Dead Calm (15 page)

“Don’t you see, it was the shark!” Then
Saracen,
running at full throttle with no one at the wheel, careened off the side of a swell and went into another hard turn. They lost their balance in the welter of sailbags and cases of stores around the door, and she fell backward onto the bunk. She sat up. Warriner dropped to his knees between the bunks and pressed his face into her lap, encircling her legs with his arms. His shoulders shook. Her left hand was free, but the other, holding the bottle, was trapped by his arms.

She reached down and gently stroked his head. “Of course it was the shark, Hughie.”

He raised his head then and looked up at her, and while his eyes were still wild there was nothing dangerous in them. On the contrary, they were almost beseeching, like those of a frightened child. The words began to pour out, tumbling over each other. “It was a big hammerhead, over twelve feet long. I tried to drive it away. I tried to save her. I hit—I hit it on the nose. But she was up on the surface, splashing too much. If she’d come down where I was—they won’t bother you under the water, you know that, everybody does—but she wouldn’t dive. It was horrible, the shark cut her in two, the water was all bloody…”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but what he wanted was plain enough. He was asking her for exoneration. It was the other boy who’d started the fight or had thrown the football through Mrs. Cramer’s window. She stroked his head again. “It wasn’t your fault, Hughie. Of course it was terrible, but you did everything you could.”

His arms had relaxed their grip around her legs, and she was able to slide her right hand free. While he was still looking up at her face, she brought it up the side of her thigh and shoved the bottle into the pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She sighed. He hadn’t seen it.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course I believe you,” she said.

“I knew you would. Somehow I knew it.” He hugged her legs again, almost as if in gratitude, and pressed his face against her knees. His voice was almost normal as he went on, “You won’t leave me, will you? It’s so awful—” He stopped.

She glanced down. He had raised his head again, but this time he was looking at something behind her on the bunk. It was the shotgun. She felt the chill of gooseflesh spread up her back. He went on staring, and then he whispered, “You were going to kill me.”

“No. Hughie, no. Listen—please, it’s not even loaded.”

He still hadn’t moved, and his voice was no louder than before. “You want to kill me too.”

He reached around behind her and slowly pulled it out by the barrels. There was nowhere she could run, nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything in her mind except the bitterness of the thought that after four hours she’d been within a few minutes of winning, and now she’d lost. Maybe the fear would come in a minute. She was simply too tired to handle more than one thing at a time.

With a wild outcry he lunged to his feet then and swung the gun against the side of the boat. The stock splintered and broke off against an oaken frame above and behind her head. She ducked down between the bunks as he swung again—not even at her, as far as she could tell, but merely in some fury of destruction directed against the gun itself. The barrels rang against the upright pipe of the bunk frame. He beat it twice more against the pipe and threw it behind him, into the after cabin. Above the noise of the engine she heard it slide and bounce along the deck and crash into something, probably the ladder at the after end. At the same moment, while he was turning and off balance,
Saracen
rolled down and the bow swung off on another violent change of course. He fell over against the bulkhead beside the door and slid down atop the sailbag behind which the compass was wedged. He was on his feet almost immediately, facing her. When she’d seen him lose his balance she’d started to scramble up, hoping to get out the door, but there wasn’t time. He was right beside it. There was nowhere to go, anyway. She sat down on the bunk again, trying to conceal her fear.
Don’t fight him,
she thought; don’t try to run. Her only chance to survive was to use her weapons instead of his; there was a lost and frightened boy inside the maniac, and maybe she could reach him. And he could already have killed her with the gun barrels, but he hadn’t.

He stared at her wildly for a moment and had taken a step toward her, when he turned, as if he’d remembered something. When he bent over the sailbag she knew what it was. He’d seen the compass when he fell, and the scratch pad with its penciled notations of the course. He lifted the compass out and with another cry of fury he turned and threw it against the starboard side of the cabin. The box splintered, and it fell to the deck in a ruin of broken glass and spilled alcohol.

Then, before he even had a chance to look back at her, she said gently, “Hughie, come here.” When the frenzied eyes swung around and fastened on her, she touched her knees, where his head had rested before.

“You wanted to kill me!” he cried out. His hands clenched and opened, and he took a step toward her, coming between her and the door. She saw the hands come up level with her throat, but there was a faint uncertainty or hesitation in his movements now, and she’d detected just a trace of defiance in the outcry. Without that, perhaps she couldn’t have found the self-control to do it. She continued to look up at him with perfect serenity.

