Aground (8 page)

Would you like to go back?

That was the thing he’d almost remembered a while ago. It was what Morrison had said in Spanish before they realized he understood the language, the thing that had stopped Ruiz’ protests.

So they couldn’t go back.

But why? Because of the charge of theft? It had to be more than that. Were they afraid of the men from whom they’d stolen the guns? That might be it, of course, but he had a feeling it was still something more. Then it occurred to him that this didn’t really answer the question, anyway. Ruiz’ problem wasn’t simply that he couldn’t go back; for some reason he couldn’t go back, or ahead. You’ll go crazy, he thought; there couldn’t be any one answer to that.

He smoked the cigar down to the end and tossed it away. It described a fiery parabola and fell hissing into the water at the edge of the sand. Cuban music and the sound of off-key singing came from the
Dragoon,
and he saw now that they’d turned on the spreader lights. With that radio and the lights and refrigerator they would run the batteries down. Then he was conscious of annoyance with himself. You’ve lived alone too long, he thought; you’re beginning to sound like Granny Grunt. You form a mule-headed prejudice against a woman merely because nobody’s ever told her you don’t set highball glasses on charts, and now while you’re living one hour at a time on the wrong end of a burning fuse you’re stewing about the drain on a set of batteries. You ought to be playing checkers in the park.

The pillow and the folded blanket were beside him. He picked up the blanket and gave it a flipping motion to spread it, and heard something drop lightly on the sand. Apparently whatever it was had been rolled up inside; he leaned forward and felt around with his hands, wondering idly what it could be. He failed to find it, however, and after another futile sweep of his arms he flicked on the cigar lighter and saw it, just beyond the end of the blanket. It was a black plastic container of some kind, apparently a soap dish from a toilet kit or travel case. Well, at least he’d be able to wash up in the morning. He retrieved it, and was about to set it on the crates behind him when he heard a faint metallic click inside. He pulled the lid off, and flicked on the fighter again. There were several things in it—none of them soap.

The first item was a money clip shaped like a dollar sign and containing several folded bills, the outer one of which appeared to be a twenty. The next was a small hypodermic syringe, its needle wrapped in cotton, and finally there was a tablespoon with its handle bent downward at right angles near the end, apparently so it would fit into the box. The rest of the space was taken up with eight or ten tightly folded pieces of paper. The lighter went out then. He spun the wheel again and set it upright on the sand beside him while he unfolded one of the papers. It contained just what he’d expected to find, a small amount of white powder, like confectioner’s sugar. The lighter went out, and he sat frowning thoughtfully at the darkness.

He’d never seen any of the paraphernalia before, but had read enough about it to know what it was. There was a drug addict aboard. But which one? Didn’t the police always examine the arms of suspected junkies, looking for punctures? He’d seen both of them with their shirts off, and would have noticed if they’d had any; they didn’t. But wait. . . . Obviously, the blanket must have come from one of the unused bunks. So it must belong either to Ives or to old Tango. And the odds were against its being Tango’s. He probably couldn’t afford a vice as expensive as heroin; all he had was a small disability pension from the First World War and whatever Mrs. Osborne paid him for living aboard the
Dragoon
. So it must be Ives’. She’d never said he was an addict, but then she’d never said much of anything about him. Well, it was a relief to know it wasn’t either of the two still aboard; that’s all they needed now, a wild-eyed and unpredictable hop-head to contend with.

He put the lid back on the box, scooped out a hole in the sand, and buried it. He’d better get some sleep so he could wake up around two or three a.m. By that time they should be sleeping soundly; he didn’t have much hope he could get aboard the schooner without waking one of them, but he had to try. And if he got out there and found he couldn’t get up the bobstay, he wanted to be sure of having an incoming tide so he could make it back.

Just as he was dropping off, he was struck by a curious thought. Why would Ives have a money clip? There at the Eden Roc Hotel, he’d taken his business card from a wallet when he introduced himself. Well, maybe he carried both. . . .

