Big Kiss-Off (2 page)

Cade shook his head. “The back of my hand to Tocko.”

Laval smiled without mirth. “A big-shot colonel, huh? A hero. Or maybe not such a hero. While the other men you went over with were still dog-fighting all over Mig Alley, you were sitting it out on the ground, shot down over the Yalu.”

Cade choked back a hot retort. He didn’t want any trouble with Laval. He wished the other man would go away.

Laval stepped away from the table. “Okay. Bring him outside, Squid. And hurry up about it.”

Cade tried to avoid the Squid’s hand. It lifted him out of the booth like a drag-line and hurled him across the barroom and into the juke box so hard that the instrument stopped playing.

Salvatore came out of the kitchen. “Here. What the hell?” he asked.

“You keep out of this, Sal,” Laval said.

The silence that followed reminded Cade of the silence over big south mud lump. None of the dark-complexioned men at the bar or in the booths, most of them of Montenegrin and Serbian and Dalmatian and Slavonian ancestry, attempted to interfere. In Bay Parish, a man fought his own battles and scrupulously minded his own business.

Moving fast for so large a man, the Squid followed up his advantage, smashing hard rights and lefts against Cade’s face and body. “You come outside?”

Cade tried to fight back but pounding on the Squid was like beating on a brick wall. His breath rasped in his throat. Blood filled his mouth and choked him. Cade spat it out and backed away, feeling for a weapon. “You bastards,” he panted. “If I had a gun I’d kill you both.”

Laval continued to smile without mirth. “Why all the fuss? All we want is to talk to you.”

Cade’s groping hand encountered a chair. He smashed the chair on the floor, snatched up one of the legs and brought it down on the Squid’s head.

The Squid’s scream was thin and haunting — like a woman screaming in ecstasy. One of his big hands moved forward, almost gently. Then all the lights in Sal’s went out and Cade felt himself falling through space.

From where he lay, his battered face pressed to the soft mud of the levee, Cade could hear familiar night noises; the thud of colliding driftwood logs, the troubled squeak of floating hyacinth bulbs rubbing together, the sigh of unseen grasses being fondled by the wind. Farther out, where the current surged toward the forking of the passes, the ceaseless din of the river.

Cade raised himself on one elbow. He’d wanted to come home. He had. He felt his face with muddy fingers. His nose was swollen. A flap of flesh hung down under one eye. His other eye was swollen almost shut. The Squid had done a good job on him.

He lay thinking back to the beating in Sal’s. He remembered hitting the Squid with a chair leg. He remembered hearing the Squid scream. Then all the lights had gone out and when he’d come to again, he’d been standing in the ankle-deep mud of the levee with the Squid supporting him and Laval’s thin face only inches from his. He could still hear Laval’s tense voice.

“Cast off, Cade,” Laval had warned him. “Get out of the Delta. Go on up the river to New Orleans or back to Corpus. But be gone by tomorrow noon. If you aren’t, Tocko says to let Squid go all the way.”

The thought made Cade sick. He lost the wine he’d drunk, then returned his torn cheek to the mud.

There ought to be a law. There was.

But why? What had he done to Joe Laval? What had he done to Tocko? Why should they be afraid of him?

The freshening wind was off the Gulf. There was the usual bustle on deck as a ship dropped anchor at Quarantine. Cade listened to the creaking of winches, the shouted orders which were carried to him by the wind. Farther out in the river, holding for South Pass, the running lights of a steamer were visible, a steamer bound outside for Martinique, Honduras, Rio, Buenos Aires. It could be bound anywhere.

Cade fought down a desire to be on her. He
liked
being where he was. Bay Parish had been home to eight generations of Cains, ever since a curious Kentucky flatboatman had wondered where the Mississippi went after it coiled past New Orleans. He had fallen in love with and bedded an olive-skinned Baratarian wench reputed to be kin to Jean LaFitte.

Cade, with an effort, turned on his back and fumbled his cigarettes from a shirt pocket. One thing was certain. Nobody was going to run him off the river — not after all the trouble he’d gone to getting home.

