Scorpion Reef (7 page)

I walked around to the other side of the deckhouse and set the key case to drain beside the ladder where I could find it. Then I went aft, unplugged the light, and hauled it aboard, coiling the cable. I put it away in the storeroom, along with the diving mask, and locked the door.

I wrung out the wet clothes and hung them in the bathroom. Glancing hurriedly at my watch, I saw it was ten minutes of eleven. I had plenty of time. Then I did a double take, realizing how bad the strain had been. I’d had the watch on all the time, three trips to the bottom of the channel, without even noticing it.

It was supposed to be waterproof, but that didn’t mean much. Five fathoms down was a lot different from standing in the rain. I held it up to my ear. It was still running. I took it off and dried it.

Splashing myself with a pail of fresh water, I dried off and looked at my face in the mirror. There was a discolored lump above my right eye, a cut in the corner of my mouth, and another bad bruise on the side of my jaw. There was nothing I could do about it now except try to keep anybody from seeing it. I examined the hand. It was badly swollen, but I couldn’t feel anything broken.

I dressed, putting on a white sport shirt like the one the pug had been wearing. It was just eleven o’clock. Plenty of time, I thought, beginning to feel tight in the chest. But I didn’t want to cut it too fine. Sometimes the graveyard man came early and they sat out there and talked, two lonely old men who had only their jobs and bleak boarding-houses to fill their time. I couldn’t take a chance on two. I’d better go, even though it meant more time to kill outside before I could come back.

I locked the door, picked up the key case, and went up on the pier. The wet trail I’d left before was still there on the concrete. I remembered the car was a green Oldsmobile. That was good. Mine was a tan Ford. He’d remember all right; there couldn’t have been any mistake. I didn’t have the flashlight now, but I groped around until I found it. I got in and started the motor. I was nervous. Suppose he was standing outside the shack where he could see right into the car? I wouldn’t know it until I’d come out the doors at the other end of the shed, and then it would be too late.

I thought of the answer to that. Switching the lights on, I turned the car around until it was headed for the door at the far end, and turned them off again. As soon as my eyes were accustomed to the darkness I went slowly ahead. There was no danger of running into anything, and I could see the door just faintly ahead of me. When I was within thirty or forty feet of it I eased to a stop and got out. Slipping up to it on foot, I peered around the edge. It was all right. There was only the empty gate with the hot cone of light above it, and the vacant lots beyond. He was inside. I turned and ran lightly back to the car.

Remembering to slouch low in the seat, I eased the door shut, flipped the lights on, and went ahead. My mouth was dry. It was a hundred miles. I was outside now. I turned left, crossed the railroad spur. Not too fast. Slow down a little approaching the gate. The car was right in front of the shack now. Lifting a hand, I looked just once, out of the corners of my eyes.

He was sitting on a stool at the desk just behind the window, pouring coffee out of a Thermos. He glanced up casually, waved a hand, and then looked back at the cup. I was past.

The tension gave way, and I felt as if I’d flow out over the seat like spilled water. Every nerve in my body relaxed. There was nothing to it now.

I turned left at the next corner and went down a dark street toward town. It was about fifteen blocks to the honky-tonk district. Parking the car in a dark spot a half block from a gaudy burst of neon and noise, I looked quickly around and got out, taking the keys and locking it just as he would have. No one had seen me. I went up to the corner and turned right, away from the water-front. As I passed a vacant lot I threw the keys far into it in the darkness. I was free of him now. I thought of him and shuddered. The poor, vicious, unfortunate little bastard.
Why couldn’t he have stayed away?

I didn’t know how far I walked. It must have been miles. I avoided lights and kept to the quiet residential districts, going away from the water-front all the time. At twelve-thirty I was near an all-night drugstore. It was late enough now. It would be around a quarter of one by the time I got back. I went in a side door and back to the telephone booth and called a cab. When it came I was waiting out at the side in the shadows. I got in without the driver’s getting a look at my face. Everything was all right now. I sat back in the corner, where he couldn’t see me in the mirror.

