The Detonators (23 page)

He said, “Shit, it was supposed to be a simple hit on a dumb society broad; nobody warned us she had a pro guarding the body. You don’t futz around with that shiny smoothbore, do you? Christ, what a mess!”

“You were after Mrs. Williston?”

“Shit, I don’t even know who you are, mister.”

“Who sent you?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. Shit, man, I’m dead if I tell you that.”

I shrugged. I made a production of opening the shotgun action far enough to pick out the round in the chamber. I dropped it carefully into my left pants pocket. I dug a shell out of the right-hand pocket and showed it to him.

“Number One buck,” I said. “It won’t spread much at this range, just a few inches, but enough to do the job.” I slipped the round into place, and closed the gun. I pointed the barrel at the zipper of his shorts, low down. “A word of warning, friend. I don’t have the time or the patience to play with you. When I ask the question again, I either get an answer or I shoot. You can figure out what a full load of twelve-gauge buck will do to you down there just as well as I can. Okay. Question. Who sent you?”

There was a moment of silence. I shrugged in a resigned way and steadied the Winchester.

“Hold it, hold it! It was the big man, Connie Grieg himself…”

A startled look came to his blood-streaked face. His eyes became big and round and shocked. He started to cough, hugging himself tightly; then the blood came pouring from his mouth in a dark flood, covering the pattern of his gaudy shirt. He slumped sideways on the cockpit seat.

I felt for a pulse and found nothing. I opened the gory shirt and looked at the chest. There was a tiny hole and a small amount of bloody leakage where one Number One buckshot pellet had struck near the left nipple. Less than twenty-five grains of lead, less than a third of an inch in diameter. I knew a girl once who was shot in the back at point-blank range with a 240-grain bullet from a .44 Magnum. It tore her up badly, of course, it required a lot of surgical cutting and stitching and patching; but two months later she was recovering well, and we were having lots of fun on the beach in San Carlos, Mexico, and other pleasant places nearby, outdoors and in. You never know what’s going to kill them and what isn’t.

“Helm!” It was Mrs. Williston’s voice. “Hey, I hope you know you’re sinking!”

I became aware that the king-sized speedboat was feeling rather sluggish in the gentle rollers. I left the dead man, looked down into the cabin, and saw the gleam of water. Obviously I’d underestimated the power of those shotgun slugs very badly. They’d kept right on going after being fired down through the cabin top, emerging through the bottom of the boat. They’d have been nicely expanded by the time they got there, tearing four holes each over an inch in diameter, maybe bigger if they’d hit something hard like a metal fitting or fastening and driven it out through the bottom of the hull. Well, it saved me from hunting for a suitable seacock.

Working fast, I hauled the dead men to the main hatch, one after another, and dumped them into the cabin, hearing them splash in the rising water. No shark food here. I gave a hasty look around. There was a life ring aft displaying the boat’s name and hailing port:
Hot Rock III
, West Palm Beach, Fla. It seemed to me that although I was still a landlubber at heart, I could come up with better boat names if I had to than all these salty sailors.

I threw the life ring into the cabin with the bodies, where it wouldn’t float away. I closed the hatch and snapped the lock. I switched off the searchlight, waited a few seconds to accustom my eyes a bit to the resulting gloom, and then made my way forward. Mrs. Williston had pulled the bow close to
Spindrift
’s rail. I hesitated, looking down at my feet. I couldn’t see them very distinctly, but I could see the dark tracks they’d left on the powerboat’s cabin top. I pulled off my shoes and passed them across.

“Watch out, they’re kind of messy,” I said.

She flinched only slightly as she took the bloody shoes and laid them on the cockpit seat, soles up.

Her voice was quite steady when she spoke: “Come aboard and sit down, and I’ll make us each a drink. I suppose you’ll want to wait and make sure it does sink. We can use the time taping a temporary patch on that mainsail until I can sew it up right.”

I awoke to odd splashing sounds coming in through the open port and hatch above my bunk. I started to jump up to see what the hell was wrong—after all, I was the commanding officer responsible for this ship, wasn’t I?—but then I remembered that we were lying in a rather narrow anchorage about halfway down the Berry Islands, between the southern tip of Little Harbour Cay and a low rocky islet to the west, unnamed on the chart, with perpendicular shores that were only six or eight feet high: miniature limestone cliffs, curiously eroded, against which the little waves of the inlet gurgled and plopped and splashed in a disconcertingly noisy manner.

