The Intimidators (28 page)

Momentarily distracted, I remembered where I was and what I was doing, and brought the flying craft back on course once more. Loretta Phipps, her long hair and sheer garments whipping wildly in the fifty-knot gale of the boat’s motion, made her way behind my chair, moving sensibly from one handhold to the next. I remembered that the girl had, after all, done a reasonable amount of yachting. She knelt beside Haseltine, just as there was a great burst of light astern. I saw the kneeling girl look up, startled. I saw that Haseltine was unconscious, bleeding from a wound just above the belt. There wasn’t a boat visible within a couple of miles of us. The light had almost faded when the concussion hit us.

Afterward, I glanced at the depthfinder. It read fifty feet, dropping fast. We were off the shallow Cuban coastal bank. We were home free. Well, almost free....

They never caught up with us; and if they sent planes after us, they never found us. I held on to the east and north until I found a rain squall to hide in. With the gusty accompanying wind, it got too choppy to maintain any speed, so I just shut down everything and let the boat take care of herself while I struggled to erect the canvas—well, vinyl—spray hood forward and move Haseltine into its limited shelter, working with the girl’s help in the wind and pouring rain. It was daylight by this time. Loretta made her way aft through the downpour and returned clutching a first-aid kit Apparently, she sometimes slipped and let herself betray signs of intelligence. I didn’t take it too seriously. The idiot performance she’d put on earlier, as far as I was concerned, still left her far down near the bottom of the minus column.

With three of us inside, the boat’s little instant tent-cabin was crowded with humanity. I wasn’t sure it was good seamanship to have all that weight forward on a small vessel in the middle of a squall. However, it was just a junior-grade thunderstorm; and although we did considerable rocking and pitching as the seas built up, we didn’t seem to be shipping anything except rainwater that ran right out again through the cockpit drains—all right, I’ll call them scuppers if you insist. I pulled out Haseltine’s wet shirt to look at the hole. It wasn’t very big and it wasn’t bleeding very much, at least not out where we could see it. Inside was probably a different story. I taped a large gauze pad over it for something to do, knowing it was just a formality. I might as well have used a band aid, or left the wound uncovered. The big guy opened his eyes.

“Hell of a cruise ship you run, Admiral,” he whispered. “If you’d just shot out all those searchlights like I told you, nobody’d have got hurt,” I said. “I can’t help it if folks can’t obey simple orders.”

He grinned faintly. “You bastard,” he said, and licked his lips. “Loretta?”

The girl had parted the drenched, darkened blonde hair that had washed down her face; she was tucking the dripping strands behind her ears. “Yes, Bill?”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Don’t talk. It’s all right. I... I lost my head for a few minutes, back there; but it’s really all right. We’ll talk about it later.”

“That’s a lot of bull,” Haseltine breathed. “Later’s a lot of bull. Now is all there is; and I want you to understand. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to, God

knows I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’m not built like that. It was as simple as that.”

“Of course, Bill. Just be quiet and—”

“Cut it out. Don’t give me that of-course-Bill crap. And don’t give me that be-quiet-Bill crap, either. I’ve got forever to be quiet in, don’t I, Admiral? Starting pretty damn soon.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know—”

“The hell you don’t. I know.” His attention went back to the girl. “You’re still mad, aren’t you, Lorrie? You think I should have paid up the minute I was asked, don’t you? Just like that. You think I’m just a lousy Texas cheapskate. You think I was worried about the lousy money; that’s why I.... I tell you, I just couldn’t do it, Lorrie! Couldn’t let those bastards hold me up like that. A million bucks or one buck, makes no difference. Spend every cent I’ve got to find you, to get the sonsofbitches who.... But ransom, no. I don’t pay ransom. You’ve got to understand. I don’t operate like that. I can’t.”

“Of course I understand—”

He went on, as if unaware that she’d spoken: “Don’t care who’s snatched, even you. They can’t pry it out of me like that. I don’t pay off on a deal like that. You let one guy get away with it, they’ll all be in there trying, every lousy get-rich-quick jerk with a gun or a knife and somebody to point it at. That bastard Leo, you’d have thought he’d have known how I felt, often as we’d sailed together. You’d have thought he’d have known I wouldn’t play. Well, we never did get along. He always had the idea that, where I came from, I just had to be prejudiced against anybody who talked Spanish and, hell, maybe he was right. But I think maybe Leo just wanted to stick it into me, as much as he wanted that million-dollar ransom to finance the crummy military operation his wild-eyed Latin relatives had suckered him into.... You’ve got to understand, Lorrie. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t....”

