Scorpion Reef (12 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Then what?”

“You’re next. Have you ever been to a drive-in movie?”

“Yes. Several times.”

“All right. As soon as he leaves the house at nine-ten you lock all the doors. Be standing right by the phone at nine-twenty. If you hear any commotion or gunshots, call the cops and hide, fast. A prowl car will get there before they can get in and clobber you for having him hidden in the house. But if you don’t hear anything, you’ll know he got away. So leave the house at nine-thirty. Just go out front to your car and drive off. Some of them will follow you, of course. Go to the Starlite drive-in, out near the beach on Centennial Avenue. Centennial runs north and south. Approach from the north, and try to time it so you get there at ten minutes before ten. If you look you’ll see a black panel truck parked somewhere in the last block before you get to the entrance. That’ll be me. Drive on in.

“Now, all this is important. Be sure you get it right. This is Saturday night, so it’ll be pretty full. But you know how they’re laid out, fan-wise, spreading out from the screen, and there are always a few parking places along the edge because the angle’s poor out there. Enter one of the rows and drive across to the exit, slowly, looking for a good spot. But there aren’t any. So you wind up clear over at the end. Sit there twenty minutes, and then back out. You’ve decided you don’t like that, and there must be something better farther back. So drop back a row and go back to the entrance side again. Park there for five or ten minutes, and then get out and walk down to the ladies’ room in the building where the projector is. Kill about five minutes and then come back to the car. The minute you get in, back out and drive toward the exit. Before you get to it, pull into one of the parking places along the edge, and step out, on the right hand side. Don’t scream when a hand grabs your arm. It’ll be mine.”

“Won’t they still be following me?”

“Not any more,” I said. “By the time you come back from the ladies’ room I’ll know who he is.”

“You think he’ll get out of his car, too?”

“Yes. It’s like this. There’ll probably be two cars tailing you. When they see you go into a drive-in theater one man will follow you in to be sure it’s not a dodge for you to transfer to some other car. And the other bunch will stay outside near the exit to pick you up coming out, because there’s a hellish jam of cars fighting for the exit when the movie breaks up and they could lose you if they both went inside. There’s just one thing more. If an intermission comes along, sit tight where you are. You’ve got to make those two moves and that trip to the powder room while the picture’s running and not many people are wandering around. It’s darker then, too; nobody has his lights on.”

“Yes, but how are you going to stop him from following me the second time? Bill, they’re dangerous. They use guns.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “He won’t even see me. When he gets out to follow you on foot I’ll just get in his car and pull all the ignition wires loose from the switch, under the dash. By the time he tumbles to the fact his car’s not going to start, you’ll already be down at the other end of the row and in my truck. When the picture’s over, we just drive out, along with everybody else.”

“All right. But you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

“Yes, if you say so.”

“I do say so,” she said softly.

“Why?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.

“Couldn’t we put it this way—if anything happens to you we wouldn’t get away.”

“We’ll call it that.”

“Yes,” she said. Then she added, “That, at the very least.”

She hung up.

I sweated it out. Somehow, after a long time, it was dark. I was growing increasingly nervous after eight o’clock and kept looking at my watch every few minutes. At eight-fifty I picked up the big flashlight I’d bought with the stores, and got in the truck. The watchman let me out the gate.

I skirted the edge of the downtown area and went on west. Crossing Brandon Way, I looked at the numbers and saw I was about ten blocks north of Fontaine Drive. I turned left at the next corner, went nine blocks, and turned left again. Just short of the corner I pulled to the curb under some big trees and stopped. This was a block and a half above him. I flipped the lighter and looked at my watch. It was 9:10. I waited, feeling dry in the mouth. A lot depended on just a flashlight and a panel truck.

The thing was to give him just a little time to look it over, so I wouldn’t spring it on him too suddenly, on the same principle that you never surprise a snake if you can help it. He’d be able; to see what I was doing, and as I passed under the street light at the intersection of Fontaine Drive he’d see the black sides of the truck. My headlights would cover the Louisiana license plate. I took another look at the watch. It was 9:18. I stepped on the starter and eased away from the curb.

