Darker Than Amber (13 page)

In the increasing light I saw that Shovel Jaw looked better in his flyboy sun glasses. His eyes were small, inflamed, perhaps by his days on the beach, and his lashes were stubby, sparse and pale. They had the look you see in elephant eyes, a dulled and tricky savagery. He stood at a professional distance and held one of the most reliable and deadly of handguns aimed casually at my chest, dead center, a heavy Luger. I could see how neatly he had taken me. He had been tucked behind the plantings just to the right of the gate, perfectly content to wait there, knowing it was the only way out.
He hooked a toe under the tire iron, flipped it far to the side. "You keep getting the wrong key, buds."
"You keep pretty good track of this place."
"I run the wire from a little Jap intercom through the wall, set it on dictate at full volume, the other half of it next to my bed. I get a week off one of those little nine-volt batteries. You came through loud and clear. I was expecting somebody. Not you. Somebody I know better. Turn real slow. All the way around. That's nice. Hands flat against the gate. Keep them there. Walk your feet back toward me. A little more. Little more. Fine."
Even then he was careful. Long reach. Quick little taps with the fingertips. Fortunately he tapped the money bulge before he made any further investigation of the slight bulk in the right-hand pocket of my slacks. And it is such an unlikely weapon carried in such an improbable place, it will even get past most hasty police searches.
"Now keep yourself braced just like that with your left arm, and reach down and unbutton the shirt and shake that stuff out of there, buds."
The four packets fell. He tapped the shirt again at the waistline to be certain. Then he had me shuffle several feet to the side, maintaining the same helpless posture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him squat, gather up the packets, the gun now in his left hand. They went into the front of his shirt.
He straightened up. "Where the hell was it?"
"In the ceiling, up underneath the big light fixture over the sink."
"Fifty hours I spent in there. So the bitch told you."
"Or maybe I'm not as stupid as you are, Griff."

"I don't make that kind of mistake, like letting you get me sore. I take it very calm, buds. I don't care who you are. I don't have to know who you are, or who told you what. All I have to do is keep my mind on this play until it's over. What you do now is open the gate very slowly, and you open it wide. And you walk slowly down the drive the way you came, with me behind you. And then you go around your car and you get in on the passenger side, and very slowly you ease yourself over behind the wheel. Let's go. There's a busted door, a tire iron. I try to fire a warning shot and it gets you in the spine. It's no sweat to me to testify, buds. Remember that. I'm clean as Girl Scouts m the area."
Never get cute with the competent ones. Amateurs with guns in their hands are dangerous, but there is almost always a delay before they can bring themselves to actually fire at a human being. The competent ones are not hesitant.
When I was behind the wheel, he closed the door, hitched close to it, rested the Luger barrel on his left thigh, aimed at my middle, his thick finger on the trigger. "Get your keys, buds, and start it up. Keep it at thirty-five. Go out to the highway and turn south."
I was one docile fellow. I wanted no lead tearing through the irreplaceable parts of wondrous, inimitable, precious me.
"How far?" I asked.
"Keep going."
After a mile or so I said, "Did they make Terry do it the second time too?"
"He was away. Shut up."
"You could be making a mistake, Griff."
"So when I find out, I'll cry a little."
The beach clutter thinned out. He told me to slow down. He had me pull over onto the right shoulder until the road was clear of the meager morning traffic. Then, at his direction, I drove diagonally across the highway, up a rutted sandy track and pulled around behind a huge billboard advertising that ocean-front piece, eleven hundred feet of Atlantic Beach, four hundred feet deep from highway to tide line, for sale or lease.
The orange-red rising sun was lifting out of the sea, the gap between it and the steel blue horizon widening. He made no mistakes getting me out of the car. We walked across sandy hummocks, past tall clumps of sea oats. We came to a swale between brown dunes which seemed to satisfy him.
"What you do now, buds, very slow, is you lie down right there flat on your back."
"Now wait a minute!"
"When you goof a play, the cost comes high. You should know a thing like that. The little ball drops in the wrong hole. Stretch out, boy. They find the Luger in your hand. After I put one in the side of your head, I even let you fire one out to sea in case some clown takes a paraffin test. There's no history on the Luger, and I put no prints on the car. The surf noise like that, who hears two shots? Nobody sees us here. We're out of sight. I was sleeping in swim trunks. So I roll the loot in my clothes and walk all the way back down the beach. Maybe I find a pretty shell. Who knows? Just stretch out nice, buds."
"Can I have a cigarette?"
"Don't use them."
"I got my own. How about it?"
"Stop stalling and... okay, light one. It'll look like you thought it all over and decided to take the jump."