We passed the last street and were approaching the gate. No one was in sight. “Just slow down there so I can tell him who I am,” I said to the driver. “You don’t need a pass to drive in.”

“Right, chief,” he replied.

He braked to a stop in front of the shanty. The 12-to-8 watchman was looking out the window. “Manning,” I called out, keeping my face in shadow. He lifted a hand.

“All right, Mr. Manning.”

The driver shifted gears and started to move ahead. Then he stopped. Somebody was calling out from the shack. “Mr. Manning! Just a minute—”

I looked around. The watchman was coming out. “I almost forgot to tell you. A woman called about ten minutes ago—”

But I wasn’t even listening now. A prickling sort of numbness was spreading over my whole body as I stared at the window of the shack. It was old Chris. He had just got up from a chair and was looking out, a puzzled frown on his face. Then he turned toward the door.

The other watchman was still talking beside the cab window.”… Chris was just about to walk out and tell you. He said you was on the barge.”

I couldn’t move, or speak. Chris was standing beside him now, looking in at me. “Son of a gun, Mr. Manning. When did you go out? I didn’t see you.”

I fought to get my tongue broken loose from the roof of my mouth. “Why—I—” It was impossible to think. The whole thing was like some crazy nightmare. “Why, I came out a while ago. Remember? When my friend left. We drove out to have a couple of beers. It must have been a little before twelve—” I’d got myself started, and now I couldn’t stop. I could hear my voice going on and on. “—that’s when it was. A little before twelve, I waved at you, remember? He was an old friend of mine—get a couple of beers—”

“You was in that car when it left?” He peered at me, more puzzled than ever. “Well, I’ll be go to hell. I looked right at it, too, and didn’t even see you. I must be gettin’ absent-minded. And here I was about to walk all the way Out there to the barge and tell you that woman called—”

He broke off suddenly, and then went on with quick concern. “Why, Mr. Manning. What’s wrong with your face?”

That was the absolute horror of it. There was nothing happening, really. I wasn’t being accused of anything, or tortured by a Gestapo, or given the third degree. I was just being clucked over by two gentle, lonely old men trying to be helpful. They took an interest in me. They had to sit there eight hours a day and guard the goddamned place and I was the only thing in it alive or moving or that you could talk to or from which you could get even the vicarious illusion of still being connected with a world where some day somebody might conceivably do something, so they liked me and took an interest in my comings and goings. That was all it was. And they would remember every word of it.

“Oh,” I mumbled, feeling my face as if I were surprised at the fact of having one. “I—uh—I was getting something out of the storeroom and fell.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” he answered solicitously. “But you ought to put something on them cut places. Might get infected. You never know. I think it’s the climate around here, the muggy air, sort of—”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Thanks.”

Somehow, we were moving again. It was over. At least, that part of it was over. The nightmare itself came right along with me. The driver went on through the shed and stopped at the end of the pier. I got out under the light. It didn’t make any difference now. Nothing made any difference,

He handed me my change. I tipped him a quarter, and he said, “Thanks, chief.”

Then he grinned at my face and swollen hand. “Hate like hell to see the other guy,” he said.

He left.

I walked over to the big stringer at the edge of the pier and put my foot on it, looking down into the shadows below me, only half conscious of the big diesel tug muscling a string of barges up the waterway ahead of me. Again, it was the simplicity of it that terrified me. It had been nothing but an old man who hated to go back to the four bleak walls of a boarding-house room.

I tried to think. How much chance did I have now? In a few days he’d float up, somewhere along the water-front, and the police would start looking. One of the first things they’d do would be to question all the guards along the piers—

Float up?
That was it. He couldn’t float up. I had to stop it. I looked downward again, and shuddered. Could I go back into that place once more?
Once?
It would take at least a half dozen dives to do it, to make him fast with wire to the bottom of one of those pilings. Too much precious time and breath were wasted in going down and coming up. But I could recharge the cylinders of that other aqualung. It’d be easy that way.