Switching on the flashlight, I held it in my left hand and shot the beam into dark places under the trees and back among the hedges as I came slowly down the street. After crossing Fontaine I could see him. He was in the same place, facing this way. I flashed the light into another hedge.

I had to calculate the angles fast now. I was well out in the center of the street, watching the mouth of the alley on his side. He was parked just beyond it. I stopped with my window opposite his, and at the same time I threw the light against the side of his car but not quite in his face.

“You seen anything of a stray kid?” I asked, as casually as I could with that dryness in my mouth. “Boy, about four, supposed to have a dog with him—”

It worked.

I could feel the breath ooze out of me as a tough voice growled from just above the light. “Nah. I haven’t seen any kid.”

“Okay. Thanks,” I said. I felt along the edge of the window frame in the opposite door.
Hurry. For the love Of Christ, hurry.

My finger tips brushed across a hand. I inhaled again.

I let the truck roll slowly ahead three or four feet, and said, “If you see a kid like that, call the station, will you? We’d appreciate it.”

I moved the light away from him. He wouldn’t be able to see anything for twenty or thirty seconds, and Macaulay was on the far side of the truck, walking along with me. But he had to be in before we hit the street below Fontaine, under the light. I slipped the clutch and hit the accelerator a couple of times, shooting the flashlight beam along the sidewalk. The door opened soundlessly, and he was sitting beside me. He closed it gently.

There was no outcry behind us. I wanted to step on the gas and flee.
Not yet
, I thought.
Easy
. I still hadn’t seen him at all. He was only a dark shadow beside me as we rolled on toward the intersection. Then a cigarette lighter flared.

I jerked my face around, whispering fiercely. “
Put that
—”

“It’s all right,” a smooth voice said. “Just turn at the corner and go around the block, like a good fellow.”

I saw a lean face, and tweed, and the gun held carelessly in his lap. It was Barclay.

We turned. I was numb all over and there was nothing else to do. We went slowly up the street behind Fontaine and turned again.

“Rather theatrical,” he said, almost deprecatingly. “But it was the only way to enlist you without a brawl which might arouse the neighborhood. Please go on around and park at the mouth of the alley, where you were.”

“Mrs. Macaulay?” I asked mechanically.

“She’s in the house.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. A little shock, perhaps.”

I swung around the next corner, and we were on Fontaine, under the big, peaceful trees. “Then you finally killed him?”

“Oh. Yes,” he replied, almost as if talking to himself. “Quite unfortunate.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but there was no point in asking. I was too far behind now to catch up in a week. We parked at the mouth of the alley. Across the street I could see the red tip of a cigarette in the other car. Bitterness welled up in me. I’d fooled them, hadn’t I? It was wonderful the way I’d fooled them.

Barclay opened the door on his side. “Go inside, shall we? Ready to leave shortly.”

“Leave?”

“Embark.
Ballerina
does sleep four, doesn’t she? Hope we haven’t been misled as to the accommodations.”

He stepped aside in the darkness and followed closely behind me. My mind turned the parts of it over and over with no more comprehension than a washing-machine tumbling clothes. Embark? Four of us? Macaulay was already dead; that was what they’d wanted, wasn’t it?

It was—unless she had been lying all the time. I tried to shove the thought out of my mind. It came back. How would they have known I was coming by in the truck unless she had told them?

Maybe I could have got away from him in the alley, but I didn’t even try. The whole thing had fallen in on me, and I didn’t have anywhere to go. I wanted to see her, anyway. She had lied about it, or she hadn’t lied about it. I had to know.

We went in through a rear garden full of dark shrubs and the cloying sweetness of honeysuckle. The kitchen door was unlocked. There was no light inside, nor in the hall beyond, but at the end, through a Spanish archway, I could see the living-room and hear music.

It was a large room dimly lighted by the one bridge lamp that was turned on. I had a confused impression of beige broadloom, modern furniture, and drapes with bright splashes of color. The music was issuing from a phonograph console at the right end of it.

