Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

He nodded. “I got a nap, but I need a lot of catching up. I’m going to sleep out the rest of the day and move on out of here about dusk. I’ll bring you down some blankets so you can rest better, Mr. McGee.”

“Don’t knock yourself out with favors.”

He left. It was just a wild enough idea to work, if I’d been alone aboard. But Meyer would know Janine had been aboard, and so would Connie Alvarez. They would never quit, not until they found out what happened. Small comfort.

So this had to be the time. During this long afternoon. Don’t count on his getting careless later on. Because even when pooped, he wasn’t careless. He’s been on the run. His two shipmates are latched up tightly. The bed is deep and soft. The sea rocks him. He may never sleep as deeply again.

So get to it, McGee. Get something working, mostly your dull head. Nothing in the pockets. Escape needs tools. Like a belt buckle? Ah yes. A careful young man. The old jail training. Belt and shoelaces were gone. What have you got that’s made of metal, fella? Well, you have a corroded old bucket and you have a wristwatch, and you have some fillings in the fangs, and that is it.

And if you had metal, what could you do? You might try to pick the lock on the cuff. Think nothing of the fact that they are designed to be pickproof. Or if you happened to have a very thin and fairly narrow piece of spring steel, you could maybe work it into this little aperture where the cuff clasps together and maybe free the ratchets somehow. Except the good sets, like this one, have little knurled places designed to keep you from doing just that.

The hatch latch clicked and it opened and he shoved two blankets in far enough for me to reach them and slammed it again. Nice gesture, fella. Thanks a lot.

More appraisal. The cuff would slide along the heavy pipe bracing. They were in the shape of the letter X laying on its side, and I was cuffed to the one with its low end on the starboard side, the high end on the port. They did not quite touch at the center of the X. There was room to get the cuff between them. I could stand up, if I kept pretty well hunched over. I gave myself very good grades in the handyman department, at least in that bracing chore. I had hacksawed them to fit snugly, then slipped the collars over them, each with a base about four inches across with four big bolt-holes. Even with the biggest wrench aboard, I would have had trouble. The rust looked as solid as the steel.

Suddenly I remembered that they were just friction collars. They were not threaded on. And the lip was about one inch deep. So, if a man could put his back into it, and put enough of a bend in one of them to make it an inch shorter, it would slip out of the bolted collar and that intelligent fellow would be free.

I made a blanket pad to protect my back. I hunched under the cross pipe, got myself nicely braced and tried to bend it. I tried until the world turned jet black with little streaks of red flickering through it. I tried until my ears were full of blood roar and my jaws ached and the pipe was grooving my bones, but it did not bend a quarter of an inch, if that.

I sat down and panted for a time. My eyes stung with sweat. Impasse. The only possible way I could get myself loose, other than chewing my hand off at the wrist, was to bend the pipe brace. And I couldn’t bend it.

Give me a lever and a place to stand, somebody said. Or was it a fulcrum? Anyway, he was going to move the earth. If a reason had been given, I had forgotten it.

Sure. With a lever or a winch or a truck jack, no problem at all. I drank some milk and ate some cheese. Okay, McGee. Sit here and make yourself a truck jack out of some bread, cheese, a watch, a pail and two blankets. The old know-how.

And something went skittering across the back of my mind so swiftly I didn’t catch it. A frail ghost of some kind of a frail idea. I lay back and tried to think of nothing at all, and when it appeared again I grabbed it. I shook it but it didn’t have anything to tell me. It muttered something about a turnbuckle and I let it go.

There are two ways to move something. Push it or pull it. I sat up and looked at my equipment. I took one blanket and, starting at one corner, I rolled it as neatly and tightly as I could. There was a squat thick short timber brace on the port side near the bulkhead, but it was a foot beyond my best reach. I soaked the ends of my blanket rope in the water bucket. I took off my shoes and socks and stretched out and fumbled the end of the blanket rope around the brace and clapped it between the soles of my feet and pulled it through and toward me. I looped the other end around the pipe brace to which I was fastened, and pulled it as tightly as I could manage and knotted the wet ends together. I poured the water out of the bucket, put my boat shoes back on and trod upon the bucket until the side seam parted and the seam that held the bottom on tore loose. Then I stomped and folded and grunted and sweated until I had a clumsy metal club about two and a half feet long. I wrapped that up in the other blanket as tightly as I could and tied it with strips torn off my shirt. Then I stuck six inches of the padded lever between the two strands of the blanket rope and began winding.

It was easy — at first. The blanket began to twist and knot like the rubber band in a toy airplane. The timber brace made alarming creaking sounds. Each full wind took more effort. I had wrapped my lever in the blanket to try to keep it from bending. But as I began to have to hold it right out at the end to get enough leverage, it began to take on a curve. When I noticed that the pipe brace was taking on a curve too, I began to worry about what might happen when all that accumulated force was released. The sweat ran. I turned my lever. The blanket was so taut I could imagine I could hear it humming. What is the breaking strength of the average blanket?

Suddenly it was like being dropped into the middle of a threshing machine. The pipe sprang out of the collars and banged me on the shoulder. The lever spun free and hit me on the elbow and numbed my forearm and hand. The pipe spun and rang against my skull and knocked me down and tried to twist my arm off by the cuffed wrist. It was an ungodly din, and Freddy was going to come charging down. I slipped the cuff off the end of the pipe. I clawed the shirt strips off my lever and knelt by the hatchway with the raw, flattened chunk of bucket held high, silently begging him to stick his head in, and wondering if he was on the other side waiting for me to stick my head out.

So I went creeping cautiously out, holding the loose cuff in my right hand with enough tension to keep the chain from clinking. I went up through the other hatch forward and moved silently aft. I stopped every few steps to hold my breath and cock my head and listen. At the mouth of the corridor I heard a buzzing snore, deep and slow and regular. The door of the master stateroom was ajar. The door to the head was closed, and I could hear a faint clinking of chain.

Procedure — Go to the lounge. Get the weapon from the desk. Go charging in and blow one of his kneecaps off just to be on the safe side. Liberate the lady. Head for Dinner Key and radio the police to meet us.

But again he was careful. He had shaken the place down. № 38. I checked the pilothouse and the shark rifle was not in the spring clamps where it belonged.

Revised procedure — Silently liberate the lady and get her the hell out of there and into the Muñequita and when we had drifted far enough, start her up and leave in a big hurry.

Chain. So the quickest, easiest way would be with the great big nippers, a brute set with handles a yard long. And they were right where I hoped they would be, in behind the tool locker, wedged in place.