The Last One Left (21 page)

“Now I know that a man as good as Staniker around boats must be working for somebody, and to get loose, he’d have to locate somebody reliable to take his job while he’s with me. So when you talk to him, you tell him I’ll pay him three thousand for the six weeks, him and his wife, and if it runs longer, I’ll pay him at the same rate. You line it up for me, and I’ll phone you from New Orleans or Biloxi on the way around the Gulf, and I’ll give you a little present for your trouble, Miss Crissy.”

“You don’t have to do that! I’m glad to do it, for old time’s sake, really. But …”

“What’s bothering you?”

“You know what he’s going to say. He’s going to want to know why you’re willing to pay so much.”

She got up and took his empty glass and her own over to the drink cupboard. He remained silent and thoughtful. When she handed him his new drink he said, “My pretty little wife is itching and aching to see the Bahamas. I’ve been too busy for a vacation. Stel and Roger are my kids by my first wife. I’ve got an interest in some resort land over there. Trying to do business with some people who aren’t what you’d call eager to take the bait. You tell Staniker I might have to meet some of those people on the sly, maybe on one of the Out Islands, and offer a little sweetening their partners might not get to know about. So I’d be paying extra for I’d guess the same thing Fer wanted, a real bad memory about where we went and when we went and who might have come aboard. I remember him being bright enough to buy that.”

“I’m sure he is.”

Kayd looked troubled. “There’s one thing he doesn’t have to know. But it’s the reason I want a man Fer was willing to trust. It
isn’t likely Staniker would ever have to know, but there’s always the off chance him or his Mary Jane might find out somehow that I’ve got all that sweetening aboard, a stack of it I sure wouldn’t want to risk having a pick-up captain or ship’s cook knowing about.”

“And there’s no point in letting even Staniker know about it if you can avoid it.”

He looked at her warmly and appreciatively. “Fer sure found himself a smart gal. Don’t ever tell anybody one word more than they need to know. Decided to tell you because what I want you to do, if there isn’t enough, I authorize you to boost it on up to where he’ll say yes. But not over five. I pay for what I need, but I don’t want somebody trying to guess what the traffic will bear. If you know all my reasons, you can do a better job on Staniker. Maybe, later on, if things work out right, and you’ve got the time, you could go over there to Nassau on a little vacation once in a while and do me a little favor now and then. You’d get some little presents. Enough so as to know you weren’t wasting your time.”

“Little favors?”

“A man on my payroll with some cute ideas about what he can get away with, seeing as how I’m so far away, might want to put on the brag to some pretty tourist gal who never heard of Bix Kayd. Or some old boy who didn’t land a contract to barge building materials to one of the islands I hope to buy, might tell the big-eyed tourist gal how the boy who did get the contract is making kick-backs to the builder. When I get to wondering about something I get to fretting about it. A smart, pretty woman is the best pair of ears a man can buy. I’m into a lot of things, scattered here and there. I get the big sell from these investigation firms. They want me to put in what they call a security system. Screening, lie detectors, concealed microphones, psychological tests, plant some investigators on the pay rolls. Know what they never understand? Why should I pay some outfit forty or fifty thousand a year to find out everything about
what I’m doing? Who do they sell
that
information to? I have a few smart gals here and there. They do little favors. I make a little present. They like it, the smart ones. It’s kind of a game. And nobody knows they’ve got any connection at all with Bix Kayd. It’s a little excitement. Something different.”

He looked at his watch, gulped the remainder of his drink, put the glass down and stood up. “Don’t want to miss that flight.” He took an alligator billfold out of his inside jacket pocket, fingered ten hundreds out of what he was carrying, said, “Here. Give it to Staniker so he’ll know we’ve got a deal.”

“I hope he isn’t off somewhere on a cruise, Bix.”

“Do your best, Miss Crissy.”

She thought about it all night long. Staniker did not come by. She paced and thought and drank and nibbled at the knuckle of her thumb. She would stop and study herself in her mirrors. The excitement kept starting in the pit of her belly, coiling up through her to burst like bright rockets in her skull, dazing her. In the bright dawn she closed the draperies and went to bed to sleep heavily for several hours.