I broke off and just stood there, regarding the ultimate horror. What I was actually looking at was the tug disappearing around the bend above me, shoving its barges in toward the oil dock near the end of the waterway. I was a diver, and yet it had taken me all this time to realize it had just gone by here with its powerful twin screws churning up that muck and silt on the bottom. You could hold a thousand-watt light three inches in front of your eyes down there and it would look like the glow of a firefly.

The tide was still ebbing. It would be the end of the next flood before you could see your own hand under the pier. And not only that. The churning millrace from the propellers might have moved him. There was no telling where he was now.

There was just one more thing, I thought, and then we had it all. Carter would be back from New Orleans sometime this morning, here aboard the barge, and I wouldn’t be able even to look.

I fought with panic. I still had a chance, I told myself. They might never connect me with it. After all, there was no identification on him now that I’d shoved the wallet into the muck. They wouldn’t have a picture of him, except possibly one taken as he looked when he came up. Chris might not have had a good look at him when he came in the gate.

But I wouldn’t know. That was the terrible part of it. I’d never have any idea at all what was happening until the hour they came after me.

I had to get out of here. I was thinking swiftly now. Quit, and tell Carter I was going to New York. Sell my car, buy a bus ticket, get off the bus somewhere up the line, and come back. Buy the boat, under another name, of course. In three days I could have it ready for sea. We’d be gone before they even came looking for me. If they did.

It didn’t occur to me until afterward that never once in all of it did I ever consider the possibility of not buying the boat and not taking Shannon Macaulay. That part of it was apparently foregone, and inevitable, so I didn’t even have to think about it.

Suddenly I had to see her. Why, I didn’t know. I had to get the money for the boat, or make arrangements for it, but that didn’t account for the overpowering desire just to see her. For the first time in a self-sufficient life I was all at once terribly alone, and for some reason I couldn’t define she was the one I wanted to see.

That reminded me. What had the watchman said? Some woman had called? I looked down, and I was still holding in my hand the slip of paper he had given me. It was a telephone number, the same one she had given me in the bar. Maybe something had happened to her. I turned and ran toward the car.

C
ALLING FROM THE WATCHMAN’S SHACK
would be quicker, but I didn’t want the audience. I slowed going through the gate, and the graveyard watchman lifted a hand and nodded. I noted bitterly that old Chris had gone home at last.

I turned right off the dark street, away from the waterfront. There was an arterial and a shopping center about ten blocks over. The drugstore was closed, but I saw a neon cocktail glass beyond it and a sign that said
Elbow Room.
I parked and pushed through a door into refrigerated dimness and smoke and a muted ground swell of “Easy to Love.” The phone booth was at the rear, beyond the jukebox.

I closed the door and fished for a dime. The little fan whirred. I wondered uneasily how long it had actually been since she’d called. Twenty minutes? Thirty? It was ringing. It went on. Then it clicked. “Hello,” she said. “Mrs. Wayne speaking.”

She sounded all right. I breathed easier.

“Manning,” I said.

“Oh.
Bill!
I was just hoping you would call—” There was a contralto delight in it that was like the brush of finger tips. Then I remembered what she’d told me: be careful what you say. She was merely cueing me. There still might be something wrong.

“When am I going to see you again?” I asked.

“Do you
really
want to?”

“You know I do,” I said. “How about right now?”

“We-e-ll—”

“Can I come out?”

“Heavens, not here,” she said, coyly chiding. “Bill, after all—”

After all, we have to be discreet. There was a strained, uncomfortable feeling in this talking to her as if we were lovers, and I wondered what she thought of having to do it.

“Where can I pick you up?” I asked.

“How about meeting me at that same cocktail lounge? In about fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.

I was sitting in the car in front of it when she pulled up in the Cadillac and found a place to park. If she was being followed I didn’t want to go inside where they might get a look at my marked-up face. I eased alongside. She saw me, and slipped out on the street side and got in. It had taken only seconds.

I shot ahead, watching the mirror. There were cars behind us, but there was no way to tell. There are always cars behind you. I was conscious of the gleam of the blond head beside me, and a faint fragrance of perfume.