* * *

He opened his eyes. It was still night, and for a few seconds he was uncertain what the sound was that had roused him. Then he heard it again, and grunted with disgust; it was a feminine voice raised in maudlin song. God, were they still at it? He flicked on the lighter and looked at his watch. It was a quarter of two. Then he became aware the voice wasn’t coming from the schooner; it was much nearer. He knuckled sleep from his eyes and sat up.

The night was still dead calm and velvety dark except for the gleam of uncounted tropical stars, and the blanket and his clothes were wet with dew.
“Come to me, my melan-choly ba-a-a-a-a-by,”
the voice wailed, not over fifty yards away now, and he heard the splash of oars. How in the name of God had she got hold of the raft? He walked down to the edge of the water just as it took form in the darkness, and could make out two people in it. When it grounded in the shallows, the man who was rowing got out. The figure was too slender to be that of Morrison. Ruiz ought to take out a card in the Inland Boatmen’s Union, he thought.

“—for you know, dear, that I’m in love with youuuuuu!”
Rae Osborne lurched as she stepped out, and Ruiz had to catch her arm to prevent her falling. He marched her ashore, pulling the raft behind him, and halted just in front of Ingram.

“I have brought you this one,” he said in Spanish.

“Thank you a thousand times,” Ingram replied, thinking sourly of
The Ransom of Red Chief.

“Let us hope you have already had sufficient sleep, and that you are not a great lover of music.”

Rae Osborne pulled away from him and weaved drunkenly toward Ingram. “Well, whaya know? M’rooned on desert island. With ol’ Cap Ingram, the Ricky Nelson of the Garden Club. Hi, Cap!”

Ruiz turned away in unspoken contempt and disappeared into the darkness, towing the raft. Ingram took her arm and led her to the blanket and set her down with her back against the crates. In the moment before she started singing again, he heard oars going away in the night.

He noticed she still had her purse, and was pawing through it for something. Then the caterwauling trailed off, and she hiccupped. “Got light, Cap?”

He knelt and fired up the lighter. She looked as if she’d had a large evening. The tawny hair was rumpled, she had a black eye that was swollen almost shut, and there was a purplish bruise on her left forearm. The bottoms of the white calypso pants were wet, of course, from wading ashore, and one leg of them had been ripped up the seam for several inches above the knee.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He ignited the cigarette she had in the corner of her mouth, and put the lighter back in his pocket.
But not too sorry; you asked for it, sister.

“Talk about survival training,” she said with wry amusement. “I think that’s about the nearest I ever came to being checked out on actual rape.”

He muttered a startled exclamation and clicked on the lighter again. This time he had sense enough to look at the other eye, and he saw the cool, green glint of humor in it just before she winked. She was no drunker than he was.

8

“Is he gone?” she asked.

“Should be about halfway back.”

“No wind that blew dismayed her crew, or troubled the Captain’s miiiiiinnnnd!”
she howled. Then she went on quietly, “He woke up while I was trying to get the raft overboard. I started singing again, and said I was going over to the yacht club to see if the bar was still open. I think I fooled him. Anyway, he’d apparently had it as far as the Bahamas Nightingale was concerned, so he brought me over here instead of tying me up.”

“You can kick me now,” Ingram said, “or wait till daylight if it’s more convenient. I thought it was on the level.”

“If you mean you thought I was drunk, you were pretty close to being right. Even with what I managed to ditch, I still had to put away a lot of rum; that Morrison must have been weaned on it.”

“You were after the raft?”

“Principally. I thought we might be able to make it ashore somewhere. But I also wanted to get down in those cabins and see if I could find any of Patrick Ives’ things.”

“You were taking a long chance.”

“It wasn’t quite that bad. They wouldn’t gang up on me; Ruiz isn’t that type of thug. I wasn’t sure whether I could handle Morrison or not, but it was worth the risk. After all, Ingram, I’m not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’m thirty-four, and I’ve been married twice. If I lost the bet, I’d still survive.”

