big table were listening to the conversation now. Cade glanced over his shoulder at them, then snuffed his cigarette and looked at Tocko. “This morning you crashed back into the picture,” Cade said, “by making Moran an unwilling accomplice to the illegal landing of six aliens. This gave you the bluff of calling in the law, with the certainty you’d all go to jail if Janice didn’t return to you and you weren’t permitted to resume your rightful position as head man.”

Tocko was amused. Moran said, “You’re good, guy. That was just what happened. And with my record I don’t dare call his bluff. So there it stands. I’m damned if I do and the same if I don’t.”

“Why?” Cade asked flatly. “Why not play it smart?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why not dump Tocko and play along with me? The land is legally mine. If you let Tocko take over, all you’ll get is crumbs. I’ll cut you in for a full half.”

“Shut up, Cade,” Janice said thickly. “You’re trying to make trouble.”

“How?” said Moran.

“By having him indicted for conspiracy in the murder of the six aliens he had one of his boats maroon on big south mud lump when a Coast Guard boat got too close.” Cade added, “I saw the bodies. You must know the details.”

“And Janice?”

“Janice isn’t mine to offer, but with Tocko out of the way I don’t imagine you’d have any trouble with her.”

Tocko got to his feet slowly. His plump face was pink with anger. “Words, words words. Use your head, Jim. Let’s not have any more trouble. We have everything ironed out.”

Cade laughed. “Sure. With you taking both Janice and nine-tenths of the money and Moran being kissed out of the picture because of his past record.”

Janice stood up beside Tocko. “Don’t be a fool, Jim. All Cade is doing is trying to save his neck.” She laid her hand on Moran’s arm. “Can’t you see? He
wants
us to fight among ourselves.”

Moran slapped her. “Shut up. No. I can’t see.”

“You can’t see what?”

“Why I should let you and Tocko make a chump out of me. Why I should take the short end of the deal. I figured this thing out. I made the original contacts. I arranged for the advance. What Cain says makes sense to me.” Moran looked at the men milling restlessly around the big table. “What do you think, fellows?”

The silence broke as the men voiced their views. Tocko shouted, in vain, to be heard. The men moved up in arguing knots.

Tocko struck one in the face. “Shut up and keep out of this or you’ll wind up on a mud lump.” He resumed his effort to be heard. “Men. Listen to me — ”

Cade hit the window screen hard. For a sickening moment he thought the copper wire was going to hold, then his body catapulted into space. The dry sand under the window seemed to rise to meet him.

Behind him he heard Janice scream. The flat slap of a fired pistol followed. A second, a third, a fourth report followed the first shot.

His nerves tensed against the expected impact of the bullets, Cade zigzagged desperately, but there was no familiar pacing whine of lead as he ran on.

The moon had risen. He was a perfect target, but whoever had fired the pistol hadn’t been shooting at him.

The radio shack was the last in the row of separate cottages. Cade paused in the shadow of the tower to pant for breath. The lack of pursuit worried him. Tocko couldn’t permit him to live. Even Moran’s men, realizing they had been tricked, should be boiling out of the window by now.

Through the lighted windows he could see figures moving around in the lodge but the wind whipped away their voices before they could reach him. The only sounds were the slap of the water on the beach, the
thud thud
of the power plant and the chirp and thunking of the night things in the swamp.

Cade rounded the radio shack cautiously. There was a small angle iron leaning against one of the concrete piers. It wasn’t much of a weapon. It was something. Cade picked it up and turned the knob of the closed door. The door seemed to be unlocked. Cade gripped the angle iron and walked in.

His upturned white monkey hat cocked low over one eye a gum-chewing youth in blue dungarees and white skivy was covering the radio operator with a .45 caliber service automatic. He included Cade in the coverage.

“Come in,” the youth said. “Who are you?”

A bead of sweat dripped from Cade’s nose to plop inaudibly on the floor of the shack. After all he had been through, this was an anti-climax. He knew who the youth was, at least whom he represented. He’d seen similar gum chewing youths in blue dungarees and web gun belts before — a lot of them.

The youth noticed the iron. “Put it down, fellow.”

