Murder Queen High (15 page)

“They didn’t know any better,” said John Henry.

“The risk for the profit,” Barselou said heavily. Trim was guiding himself down the incline at that moment and the big man winked significantly at John Henry. Even in this weird setting, on the gun deck of a forgotten ship, he felt a rebirth of hope. After all, they were three against one — and they had nothing to lose.

Trim sidled away from them, his pug-nosed face leaning over the pistol barrel as though he had scented their thoughts. “I warn you. I shed my compunctions easily.” The skull and crossbones cockade on his hat didn’t seem ridiculous here.

Sin shuddered up against her husband. She nudged him and extended a trembling forefinger. “Look at them!” Sprawled around the deck in haphazard piles were collections of bleached bones. A skull stared at them with hollow eyes as the rising sun caressed it.

“Some of Arvaez’ crew,” Barselou said, and his tones were almost scholarly.

A cannon lay helplessly on one side by a roughly square hole that had once been a hatch. Sin held tightly onto John Henry’s hand and peered around at the dimlit recess beneath and at the dusty timbers that curved up to meet the flooring they stood on. Two of the great planks had sprung and almost directly beneath her she could see the five horses in the canyon, two hundred feet below. She drew back shivering.

Trim, in his red knee breeches and long blue coat, seemed a fit commander for the ghost ship. He wasn’t looking at the bones on the cannon or the empty hold. His sharp eyes raced around the corners of the shadowy deck. Then he let out a whoop of triumph.

Against a moldering bulkhead, far forward, was a row of squat chests. “There!” he ordered. “Hurry — open them up!” The four people moved cautiously toward the ironbound boxes. Barselou and John Henry wrestled with the first chest of the row, prying at the lid. It creaked and gave a little, sifting rust onto the timbers.

“Together,” grunted Barselou. The two men panted in unison and forced it open. They stared into the black depths. John Henry lifted his head first and looked at the man in the pirate costume.

“False alarm,” he said. “It’s empty.”

“Don’t lie!” Trim rasped.

“Why should I? It’s empty. There’s nothing in it.”

Trim bounded forward and drove the other two aside with the gun. A moment later, he raised a face that was pale and contorted with rage. Barselou still gazed at the opened chest as if hypnotized. His countenance had gone dead.

“Get back!” Trim commanded, panic in his words. His lower jaw hung open as if he had forgotten about it and his wet tongue moved back and forth over his ugly teeth. Sin and the two men backed up. Their captor’s brown eyes flicked between them and the treasure chests as he went down the row kicking at the dusty ironbound tops. Most of the lids flew back instantly, banging against the bulkhead. A red dust arose and sunbeams danced on flakes of rust.

At the last chest, Trim uttered a howl and dipped his free hand deep within it. He pulled out a fistful of round black objects like withered marbles and held them close to his face, staring uncomprehendingly. Then he pivoted and hurled the tiny wrinkled balls spitefully at Barselou.

“There’s your fabulous riches!” he shrieked. “There’s the Queen’s jewels!” He capered around madly, his joints jerking as though marionette strings guided him. His high cracked voice screamed curses at Barselou until gasps of spent breath stopped the obscene flow.

The withered black globules lay patternless on the sandy timbers. Sin gazed at them and remembered something she’d read. Pearls, exposed to the elements over a long period of time, deteriorate and become valueless.

“I don’t understand,” Barselou said dully. “I don’t understand.”

“Maybe you can understand this,” Trim panted, waving his arms. “Somebody beat you to the gold, the emeralds, all the treasure. Somebody maybe a century ago. Can you get that through your thick head? Somebody else found the galleon first! Anglin knew! Anglin was double-crossing us both!”

John Henry laughed. He couldn’t help it, he couldn’t restrain it even in the face of maniacal fury. Barselou’s search, Trim’s involved intrigue — all had been for nothing. Three men had died for a chest of worthless pearls. Anglin had known and he had profited most from the Queen. But Anglin hadn’t been clever enough.

