Aground (10 page)

But he was beginning to be afraid now. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen for the tremendous exertion of pulling that anchor warp across the tide, and carbon dioxide was accumulating to dangerous levels in his body. Those hurried gulps of air weren’t enough; he had to stay longer on the surface, or drown. Then, suddenly, he could get no slack at all. He’d come out to the end. He took another breath, heard the bullet strike somewhere beyond him, and worked the anchor back and forth, digging its fluke into the bottom. He started back, going very fast now, pulling himself hand over hand along the warp. When he came up for air, Morrison wasn’t expecting him in this direction, and there was no shot. He had to surface once more on the way back, and then he could see the schooner’s stern ahead of him. Just as he was about to black out completely he came up under her side and lay on the surface too weak to move as he held onto the line and drank in air in long, shuddering breaths.

Rae Osborne was just above him, the fear still showing on her face. “Let’s don’t go through that again. I thought he was going to kill you.”

Ingram could only nod. It was two or three minutes before his strength began to return. “Toss the line up over the boom,” he directed, “and pass me the other end.” He caught the doubled line and managed to pull himself on deck. She disappeared down the ladder while he slipped on the khaki trousers, and when she came back she silently handed him a towel. He collapsed on the cockpit seat and mopped at the water running out of his hair.

“That was a little too much,” he gasped. “I guess I’m an old man.”

“Not old, Ingram. But a man.”

He glanced up quickly. There was sudden confusion in her face. “Well, thank you,” he said, surprised.

The old arrogance of manner was back now and everything was under control. “Forget it,” she said indifferently.

“Sure. But sometimes I wish I could figure you out.”

“Really? I thought you’d done a beautiful job of that—
and
expressing your opinion.”

“So I was wrong,” he said uncomfortably. “But I did try to apologize, didn’t I, when I found out it was just an act?”

“Oh, that.” She dismissed it with a shrug. “I was talking about Nassau, there in the Carlton House bar.”

He stared at her, completely baffled. “Carlton House? When were you in there?”

It was her turn to stare. She sank down on the opposite side of the cockpit just as one of Morrison’s 30-caliber slugs struck the foremast and went screaming off across the water; neither of them even noticed it. “Oh, good Lord! You mean you didn’t even see me?”

“No,” he replied. “I didn’t see you anywhere. Except there in your room.”

“Ouch! Don’t remind me of that. I guess I’m the one who owes you an apology. But I was furious. I thought you’d done it deliberately.”

“I’m sorry,” Ingram said. “That’s happened to me before. I’m an absent-minded goof at times, and I think I was reliving my past.” He was conscious of still being puzzled, however; she was too intelligent to get very upset over anything as petty as that.

She grinned. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the real beauty of it yet. Most of the time I seem to have all the social grace of a water buffalo. It’s just carelessness, but it can lead to some very embarrassing situations. You remember I got out of the taxi to go shopping, and asked you to take my things on to the hotel and register for me. I was two blocks away before it dawned on me this was a little on the casual side, to say the least, since I didn’t know anything about you at all. There was no telling what you might think, or how you might take it. And to make it worse, I couldn’t even remember exactly what I’d said. But of course when I got out to the Pilot House Club everything was all right. Apparently whatever I’d said hadn’t been
that
ambiguous, and I’d been embarrassed about nothing. It even struck me as a little funny—until I walked into the Carlton House bar where you were drinking beer and sat down around the curve of the bar and smiled at you, and you looked right through me and three feet out the other side. So much for the amusing little situation.”

“I
am
sorry,” Ingram said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Maybe under the circumstances, we’d better just go back and start over.” She solemnly held out her hand. “I’m Snafu Osborne, the girl with two left feet and a stranded yacht.”

“Cousin Weak-eyes Yokum, ma’am,” he said gravely, and took her hand. “And I’ll get your boat back in the water if you’ll promise never to tell anybody I looked at you and didn’t see you. They might lock me up.”

She laughed. “Well, I’m glad we’ve got that straightened out. Now what’s next on the schedule?”

“All we have to do now is get a tackle on that anchor warp. You can help me reeve these blocks.” He slipped the T-shirt over his head and put his sneakers and the watch back on. After laying the two blocks out in opposite ends of the cockpit, he began reeving the line through the sheaves. When it was completed, he crawled forward along the port side of the deckhouse and made one end of the tackle fast to a cleat. Then he led the anchor warp in through the chock on the stern, hauled it as tight as possible by hand, and took a purchase on it with the tackle. He hauled again. With the multiplying leverage of the big four-sheave blocks the anchor warp came out of the water astern, dripping and as tight as a drumhead. The blocks were overhauling now. He stopped the warp off at a cleat on the stern, ran the tackle out again, took a new purchase, and hauled. The anchor was holding beautifully, and the warp ran straight out now, as rigid as a steel bar. He took a turn around a cleat to hold the strain, and looked forward along the deck. The
Dragoon
was on an even keel as well as he could tell, and the tide was still flooding almost imperceptibly onto the Bank. They might make it, he thought; they just might. He held up crossed fingers. She smiled as they faced each other crouched on the bottom of the cockpit.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Just hold what we’ve got. In a few minutes we’ll start the engine and try to back her off.”