The squall was diminishing to a drizzle; the wind was dropping as fast as it had built up. I found a tarpaulin to spread over him, reflecting that I had, at last, an explanation for the curious, ambivalent attitude the man had shown: the trouble he’d gone to to get me on the job, for instance, and the reluctance he’d then shown to give me vital information, even going to the extent of misleading me in some instances. Believing that the girl and her family had been killed as a result of the stand he’d taken, he’d wanted to find and deal with the murderers; but he’d also been aware that many people would condemn him if the story got out. Maybe he hadn’t been quite as sure of himself and his actions as he’d wanted us to think. Maybe he’d even had a few twinges of guilt, leading him, instinctively, to try to cover up what had happened even while he was putting me to work to uncover it. Well, his secret was safe now.

After a while, the girl got up and moved away to sit miserably on the fish-box in the stern of the boat. Her thin, soaked, clinging bedroom finery, trailing soggy ruffles ripped loose by bushes and whipped loose by wind, didn’t seem adequate for either warmth or modesty. I started to take off my windbreaker to put around her, but she waved it away irritably.

“I’m not cold,” she said. “Why do you men always have to be wrapping us up in your damned old clothes. I’m fine. There’s nothing I love like sloshing around the Gulf Stream in my wet lingerie.”

I almost laughed, knowing from whom she’d inherited that attitude; but it was no time for laughter. I said, “I just wish we were in the Gulf Stream. We’re way to the east of that; and we’re almost out of gas. The radio’s shot to hell. It looks as if we’re going to have to do some drifting until somebody finds us, I hope.”

It didn’t seem to register. Anyway, it didn’t serve as the distraction I’d intended. “I killed him, didn’t I?” she said flatly. “If I hadn’t acted like a crazy spoiled brat, running off to hide like that, to teach him a lesson, he’d have gone in the other boat, wouldn’t he? And he’d have been alive now.”

I said, “This is Big Bill Haseltine we’re talking about? Do you really think he’d have let himself be shipped off to safety with the women and children—at least I hope they’re safe—while somebody else played decoy for him?” “Maybe not, but I.... All those weeks that we were waiting to die just because he’d refused.... When I saw him, I guess I just went mad a little, remembering all the agony we’d gone through in that place because he wouldn’t... I mean, it was just money, after all; and Daddy would have paid him back, if that was what worried him.”

“It wasn’t,” I said.

“I know that now. But at the time it just seemed so incredible and unnecessary that we were all going to be killed because.... We almost were, you know. I’ve never been so scared in my life. They were talking, right in front of us, about how we weren’t worth anything to them any more, and how they should just shoot us and throw us in the sea. It was Leo who saved us. He sold them on the wild notion of making a much bigger deal of it since they couldn’t get anything out of Bill; of keeping us alive and kidnaping those others and using us all to get real military help, not just money, for their nutty cause or movement or whatever.... Do you know something? I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Matt,” I said.

“I’m Loretta Phipps,” she said. “At least I used to be a lovely thing they
called
Loretta Phipps, but I was never quite sure.... A lovely, sheltered, stupid thing.... Do you want to know something, Matt? Being lovely isn’t really difficult, if you’ve got a little money and the right heredity; but being stupid is very hard work.”

“Why would you want to work at it?”

“Somebody’s got to be stupid around the place, if everybody else is so terribly bright and beautiful, don’t they?”

It seemed like an odd conversation to be holding on a shot-up, almost-out-of-gas boat drifting far out of sight of land with a dead man up forward; but at least we were off the subject of Haseltine. Loretta shivered slightly.

“I guess I will take that jacket, please,” she said. “Why should I sit around practically naked just because Mommy always made fun of.... You’ve met my mother?”

“I’ve met your mother.”