“Did Morrison finally pass out?”

“Yes. Around midnight, I think. By that time I’d used up all the other routines, and didn’t know any judo, so I pretended to be sick and locked myself in the biffy. I beg your pardon, what’s the word?”

Ingram grinned in the darkness. “The head.”

“The head. Anyway, when he quieted down, I came out, and he was asleep in the cockpit. But I wasn’t sure about Ruiz. When he came back from over here and pulled the raft up on deck, he took some bedding and went up forward, so I couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or not. I pretended to pass out on the other side of the cockpit and waited for over half an hour. Then I tiptoed up to where I could see him, and found he was asleep all right. I went below then, and started through the cabins.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“No. It wasn’t a real thorough search, because I was afraid to take very long or turn on too many lights, but I found three suitcases and went through them and there wasn’t anything that would identify Patrick Ives. Two of them belonged to Morrison and Ruiz, because their wallets were in them, but the third one—in one of those staterooms where the ammunition is—didn’t have anything except the usual clothing and shaving gear and so on. It could be his clothing—that is, I think it would fit him—but for some reason they must have thrown his wallet overboard.”

“Unless it was in his dungarees,” Ingram said. “I mean, there in the dinghy. Those two men in the
Dorado
could have taken it.”

“I thought of that, but somehow I don’t think they did. I talked to them, remember?”

“Do you have any idea why they’d destroy his identification?”

“Just a minute,” she said. “It won’t do to get too quiet too suddenly. So duck.” Her voice soared to a maudlin wail.
“Oh, when Irish eyes are smiling, sure ‘tis like a morrrnnn in sprinnnnnggggg—”
She chopped off suddenly, and said with amusement, “He’ll think I fell down, or you threw something at me.”

“It doesn’t matter now whether he thinks you’re drunk or not,” Ingram pointed out.

“But it does,” she said. She took a puff on her cigarette; the tip glowed, revealing for an instant the handsome face with its prodigious shiner. There was something undeniably raffish about it, and appealing, and as attractive as sin. Must be atavistic, he thought; the view just before the clinch, after a Stone Age courtship.

“What are you driving at?” he asked.

“I don’t want Ruiz to figure out I might have fooled him. He has a great deal of contempt for me, and I want to keep it alive.”

“Why?”

“I think our only chance is for one of us to surprise him while Morrison’s over here on the sand bar, and you’re never going to get behind him if you live to be a hundred. I watched him all day, and that boy’s cool.”

“Also too tough to be knocked off his feet by a woman,” Ingram said. “If he looks easy, it’s just because you’re seeing him alongside Morrison.”

“It wouldn’t have to be for more than three or four seconds, if we timed it right. However, we’ll table that for the moment, and get back to Patrick Ives. It doesn’t add up. He was aboard. They say he drowned.”

“Are you sure he was aboard?” Ingram asked quietly.

“Positive. I managed to get Morrison talking about him a little tonight. Hollister was Patrick Ives, and nobody else. He never actually told Morrison that was his name, but he practically admitted it wasn’t Hollister. And of course Morrison knew that Hollister-Dykes Laboratories thing was a lot of moonshine. He told Morrison he was an M.D. who’d got a bum deal from the ethics committee of some county medical association over a questionable abortion. That’s pure Ives.”

“Just a minute,” Ingram said. “Was he a drug addict?”

“You mean narcotics?” she asked, puzzled.

“Heroin.”

“No. He was a lot of other things, but not that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course. Unless he’s acquired the habit in the past four months, at the age of thirty-six, which would seem a little doubtful.”

“All right, one more question. Are you absolutely sure he was an aerial navigator during the war?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not just taking his word for it? I gather he was quite a liar.”