“Don’t be silly, Hughie,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you.” She wasn’t sure herself how she accomplished it, but the tone was squarely on pitch, the voice of all the mothers in the world, firm but still gentle, compassionate, and forgiving. She touched her knees again and said, “Come here, dear.”

He came with a rush then. He fell to his knees before her with his face pressed against her legs, and he was crying uncontrollably.

The strength drained out of her, but she managed to remain erect while she gently stroked his head. The clatter of the engine went on.
Saracen
pitched, and the bow swung off onto another tangent in her blind flight across the surface of the sea. Part of it had been luck, she thought, in that the first, compulsive outburst had been directed against the shotgun, but she knew she could control him now. She had nothing more to fear from him. Except that she still couldn’t make him go back. But the codeine would take care of that.

Then she remembered the compass and looked across to the opposite side of the cabin, where spilled alcohol still dripped down the planking of the hull. Well, she thought wearily, there must be some answer to that too; she’d think of it in a minute. Apparently after four hours of improvising and feeling your way along the rim of disaster you began to develop a belief there was always another handhold just beyond.

Russell Bellew had been dreaming he was packing into the Bitterroot country again for elk when he awoke and he was back on that sinking abortion of a boat and the Duchess of California was poking his shoulder with a pair of rulers. She was looking down at him with that usual expression of hers, as if he were something that had just crawled out of the drain in a bus-station washroom. What the good Duchess needed, besides being knocked on her can a few times, was exactly what she’d have had this morning in about five more minutes if Goldilocks hadn’t sighted that other boat and come charging down there with his club just as he got her pinned down on the bunk. Rub it on him for practice, would she?

“Madam called?” he asked.

“Ingram said to wake you.”

He loved that bit with the rulers. He slid a hand up the back of her thigh and squeezed. “You should have used a longer stick.”

“Obviously.” There was no attempt to draw back, or hit him, and she didn’t even bother to change expression. “Then you are awake?”

He sat up. “What does Hotspur want now?”

“There’s a squall coming up.”

“So?”

“So the bird of time has but a little way to fly—”

“Shove it.”

She tore him off about three-sixteenths of an inch of another supercilious smile, dropped it in his eye, and said, “Yes, of course.” She went back on deck.

Cuddly type, the good Duchess. But somebody should have warned her before this that nobody was quite as hard as she thought she was. No doubt she was a better man than drat boar’s tit she was married to, but she was in for a shock when she found out what it’s really like out there when they take the cover off and let you look in. When that ocean started climbing up her leg she’d be screaming her tonsils loose. He didn’t like to think about it himself. Well, it couldn’t be any worse than jumping into France in the dark with those jugheads down there waiting for you. But that was a long time back. Sport, that was a long time back.

But, hell, you had to look on the bright side. Think about Hughie-boy. He wasn’t going to drown. It brought the lump right up there in your throat just thinking that Mama’s precious made it up the ladder before he chopped it loose. And he only had to kill four people to do it. But we don’t mind, do we, fellows?

He went up on deck…

It was 5:10 p.m. when the sun was blotted out and the squall burst around them. Ingram clung to the pump and looked along the deck in the fury of spray and horizontal, wind-hurled rain. Mrs. Warriner and Bellew crouched in the lee of the deckhouse, seeking the little protection they could find. Mrs. Warriner’s hair was plastered to her head and face, and Bellew’s Mexican hat was long since gone, blown overboard in the first onslaught of the wind. The deckhouse hatch was closed, as well as the two where they’d been bailing, and he and Bellew had lifted the dinghy aboard and lashed it. There was nothing else you could do. Except pray, and keep pumping.

Now that they were inside it, where all directions were the same and visibility was cut to a few yards, perspective was gone and there was no way of telling which way it was moving or how far they were from the edge, but he believed from having watched it as it made up that the worst of it was passing to the northward of them—for what that was worth. It wasn’t the wind itself he was afraid of; it was the sea, and that was the same all around them.

