Dan Marlowe - Killer with a Key

Johnny turned back to Mike Larsen as something occurred to him. “You sent the note in to Vic?”

Mike nodded; he was looking out at the pier. “Yes. Not one of my more inspired moments. Can't even think now why it seemed important at the time, except that things were popping a little too rapidly for my liking.” He seemed to rouse himself as he looked back at Johnny. “I sent the trio who waylaid you outside of Lorraine's, too. Another little backfire that fizzled. I wanted you to blame Russo for it; he'd already become a headache to me. I thought you'd dismantle him on sight.”

“The first fifteen seconds that I saw him afterward he tried to bet me fifty he could take me even. After sendin' out a losin' goon squad, it just didn't figure.”

He had lost Mike's attention; from the back seat the automatic motioned at Lorraine. “You get out first.” She complied, and Mike eased out on Johnny's side of the car, gun leveled. “You, Johnny.”

Johnny got out a little stiffly; he stood erect and stretched leisurely. He looked up at the sky; the earlier haze had disappeared, and the night was clear. He fixed the stars in his mind; he knew now what he had to do, but he didn't know how much time he had in which to do it. Mike Larsen did not intend that three of them should return from this boat ride. Or even two of them, whether Lorraine Barnes realized it or not.

The beam of a flashlight came on in Mike's hand; he moved in a semicircle around Johnny and handed it to Lorraine. “You lead.”

The loose fill grated under their feet, and the weeds whispered damply. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the pier's timbers until they stood dockside to Ye Olde Beaste. Beneath their feet there was the faint hiss of water and the occasional slap of a slightly larger wave against a piling.

Against the night light of sky and stars the stubby masts of the moored boats danced in shadowy disorder.

“You first, Johnny, into the boat,” Mike decided. “Drop down and take off the tarp. You keep the light on him, Lorraine, and if I see you going for a spanner, Johnny, that's it, right there.” The white of his teeth showed in the blur of his features. “You could probably dive under the pier and get away; I know you're a fish in the water, but I think you'd rather get your hands on me.”

How right you are, Mike Larsen, Johnny thought to himself as he swung down the piling ladder and reached for the deck with his feet. And I know how I'm going to do it. In the beam of light directed down at him from the pier above he knelt and loosened the ties on the tarp, bundled it and tossed it amidships.

“Take off the engine cowling.” Mike's voice sounded right at his elbow; sound carried in the night. Johnny slid off the metal casing and stood it up in the stern. “Lorraine's coming down now. I'm watching you.”

Johnny watched her cautious descent of the ladder; was it more typically feminine to be afraid of falling from the ladder between the creaking, barnacled pilings and the dark water line than of the gun in Mike Larsen's hand? He stepped up from the cockpit to the deck, scooping up an air-filled seat cushion as he did so. He reached up and lifted her down from the ladder, and with her body as a shield pushed the cushion under her arm, his whisper a breath in her ear. “Hang onto this.” He released her; she made no sound, but her arm gripped the seat cushion.

Mike's carefully contrived face-forward descent, flashlight under an armpit and the gun in his free hand, was a strain on him. Explosive relief was again evident in his tone as he dropped the final three feet to the deck planking. “Now!”

Johnny smiled tightly to himself. He thinks he's crossed his last river. He doesn't know his white water is still ahead of him.

Mike pointed with the gun to the opposite side of the cockpit from his own station at wheel and throttle. “You, Johnny. Over there. Carefully.” He groped in a locker cupboard behind him and tossed a fish knife to Lorraine. “When I say so cut the lines.”

The cockpit sprang to trembling life as the engine roared, and Mike gunned it a time or two to make sure it had fully caught. A flip of a switch and the port and starboard red and green lights came on, and the masthead running light.

“Cut the lines!” Mike had to raise his voice over the engine sound; he waited as Lorraine cautiously picked her way from stern to bow. Mike eased back delicately on the bar throttle as they inched away from the pier. In a boat as over-engined as Ye Olde Beaste slow speed was nearly as ticklish as high; long ago Mike had wound a strip of tape, now dirty and discolored, around the throttle bar at the point beyond which it was not safe to advance the lever arm.

Around them Long Island Sound glimmered black and slick as Lorraine came back and sat down to Johnny's left. They moved out beyond the point, and as the shoreline disappeared behind them a faint swell manifested itself even in the flat calm. An occasional wave slapped lightly under the bow and hissed along the water line; Mike touched the throttle bar and the engine took on a deeper note. The stern-heavy Ye Olde Beaste settled even more deeply in the water as the powerful propeller took hold, and the bow rose correspondingly steeper in pitch.

Johnny looked at the silvery wisps of spray filtering in over the stern, then up at the stars. With the toe of his right shoe he forced his left shoe off and in an unhurried movement picked it up in his toes and lifted it to where he could reach it with his hand without bending down. He placed it gently on the thwart beside him; he had a feeling it would not be long now. The gun should be no problem; Mike wanted no bullet holes. When Mike went for a spanner, or next attempted to position Johnny differently, possibly…

Mike Larsen moved out a step from his helmsman post, his left hand negligently on the wheel behind him. The gun which had dangled at his side in his boat-handling preoccupation swung up and around in deliberate presentation. Mike's voice was crisp; his face was calm. “Sit still, Lorraine. Johnny-” His left hand left the wheel and groped in the locker beside him, and in the second his eyes veered fractionally Johnny stood up, picked up his shoe and threw it at the throttle bar.

At the short range of the crowded cockpit he scored a direct hit on the lever arm, and Mike Larsen yelled hoarsely as the arm jumped the restraining tape and jammed at the full-speed end of the bar. Johnny crouched as the engine boomed in a long unused explosion of power, and Ye Olde Beaste jumped forward beneath them. The engine sound was fantastic; the stern flattened, and the bow canted higher. The boat began to shudder uncontrollably, and Mike Larsen by main strength clawed himself off the cockpit rim against which he had been flung and stared wild-eyed at the water shipping in over the stern. Beneath their feet a deep grinding noise punctuated splintering sounds as the hull began to disintegrate under the pounding of the water, and a high-pitched whine filled the air.

The white-faced man dived for the throttle as black water spurted through the sprung seams; his frantic grab jerked the lever arm from full speed to zero, and Johnny leaned forward, picked up Lorraine Barnes and threw her over the side. Behind him the stern rose like a cork; the high-canted bow dipped deeply and plunged its blunt nose into an oncoming swell like a fat man stabbing his toe into the ground in the middle of a hundred-yard dash. There was a shivering crash; Mike Larsen screamed shrilly as the heavy stern rose inexorably in a monstrously grotesque cartwheel while disintegrated planking flew like popcorn.

Johnny went over the side in the deepest dive he could manage as the boat stood on its nose; he hit the Sound's unyielding bottom with an impact that nearly stunned him. His ears rang both with the concussion of his own dive and the nearby cataclysmic dull thunderclap of sound as Ye Olde Beaste pounded back into the water, upside down. He struggled back up in a frenzy of arms and legs, surfaced and roughly sleeved the water from his eyes. The night was filled with a hissing, bubbling noise, and seventy yards ahead a black blot that bore no resemblance to a boat disappeared altogether in a leisurely curving arc.