Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

He swam after her, putting everything into the first minute. He could sprint that long. But if he couldn’t catch her in sixty seconds, then he would probably never be able to make it.

He gained, but the effort whipped him. He felt as if his legs were weighted with lead diving shoes.

The minutes became two. He was still ten feet away. The wind drove the ketch faster. The gap between him and that white stem widened slowly.

He had been in a spot like this once before. Washed overboard, offshore in a gale, stunned and unable to swim back to the Vigilant. He would have been a goner that time if Mulcahey hadn’t jumped over and come for him.

The thought of the blundering, fearless, slap-happy, wise-cracking Irishman who’d been in — and out, of so many tight spots with him, kept Koski’s arms threshing long after there was any possibility of his catching up with the Sea-Dog.

He couldn’t have hold how long it was before a comber picked him up, flung him forward like a surf rider. He rode the crest, calling on his last ounce of energy.

He touched the ketch’s tail-pipe as the comber went under her stem, dragging him down. He hung on.

The Vigilant’s port running light was a red pinpoint off toward City Island by the time he’d summoned strength enough to pull himself up to the Sea-Dog’s taffrail and over it.

Water was sloshing ominously below deck. Also something was churning around in the water which half-filled her cockpit, too. A dead man.

Maybe that’s Joe, Koski raged silently. Maybe that’s old sarge!

It was Buzz Cotlett. His skull had been beaten to a pulp.

The lieutenant stumbled below. Lights were on. Water was up to the floorboards. Nobody was in the main cabin.

“Joe!” he called hoarsely. “Irish!”

Bump! From the forecastle. He had heard that bump before.

He slipped and slid on oily floorboards, skidded up forward. There was a different figure in the bunk where he’d found Belton.

A slim, dark, mustached man lay there, bound and gagged as the wrestler had been. A man whose features Koski had seen on movie screens and television sets.

Maury Perris!

Koski ripped the gag out of the man’s mouth with no unnecessary gentleness. “Where’s the sergeant?”

Perris’ lips were puffy with blisters. “Who? What sergeant? They only let me out a half hour ago.” He groaned. “And then only to bum my mouth with cigarettes.”

“Great bunch you had on board.” Koski cut his bonds. “Where’s the seacock on this craft?”

“Beside the motor. Starboard side.” Perris rolled off the bunk, staggered to his feet.

“Close it,” Koski ordered. “Know how to start your bilge pump?”

“Yes.”

“Get it going.” The lieutenant searched the sail locker, forward. Looked in the toilet, the galley. No sign of Mulcahey.

He went back to the cockpit, pushed the clutch lever. The Sea-Dog shuddered, answered her helm heavily.

He put her stem to the wind; pointed her bowsprit down Sound toward the spot where he had last seen the Vigilant’s running lights.

From the motor-room, Perris called: “Seacock’s closed.”

“Get that pump going.” Koski examined his foot. The screw-blade had sheared off the side and toe of the boot. He felt of his own toes. They were all there. But his hand came away warm and sticky.

He felt weak.

Can’t droop off now, he told himself angrily.

Neither Mrs. Perris nor Ham Belton was aboard. It must have been one of that pair who had escaped on the Vigilant with Vaugh. Which one it was and what had happened to the other one, was of strictly secondary importance until Koski had learned what had happened to Mulcahey.

He lashed the wheel with a rope becket, went below to the galley, found a bottle of Cuban rum, nearly full.

He let half a pint bum his throat, poured the rest over his cut foot. The sting, inside and outside, braced him.

Perris emerged from the motor room under the companionway. “Pump’s running. But it’ll take a week to get her dry.”

“Not if you bail, too,” Koski snapped. “Grab a bucket and squat down there in the bilge. Get a pail to work.”

“I can’t,” Perris whined. “I can hardly stand.”

“You’ll stand. And for a lot, before this is done! Jump!”

“You can’t blame me for any of this.” The producer began to pour water into the galley sink.

“Not for your engineer’s death, I suppose?”

“Buzz?” The swollen mouth hung slackly open. “Buzz killed?”

“Back there in the cockpit. With his dome caved in.” Koski lifted a bunk cushion. There might be just room enough in the locker beneath to cram a body as big as the sergeant’s.

“I didn’t do it.” Perris shivered. “I’d never have hurt Buzz. He was a great little joker. I liked Buzz.”

“How about your steward? Like him, the same way?”

“I hate him. He’s Sydna’s pick, not mine. He does what she tells him, never sees anything she doesn’t want him to. I paid him off quick, when I got out here, but they tied me up and threw me in the lazarette before I could row him—”

Koski didn’t hear the rest of it; he was running aft.

The lazarette. How could he have been dumb enough to forget that a ketch like this would have to store its bottled gas, for cooking and refrigeration, in a cubbyhole beneath the stern deck!

The tiny hatch was right behind the wheel. He had been sitting on it while he lashed the becket in place!

He tore the hatch open, leaned over, stuck his arm down into the darkness. Water sloshing, tiller lines creaking. And rubber! Mulcahey’s slicker!

Koski glanced forward to make sure Perris was still emptying water into the galley sink. It would be too easy for somebody to bop him, once he squeezed into that deep, narrow compartment.

He let himself down, not daring to hope.

Yet why would Mulcahey’s body have been kept on board? More likely the intent had been to hold him as a hostage. That idea might have been abandoned after Vaugh took over the Vigilant.

Joe was breathing. The hair on the back of his head was matted with oil and blood.

It took a while to hoist him up through the hatch, into the cockpit. Koski didn’t want to move him any more than necessary. Maybe the sarge had a fractured skull.

In the galley was an unopened quart of Pieper Heidsick, ’28. Perris stared as Lieutenant Koski knocked the head off the bottle.

“I’d let you try some of your own champagne, but the bubbles might bruise your tender little lips. What were they trying to get you to tell ’em?”

Perris just shook his head.

“Where you’d hidden the stuff you’d brought up from Cuba and meant to take ashore in that suitcase, I expect.”

Perris said nothing.

Koski peered into the toilet-room. “Where is that suitcase? Did they find the stuff and take it with them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The Duke of Dames wiped a smear of oil across his nose.

“That’s why they didn’t mind letting you go down with the ketch,” Koski nodded. “They made you sing. You told ’em where you’d hidden it.”

Perris clamped his mouth shut, winced at the pain it caused.

Koski took the champagne, went back, dribbled a little between Mulcahey’s half-open lips.

The sergeant sputtered, made gagging noises, opened one eye. “I’ll break every living bone in your — Steve!”

He tried to sit up. Koski put a palm on his chest, held him down.

“Easy. Drink this moose juice. How you feel?”

“Head aches,” the sergeant grumbled. “Ears ring. I see double. I could spit sewage. But show me that cruddy wrestler and I’ll feel just grand!”