I slapped my shirt pocket, reached into the right hand pocket of my slacks. The spring release jacked the little Bodyguard into my hand, and I fired once, falling to the right, rolling hard, every nerve arched tight waiting for the slug. I ended up in a prone position, braced on my elbows, left hand clamping the gun wrist to steady it. He was down. I saw his right hand on a slope of sand, the fingers opening and closing. The Luger stood upright in the soft sand a foot from his hand, barrel sunk straight down. I walked to him on my knees, holding the gun on him. I circled him, picked up his weapon, tossed it a dozen feet behind me. The upper right side of his chest had a spreading red stain sopping the thin yellow fabric of the sports shirt. He coughed weakly and blood ran from the corner of his mouth down into the coarse sand.
The reddened eyes looked vaguely at me. "Tricky bastard," he said in a half whisper. "Should have known you were taking it too easy. My play would have been to check you out better. Christ, everything feels as if it was going all loose inside me."
Where's Terry?"
"Screw you, buds."
"You aren't hit as bad as you think, Griff. The sooner you answer, the sooner I go get an ambulance."
He turned his head, coughed a heavier gout of blood into the sand. He closed his eyes. "Ans Terry. Him and the Whitney bitch. Monica Day."
Abruptly he opened his eyes very wide, threw his head back and stared at the sky. His body arched twice, thudding down against the sand, and he kicked his heels against the sand, then slowly softened and dwindled into stillness. The slug had evidently severed one of the big arteries in the right lung. It hadn't taken long. I stood up slowly, slid the Bodyguard back into the spring catch. I looked around. I could hear traffic sounds merged with the wash of the surf. It numbs, always, even when you keep asking yourself what other choice you had. Somebody watched him pull himself up by the crib bars and stand cooing and drooling, and thought him a damned fine baby. Far down the beach I saw an early-morning family moving slowly my way. Two large shapes, two tiny shapes covering more ground. I reached down, yanked the yellow shirt out of the waistband, recovered the four packets, buttoned them back inside my shirt. I thought of wrapping his hand around the Luger and putting a second slug into the same hole. But who shoots himself high in the right side of the chest?
I saw a piece of weird board in the sea grass, a splintered piece of one-by-1 a little over two feet long. I squatted near the deepest part of the swale and, working as hard and as fast as I could, using it as a crude shovel, I made him a hole as long and as wide as he was, and almost as deep as he was thick. I checked his pockets, found nothing, took another look at the beach and saw how much progress the family had made. I tugged the body down parallel with the trench, then rolled him one half turn to drop face down into it. Next I slid my board under the Luger and dropped it beside his ear and used the board to shove it down into the sand. Like a nightmare bulldozer I crawled around the area, shoving the board with two hands like a bulldozer blade, covering him over, borrowing from all sides of the swale to fill the pocket a good two feet deep above his thick dead brown neck, and at one point heard myself making a small foolish whimpering sound, shut my teeth hard and cut it off. I stood up again, sweaty and weak. The family was heading back from whence they came, back probably to a motel breakfast.
The sand was too dry to take any identifiable imprint. A footstep left a shallow pocket of sliding sand. I scraped the coughed blood under. There was no sign of him. The wind might uncover him in a day. Or cover him ten feet deeper.
I walked back to the car. I had to think out the normal automatic motions of walking, lift of the foot, bend of the knee, swing and placement of the foot, and the alternate procedure with the other leg.
I backed the car away from behind the billboard, got stuck for a heart-stopping moment, rocked it free and came out to find nothing on the road except two big trucks, both receding in opposite directions.
I unlocked my mirrored room and walked into it, realizing I had absolutely no memory of the drive back. I looked out my windows and knew it was full morning, and I knew that when Griff had eaten yesterday's three meals, he hadn't any idea they would be the last three. I wondered if the girl with the sun-sleepy whine of voice was nested in her sleep in Seven C, her body resting from Griff's use of her, dent of his head in the neighbor pillow.
The records say that forty thousand men disappear every year in this country. A great many of them stay lost. People don't look very hard.
I could guess what the others would think. Griff had been teamed with Vangie-Tami. The execution could have made him uneasy. If he came across her money and left, he would be difficult to find. I put the chain on the room door. I locked myself in the bathroom, put her money on the countertop, and with the little kit from the side pocket of my suitcase, I cleaned out the short barrel of the Bodyguard, replaced the missing round, shoved it back into the clip against the spring pressure.
I removed the rubber bands, sorted the money by denomination and counted it twice. Her guess had been optimistic. Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty. Taking mostly fifties, I put the eight hundred and sixty into my wallet. I banded the rest of it into one solid brick, wrapped it in a dirty shirt and stuffed it into the glove compartment and locked it.
I took a long, long shower. I stretched out on the bed.
So go home, McGee. Why not? It's just another salvage operation, only this time you get to keep it all. The wench is dead. And these are rough folks. Right now the sun would be burning down on your open eyes, waiting there for somebody taking a short cut to the beach to come across the car and then the suicide. Scratch one Vangie and one Griff. They cancel out. So go home. There's enough in the kitty now to take you to a year from Christmas, and a very lush year at that. Sure. And spend the whole year wondering at what moment they were knocking off what new pigeon, now that they'd cleaned up the operation by disposing of the one weak link.