Sin laughed too. She crossed her arms in front and tried to hold back the mirth. “It’s another Spoonerism,” she giggled, caught up in the frenzy that charged the air.

“What?” said John Henry.

“Spooner,” she repeated, her shoulders shaking, “You know — the man who always got his words twisted.”

“What about him?”

Sin giggled harder than ever. Her words trailed up hysterically. “Remember? Somebody asked him if he sang and Mr. Spooner said, ‘I know only two tunes — God Save the Weasel and Pop Goes the Queen.’ Don’t you get it, Johnny? She just popped!”

And Sin went off into gales of laughter.

“Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Trim. He thrust the muzzle of his revolver almost in Sin’s face. Her peal of laughter became a tangled sob. “Get over against the wall — all of you!” commanded the little man. Flecks of light were dancing oddly in his eyes. He hissed softly, “This is high tragedy. I will not accept the role of clown. I will not accept it.”

Sin and John Henry backed up silently, Barselou mechanically.

“There. Right there,” barked Trim as three backs touched the side of the galleon. The trio stood on a wide curb of wood that surrounded the entire deck — the gun platform. Behind them, the rectangular cannon ports revealed the rock face of the cliff, blind and gray.

Something hard bobbed against Sin’s neck and she ducked. From a beam that ran the length of the ship’s side, several rusty iron chains dangled. Each chain terminated in a wide iron cuff. The ship’s irons, designed for lazy or mutinous seamen of His Majesty’s Navy.

Trim was addressing Barselou. “Snap those chains around their wrists, if you please.”

John Henry looked around desperately. Sin licked her trembling lips and asked, “What are you going to do, Mr. Trim? Please — ”

“An old pirate custom, Mrs. Conover.” A wrinkled hand pulled the cocked hat lower over spangled flickering eyes. “No prisoners. By the time you’re found, you’ll be indistinguishable from the other skeletons here.”

“No — you can’t — ” Sin choked. She almost fell to her knees but John Henry held her to him.

The threatening pistol motioned at Barselou. The big man reached for the dangling chains. The muscles in his face were working now, but his eyeballs were transparent, far away, as though he were pondering some weighty problem. Barselou’s grasping mind had been numbed by the loss of the treasure.

“Johnny — don’t let him — ”

Conover struggled but the expressionless gambler was inexorable. Machine-like, Barselou forced John Henry’s wrists into the iron circlets. It needed all the power in his hairy hands to press the rusty gyves together.

Sin submitted limply. The pair stood side by side on the gun platform, their wrists held at ear level by the ancient cuffs anchored to chains from the beam above.

Barselou wheeled slowly and said, “What next?” He looked at the man with the gun disinterestedly.

Trim smiled but his mouth was stiff and his instructions panted through it. “It’s your turn, Mr. Barselou. Face the wall.”

Dumbly, the big man obeyed.

“Put your hands up just like the others.” Trim stepped catlike across the deck and shoved the mouth of his pistol into the small of Barselou’s back. “Now just hold still.”

John Henry felt the perspiration beading his palms. He held his breath back and waited for the moment, the only possible moment. A muscle twitched where Barselou’s shirt was tight across his huge shoulders.

John Henry lashed out with his foot at Trim’s kneecap. The little man danced back, howling, and stumbled on the uneven timbers. Sin screamed.

Over her treble shriek came the blanketing roar of colossal rage. With one motion, Barselou jerked a rusty chain loose from its mooring and whipped it ferociously at the cocked hat. The hat spun away crazily. Trim sank to one knee in the center of the gun deck, blood streaming from his bald head. He raised the revolver.

John Henry fought to escape the gyves. He got one hand free of the loose cuff of iron. But Barselou had leaped. With another reverberating roar, he sprang from the gun platform for the crouched figure. The pistol exploded against his chest and in the narrow bowels of the galleon it was like a cannon blast.

Barselou’s huge body enveloped the little man, his knees and fists battering, pummeling, mauling. Trim howled and his revolver blasted again.

The deafening noise joined the echoes of the first explosion. They bounded against rocky walls up and down the canyon, doubling and redoubling, until the wooden ship was a trembling fury.