She awakened not knowing for a little time where she was. Then it came tumbling back into her head. She got up and went to the money Bix had given her. The money made it real. The money made all the rest of the money possible.

She willed Staniker to come to her. He came strolling in at four thirty in the afternoon, smelling of beer, complaining about the condition the rental skiffs had been in when they were returned. The terrace was in shade at that time of day. They sat at a table, and she fixed drinks and brought them out. She had told Francisca she would not need her. At last Staniker noticed how unresponsive she was. “Is anything wrong?” he asked. “You sore about something, Cris?”

“How’s the job hunting?”

“Something will turn up.”

“Oh, certainly. Because you make such a marvelous impression these days, Captain. Let me list your charms. You’re getting a beer belly. You missed a couple of places on your jaw when you shaved. You smell sweaty. Look at your fingernails. It’s been a year, Captain, a whole year since you ran a good boat for good pay. And downhill all the way. Haven’t you noticed?”

“What the
hell
, Cris!”

She leaned toward him and said with a slow and deadly emphasis. “Do you know what’s going to turn up for you? More of the same, Captain. More of just what you’ve got. Nothing. Ten years from now your Mary Jane will be working as hard as she is right now. And by then you won’t even pretend to work. You’ll hang around the marinas with the other old nothings. You’ll tell lies about the navy and about the Bahamas and about me. I’ll be somebody you used to know, Garry. Just lies, my friend. Beer and dirt and no money and fancy lies that not even the other old bums are going to believe. Starting today I think I’m going to become somebody you used to know. You never had it. I guess that’s the secret. You always looked as though you had it. You acted as though you had it. But on the inside, Garry, nothing. Nothing
I
need. Nothing
I
can use.”

“What are you trying to
do
to me?” he whispered.

“Me. You’re doing it to yourself. You just haven’t noticed. You’re a slob. Everything you’ve touched has turned to nothing. It’s your great talent, wouldn’t you say?”

“I had some bad luck, but …”

“Your luck is going to change? Why? Because you’re so young and competent and charming? Staniker, you are a silly, stupid, middle-aged man who puts dark goop on his gray hair and keeps forgetting to hold his belly in when he stands up.”

“Do you know what you are!”

“Go ahead. Say it. It will help me decide.”

He hesitated too long. “Decide what?”

She laughed. “It’s all pretty funny, you know. We’ve run the string out, you and me. We’re both on the long downhill ride. The big chance came along, and it’s too late for us to try to grab it. Maybe back when you had some guts left and some pride. When you still
wanted
things badly enough to go after them.”

“How do you know how bad I want things? What do you mean, big chance? What are you talking about?”

“You’re not hard enough, Garry. Believe me, you couldn’t carry it off. I couldn’t take the chance. Not with you. You’d mess it up somehow. And the sad part of it is that I haven’t got time to find the right man for it. A hard man. One I could trust. So instead of a big, beautiful cake, all you get is a couple of crumbs. You might as well have the crumbs. He
did
ask for you.”

She reached into the pocket of her slacks and took out the little packet of bills Kayd had given her. They were folded once. She flipped them onto the table. “Go ahead. Pick them up, Captain. You’ve got a job. That’s an advance on your salary.”

His big hands shook as he counted it. “A job?”

She forced a yawn. “Running a boat. What else? You aren’t able to do anything else, are you? Six weeks, or so, beginning about the middle of this month. Oh, and he wants your wife aboard too, to cook. He wants to cruise the Bahamas. He said it’s a fifty-three foot cruiser, custom built, twin diesels. He’s bringing it around the Gulf from Texas and when he gets in touch with me I’ll tell him how to get in touch with you. He’ll pay three thousand total. That’s five hundred a week for the pair of you.”

“Why does he want to pay that much?”

“He knows you. His name is Kayd. Bixby Kayd.”

Staniker looked puzzled. “I know that name—Oh, great big fella? Big voice?”

“Himself. One of Fer’s pack of old buddies. He guessed that if
you didn’t know how to keep your mouth shut, Fer wouldn’t have kept you on. So the big fee includes keeping your mouth shut. That means it’s some kind of a business trip.”

“A thousand dollars!” he said in a reverent tone.