A glance through a porthole assured me that we were still where we’d been when I’d retired below to clean the shotgun, first, and then take a nap—in the business you learn to grab any opportunity to catch up on your sleep. Anyway,
Spindrift
wasn’t drifting ashore. She wouldn’t dare. Not after the confident way Mrs. Williston had brought us in here under power and planted—or had me plant—two anchors to hold us in position in the middle of the inlet: the Bahamian moor I’d read about in the guidebook. Apparently there’s seldom room to swing in a big circle around a single anchor in those tight little island harbors. You’re supposed to lie spread-eagled, so to speak, between two hooks, in order to stay pretty well in one place and leave as much mooring space as possible for other boats.

I glanced at my watch and was surprised to find that it was close to dinnertime. We’d come in here after lunch, having picked up Great Stirrup Light about dawn and found a good breeze that, with all that sail up, had sent us roaring down along the chain of little cays in a spectacular fashion that had made me very nervous; but the boat hadn’t capsized and the mast hadn’t fallen down and Mrs. Williston had laughed at my apprehensions. This was what
real
sailing was all about, she’d said. However, she’d informed me that even if the wind held we couldn’t make Nassau before dark. We might as well find an anchorage and let her make proper repairs to the mainsail, then get a good night’s rest.

Yawning, I pulled on my jeans—with daylight, the sky had cleared and it had become too hot below for me to sleep in anything but my shorts. I moved to the main hatch and looked out into the cockpit. The awning was up, and Mrs. Williston was working in the shade of it. She was one of the least domestic-looking women I’d met, but it was a domestic scene anyway: the handsome lady with a lap full of white Dacron, sewing away skillfully, but using a sailmaker’s leather palm instead of a seamstress’s metal thimble. She’d long since peeled off the heavy sweat shirt she’d worn last night and was clad, above the waist, in what looked like a man’s sleeveless undershirt. I believe on a woman it’s called a tank top, although I can’t tell you why. Her shoulders were smooth and brown, I noticed; and told myself to forget it.

“Did you have a nice nap?” she asked with the self-righteous sarcasm of someone who’s been laboring while others rested.

“My God, are you still working on that?” I asked.

“I’m almost finished. But you have time to scrape the fuzz off your chin. We’ll make an early start in the morning, and you probably won’t have time to shave then.”

“Your wish is my command, Milady… What the hell is that you’re sewing on? I thought the only bullethole was the one up near the spreaders where I was standing.” She was making a neat little square patch over a neatly trimmed little hole—also squared, now—near the bottom of the sail. The foot, in nautical parlance.

She said without looking up, “This is the one that went past my head when you shot the man who was pointing a gun at me.”

I said, “The blast of the shotgun must have covered the report. I didn’t even know he’d managed to pull the trigger. I was hoping he wouldn’t.”

“I’m sure you were.” Her voice was tart. “Anyway, he missed. Go shave, please. I’m willing to make allowances in a long race, but we’re not racing; and I prefer not to look at bristly men at dinner when I don’t have to.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It had been all right last night. Actually, I hadn’t got my drink immediately. First we’d furled the Genoa and brought the mainsail down and taped up the knife slits with tough white patent tape from a sail-repair kit I’d bought when outfitting the boat, along with a lot of other expensive stuff I’d been told I couldn’t possibly sail without. Only then, just drifting there in the dark, had we relaxed and treated ourselves to a victory drink apiece while waiting for the speedboat to sink.

Hot Rock III
had settled, toward the end, very gradually, as if reluctant to take the long dive to the bottom some six hundred fathoms below us (multiply by six to get feet). However, when she did go, she went stern first with a rush that barely gave me time to turn loose the bowline. Something about watching the boat go down like that with the bodies on board had changed Mrs. Williston’s attitude abruptly, reminding her that we weren’t really old comrades in arms after all; that in fact she didn’t approve of me a bit and couldn’t understand how in the world she’d let herself become my accomplice in the concealment of a quadruple homicide. She’d been remote while we were getting under way again, and she’d been cool to me ever since.

