Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

“But Arlene Denn saw you.”

He shook his head slowly. “All those weird kids. I thought I was in the clear on Bannon. Then she said she watched. I stood out there in the night trying to think of some way I could kill all of them. Like tunk them all on the head and an overdose or something. Or a fire. But I was on the dispatch book because they gave me the complaint. I had those pictures, and I had that stuff I took off them. She didn’t want trouble. I could give her a lot. So when she was off her high and made sense, I asked about maybe if Mrs. Bannon was playing around, or if there was some friend she could say she saw instead of me. So...”

There was a stir beyond the yellow couch, a grunting sigh. Freddy got up quickly and went to Janine. When he bent down over her, he was out of sight. I heard the tone of his gentle voice but not the words. It sounded as if a lover were murmuring to his beloved, comforting her fears. I heard the tiny thud once more.

When he came back and sat as before, I said, “That isn’t going to do her any good, Deputy.”

“Or no harm, Mr. McGee. I know just where and how hard. It just kind of puts a jolt onto the brain, with hardly even a headache afterward. I’ll be thinking on what I should do so I can get some sleep without worrying about either one of you. You know, if you’d only been right here on this boat when Shawana County made the request to have you picked up and held, everything would have been all smoothed over.”

“Don’t count on it. No matter how good you make it look, Freddy, the people I was with at the time you killed Tush would have come forward and cleared me and left you with a lot of explaining.”

“By then there would have been no Arlie to change her story. It maybe would be a big mystery, but there’d be no way to get me mixed up in it.”

“So Tush was an accident, and the woman with the rake in her neck was an accident, but Arlie Denn was going to be on purpose.”

“You get pushed so far there’s only maybe one little narrow way out of the corner. I better get you two...”

I awakened lame and sore, with no knowledge of time or place. Daylight came from overhead, around the edges of a hatch cover that did not fit as well as it should. I had what I thought was a hangover headache, and when I realized that I was in the forward bilge area of the Flush , curled close to the anchor line well, the old frame members of the hull biting into my side, I thought that only a sorry drunk would pick that as a place to sleep. But when I tried to bring my right hand up and rub my face, it stopped with a jolting clink of chain. I turned my head and saw that my right wrist was handcuffed to one of the forward braces made of two-inch galvanized pipe, braces I had installed long ago to give her more forward rigidity in rough water. And I wasn’t going to yank one of those loose, not without a chain hoist and a power winch.

I fingered my skull with my left hand and found a tender area above the right ear and a little behind it. I could not remember being “tunked,” or where the conversation had stopped. My thinking gear was sluggish. It took me a long time to realize that my houseboat could not be moored at Bahia Mar. The motion was wrong. She was at rest, bow into a gentle swell, lifting and falling. Sometimes she would get out of phase with the swell and I could feel the soft tug of the anchor line snubbing the left of the bow.

I sat up and shifted and found a better place to stretch out, where no white oak ribs dug into me. I kept telling myself that Janine was perfectly all right. There wasn’t a thing in my pockets of any earthly use to me. And there was nothing I could reach. I managed to doze off a few times. The motion was restful. At eleven fifteen by my watch I awoke and heard the latch on the small hatchway entrance to the forward bilge click.

Freddy Hazzard came crawling through, wearing a pair of my fresh khaki pants and a clean T-shirt. He nodded and reached back through the hatch and lifted a half bucket of water through and put it within reach. He reached again and brought in a brown paper bag and put it beside the bucket.

“Mr. McGee, there’s milk and bread and cheese in the sack, and a roll of toilet paper. You’ll have to make out best you can with a bucket, because I’m not about to let you loose until there’s a good reason.”

“Where’s Mrs. Bannon?”

“She’s just fine. I found some chain and a padlock, and I got her chained in the head by one ankle, and I took her some food first.”

“Where are we?”

“Anchored in the flats just off Sands Key, way east of the channel, maybe twelve mile south of Miami. I had me a time working this thing out of that big marina. The wind takes it. I fished commercial about every summer I was a kid in school. Mr. McGee, I found your fuel tables in the drawer next to the chart rack. With the fuel aboard it figures out to maybe four hundred miles range. Does that sound about right to you?”

“Why should I tell you anything, Freddy?”

He squatted on his heels, balancing easily to the motion of the hull. He looked at me in a troubled way. “I got that little runabout boat in tow. That’s what gave me fits getting clear of the boat basin. I’ve been checking her over, and I think she’s got maybe three hundred miles in her because the tanks are topped off full. Cuba would be easy, but I’ve got the feeling it would be another kind of jail. I’ve been checking weather and there’s a good five-day forecast. I think I could just about get to the Caicos Islands. There isn’t much of any red tape or government there because, like a friend explained to me, they used to belong to Jamaica and when Jamaica went independent, the Turks and Caicos Islands weren’t in that deal. I’ve got your papers and I can scorch them up some like this boat burned, and leave enough to read so I can pass for you where nobody knows you. I’m sorry about the way it has to be, but if I’m going to be you, I’m going to have to leave you and her fastened tight to this thing when she runs out of fuel and I open her up and let her go down. I thought of all other ways and there just isn’t a one. Now, I’m telling you this, how it’s going to be, but I’m not telling her because she’d come all apart. And you won’t be telling her because you and she aren’t ever going to see each other again. It’s the only chance and I’m sorry about it, but I have to give it a try. Now you want to know why you should tell me anything. It’s because when the time comes, I can lay one on your skull bone and hers too and you’ll drown without knowing a thing about it. And I’ll make you comfortable as I can meanwhile. Her too. But every boat has cranky ways, and when this thing isn’t acting right, I want to ask you what to do and you tell me right. If you don’t, you aren’t either one of you going to be comfortable hardly at all. And you should know that when I was carrying her into the head and getting that chain fixed on her leg, I thought about how full-grown women like that always made me feel dumb and clumsy and afraid to even think of touching them. But since she’s going down to the bottom anyways, it wouldn’t matter what happened to her beforehand. I might mess with her and I might not. I couldn’t say right now, but there’s not so much chance of it if you act right. So right now I want to know just where to put those tacs to get the top range out of this thing.”

“It isn’t going to work.”

“It’s the only chance I’ve got. What rpm, mister?”

“Eleven hundred.”

“Where’s the switch on the automatic pilot?”

“Up on the topside controls, under the panel, over on the port corner.”

“Where’s your compass correction card?”

“Pasted to the inside lid of the box where the rule and dividers are.”