Free Fall in Crimson (29 page)

Donnie placed my Colt carefully on the coffee table. He said, "Just hold tight, huh. I'll come back with the word."

Meyer and I were alone with the bodies. He looked up at me with the querulous expression of a child who cannot understand why it has been so punished. Tears ran down his face.

I helped him up and he looked down at Grizzel's corpse and walked woodenly to the head and closed the door quietly behind him. I heard the water running.

Donnie returned in a half hour. His eyes looked pink and irritated. In his slow and heavy voice he said, "What will happen, it will be a cleaning truck, maybe in three quarters of an hour, and the security will let them in here for a pickup, right? This carpeting is shot. Better you shouldn't try to get it cleaned. They will take it up and roll them up in it at the same time and horse them out to the truck, and you can forget it from then on. Any stains came through, they're your problem. Preach don't want no contact from you."

"What will they do with them?"

"Usually it's construction foundations where they go." He straightened and sighed. "Me, I got to tell his girl he had to go back home to Sydney, Australia, on a family emergency."

ON AN August afternoon I worked the Busted Flush,into a bayou ringed with mangrove down near the mouth of the Snake River, below Naples. There, like a mother spider, I began building my web of lines, finding good holding ground for anchors, tying off other lines to the sturdiest mangroves, and making allowance for big tides.

A medium hurricane named Carl was due to bash Cuba by midnight, on a course that would carry its diminished muscle up through the Straits of Yucatan. We would get some of the fringe of it, and if it curved back toward the Florida west coast, we might get a hell of a lot more of it than we wanted.

We had plenty of fresh water, fuel, and provisions, and Annie was excited and stimulated by the idea of sitting it out. The afternoon was hazy white, with high tendrils of unusual-looking clouds and some burly rain clouds over the Gulf.

After she had helped me do everything I felt we could do to assure our safety, we went up onto the sun deck and sat under the canopy at the topside controls in the big captain's chairs where we could watch the weather.

Out of nowhere she said, "I still feel pretty strange about you getting yourself associated with people like that Preach."

"Who is associated?"

"How about through that Indian person, that Mits?"

"She owns the whole ball game now."

"But doesn't she give you money?"

"She tries hard."

"Doesn't it come from some kind of rotten source, like drugs?"

"Probably. Indirectly."

"Am I boring you?"

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I turned and grinned at her. "Not most of the time."

"It's just that I want you to be-"

"Respectable?"

"That's not the right word: It's not as stuffy a word as that."

"Independent?"

"Closer."

"'That is something I have always been, Annie, and always will be. I steer through a pretty crowded track, and once in a while I brush up against a Preach, who wants to tame me by breaking my elbows, or a Dirty Bob, who wants to punish me by killing my friends. Okay I have a lot of moves. Earnest apology. Happy sapistry. A good straight left hand when needed. They nearly had me quelled, kid. That was before all this with Esterland."

"Will you tell me all about it sometime?"

"Probably. They had the lid almost hammered down on me. But I couldn't take a life that flat.

You know. Things have to move. Like I lied to you about not being able to run away from the storm. We probably could have. But this is a better way."

"I know we could have. I checked the charts."

"I have a lot of trouble with bright women."

"You couldn't stand any other kind." She hesitated, biting her lip. "After the storm, are we going to hurry back to Lauderdale?"

"If you can call anything this crock can do hurrying."

"I think about Meyer."

"So do I. Look, he has to be alone for a time. Maybe it is long enough by now. I hope so. He failed his image of himself because I think he fashioned that image a little too closely to his image of me. I am more of a physical person than Meyer. He has too much imagination. That's what helps people break themselves. He didn't expect it. He's been in tighter spots. This time he saw something in the crazed, dying, evil eyes of that man. He saw his death there, and it sucked the heart right out of him. And he's ashamed, though he shouldn't be."

"Have you told him he shouldn't be?"

"Of course. I told him it can happen to anyone at any time, and I tried to tell him it had happened to me too. It almost did, once. But not quite. And I couldn't lie well enough to convince him."

"What will happen?"

"He'll want to get into something rough. He'll look for a chance to try to recover his self-respect. And it might be a very close play indeed to try to keep him from getting himself killed. He seeks that absolution, the end of shame. And that is a primitive reaction. Whatever it is, I am going to have to help hunt for the situation, and I am going to have to see that he gets away with whatever foolish move he makes.

"Then he'll be okay again?"

"Practically. Not quite. Because he knows it can happen."

A breeze came skitting into the bayou, silvering the black water. She lifted her face to it. "Hey!

Feel that!" It faded away, and a mosquito sang into my ear. "Will we get a lot of wind?"

"Maybe."

"Will it turn into a constant shrieking like they say?"

"Maybe. But it is a roaring kind of shriek. Deeper than plain old shrieking."

"Could we maybe, while it's roaring or whatever, make love?"

"I will certainly see if I can arrange it, Annie. I will put some thought to it. I really will.

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