Monica Day. Who the hell was she? And why did she sound familiar? Bit parts? Ans Terry. Ansel. Ansel. Known as one big powerful son of a bitch who could kill people with his hands.
So, very probably, could Griff.
And so had I. And it didn't feel any better than doing it with a gun. In fact, it felt a little worse.
At a little past noon I was back aboard The Busted Flush. I leave the airconditioner set to cycle when the inside temperature gets past ninety. I put the thermostat back down to seventy, then went through into the forward bilge with my brick of money. My safe is an aluminum box. A child could open it with a church key. But the child who could find it would frighten me.
Forward, on the port side, below the water-line, I have a section of fake hull. Drill a hole and the sea would come spurting through, and keep coming, because there is an open sea cock that keeps it filled with about sixty gallons. There is a little lever which closed the sea cock. The lever is carefully concealed. I close the sea cock. I press an area of the hull just so. Then I can get a blade under the other end and pry it open. It swings on concealed bronze hinges. Thirty gallons or so rush down into the bilge and the pump starts automatically. I reach into the gap and down between the double hull section, and pull the box free of the brackets that hold it. I shake the water from it. It has a good rubber gasket, a clamp fastening with good leverage. I open it, put the brick of currency inside, push it back down against its buoyancy, back into the brackets. I swing the heavy curve of wood back into place. I open the sea cock. I hear the faint garglings as it fills again, up even with the outside water-line. The fake hull in that area is always slightly damp. One small artistic leak that trickles about a meaningless cup of seawater a day.
I have a second safe, a barrel job, hidden quite carefully. I keep a few good things in it. Not too much. Enough to keep disappointment from being too acute. A man who finds something does not keep on looking.
And so, on that Friday, I went right from Bahia Mar to Port Everglades to check on Monica Day. More properly, the Monica D. D for DeLorio Shipping Lines. Day as in the Italian pronunciation of the letter D. The home base of the company is in Naples. From November through June they operate two small single-stack, single-class cruise ships out of Port Everglades. On the drive down I had remembered why the name was familiar. The sister ship was the Veronica D.
When I went over the bridge I saw three vessels moored there. One was the Veronica D. No particular activity around her. I drove into the port area and parked the rental car by the big customs shed. There were a few people around and a mild and aimless air of activity. Cases of provisions were being taken off a truck and put on a conveyor belt that ran up to an open cargo hatch in the side of the hull where the hands were grabbing the cases and stowing them. A man stood with a clipboard, checking the items aboard. I found a gate ajar in the wire fence and walked with an air of purpose to the forward gangplank. An officer in white was at the top of it, just stepping aboard. I went on up. There was a smart young seaman on the side deck, and he watched me walk up the incline and stood at attention, blocking the way.
"Sir, is not permitted coming aboard now. Is later."
"I want to talk to the purser."
"Is ver' busy now, sir, for the sailing. Five o'clock sailing. Much work."
I found a five-dollar bill for him, shoved it into his tunic pocket. "Why don't I stand right here and you run and find him and tell him it's important?"
After a little hesitation, he hurried off. He was back in a very short time with a man who looked like a fifteenth-century bishop. He had a regal manner, a spotlessly crisp white shirt.
"May I be of some help, sir?"
I led him a dozen steps forward, out of earshot of the gangplank guard. "A question of identification, if you wouldn't mind."
I showed him two of the wallet-sized pictures of Vangie. "Do I know her? Oh, yes, of course. It is Mrs. Griffin. Mrs. Walter Griffin. She has sailed with us... five times, perhaps six. Over two seasons."
"Can you describe her husband?"
"Oh, yes, of course. A large man, brown, very strong-looking. A large jaw, small mouth."
"Have they acted unusual in any way?"
"I would say no, not really. Always the best accommodations, an outside room on the Lounge Deck. Quiet people. Stay to themselves. A table for two they must have. They do not join in the fun, you know? The poor woman, she cannot take the sunshine, so I wonder why she does go on cruises. He would spend much time in the sun. They are generous with tipping. Is there trouble? Perhaps she is the wife of some other person. Believe me, I could not make any statement about such a thing. We cannot get involved in a thing of that kind. It is not our affair."
"I am not going to ask for a statement."
"There is nothing more I could tell you. I hope I have helped you. Oh, one thing. They have always taken our shorter cruises."
"Where is the Monica D. now?"
"On her last Caribbean cruise of this season. We have had our last. Tonight we sail for Italy, perform Mediterranean cruises, and return in late November. The Monica D. will join us in the Mediterranean." He took out a thick black wallet, leafed through some cards, handed me one. "This, sir, is the cruise schedule of both vessels this season. Could you now excuse me, please?"