It was high, steep-sided, and confused, fighting the ground-swell running up from the south.
Orpheus
had too little freeboard now, and she was too heavy-bellied and sluggish to ride with the punch and escape any of the beating she was taking. She pitched, lurched over, and was swept from bow to stern by every breaking sea, wallowing helplessly like some huge but mortally wounded animal. She rolled down too far and hung, pinned there on her beam ends for long moments by the inertia of the water inside her, and Ingram winced, thinking of the stresses as the enormous weight of the keel pulled the other way to bring her back. He could hear the creak and groan of her timbers even above the shrieking of the wind and knew that all the while more of her fastenings were working loose and pulling out of rotten frames and planks below him. Swung around and crouched to protect his face from the stinging of the rain and spray, he continued to pump, wondering about the bed bolts of the engine. And the great keel bolts themselves …

But they continued to hold, and in another twenty minutes it began to subside. The sun broke through. The wind dropped and then died completely, and they were still afloat. At six p.m., with the sun low on the horizon, the sea had quit breaking aboard, and they were able to open the hatches to resume bailing. When Ingram looked down at the depth of water in the after cabin he knew there was very little chance she would live through the night.

It was 1:40 p.m., five minutes now since Warriner had suddenly sprung to his feet and run back on deck to take the wheel.
Saracen
was plowing steadily ahead, back on course—whatever it was. Rae Ingram stood beside the sink in the after cabin, crushing the last of the three codeine tablets between the spoons. The bottle containing the others was recapped and stowed in one of the drawers, ready in case she needed more. She dropped the powder into the glass, but it was the other problem she was thinking of. This idea of hers, she felt sure, would still work. Within a few minutes—with any luck at all-she might be in command of
Saracen
again. But what good was it if she couldn’t find her way back to the other boat?

The 226 degrees her compass had been reading meant nothing now that he’d smashed it and there was no way to compare it with the steering compass. It could have been as much as twenty or thirty degrees from the actual course. So as far as knowing what their course had been from the other boat, she was little better off than she’d been at the beginning, and now they were at least twenty-five miles away. Somehow she had to find out what he was steering. But how? Try to get a look into the binnacle when she went up? No, that wouldn’t work. It was covered, so you could see into it only from the helmsman’s seat, and he would be instantly suspicious if she tried to work her way around behind him. He wouldn’t let her, and it might even trigger him into another outburst, which would wreck her chances of success with this idea. She couldn’t risk it. Getting control of the boat came first. Wait, she thought, beginning to see the solution. The sun. It was shining, and far enough down from the meridian now to cast a good shadow. It wouldn’t be exact, but it would be a good approximation, probably near enough to bring her back within sight of the other boat.

Working rapidly now, she dropped sugar into the glass with the powder from the pulverized tablets, put in a few spoonfuls of water to start it dissolving, and squeezed in a whole lemon. Then she opened the door of the tiny electric refrigerator inset in the after bulkhead and took two ice cubes from the tray. She finished filling the glass with water and stirred until there was no trace of the powder left in the bottom and the glass itself was beaded with moisture from the cold. Warriner had been sitting there in the sun since nine this morning with nothing to drink; there wasn’t much chance he could resist it—especially if she didn’t offer it to him and was drinking from it herself. A little of it wouldn’t hurt her.

She carried it up the ladder into the hot glare of sunlight on deck. Warriner looked up from the compass with watchful appraisal but appeared to relax when she sat down on the after edge of the deckhouse beside the mizzenmast, rather than coming down into the cockpit. He said nothing. She ignored him, looking aft as if hoping to see the other boat following them. She took a sip of the lemonade.

The sun was diagonally behind her, falling over her left shoulder, which meant their course was somewhere in the vicinity of southwest. There was a good chance he was steering for the Marquesas or for Tahiti, but she couldn’t depend on that because there was no guarantee he even knew the correct course to either of them. She had to narrow it down. Moodily, as if lost in thought, she let her gaze run idly along the scupper on the port quarter, the extreme edge of the deck where it was crossed by the shadow of the mizzenmast.

Of course the shadow was by no means stationary. With
Saracen’s
corkscrew motion as she quartered across the swell, and his deviations on either side of the course he was steering, it moved forward and aft along the edge of the deck as much as two feet or more. But by catching it several times when the boat was on an even keel to cancel out the rolling, she was able to strike an average between the extremes of his steering. The after edge of the shadow would be about three inches forward of that lifeline stanchion, the second one counting from astern. All she had to do, if and when she got the wheel, would be to line the shadow up on that spot, note the heading on the compass, and figure out the reciprocal. But was he going to take the bait? It had already been several minutes.

She looked aft and, without appearing even to notice him, saw that his eyes had been on the glass. She raised it to her mouth, took another sip, and set it beside her on the deckhouse while she reached in her pocket for a cigarette. It was well beaded with moisture, and she knew he could see the ice. How much longer could he stand it?