“And if she doesn’t come off?”

‘We’ll try again on the next tide. In the morning.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this mess, Ingram.”

“You didn’t,” he said. “Ives did.”

“I’m still responsible. You just got caught in the line of fire.”

“Who was Ives?” he asked.

“My first husband,” she said.

“Oh.” He turned and looked out across the water. “That was the reason you didn’t tell the police?”

“No. I didn’t tell them because I still wasn’t sure then that Hollister was Patrick Ives. I wanted to find out definitely. There wasn’t much they could do, anyway, as long as the boat was out here.”

“And you were afraid something had happened to him?”

“No.” She smiled faintly. “I was trying to catch up with him for the same reason you were. I have a stubborn streak in me, and I hate being played for a sucker. To be quite frank, he made an awful fool of me. Did Ruiz say anything at all while I was down there getting the rope?”

“No. Except that I’d have to go ahead and shoot. He wouldn’t go back. I asked him if it was Ives they killed, but he wouldn’t say.”

“Do you think it was?”

“It could have been,” Ingram said. “It’s a cinch something happened to him between the night they stole the boat and the night they loaded the guns aboard.”

A bullet slammed into the hull just forward of them, followed immediately by the sound of the rifle. Maybe Morrison was trying to drive them crazy. He looked out at the surface of the water that was almost at a standstill now as the tide reached its peak. Reaching past her, he switched on the ignition, set the choke, and pressed the starter. On the second attempt, the engine rumbled into life. He let it warm up for two or three minutes and checked the wheel to be sure it was amidships.

There eyes met. He nodded. “Here we go. We hope.”

He put the engine in reverse and advanced the throttle. Bracing his feet against the end of the cockpit, he caught the tackle and hauled. Rae Osborne slid over beside him and threw her weight on the line. There was vibration from the engine, and water rushed forward along the sides of the schooner from the churning propeller, but the
Dragoon
remained hard and fast against the bottom with the unmoving solidity of a rock.

Thirty minutes later he cut the ignition and slumped down in the cockpit, exhausted. As the sound of the engine died, a bullet slammed into the furled mainsail above them. There was something mocking about it, he thought; maybe it was Morrison’s way of laughing at them.

10

Rae Osborne tried to look cheerful. “Well, there’s always tomorrow. Do you think the tide might be higher then?”

“It’s possible,” Ingram said. “But not necessary. We’ll get her off then. I’m going to haul her down on her side.”

“How?” she asked. “And what does that do?”

“It tilts the keel out of a vertical plane, so she doesn’t need so much water to float. That’s why I saved those boxes of ammunition. We’ll sling them on the end of the main boom and swing it out over the side for leverage. We’ll have to wait till after dark to rig it, though, so he can’t pick us off with that rifle.”

“Then there’s nothing that has to be done right now?”

He shook his head. “Why?”

She smiled. “At the moment, the thing that’d do more for my morale than anything else in the world is a bath. I think Morrison said they filled the fresh-water tanks—”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Use all you want. We may have to pump some of it overboard, anyway.”

“Wonderful.” She started to scuttle toward the ladder, but paused, her face suddenly thoughtful. “You don’t suppose any of those bullets are going through the hull? I don’t know why, but there seems to be something indecent about being shot at in the shower.”

He grinned. “Not at three hundred yards, and from the angle he’s shooting. They’re just gouging splinters out of the planking.”

She went below. He picked up the glasses and peered cautiously over the top of the deckhouse. Morrison was still lying behind his rest, smoking a cigarette while he casually reloaded the rifle. He’s got no food, Ingram thought, but he does have water; he could last for several days. But obviously he had to get back aboard; he might be able to swim that far, but not carrying a rifle or the BAR. However, if he managed to empty enough of those cases and could nail them together, he might make a raft of sorts on which to carry the gun. At any rate, he wouldn’t try it until dark, knowing they had Ruiz’ automatic. They’d have to stand watch all night.

He located the rod and sounded the two fuel tanks. As nearly as he could tell, the starboard one was still full and the port a little less than half. They had about two hundred gallons aboard. The fresh-water tanks were forward where he couldn’t reach them, but if they were even half full, they had at least that much water. Getting rid of some of it would help. The water could be pumped overboard, but there was no way to ditch the gasoline unless he could find a hose and siphon it out. He could, of course, start the engine and let it run, but the amount it would use up wouldn’t justify the noise. He disliked engines, anyway, and having to listen to them always irritated him. He went below and ransacked all the lockers, but could find no hose except a few short pieces that had been split for use as chafing gear. He heard the shower stop, and knocked on the door.