Putting her arms into the sleeves of the jacket I held for her, she gave me a sharp glance over her shoulders. “Oh, like that, huh? She still bowls them over, doesn’t she? But I’d think she’d be a little too old for you; although I admit she doesn’t look it.”

“Miaow,” I said.

Loretta laughed. “Well, how would you like having had to compete with that ever since you were a baby? I’m not me, not really. I’ve never been me. No matter how hard I try to break the goddamn mold, I’m still just movie-star Amanda Mayne’s daughter.... She was never
really
a star, you know. Oh, hell, I shouldn’t have said that. What does it matter; and she’s really very nice. I mean, if she were a horrible bitch, now, and I could feel justified in hating her lovely guts....” She stopped, shrugged, and went on: “Well, when I find out who I really am, I’ll let you know.”

“You do that,” I said.

She gave me that sharp, searching glance once more, and grinned abruptly. “You know, I don’t think you take my identity crisis very seriously, Matt.”

I said, “Well, whoever you are, I think we can wait to find out until we get ashore. If we get ashore.”

She looked rather surprised. “Are you really concerned about.... I thought, the way you were giving orders and handling the boat, you must be a pretty good seaman.”

“I try to kid people that way, but they always seem to find out the truth,” I said.

“What are the weather reports, do you know?”

“Stable, except for a few squalls, for several days. No frontal activity in sight.”

“Well, then there’s really not much of a problem,” Loretta said calmly, “as long as the boat isn’t leaking seriously, which it doesn’t seem to be; and as long as we’re clear of the Cuban patrols. You say we’re way off to the east?”

“That’s right. East and north. I figured they’d probably put everything they had between us and Florida; and the only thing to do was head out this way and hope for the best.”

“Well, the prevailing wind usually blows from the southeast around here. We’ll have to wait a little until it picks up again after the squall; but if we put up the rest of the curtains and awnings and stuff to get more windage, and head as far to the west as we can and still keep her drifting right along, the wind and current combined should take us home sooner or later. Let’s hang up all the available canvas first so we’ll be ready for the wind when it comes; and then we’d better check to see how we’re fixed for food and water....”

I sighed. I had another one, it seemed. You can’t throw a rock down there without hitting a feminine Columbus or Leif Ericson. It was really a loused-up operation. I mean, I’d missed my chance to be marooned on a desert island with one beautiful, inadequately costumed lady; and now I was drifting in a small boat in tropical seas with another lovely female specimen draped in scanty lingerie—and all we talked about, for the day and a half that followed, was navigation, the weather, and how long Harriet’s water and emergency supplies would hold out.

We carefully avoided talking about the object under the tarpaulin forward; although I guess it was in both our minds that something would have to be done about it if help didn’t find us soon, but it did.

When I first saw it on the horizon, I glanced hastily at the two Thompsons still resting on the seat forward of the console, with the remaining clips. The approaching vessel looked like the white fifty-foot fishing job we’d had trouble with before, tuna tower, outriggers, flying bridge, and all. Then I realized that this was a somewhat smaller craft, but still familiar, although I’d never seen it away from the dock. Soon Harriet was looking down at us from the top of the tall structure resembling an oil derrick towering over the cabin and flying bridge of the
Queenfisher.

“I figured, the amount of gas you had, if you made it at all you’d wind up somewhere around here,” she called. “My God, some people are hard to kill.”

“And some aren’t quite so hard,” I called back.

I saw her lean brown face change expression slightly. She glanced at the girl beside me, obviously alive, and back to me.

“Oh. Haseltine?” There was a little silence. I realized that she’d liked the big guy. Then she shrugged up there, perhaps dismissing some half-formed hopes and plans. “Well, win some, lose some,” she shouted. “Let me get down from this skyscraper before I come alongside. Meanwhile you’d better dump those armaments. We can’t risk landing with them; they’re illegal as hell. And I’m going to figure out how to sneak the boat into a yard where they’ll keep their mouths shut about all the holes you seem to’ve let people shoot in it.”

Women’s Lib or no Women’s Lib, I was getting a little tired of having my life run by the ladies. “Never mind, Hattie,” I said. “We’ll take care of the bodies and bullet holes and illegal weapons; that’s our business. Just let me at a radiotelephone so I can check in....”