He put a cigarette into his mouth and lighted it. The beating didn’t make sense. He hadn’t done anything to Tocko or Laval. He hadn’t even seen either man for twelve years. So six aliens had been marooned on south mud lump. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

Cade sat up in the mud. Most of his nausea was gone. The pain had lessened. He got to his feet and lurched down the levee toward the old frame house where he had been born. Weeds had taken the fence. The gate was hanging by one hinge. He tried the front door and found it locked. In the mood he was in, the old house depressed him. He’d open it up and air it out in the morning. He might even sell it. A single man had no need for a house.

He climbed the levee again. With the exception of the smear of yellow light spilling out of Sal’s, the business section of the town was dark. The juke box had been repaired. It was playing
Jambalaya
. Cade stood sucking his sodden cigarette, debating going back and asking Salvatore if he knew what was eating Joe Laval and Tocko. But even if the Portuguese knew, Cade doubted that he
would tell. Minding one’s own business was a fetish in Bay Parish.

He’d see Tocko himself in the morning, Cade decided. He’d go directly to the brass. His fingers were bruised from beating on the Squid. His cigarette slipped from them into the mud. He ground it out with one heel and started out on the pier and stopped, every tensed muscle in his body aching as a darker blob of black moved out of the night to bar his way.

It wasn’t easy for the Squid to talk. His voice sounded thin and unsuited to his bulk.

“You goin’ to’ leave like Joe tol’ you?” he asked.

Cade tried to see the big deputy’s face. “What’s it all about, Squid? Why has Tocko got his knife in me?”

The Squid’s smile was sly. “I ast you first You goin’ t’ stay or shove off?”

Cade considered his answer. He was in no condition to take another beating. “I’ve until tomorrow to decide that.”

The Squid’s head, like his voice, was too small for his body. He bobbled it as he agreed. “Joe said until tomorrow noon.” He sucked in his breath as he raised a big hand and ran it lightly over Cade’s body. When he spoke, his thin voice was plaintive. “Don’t go. Please.”

Cade backed a step, embarrassed. The touch of the Squid’s hand made his flesh creep. The Squid liked to know and give pain. Due to some flaw in his biochemistry, to the Squid pain was a woman. Cade sidestepped the big man and walked out on the rotting pier.

Light from the pressure lantern he’d forgotten to turn off flooded the cockpit. Cade jumped down into the boat, then turned and looked back down the pier. The Squid had blended with the night and the silence. In the thin moonlight mingling with the first of the fog rolling in off the river, the frame houses behind the levee and the unlighted business section of Bay Parish looked distorted and unreal, imbued with all the qualities of a nightmare.

Old man Dobraviche had shaken his hand. A dozen men had welcomed him home. Miss Spence, the postmistress, had kissed him. Sal had said the drinks and eats were on the house. The attack on him didn’t make sense.

Inside the cabin aft, Cade studied his face in the mirror he used for shaving. It was bad but it would heal. He’d
been hurt worse. He cleaned the wounds as best he could and painted them with merthiolate. Then reshaping his nose with his fingers, he bound it and the torn flap of flesh under his eyes with waterproof adhesive tape.

The mud had soaked through his clean shirt and pants. He stripped them and his sneakers off and lowered himself overside by the rope hanging over the transom.

The cold water felt good on his bruised body but the hyacinth bulbs clogging the slip were so many slimy little snakes with hands. Still clinging to the rope, Cade washed the mud from his body and pulled himself back into the cockpit and dried with a coarse towel.

There was a bottle half full of rum in the galley. He drank from it and put it back. Dumping the contents of one of his duffle bags on a bunk, he picked a .38-calibered Colt automatic from the mound of crumpled clothes and personal possessions and laid it aside before putting on clean dungarees and a skivy.

The uniform he had bought in Tokyo was in the bag. The silver maple leaves on the shoulders of the tunic looked strange and out of place in the cabin of a fishing cruiser. Cade made a mental note to get a mothproof bag in which to hang the uniform. It could be he had made a wrong guess on how to spend the rest of his life. It could be that in a few months he would be banging on doors back at Nellis, trying to get some flight surgeon to recertify him for duty. What the hell. He was only thirty-two. Once his nerves stopped jumping and he’d put on a few pounds, he could still fly a lot of jet. Maybe it had been a mistake — this business of coming home. Maybe he’d been airborne so long, he was out of place in any other element.