“Yes?” she called out.

“Just let it run and empty the gravity tank,” he said. That would help, and he could pump some more overboard later. He found a coil of new nylon line, gathered up an armload of the rope lashings, and went back to the cockpit to size up the job before it grew dark.

The topping lift probably wouldn’t hold it alone, not a half ton out there on the end of the boom; but if he backed it up with the main halyard and reinforced the halyard fall with this heavier line it should be safe enough. The awning would have to come down. He’d have to memorize the location of everything; it wasn’t going to be easy, having to do it all in the dark, by feel. He looked at his watch; it was a little after six now, and the tide was beginning to ebb off the Bank. A timber creaked as the
Dragoon
settled a little and began her slow, inevitable list to port. He began cutting the rope lashings to make slings for the ammunition boxes. A cat’s-paw of breeze blew out of the south, ruffling the awning and making it cooler for a few minutes. The sun was low in the west.

Rae Osborne came up the ladder. She looked cooler and much refreshed in spite of the fact that she had no other clothes to change into; her hair was neatly combed now, and her mouth made up. He looked at the handsome face with its spectacular shiner, and grinned. “You look wonderful.”

She touched the puffed eye with her finger tips, and smiled ruefully. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“Well, as shiners go, there’s certainly nothing second-rate about it. It seems to match your personality, somehow.”

“You mean beat-up?”

“No. Colorful. Flamboyant. And undefeated.”

She laughed. “I’d better think about that. I’m not sure but what it sounds like some biddy in a barroom brawl.”

She went below again and returned after a while with a plate of tuna sandwiches and a pitcher of water. They ate facing each other across the bottom of the cockpit while daylight died in a drunken orgy of color and the intermittent sound of Morrison’s gunfire. She gazed westward to the towering and flame-tipped escarpments of cloud beyond the Santaren Channel, and mused, “I know it sounds stupid under the circumstances, but I’m beginning to see what makes people crazy about the sea. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“You’ve never been around boats before?” Ingram asked.

“No. My husband just took the
Dragoon
in on a business deal; neither of us had ever owned a boat of any kind, or even wanted to. He planned to sell it to get his money out of it, but he died just a few weeks afterward—almost a year ago now. He was killed in the crash of a light plane he and another man were flying out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch.”

“What business was he in?” Ingram asked.

“Real estate.” She smiled softly. “Or that’s one way of putting it. Actually he was a speculator. A plunger. It’s a funny thing—he was the gentlest person I’ve ever known and he looked like an absent-minded math teacher in some terribly proper school for young girls, but he was one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers you ever saw in your life. He was forty-eight when he was killed, and he’d already made and lost two or three fortunes. Actually, it never made a great deal of difference to me. Beyond a point, piling up money you don’t need seems like a waste of time, especially if you have no children to spend it on or leave it to, and most of the time I wasn’t even sure whether we were rich or in debt. He was away from home so much I had a business of my own, just to have something to do. I never was any good at that social routine. I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools always made me feel inferior, and I’d get defensive and arrogant and make a fool of myself. I’ve always been crazy about sports cars, so I had a Porsche agency, a little showroom in a shopping center near where we lived. I still have it.”

“Why were you so long trying to sell the
Dragoon?”
he asked.

“I couldn’t sell it. There was a tax lien on it. When Chris was killed, several deals he had pending fell through, and it developed he was overextended again and pretty shaky financially. On top of that, he’d just got an adverse ruling on an income-tax thing, so the government froze everything until it was paid. I didn’t want it sold at auction at a big loss, so I held on and the lawyers finally got it straightened out after about eight months. There wasn’t a great deal left other than the schooner and the house. Anyway, as soon as it was cleared up—I think it was in March—I came over to Miami to see some yacht brokers about selling her, and that’s when I ran into Patrick Ives. For the first time in thirteen years.” Her voice trailed off, and she stared moodily out across the water.

“That’s when he went aboard?” Ingram asked.

