Ричард Деминг - Hit and Run

Eventually they blinked twice again.

He started the motor and headed at full throttle toward the point where he had seen the lights. But running a boat in the dark is confusing. He was fifty yards offshore, had turned out his Coleman lantern, and was heading confidently toward a narrow dock he could see protruding out over the water when the lights blinked again, a hundred yards to his left.

Changing course, he cut the throttle way down and slowly chugged up to the small dock Helena and he had stood on the night before. As he tied up, he could make out the dim shadow of the convertible next to the dark and boarded-up cottage.

Helena greeted him with a calm, “Hello, Barney.”

“Any trouble?” he asked.

“Not since I got here. But I missed the turn and was a few minutes late. No one from the other cottages has come out to ask why I was blinking my lights.”

Looking in both directions, Calhoun could see no one. The cottages both sides of them were still dark. He went behind the car, lifted the trunk lid, and took the dead body of Lawrence Powers in his arms.

As he lurched past the front seat with his burden, he said, “Bring the gunny sacks.”

Calhoun was a fairly strong man, but it’s quite a trick even for a strong man to carry an inanimate hundred and fifty pounds over uneven ground in the dark. Once he stumbled and nearly dropped the body, and as he started to lower it into the boat, it slipped from his grip and nearly tumbled into the water before bouncing off the gunwale and settling just where he wanted it on the bottom of the boat.

He was drenched with sweat.

When he finished wiping his face with a handkerchief, he found Helena standing on the dock beside him, the three burlap bags in her hands. Carefully he covered her husband’s body with them.

Then he returned to the car for the two anchors and the sash cord.

When he was finally reseated in the boat and ready to start, Helena still stood on the dock.

“Can’t I go along and help?” she asked.

“I’d never find this place again in the dark,” he told her. He looked at his watch, noting it was ten after ten. “Pick me up at the boat livery at a quarter to eleven.”

When she didn’t say anything, he glanced up at her. Maybe it was only an effect of the moonlight, but he imagined there was a look of disappointment on her usually expressionless face, as though he had refused her some pleasure she particularly wanted to enjoy.

“Quarter to eleven,” he repeated.

She nodded, and he started the motor and pulled away.

He headed straight out from shore at quarter speed for about fifty yards, then stopped long enough to light his lantern. He didn’t care to have the Coast Guard or Coast Guard Reserve pick him up for running without lights.

When he started up again, he opened to full throttle and held it until he was even with the farthest boats from shore, approximately two miles out. He didn’t want to risk calling attention to himself by going out beyond them.

There weren’t many boats out that far, perhaps a half dozen spaced several hundred yards apart. He cut his motor halfway between two.

There was no risk working under the bright glare of the Coleman lantern; he could see nothing of the other boats except their lights, so he knew it was impossible for them to see what was going on in his. Working rapidly, he uncovered the body, cut a length of sash cord, and tied one of the anchors around Lawrence Powers’ neck. The other he tied firmly to Powers’ feet after lashing the ankles together.

He was standing up in the boat getting ready to heave the body over the side when a voice said almost in his ear, “Any luck?”

Starting violently, he lost his balance, made a wild grab for the side of the boat, and sat down with a thump on the body. He took one terrified look over his shoulder, expecting to see someone within feet of him, then drew a deep sigh of relief. There was a boat light slowly coming toward him, but it was still a good twenty yards away. He realized it was only the acoustic effect of sound traveling across water that had made the voice seem so near.

Since the two figures in the other boat were only faceless shapes to Calhoun, he realized they couldn’t see into his boat any clearer than he could see into theirs. Quickly he pulled the burlap sacks over the body and pushed himself up onto the rear seat next to the motor.

Only then did it occur to him that he hadn’t even answered the other boat’s hail. Belatedly he called back in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Couple of small perch is all.”

The boat was now within ten yards, and Calhoun could make out the two men in it. The one in front was in his early twenties and the man operating the motor was middle-aged. The motor was barely turning over, which was the reason Calhoun hadn’t heard their approach. But they hadn’t been trying to sneak up on him, he realized when he saw a line stretching back from either side of the boat. They were moving at that slow speed because they were trolling.

They passed within three yards of Calhoun’s boat. As they went by, the middle-aged man said, “We ain’t having any luck, either. We’re about ready to go in.”

Then they were past. Neither had glanced at the burlap-covered mound in the bottom of Calhoun’s boat.

He waited until he could see nothing of them but their light, then uncovered the body again, lifted it in his arms, and heaved it into the water. It landed on its back, the sightless eyes peering straight up at him for a final second before it disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles.

Calhoun tossed the burlap bags overboard after it. Then, with shaking fingers, he lit a cigarette and drew a deep and relieved drag.

He was halfway back to shore before it occurred to him that the old man at the boat livery might think it odd if he noticed his line wasn’t even wet. He cut the motor, tied a yellow and red flatfish to his line without even using a leader, and made a long cast out over the water. He knew the chance of getting a strike on an artificial lure at night was remote, but all he was interested in was getting his line wet.

His usual bad fisherman’s luck held. If he had been fishing seriously, he would have sat there all night without a single strike. Now, because the last thing he wanted at that moment was a fish, he nailed a northern pike that must have weighed close to five pounds. It took him nearly ten minutes to land it.

Then he had another thought. He didn’t have an Ohio fishing license. And it would be just his luck to step out of the boat into the arms of a game warden.

So he unhooked one of the nicest northerns he had ever boated and tossed it back into the water.

The old man saw his light coming in and came down to the dock to meet him. When he pulled up alongside the dock, the old man said, “Any luck?”

“A five-pound northern,” Calhoun said. “But I tossed it back in.”

The old man cackled. Calhoun knew he wouldn’t believe it.

As he climbed out of the boat, the old man said, “No fooling, didn’t you even get a perch?”

“None I felt like keeping,” Calhoun said. “I like them bigger than four inches.”

“Should have got something. Most everybody is tonight. Perch and crappie mostly, with an occasional largemouth. Nobody’s brought a walleye in here yet, though. Got any bait left? They been cleaning me out.”

“A few crawlers left in the can,” Calhoun said. “You’re welcome to them.”

Lifting his fishing gear from the boat, he walked up past the cottage to the dirt road.

Helena had parked the car some twenty yards up the dirt road, facing the highway. She was sitting on the right side of the seat. After tossing his fishing gear in the back, Calhoun slid under the wheel.