Cade put the angle iron down carefully.

“Okay. Now I ast you a question.”

“My name is Cain,” Cade told him.

“The former Air Force colonel who’s been kiting all over the Delta with that skirt from Venezuela?”

“Anyway my name is Cain.”

The youth was still skeptical. “I betcha. You don’t look like no colonel to me. Anyway, we can find out. The lieutenant says he is acquainted with you personal.”

A second youth stuck his head in the doorway. “You have any trouble with the sparks, Chuck?”

“Naw,” Chuck said scornfully. He looked at the sallow-faced radio operator. “I point the thing at him and he almost heaves his Hershey bars.”

“Who’s the other guy?”

“He says his name is Cain. You’d better take him up to the lodge and let the lieutenant look him over.”

“Sure thing.”

“You guys have any trouble?”

The second youth grinned. “Naw. They were so busy fighting among themselves they didn’t even know we were there until the lieutenant blew his whistle.” He covered Cain with the gun in his hand. “Let’s take a walk, fellow. And don’t give me no trouble.”

As a precaution against the seaman’s youth, Cade held his palms shoulder high as he waded the loose sand along the beach. There was no big boat made fast to the T of the pier. “Where’s the cutter?” he asked.

“We didn’t come in a cutter,” the seaman said. “We came down fast, in a crash boat. And just so you guys wouldn’t scatter we heaved-to around the next bend and walked down along the beach.”

“I see,” Cade said. He wished his knees would stiffen. He felt as if he were walking on rubber legs.

The cypress-paneled lobby was filled with men, most with their hands in the air. An alert and armed Coast Guardsman was posted at every exit. As Cade and the youth guarding him entered the room a grizzled chief whose bare arms boasted a colorful gallery of anchors and entwined hearts and lush beauties in scant bathing suits looked up from the collection of pistols and knives and revolvers he was making.

“Who you got there, Hanson?”

“Chuck says he told him his name is Cain.”

The Coast Guard lieutenant who was questioning Moran turned and grinned at Cade. “Hi, Colonel. Remember me?”

Cade couldn’t be certain after the years but the lieutenant looked like one of the Mitrovica boys of the family which had changed its name to Morton. He had the same friendly white-toothed smile. “You wouldn’t be Skip Morton, would you?”

Lieutenant Morton was pleased. “You do remember me. And I was just a squirt when you went away.” He offered his hand. “Glad to see you, man. I’m glad you’re back in Bay Parish. Welcome home.”

Cade shook hands, wondering how long his knees would continue to hold him. He felt as he had on his first night back in Bay Parish, suddenly humble and shy. The lieutenant meant what he said, just as Miss Spence and old man Dobraviche and Mamma Salvatore and all the others had meant it.

Some strength returned to his knees as he accepted a cigarette from the package Morton offered him. “And am I glad to see you. But how come the raid right now. Who tipped you?”

Lieutenant Morton grinned. “Who didn’t? We’ve been keeping our eyes on this place and laying for both Tocko and Moran for a long time, see? Then about fifteen hundred this afternoon the tips began to pour in. Mamma Salvatore was worried because you’d come down to the Bay and hadn’t shown up again. Immigration was raising hell because you were supposed to have a girl stowaway on your boat. About the same time the crashed ’copter pilot the boys on the cutter fished out of the drink this morning loosened up enough to tell how he got all the bullet holes in his plane.”

Lieutenant Morton continued. “It wasn’t any one thing.” He nodded at a small knot of men still huddled together in one corner of the lodge. “Then there were our alien friends there. We’ve had undercover agents in Havana tailing them for quite some time, waiting for them to make a break. We knew they’d made a contact. We suspected it was with one of Tocko’s captains and when they disappeared last night an all-out alert was sounded.” Lieutenant Morton’s grin grew even more expansive. “Then just to make it official one of the seamen off a converted cutter one of the big oil companies is using to smell around these waters got drunk in a Royal Street bar. He sounded off about a big gun fight that had taken place between Moran and Kalavitch’s boys down here last A.M. So the brass put it all together, I got the nod — and here we are.”