“He was, but this is from personal knowledge. I knew him during the war, when he was taking flight training. He didn’t make pilot, but he got his commission as a navigator and was assigned to a B-17 crew in England.”

Ingram took out one of his remaining two cigars and lighted it. The pieces were beginning to fit together now, and he was pretty sure he knew why Ruiz was going over the hill. A little shiver ran up his back, and he hunched his shoulders against the darkness behind him. He told her about Ruiz’ visit.

“Those boys are running from something really bad. I should have figured it out in the beginning, from the way Morrison acted. He’d rather risk anything than go back to Florida. But it was hard to see because as far as we know they hadn’t killed anybody, and hadn’t planned to. In fact, they’d gone to considerable trouble to get old Tango out of the way without hurting him—”

Rae Osborne broke in. “But somewhere along the line they did kill somebody.”

“They must have.”

“Patrick Ives,” she said excitedly. “Why didn’t we see it before? The body was here near the
Dragoon,
but the dinghy was picked up over twenty miles away, in deep water.”

“That’s perfectly natural,” Ingram pointed out. “The body was submerged—and probably on the bottom—a good part of the time, so it was acted on only by the tides. But the dinghy was carried off to the westward by the wind and the sea.”

“Yes, but look, Captain—Don’t you see? That’s the reason Morrison wouldn’t let anybody go out and get his body when Avery saw it from the plane and called us on the radio. We’d find out Ives hadn’t drowned at all, that he’d been killed.”

“No,” Ingram said. “If Morrison had had five years to work on it, he couldn’t have dreamed up a story that matched the evidence as perfectly as that did. I was already pretty sure the man had drowned, even before I got aboard the
Dragoon,
and I don’t have any doubt at all it happened exactly the way Morrison said it did. What he didn’t want us to find out was that the man wasn’t Ives.”

“What?”

“I don’t think Ives was even aboard when they left Florida.”

“But he had to be. The watch—”

“This other man, whoever he was, must have been wearing the watch. That’s all. I don’t know whether Ives is the one who’s been murdered, but somebody was, and it happened ashore where it can be proved, not out here where it could be covered up as an accidental drowning. Naturally, Morrison wasn’t going to tell us about it as long as he had a perfectly good ready-made explanation for Ives’ being missing. He was going to have his hands full as it was, forcing me to take them down there and watching us so we didn’t escape. If we knew the real story, we’d jump overboard and try to swim back to Miami.”

“He intends to kill us, then, when we get to this Bahia San Felipe?”

“I think so. And Ruiz can’t quite hold still for anything as cold-blooded as that, so he’s about made up his mind to pull out. If he can.”

“I see,” she said. She was silent for a moment, and then she asked, “You’re absolutely certain there was another man?”

“There has to be.” He scooped up the black plastic box and showed her the contents, and told her about the compass.

“That’s the reason they got in here over the Bank and ran aground. They’ve been lost. Remember, they stole the
Dragoon
on Monday night, so it couldn’t have been any later than Wednesday night when they loaded the guns down in the Keys, and sailed. This isn’t over a day’s run from anywhere in the Keys, because even if it’d been calm they would have used the engine, but they didn’t go aground here until
Saturday
night. So for at least two days they’ve been wandering around like blind men because the compass is completely butched up by all that steel—those gun barrels. Even if one of them knew how to use the radio direction finder well enough to get a fix by cross-bearings, it’s no good unless you’ve got a compass. Here’s what happens—say they get a fix from the RDF, figure out the compass course to where they want to go, and then after a while they check their position again, and find out they’ve gone at maybe right angles to where they thought they were heading. So obviously the first position must have been wrong. Or was it the second position? Do that about three times, and you’re so hopelessly lost you wouldn’t bet you’re in the right ocean.”

“But,” she said, “didn’t Ruiz say they knew about the steel’s effect? And that Ives had checked the error before they left?”