She stood up, fists in the pockets of her slacks. “So run along, Garry. Let’s pretend it’s been nice. Anything you might think I owed you, this pays it off. Right? Just stay away from me. Don’t come around any more. It would just remind me of how close I came to the jackpot.”

As she had hoped, he pleaded with her to tell him what she was talking about. She refused, chopping at his pride as savagely as she dared, sometimes making his face turn sallow under his lifelong tan. She let him follow her into her bedroom.

Finally, in a blazing imitation of anger, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll tell you, not that it is going to mean a damned thing because you’re not man enough to even recognize a chance like this. And you wouldn’t have the guts to grab it if you did. It’s too rough for you. It would take more than you’ve got. More than you’ve ever had. You see, Captain, you’ll have four and maybe five people aboard. Kayd and his second wife. His two children from his first marriage. Maybe a friend of his daughter’s. And because he was idiot enough to trust me, I guess because Fer trusted me, he told me something you’re not supposed to know. He’s going to bribe somebody in a big land deal. With cash money. And he’ll have that aboard.”

“How much?”

She had given careful thought to what figure she would tell Staniker. She knew it had to be a very substantial figure to make Kayd edgy about carrying it or having the hired captain know about it.

“Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said mildly. “Cash money. Bribe money. The kind nobody knows about and it can’t be traced. Forget it. You’ll never even get a look at it.”

“That much cash?” he said incredulously.

“There was twice that in this house once,” she said. “One of Fer’s deals. You know how it works with men like that. They have tax angles to think about. Anyway—you can see why there’s no point in talking to you about it.”

“It’s a lot of money, Crissy.”

“And only one way to take it. You’d have to fake a disaster, Captain. An explosion or something. They’d have to go down with the boat, every one of them, dead because you’d have to kill them. And you’d have to hide the money somewhere in the islands, in a place so safe we could leave it there for months and months. You’d be the sole survivor. You’d have to have a good story and stick to it no matter how hard they tried to trick you. And when it all quieted down, you’d have to find a way to slip over there and pick up the money and bring it back. We’d split it down the middle, my friend. If you were gutsy enough to give it a try. And then we wouldn’t go hand in hand into the sunset, Captain. We’d head in different directions. I know what kind of a life I’d buy with it.” She tilted her head. “You’d probably go somewhere where you could buy a big old crock of a seagoing motor sailer and stock it with a couple of adventurous little floozies and go to the far islands of the Pacific. You could be their big daddy, their seafaring hero type.”

She threw her head back and gave a loud jeering laugh. “You! Good God! Can you imagine a meat head like you bringing off anything like that? You’re too small time, Captain. You’d wet your pants even thinking about it. I can tell from the look on your face that the idea of killing six people is making your tummy-wummy turn over and over. Do you know the difference between you and a
man?
A
man
would remember that a lot of things can happen to people. Hell, their airplane might crash on the way back to Texas when the cruise is over. Mary Jane might slip on that dock some dark night and crack her skull on a rental boat. A
man
sees a chance
and takes it. You know, Garry, your trouble is that you’d
rather
live small.”

He reached her in three strides, clopped the side of her head with a big open palm and knocked her to her hands and knees, her ear ringing. “Get off my back!” he yelled.

She looked up at him. “Get out of here. You bore me. You want to talk about it. That’s all. Just talk about it and scare yourself like a little kid at the horror movie. Go away, Chicken Staniker. Get out of here.”

At midnight she lay in darkness on her bed, aware of the invisible bulk of him beside her. He sighed and said, “It’s the only chance I’ll ever get.”

“Talk talk talk. But you won’t do it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you I …”

“Maybe you could. If you really want to. But I don’t think you want to.”

He put his arms around her and pulled her close. “If you’d stop riding me and start helping me, honey. Maybe I can’t do it. Maybe I can. If we get it all planned out, maybe I can. I—I think of that much money and I feel sweaty. You know? Things have never gone right. It wasn’t my fault things didn’t work out so good. Luck evens out, maybe. A big one, to wash out all the little ones. But—what you should be doing is building me up, not tearing me down. Come on. Let’s talk more about it. Don’t fall asleep.”