By the time I had my teeth brushed and my face shaved and a clean shirt on, she was putting the sail-repair kit back together. She asked me if I thought I could get the mainsail back onto its tracks and properly furled while she was cleaning up and starting dinner. I said I’d done it before and might just manage to do it again. I was finishing putting the awning back up—I’d had to take it down to get the sail onto the boom—when she set a couple of drinks on the bridge deck and came out after them, now wearing a plain white denim dress. It was quite unadorned, just a sleeveless, knee-length shift of the canvaslike material; but it fit her in a rather intimate and interesting way, and revealed to me again her very elegant brown legs. Her feet were bare and brown and not bad-looking, if you like feet.

She said, “That is one lousy job of furling a sail.”

“Yes, ma’am. Aren’t you afraid you’ll give me a terrible inferiority complex?”

She laughed shortly. “I think you have an ego that would blunt an ax. Sit down and have your drink. How many men have you killed, really, Helm?”

I said, “Don’t get personal. How many men have you fucked, really, Williston?”

She ignored that and said with sudden intensity. “So goddam cold-blooded and swift and ruthless! They were after you for some reason, but they never had a chance, did they?”

“Jesus!” I said, startled. “What do you think this is, some kind of a sport? Who gives chances, for God’s sake? What was I supposed to do, invite them to a quick-draw contest at the O.K. Corral at high noon? All four of them?”

“Bang-bang-bang. No warning at all! No hesitation! Three men dead and one dying! If you told the truth about that last one and didn’t just strangle him with your bare hands after you’d blasted him out of that cabin without even giving him a chance to surrender. I couldn’t see what was going on beyond that damn spotlight.” When I didn’t speak, she said, “You haven’t told me what he told you, if anything.”

I’d kept it to myself, because last night had not been a good time to discuss it properly; besides, I’d wanted to think about it a little before I told her. But I’d lacked sufficient data to come to any conclusions.

Now I spoke carefully: “Shit, I don’t even know who you are, mister!”

She frowned quickly. “What—”

“You asked what he said. I just told you.”

She stared at me. “But… but if he didn’t know who you were, then why did they… why were they trying to… She stopped, aghast at the implications that suddenly confronted her.

I said, carefully as before, “Quote. ‘Shit, it was supposed to be a simple hit on a dumb society broad; nobody warned us she had a pro guarding the body.’ End quote.”

It was the first time I’d seen her shocked into incoherence. “But… but that’s insane! You… you mean…”

“Obviously somebody doesn’t like you,” I said. “It seems incredible, I know, but it does happen to amateurs trying to save the world in their clumsy way. I assume that’s what you people are trying to do, but I’m having a hard time figuring out your method, Mrs. W.”

She corrected me mechanically. “Gina, please.”

“Obviously somebody doesn’t like you, Gina.”

“Do you know… did he tell you who—”

“Quote. ‘It was the big man, Connie Grieg himself.’ End quote. End interrogation. End interrogatee. Massive hemorrhage, if you insist on the gruesome details.” I waited. When she didn’t speak, I went on: “I’ve heard of a Constantine Grieg who dabbles, and a little more, in the drug business.”

She licked her lips. “I… we never dreamed he’d send men out to
shoot
… I mean, that’s
barbaric
!”

“What did you do to make him mad?”

She hesitated, obviously trying to put her thoughts into order. When she spoke it was without immediate reference to the question I’d asked: “We let other organizations do the protest-marching bit and wave their banners about nixing the nukes and do you want your babies to be born with uranium in the cranium.” She shrugged. “Well, they do some good, I suppose; at least they keep the problem in the public eye. And of course we do a bit of missionary and educational work ourselves, corny and obvious. A group of rich socialite creeps feeling guilty about their money and trying to soothe their consciences and demonstrate how public-spirited they are by going through the proper antinuclear motions.”

“Camouflage?” I said.

“That’s right. To show we’re quite harmless, really; just another bunch of cocktail-party activists.” She was silent for a moment; then she continued: “My father used to say that a certain responsibility went with the territory—meaning with the money. Some well-to-do people donate libraries, or hospital wings, or playgrounds. We’re hoping to donate a peaceful world free of the nuclear menace; that’s where our money is going.” She smiled faintly. “And the fact that we’ll benefit, too, more than most people, since we have more to lose from a nuclear holocaust, isn’t really a valid criticism, is it? The fact that you get to withdraw an occasional book yourself from the library you built for the general public doesn’t invalidate the gift, does it?”