“Yes. Maybe I’d better tell you about him. It’s not very flattering, but since between the two of us we seem to have dragged you into this, you’re entitled to an explanation. I first met him in 1943 when he was an Army Air Force cadet at an airfield near the little town I came from. He was from Washington—the state, I mean. We were practically in flames over each other right from the first, and he wanted me to marry him before he went overseas. I would have, too, except that I still lacked a few months of being eighteen, and my parents put a stop to it. We carried on a torrid correspondence all the time he was in England, and did get married when he was reassigned to an airfield in Louisiana just before the end of the war. When he was discharged, he decided to go back to school. He wanted to study medicine. He’d already had two years at the University of Washington, before he went in the service. So we moved to Seattle. I got a job, and he tried to start over where he’d left off two years before. It just didn’t work out. Maybe we were both too immature, I don’t know. But that quonset-hut, GI-Bill, all-work-and-no-play type of college life, with another six long years of it staring us in the face before he could even hope to graduate from medical school, was just too much for us. We fought a lot, and he began to fail in all his subjects.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she made a weary gesture, and went on. “We split up. I came back to Texas, and we were divorced that summer—1946. I never saw him again, or even heard of him, until the afternoon four months ago when I was flying to Miami to see about selling the
Dragoon.
He boarded the plane in New Orleans, and took the seat next to mine.

“Those things when you’re very young are apt to be pretty intense, but no bitterness lasts for thirteen years, and after the first shock wore off it was more like a meeting of old friends than anything. It took us all the way to Tampa to get caught up. I told him what I was going to Miami for, and I’ll have to admit it didn’t lose anything in the way I said it: I was running over to see about disposing of my late husband’s yacht. That was a little childish for a woman almost thirty-five years old, but for some reason I seemed to think I had to impress him—maybe because he was so obviously successful himself. But anyway, that’s probably when he began to form the picture of the wealthy widow.

“He told me about himself. He’d got his M.D. from the University of California medical school and had quite an extensive surgical practice in the San Francisco hospitals—specializing in chest and heart surgery. He was also connected with the medical school as a part-time lecturer on surgical techniques, which brought him to the subject of this trip he was on. It seemed he and some scientist from Cal Tech had worked out a new and more simplified type of heart-lung machine for use in operations where the heart had to be by-passed. I didn’t understand any of it, of course, but it sounded very impressive to me. He was demonstrating it at a series of operations that had been scheduled at a number of medical schools. He’d just been at Tulane, and he was on his way to Miami, and he was as tickled as a young boy when he learned I was living in Houston, because he was going to be in Galveston in another week or so, at the University of Texas medical school.

“You’ve met him. You know what he’s like. He’s a very handsome man with a world of drive and charm, and frankly I was flattered by all the attention he gave me. He took me out for dinner and dancing both nights I was in Miami, and rented a car to drive me down to Key West to look at the
Dragoon
. We were aboard her most of one afternoon. He gave me a lot of advice about what price to hold out for, and said he had a thirty-five-foot yawl of his own on San Francisco Bay. I knew he had sailed small boats on Puget Sound when he was a boy. He was very sharp with Tango for not keeping the cabins and the decks cleaner, and they got in an argument, which is probably the reason he was sure Tango would remember him if he saw him again.

“Well, to cut a long and humiliating story down to a short and humiliating story, about a week after I got home he showed up in Houston. He was busy down in Galveston during the day, of course, but he took me out somewhere every night, and told me a lot more about himself. He was a lonely and unhappy man. He said he’d been married again but it hadn’t worked out, and he was divorced now. Of course, by this time I’d dispelled the myth of the wealthy widow, but still one of the most infuriating parts of the whole thing was the precise way he sized up just exactly how much he could take me for. Seven thousand, five hundred dollars. Any more and I might have balked because I couldn’t afford it. Any less and it might not have been worth all his trouble. Apparently he must have spent his days appraising everything I owned, like a professional weight-guesser.

“The actual mechanics of the swindle were simple enough. He and the Cal Tech scientist were forming a small company to produce around a hundred of the heart-lung machines already contracted for by hospitals all over the country, and one of the original five stockholders had dropped out. And while there was no question that the company would make a great deal of money, the main thing was to be careful about letting control fall into the hands of sordid businessmen who might try to cut corners and cheapen the machine. So for the sake of having the odd share in the hands of somebody with sympathy and understanding, and for old times’ sake . . . You can take it from there. I gave him a check for seventy-five hundred dollars. After two days went by without any word from him, I called the dean’s office at the medical school, and of course they’d never heard of anybody named Patrick Ives. I hired a private detective agency to find out if there was any truth in anything he said. There wasn’t. He was wanted in several places on the Coast and in the Middle West for cashing worthless checks, always posing as a doctor. This was probably the first time he’d used his real name for years, and then only to me. And when the Miami police told me about that watch found in the
Dragoon’s
dinghy I had a feeling it must be his.”

Ingram nodded. “And you thought if you could catch up with him you might get some of the money back?”

“No. It was four months ago, and the way he lives he’d have spent it all by now. I just wanted to try to get the schooner back, to salvage something out of the mess. I’d been kicked where it hurt—right in the pride—and I was pretty bitter about it. I think I even took some of it out on you, that first night. When you said you weren’t going to charge me anything for helping me find her, I didn’t believe you, frankly. I thought you had an angle too. Great little judge of character, this Osborne girl.”