“Sure,” Ingram replied. “On one heading. That’s what gave it away—I mean, that he’d already disappeared even before they sailed. It couldn’t have been Ives who did that. He’d have known better. Admittedly, he could have got pretty rusty in fifteen years, and the compasses on those planes were probably gyros, but nobody who’d ever studied navigation could know that little about magnetic compasses. They’re basic, like the circulation of the blood to the study of medicine. And you don’t adjust one by finding out what the error is on one heading and then applying that same correction all the way around. It’s different in every quadrant, so you have to check it in every quadrant. Actually, on some headings, what they were doing was multiplying the error instead of correcting it.”

“Then I guess there’s no doubt,” she said. “But if somebody’s been killed, why do you suppose the police didn’t say anything about it?”

“They don’t always tell you everything they know. And maybe they don’t know, or don’t have any reason yet to connect it with the theft of the
Dragoon.”

“Yes, that’s possible.” She flipped her cigarette away in the darkness. “If we could surprise Ruiz and get that gun away from him while Morrison’s over here, could we make it ashore in the raft?”

“Not to Florida. With luck we might get back across the Bank to Andros, but I don’t know whether we’d make it across the island. However, with Ruiz off our backs and Morrison stuck over here, I think I could refloat the schooner. At least, we could get on the phone and call for help.”

“Morrison might get back aboard, if it took very long.”

“No. He couldn’t swim it with a gun.”

“Would that thing he carries around with him shoot from here to the boat?”

“I think it’ll probably carry that far, but it wouldn’t be very accurate. However, there’s another angle on that. Once we start bringing those cases of ammunition over, he could use these rifles. We wouldn’t be able to move on deck except at night. But there’s something I wanted to ask you. You say Ruiz was sleeping on deck—that wouldn’t be way up forward, would it?”

“Yes. Right in the bow. Why?”

He nodded grimly. “I thought so. Before we spin any more gossamer dreams about what we’re going to do after we fool Ruiz, we’d better take up the question of how.”

“What do you mean?”

He told her about the idea of swimming out and trying to get up the bobstay. “He saw that was the only place I could possibly get aboard. So I’d have to step right over him. Dripping wet.”

“I know it won’t be easy,” she agreed. “As I said, I watched him all day, and he never once let me get behind him while you were alongside with the raft. But maybe he will now that I’m just a stupid drunk, and obviously harmless.”

“I can’t let you do it,” Ingram protested. “Ruiz is no punk hoodlum. He’s tough all the way through, and he’s got reflexes like a cat.”

“Let’s don’t waste time worrying about me. I’ll be behind him, and I don’t think he’d shoot me, anyway. It’s you we’ve got to think about. If he breaks loose and gets that gun before you reach him, he’ll kill you, so unless you’re sure you can make it, don’t try. But we’ve got to have a signal. How about this? I’ll be calling you Herman, and referring to him as Pancho—you know, endearing myself to everybody—but when you hear the name Oliver, get ready to come aboard.”

“All right.” They had to try for it sometime, and the sooner the better. It had to be when Morrison was out of the way. He looked at the blur of her face just before him in the soft tropic night. “I owe you an apology,” he said.

“Why?”

“For what I thought.”

“Oh, really?” she said indifferently. It was clear she didn’t care what he thought. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll wander off to the other end of our little sandpile and see if I can get some sleep.”

“No,” he said, getting up abruptly. “You stay here and use the blanket and pillow.” Ignoring her protests, he strode off in the night. Fifty yards away he stretched out on the sand with his head pillowed on an arm and stared up at the black infinity of space while he finished his cigar. He felt like a pompous and overweening fool who’d just been thoroughly deflated, and he was certain she’d done it deliberately. Well, there was no law said you had to stick your neck out and get it stepped on. He threw away the cigar and surrendered himself to the weariness that assailed him. When he awoke, her face was just above him in the gray beginning of dawn, and she was shaking his shoulder. The blanket was spread over him. He threw it aside and sat up, grinding a hand across his face.