The
Reina
groaned, shuddered. Then she began to move.

“ — collapsing!” Trim yelled in a piercing voice and tried to claw his way from beneath Barselou’s flailing bulk. John Henry threw his free arm around Sin’s waist and pulled her close.

A subdued rumble was born among the dying echoes. It grew louder and louder. Then the deck tilted.

Conover braced his feet as the gun platform shivered. The deck tilted more and the thrashing bodies before his hypnotized gaze rolled toward the stern. Old timbers creaked agonizingly and sand poured from above. Two of the great overhead planks parted. The stubby root of a mainmast fell through.

A convulsion seized the
Reina
as the roar of bursting seams soughed in the narrow canyon slot. Trim scrambled from Barselou’s grasp and hugged the shifting deck. A hairy hand fastened around one pirate boot and pulled him back. Trim screamed.

John Henry pushed Sin’s face harder against his body.

With a climactic ripping of wood, the decks of the Queen collapsed and plunged through the ancient keel for the canyon floor. Trim’s final maniacal shriek spun a thread of terror as the two struggling men dropped from sight with the down-pour of wreckage. The thin noise was drowned by the crash of timbers grinding into the earth below.

The sound faded away, dividing itself among other canyons until there was nothing left. Dust swirled in the silent air.

Sin opened her eyes. Fearfully, she lifted her face from her husband’s shoulder and looked around. She began to cry.

Below them yawned the emptiness of the gorge with its churning column of brown dust. They still stood on the gun platform far above the earth. The reverberations of the echoing gunshots and the violent struggles of the two men had caused most of the hull and rotten decking of the galleon to give way. But the stout curving timbers of the
Reina’s
sides had remained, an empty oval between the canyon walls. The curb on which the Conovers huddled had been part of the funnel through which the ruins of the hulk had poured. And the beam to which three of their four wrists were gyved had stayed up as part of the plank spider web holding the hollow shell of the ship in mid-air.

“We’re all right now, honey,” said John Henry comfortingly. Then he found his voice and repeated it out loud. Sin kept sobbing. “It’s okay, Sin.”

“I know, Johnny,” she whimpered. “That’s why I’m crying.”

Gingerly, Conover pried at their iron cuffs. Two of the rusty hinges bent open easily. His own gyve broke apart in his hands. He tossed the pieces at the wreckage below.

The dust cloud was thinning and settling now. He could make out the dead campfire and the startled horses neighing and rearing at the new mountain of rubble that had poured from the sky. To the east, the red disk of morning sun had just topped the mountains to beam on the jigsaw cracks on the Badlands.

John Henry took a deep breath. As soon as Sin felt better, they’d climb down the cliff again to the horses. In the daylight, it would be easy to retrace their trail to Walking Skull — and then civilization. It was going to be another hot day.

Sin finally got her sobs under control. They looked down into the depths of the canyon silently. Far below, nothing moved in the heap of broken timbers that had once been the Manila galleon.

“Funny,” she said softly. “I feel sorrier for the Queen than I do for anybody.”

Her husband put a gentle arm around her waist. To one side of the wreckage, John Henry thought he saw the crushed shape of a three-cornered hat.

“The poor old Queen,” he agreed. “It took a long time for the pirates to catch her. But Sin, she put up a wonderful fight.”

THE END

If you liked Murder Queen High check out:

Fatal Step

Monday, August 25, 9:15
P.M.

MAX THURSDAY stood in the shadows and waited. The illuminated hands of his wrist watch crept closer to nine-thirty.

He was a big man, with wide shoulders and long legs. His weight wasn’t intended for six feet of height but it was evenly distributed. Only his face hadn’t gotten its share. A prominent arched nose jutted from a lean countenance that was all planes and tight-skinned angles with no gentle fat. The face was impassive and stern.

A snap-brim hat covered most of his coarse black hair. The coat pockets of the brown tweed suit were baggy as if they carried his big fists much of the time.