Cade turned down the pressure lantern and stuffed the pistol in the waistband of his dungarees. If Joe Laval and Tocko were as anxious to get him off the river as they seemed to be, perhaps the noon deadline was just a feint. A few slashes with a sharp knife and he wouldn’t have any cruiser. He might as well be back in a POW camp, dreaming about the boat he was going to buy if he ever got out of where he was.

A wry smile twisted his lips. Sure. He had it made. From here on in, all he had to do was live.

He made certain the lines to the creosoted pilings were fast, and walked back down the pier and sat with his back against an upturned flat-bottomed skiff that had been pulled up on the levee.

The wind died but the night remained cool. Cade wished he’d brought the bottle of rum with him. He wished he’d brought the loaf of bread and the can of beans. He wished he knew where Janice had gone after she’d divorced him. The least she could have done was to have waited to say goodbye.

“Good luck, soldier. It was nice knowing you.”

He wanted a drink. He wanted a smoke. He wanted a woman. He wanted to know why Laval was throwing off on him. The lean-faced Cajun had said:

“A big-shot colonel, huh? A hero. Or maybe not such a hero. While the other men you went over with were still dog-fighting all over Mig Alley, you were sitting it out on the ground, shot down over the Yalu.”

The shaven hairs on the back of Cade’s neck tingled. That louse Laval.

On the far side of the river, in one of the oyster camps rising on poles out of the mounds of shells that had accumulated through the years, a hound pointed his muzzle at the waning moon and howled. His eyes troubled, Cade got to his feet and stretched, then swiveled his head stiffly as a faint splash in the slip attracted his attention.

A swimmer, attempting to be quiet, was pushing through the bulbs, stopping now and then to tread water, gasping for air, before moving on. Cade drew the pistol from his waistband and stood watching the phosphorescent ripple.

Now the swimmer was gone from sight. Cade could hear panting on the far side of the levee, a hoarse, almost animal gasping clearly audible in the still air.

A small head and a pair of slim shoulders showed over the levee, silhouetted vaguely against the dying moon. Cade started to call out and changed his mind. He wanted to know, he had to know, what the swimmer intended to do.

The small figure on the levee stood a moment listening to the music escaping with the yellow light from Sal’s
door, then looked at the dimly lighted cruiser surging at her ropes.

Now the figure was moving again, slowly, out on the pier, stooping low as if to keep from being seen by anyone aboard the boat. Now he was looking in through the ports, trying to ascertain if there was anyone in either the fore or aft cabin. Satisfied that no one was aboard, the newcomer jumped down into the cockpit and entered the after cabin. The door closed behind him.

Cade was grimly amused. The pistol ready in his hand, he walked out on the pier, glancing over his shoulder from time to time to make certain he wasn’t being trapped between two fires.

At the transom of the cruiser he paused, then eased himself into the cockpit. Even for Joe Laval’s limited imagination, the trap was crude. Whoever Laval and Tocko had sent to gun or knife him, instead of being quiet and waiting, was making himself at home, opening lockers, moving swiftly from one side of the cabin to the other.

Cade eased forward the last few feet and yanked the door of the cabin open. “All right,” he said, quietly. “Let’s have it. What the goddamn — ”

His voice stuck like a pair of jammed landing wheels. The swimmer wasn’t a man. It was a girl. Standing in the center of the cabin, her wet hair plastered to her well-shaped head and only two wisps of wet lace to keep her from being as naked as the day she’d been born. A big-eyed black-haired girl in her late teens or early twenties who was toweling vigorously with one hand while she spooned beans into her mouth with the other.

As he spoke she held the towel in front of her and began to cry without sound.

Cade leaned against the jamb of the door, studying the girl. She was exotic rather than pretty. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced, with the cheeks under them slightly hollowed. Her bare shoulders and legs were the color and texture of rich cream. Her eyes and her hair were black with red highlights glinting in her hair. She looked like classic Castilian, with perhaps a dash of the Celtic blood with which so many South American races were spiced.

“And who are you?” Cade asked.

The girl tried to speak -and couldn’t. She was too frightened.

Cade tried again. “Where did you come from?”

As the girl pointed toward the river, the towel slipped. She blushed and quickly retrieved it.