Donald Hamilton - Murderers Row

PLEASE DON'T THINK I'm being callous, or anything, when I say it was kind of a relief. It blew away, so to speak, the cobwebs of illusion. It was tough on Louis, but he wasn't a particularly good friend of mine, and it made everything sharp and clear. We could all stop kidding each other now.

I mean, the message was plain: we were through with the phony glamor and politeness. We were through with lovely ladies in filmy peignoirs smiling seductively as they passed out the loaded highballs; we were through with the trick psychology, the slick dialogue, and all the rest of the Hollywood jazz.

Instead, we had, on deck, harsh reality in the shape of a tough woman with delusions of persecution and grandeur, in jeans, packing a shotgun, with a murderous giant to do her bidding. And below, in the swaying and weaving little steel prison of a cabin, we had some more crude reality in the form of a man with a dislocated shoulder, perhaps a cracked skull, certainly a broken nose and several missing front teeth, bleeding copiously. It was an effective antidote to dreams. We weren't going to walk out through an unbolted door and take over the schooner with a wave of the hand. Well, I hadn't ever thought we would, really.

Teddy stared in horror at the beaten man on the floor. She gagged suddenly and scrambled into the head-to use the nautical term-and was sick. I bent down and looked Louis over. I patted him around the body and found no tools or weapons of any kind. That figured. I opened his shirt and looked at his shoulder. It was dramatic. Nick had practically torn the arm off, as you'd rip a drumstick from a cold roast chicken.

What had happened was pretty obvious. Robin hadn't brought me on deck just for fun. In spite of Teddy's confession, she'd remained suspicious of her husband, and she'd had me up there to tease him. She'd let him see us talking cozily together, knowing that, if guilty, he couldn't help but wonder if I was giving him away right before his eyes. She'd known he couldn't stand the pressure; he'd have to go to me for reassurance as soon as possible.

She'd waited for him to betray himself by slipping below to talk to me. When he came back, she'd simply turned Nick loose. With his arm twisted out of its socket, Louis would have talked, all right. He would have told her everything she wanted to know, and all it had got him was a smashed face and a crack on the head. I couldn't help wondering if the brutal embellishments had been Nick's idea or Robin's. I wouldn't have laid bets either way. She was no longer the warm and lovely woman I'd held in my arms; but then, that woman had never really existed.

There wasn't anything I could do for the arm except lash it to Louis' side with his shirt so it wouldn't flop around when I heaved him into the bunk. He paid no attention. He'd been hit hard enough, undoubtedly, to have a concussion; he might even die. I looked into the cubicle next door. The kid had pulled herself together, but she was having trouble pumping out the plumbing. I gave her a hand.

As we struggled with the machinery, the schooner took a sharp list to starboard, and solid green water sluiced briefly across the outside of the smaller porthole above the john. I had to grab Teddy and brace myself to keep both of us from being thrown into the pipes and valves.

I said, "Hell, are we sinking?"

She giggled in spite of herself. "Haven't you ever been on a sailboat before? They all sail on their sides, silly. It's just getting a little gusty out there, and the wind seems to've hauled more abeam." Her amusement faded abruptly. "Matt, now there's nobody to help! What are we going to do?"

I knew what I was going to do, but I could hardly tell her about it. I had no choice now, if I'd ever had any.

She clung to me desperately. "What's going to happen to us?" she breathed. "Where is that woman sending Papa and the rest of us? You didn't tell me. If we can't get away before she puts up on board that ship, what will happen to us?"

If she didn't want to know, she shouldn't ask. I said, "My impression is, we'll be taken overseas to a country where there are some specialists waiting to torture hell out of us-that is, unless there are facilities and experts on the freighter."

Her eyes were wide and shocked, "Torture?"

"Torture," I said. "Don't be naive. Take a look at Louis, for a practical illustration of what happens to people who know things other people want to know."

"But-"

"Your daddy has some very special information," I said, "and I happen to be connected with a government agency that has aroused a lot of curiosity over there. They had a lady scheduled to take the trip voluntarily, but she died. Well, you know. You were at the motel that night."

Teddy glanced at me. "Did you really kill her, Matt?"

"Let's not go into that," I said. "It's complicated and irrelevant. Anyway, I've been drafted as a replacement. I'm sure there are long lists of questions just waiting to be asked both Dr. Michaelis and me, and all kinds of fancy drugs and devices to make sure we're properly co-operative."

Teddy licked her lips, looking up at me. "But-but I don't know anything!" she cried. "What do they want with me?"

"Well, you annoyed Mrs. Rosten," I said. "You were a contributing factor in getting her all wet, remember. And then you had the bad judgment to show up just at sailing time; and as I told you, your daddy knows something quite important; and one of the best ways to get information out of a stubborn man is to go to work on somebody he happens to be very fond of."

"You mean-you mean they'd hurt me just to get him to talk?" She glanced at me, and looked away. "I'm sorry. That's a pretty selfish attitude, I guess. I just-i've never been in anything like this before."

I helped her out of the head, wishing she wouldn't keep showing flashes of something kind of honest and likable. I mopped some blood off the cabin floor and helped her get settled there with a pillow, since she didn't want to share the bed with Louis, who was breathing in a funny way and showed no signs of regaining consciousness. I tried to make myself comfortable, sitting on the dresser. It was the only vacant space left. From there, I could look out through the cabin porthole, but the only view was of white-topped waves that occasionally washed up against the glass.

They got higher as the afternoon passed, and the motion got more violent. I wasn't surprised when at last Teddy got up quickly and vanished into the head. After all, she'd already done it once; she'd have it in mind. She came out looking pale and miserable and curled up with her pillow, but presently she had to rush in there again. This time she stayed so long I finally went in after her.

She was really in bad shape, too sick to give a damn about the humiliation of having me see her and help her. It was a long nightmare afternoon, and it didn't get much better after it turned into night, with Louis making strange breathing noises in the berth and the kid deathly seasick in the john. It didn't seem quite fair. What I was going to do to Michaelis was bad enough without my having to prepare for it by holding his little girl's head and wiping her chin.

I got her out of the head at last, and she was curled up on the floor, moaning, a small, bedraggled ball of misery, when the motion of the schooner changed quite perceptibly. I switched off the electric light by the dresser and looked out through the porthole. Out in the darkness, the waves, that had been marching off at an angle to the schooner's course, were moving right along with us; we'd changed direction. There were footsteps overhead, and the sounds of ropes being hauled through blocks. I slid off the dresser and bent over the kid.

"Snap out of it, Teddy," I said. "Something's happening. Brief me."