Thursday decided against lighting a cigarette. No use attracting attention with a match flare. He didn’t know what he was getting into or whom he was supposed to meet — but the man’s voice over the telephone that afternoon had been scared, very scared.

He kept his blue eyes combing the amusement zone across B street. An arched lath sign over the entrance spelled out JOYLAND in skinny capitals. Joyland covered nearly half of the downtown block between Front Street and First Avenue. It was a mushroom city of cheap amusement, a byproduct of San Diego’s war industries. Joyland and a half-dozen centers like it dotted the city on both sides of Broadway, flaunting their ferris wheels against staid office buildings, seeming to brag of elastic zoning ordinances. Peace had cut the amusement trade sharply, but marine rookies and navy boots and the high-school crowd still spent enough quarters to keep Joyland open ten hours out of every twenty-four.

Thursday couldn’t find anything in particular to watch. Under its cobweb of wires with gaudy tattered pennants, Joyland was blatantly nondescript. At the corner of Front and B, an open-front lunch counter dispensed beer and soft drinks, hamburgers and foot-long hot dogs. Then the bright cave of a penny arcade showed its banks of coin machines like iron gnomes with binoculars. Above each stubby machine Thursday could read the sign: For Art Students Only!

At the First Avenue corner was the spinning Whirligig and a big metal pavilion of scooters. Most of the scooters were parked on the sidelines. There was a patchwork of smaller concessions between the corners — Seal-It-In-Plastic, a crossbow range, a tattoo artist. By the entrance arch was a surprisingly permanent-looking Oriental Bazaar.

Through the arch, in the asphalt center of the park, stood the Loop-o-plane like two pivoting fists. Above everything towered the concentric girders and colored bulbs of the ferris wheel. Its circling cabs coasted by fourth-floor windows on the brick backside of the Scroggs Building.

Thursday let out his breath and stepped off the curb. The hands of his watch had touched nine-thirty.

He walked slowly across B Street. Traffic was sparse. Nothing much happened in downtown San Diego on Monday night, as though the city were gathering its strength for the next weekend. An evening breeze from the harbor had dissipated the August heat. The tweed suit felt comfortable to his body.

Under the thin Joyland letters, Thursday stopped for another look around. For all its carnival attire, the amusement park was practically deserted. Barkers leaned morosely on their brightly lit counters and searched for customers. The Whirligig and the ferris wheel whirled in their different orbits but without passengers.

Two sailors and their girls paused indecisively on the sidewalk. Thursday glanced their way, wondering, but the quartet walked on arguing about which movie to see.

Directly in front of him, the Loop-o-plane was motionless. One red bullet-shaped cab was at the loading ramp, doors invitingly open; its mate and counterweight swung emptily above it, forty feet in the air.

Thursday sauntered casually toward the giant centrifuge. The voice, the scared voice that afternoon, had begged him to be on the Loop-o-plane as soon after nine-thirty as the ride started. The unidentified voice and the odd appointment had been childishly dramatic. The words — ”It’s a matter of life or death, Mr. Thursday” — had been hackneyed. But the fear and excitement had been sincere. And despite the publicity he’d received from the Manila pearl recovery, Thursday’s new agency wasn’t so rushed that he could turn down business.

The woman in the blue-frame ticket booth smirked at him from behind the worn grill. She had a fat blank face and looked as if she’d been poured into the narrow booth.

“How much?” Thursday asked. He tried to picture a client in each nearby loiterer.

“Fifteen cents,” the woman wheezed, her voice touched with acid. “Just like the sign says.”

Thursday shoved a dollar bill through the grill. “One.”

The only likely people came up behind him, a man in a brown leather jacket and a redhead girl in slacks. They were haggling about something to do but neither voice matched the frightened tones on the telephone.

The fat ticket woman eyed him suspiciously as he lingered over his change. “Anything wrong, mister?”

“My name is Thursday. Anybody leave a message for me here?” He watched her doughy circle of face. “It’s nine-thirty.”

The face stayed as blank as before, then a scowl began creeping in from the edges. “What you trying to pull, huh?”