There were two men in it besides the one lying on the rug under the edge of the coffee table, but they registered merely as blurs as I swung my face and looked at her. She was on the right, near the phonograph, sitting straight upright on the front edge of a chair. She was wearing a sea-green dress and sandals, and the light gleamed softly on her hair. Nothing moved, and she might have been a well-bred girl listening to some old bore at a party until you looked at her eyes and saw the shock wearing off and could sense the scream running around inside her like a motorcycle riding the rim of a motordrome. I came over in front of her just as her mouth opened and she pressed the knuckles of her right hand against her teeth. Barclay stepped from behind me and hit her across the right side of the face with an open hand. The scream choked off before it could get started, and she whimpered and fell back in the chair.

I hit Barclay. The two men who had been blurs hit me, one of them with the flat side of a gun.

I was on my hands and knees, trying to get up with a big ocean of pain sloshing around in my head. The lights went out and then came back on and I tried to focus my eyes. I could see nothing but feet and the rug. Her nylons and gilt sandals were before me, and to one side I could see a pair of huge brogues under gabardine legs. I lunged weakly at them. One brogue kicked my arm from under me, and shoved. I rolled onto my back.

He looked down at me with a bleak grin, a big cottony blond with a flat slab of a face and gray eyes set wide apart. The other one had backed away and was on the other side of the table, holding the gun in his hand as if it were an extension of his arm. He was a mean-looking slat about six feet tall, wearing a white linen suit and a Panama hat. His face had the human softness of a hatchet blade.

He pointed with the gun. “Sit down in that chair.”

I looked at him and at the other one and slowly got to my feet with the two of them watching me. My legs buckled and I slid into the chair. Barclay got up, felt his jaw, and brushed casually at his clothes.

The telephone was on a stand at my left. Barclay saw my glance and shook his head. “I shouldn’t try it,” he said. “They’re looking for you, anyway.”

“You’ve killed Macaulay,” I said. “What do you want now?”

“Mrs. Macaulay, obviously.”

“Why?”

He gestured impatiently. “Later, Manning.” He walked over to the other end of the room and stood looking around like a director inspecting a set for a scene he was going to shoot.

I could see the man lying under the edge of the coffee table. He was wearing slacks of charcoal gray and a dark-blue sport shirt, and his shoes had crepe soles. He had been ready to go when they killed him. My mind was still numb, but it could encompass that much. He was lying on his stomach with his face turned to one side, and a little blood had run from under his chest. It looked black against the rug. The face, what I could see of it, was slender, and his hair was very dark and needed cutting. I was conscious of the crazy thought that I’d been wondering for days what Macaulay would be like when I met him, and this was what he was like. He was a dead man who needed a haircut.

I turned my face and I could see her. She was slumped forward with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. What if she had told them I was coming by in the truck? They had ways of making you talk. But what did they want with her? And with me, and the boat? The whole thing was one big blank. I sat there, feeling sick.

“You cleaned your prints from everything you touched?” Barclay asked.

The thin one nodded.

“Very well,” Barclay said. “Who has the keys to her car?”

“Here.” The big blond fished them from his pocket.

“Give them to Carl,” Barclay directed crisply. “You’ll go with us in the truck.”

He shifted his gaze to the thin man. “Take the Cadillac downtown and park it. Meet us on the southeast corner of Second and Lindsay. We shall be going east, in a black panel truck, Manning driving. Get in the front seat with him. When we go in the gate at the boat yard Manning will tell the watchman you’ve come along to drive the truck back to a garage. If Manning tries a trick of any kind, don’t shoot him; kill the watchman. As soon as we’re all aboard the boat, take the truck to some all-night storage garage and leave it, under the name of Harold E. Burton, and pay six months’ storage charges in advance. Then pick up the Cadillac, drive it to the airport, and abandon it. Take a plane to New York, and tell them we should be in Tampa in three weeks to a month. Tell them how it was with Macaulay, but that we have her and it’s well under control. You have all that?”

“Check,” Carl said. He took the keys and went out.