“What’s that you’re drinking?” he asked then.

“Lemonade,” she said.

“Oh.”

She put the cigarette in her mouth, and returned the pack to her pocket. Let him wait. Make him ask for it. Then she saw him look at the glass again and knew she had won. Her only problem had been to make him want it.

There was no way she could lose now, whether he suspected anything or not. If he asked her to bring him a glass, she would merely make another with three of the tablets in it. And whether he did or did not demand to trade after she’d given it to him, it made no difference. But she had an idea he would take the simple way. He did.

“It looks good,” he said.

“Would you like me to make you one?” she asked.

There was a trace of slyness in his eyes now. Mother was all right when he was scared and needed her, but she wasn’t going to put anything over on him. He was too smart for that. “Why not just give me that one and make another for yourself?”

“But I’ve already drunk out of it,” she protested.

“That doesn’t matter.” He smiled, as if thinking of some secret joke, and held out his hand.

She shrugged and handed it to him and started down the ladder. Then she turned and asked, “Would you like me to make you another while I’m at it?”

“No, this will do,” he replied, still smiling. “And thanks a lot.”

Once out of sight at the foot of the ladder, she hurried forward. That should have dispelled the last doubt, she thought, and he’d gulp it right down. How long would it take? Not more than five to ten minutes, probably, but with the first wave of drowsiness he was going to know she’d tricked him and he’d be dangerous until he finally collapsed. She’d better stay here, ready to barricade the door if she saw him start down the ladder, though she didn’t believe he’d ever make it this far. Of course there was the chance he might think to close and fasten the hatch to lock her below, but it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t dare remain on deck. Anyway, noise would never wake him, that thoroughly drugged, and she could tear the hatch cover apart with a hammer and marlinspike and force her way out.

She grabbed a coiled heaving line, which was soft and easy to handle, and the knife she’d used to cut open the box of shotgun shells. With the door just cracked, she peered out, watching the hatch. A minute went by. Three. Ten.
Saracen
continued to plow ahead, apparently still on course. Had he become suspicious of it after all? She was sure there’d been no taste; it was well covered by the lemon and sugar. Then she felt
Saracen
lurch and begin to turn. At the same time a demonic cry shot up above the noise of the engine, like a prolonged scream of rage, and the glass came flying in the open hatch. It narrowly missed the radio and smashed against the bulkhead at the forward end of her bunk.
Saracen
rolled down and turned in the opposite direction. She continued to watch the hatch with apprehension, but sunlight fell through it unobstructed. Almost a full minute went by. Nothing happened except that
Saracen
continued to turn, as if she were going around in a tight circle. She could visualize what had happened. Trying to get up, holding onto the wheel, he’d turned it, and then collapsed across it.

She ran through the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered out. Then she froze. He had fallen forward across the wheel, but now he was moving again, making one last effort to get up. His face was distorted, and he cried out as though in rage against the darkness swimming around him. One hand reached down to the engine control panel. The noise of the engine cut off abruptly, his arm swung, and she saw the ignition key flash in the sunlight as he threw it overboard.

The brass cover of the binnacle followed it over the side, and then, still screaming, he had hold of the compass itself, swinging in its gimbals. Muscles writhed in his arms and shoulders, and the tendons stood out in his throat. It tore free, and while he was turning with it in his hands to throw it into the sea he fell back onto the seat and collapsed with his head and shoulders on the narrow strip of deck beside him. The compass dropped on deck, burst with an eruption of alcohol, and slid over the side as
Saracen
rolled down to starboard. In the abrupt and almost terrifyingly lonely silence as
Saracen
slowed and came to rest she could only cling to the handrail of the ladder in defeat, and for a moment she wished she had killed him when she’d had the chance. There was no other compass aboard.

Then it was gone, and she was moving ahead. After what she’d been through to get this far, nothing was going to stop her. She had no idea how she was going to find her way back across all those miles of open sea with nothing to guide her, but that would have to wait till she could get to it. The first thing was to tie him. Why, she wasn’t quite sure, because he’d probably be unconscious for at least eight or ten hours and if she hadn’t found the other boat in five or less she’d never find it at all and after that nothing mattered anyway, but he had to be immobilized once and for all. Maybe it had something to do with having been completely at his mercy for all those years since early this morning, and if there had been any way to embed him in a barrel of hardening concrete up to his neck she would have done it. She stood above him in the cockpit with her heaving line and her knife.