Thursday shrugged and turned away. The couple behind him stopped their waspish conversation and moved up to the window. The man, frowning distastefully, said, “Two, I guess.”

There was a youth in a yellow shirt by the gate. Thursday gave him his ticket, got a stub back, and walked up the short ramp to enter the metal cylinder.

“By yourself?” the attendant asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began a mumbled speech about holding onto the metal bar and keeping the safety belt buckled at all times.

The cab jolted as the man and his girl in slacks got into the rear half and sat down, their backs to Thursday. The girl was whispering insistently, “Now quit beefing, George. It’s gonna be fun.” The man kept icily silent.

The yellow shirt slammed the heavy wire door and bolted it. Then he ambled down the ramp to where an electrical control box crowned an iron post. Without looking at the Loop-o-plane, he pulled the big toggle switch.

The great metal arm stirred, creaked and began to swing slowly back and forth, pendulum-fashion. Thursday planted his feet solidly against the curved floor and waited for something to happen. Nothing did except that the machine picked up more speed. It lunged higher and higher, a giant swing, each back and forth movement cutting a greater arc toward the black sky.

Thursday snorted derisively. He’d might as well relax and get his fifteen cents’ worth. The call had been a gag.

At the top of the forward swing there was nothing but night and stinging air in his eyes. On the sickening swoop back, Thursday could see the Front Street entrance to Joyland, a dumpy girl seated in the Guess-Your-Weight scales, and the rear end of the tunnel-like penny arcade, all through a cross-hatch of wires and tired pennants.

Another swing.

A pair of marines were matching coins as they swaggered out of the arcade. The dumpy girl bounded down the steps from the scales, a cane clutched in one hand.

The bullet-shaped cab shot forward in a rush. The redhead behind Thursday let out a shriek of happy terror. This time time the arm didn’t swing back. The cab hovered upside down at the top of the circle and then slid agonizingly over the brink into nothingness. As they rocketed down, the littered asphalt and the colored lights and the tar-paper roofs of the concessions merged in a gaudy blur.

Thursday took off his hat and crammed it between his legs. At the slow top of the second loop, he scanned the haphazard pattern of things forty feet below. It seemed farther, hanging upside down by a safety belt and a metal bar. He looked across B Street, near where he had parked his car, and loitered in the shadows. A slight man in a blue sweater was hurrying along the sidewalk. There was no traffic in sight but the man was glancing behind him nervously and then over at the Joyland concessions.

The cab nosed over for a second dive. The redhead in the other compartment had begun a series of short moans which rose to a crescendo as the Loop-o-plane dove for earth.

At the top of the next loop, the man in the blue sweater was cutting across the street in a half-trot. He was heading for the Joyland entrance. Or the Oriental Bazaar or the crossbow gallery or the tattoo studio. Thursday couldn’t decide which. He wondered why he was wondering as he fell through space again.

The yellow-shirted attendant sadistically stopped the machine at the height of its next dizzying circle, letting the passengers dangle upside down while the bullet teetered uncertainly on its steel arm. The unseen girl behind Thursday was screaming, “Let me down! Let me down!”

The sound of a shot slashed sharply through the playful scream and the crash of bumpers in the scooter pavilion. Thursday twisted his body against the safety belt, trying to give the noise a source.

He caught a glimpse of the blue sweater. The little man was poised hesitantly on the curb on the Joyland side of B Street. He bent over as if he were about to sprint. Then the Loop-o-plane lost its precarious balance and whirled madly down its ordained circle.

The cab slowed on the ascent again and Thursday looked for the blue sweater shape. The little figure was easy to find. He hadn’t gone much farther, just a few steps toward the crossbow range. People were running toward him. His body pressed face down on the sidewalk and one arm stuck out rigidly, pointing at the entrance of Joyland.

That was all Thursday saw before the Loop-o-plane ground over the incline and plunged down again. The redhead was laughing and screaming for somebody to stop the machine.

Thursday added his own shout to the carnival racket. But he had seen the yellow-shirted attendant galloping toward the crowd clustering closely around the still figure on the sidewalk.

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