Crackdown (34 page)

“Ellen never arrived at Straker’s Cay,” I told the Maggot, but then a sudden and searing pulse of hope shot through me. “Unless she’s there now? Maybe she arrived after I left?”

The Maggot shook his head. “I’ve just come from there. I went looking for you.” He had gone to the body of the gunman who had fallen backwards down the stairs and now he crouched beside the bloody corpse to search its pockets. This dead gunman, like the other, was dressed in the quasi-military black fatigues.

“You went looking for me?” I asked the Maggot.

“That senator—Crowninshield—wants to see you,” the Maggot explained carelessly, as though US senators were always demanding my company, then he suddenly cursed and twitched back from the dead body as though it had bitten him.

“What?”

“Jesus!” The Maggot tossed me the wallet he had taken from a pocket of the fatigues. Till now the Maggot had displayed a remarkable insouciance in the face of the flames and death that had polluted his house, but now he was suddenly showing real alarm.

The wallet was stuffed with money, but it was not the cash that had alarmed the Maggot. It was the warrant card. The dead man with the flies in his mouth was a policeman. I had just shot a policeman. I had probably just shot two policemen.

“Oh, my God.” I was shaking.

The Maggot stood up. His red Firebird made a ticking noise as its engine cooled, but otherwise there was silence. The other gunman or gunmen had fled. The gate of the warehouse yard was open and tyre tracks showed on the road where they had spun their wheels in their hurry to get away. They had left their dead behind. Dead policemen. The Maggot stepped backwards. He was going to abandon me, I was sure of it and I could not blame him.

“Deacon Billingsley,” the Maggot suddenly said.

“That’s not Billingsley,” I said. I was still shaking. It was slowly dawning on me just how much trouble I was in. The world had jumped its gears. Just a month ago I had been helping to film a Pussy-Cute commercial, and my biggest worry had been keeping the bloody cats from marooning themselves up
Wavebreaker’s
rigging; now I was a cop-killer and that meant an eternity in jail, or even worse. “Do they have capital punishment in the Bahamas?”

“Billingsley must have sent them.” The Maggot had taken the wallet back from me and was pulling out the wads of money. “For God’s sake, Nick, think! You were a witness to Thessy’s murder. They want to get rid of all the witnesses.”

I stared at the gunman. Flies were thick on the awful throat wound. “They weren’t here on police business?” I asked, still in shock.

“Of course they were not damn well here on police business.” The Maggot had grabbed the corpse by its boots and was dragging it under the smoking verandah where it would be hidden from the road. “Even the Bahamian Police are not yet officially drug-smugglers. And for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! Help me get the hell out of here!”

“Help?” It was dawning on me that the Maggot was not going to leave me to my grim fate, but was planning on helping me. I felt a flood of gratitude for the huge man.

“Sooner or later their pals will come looking.” The Maggot found his keys and unlocked the door. “So for Christ’s sake, let’s go!”

He began hauling green canvas bags from inside his house and told me to stack them into the boot of his car. The bags were heavy and clanked metallically, as though they were filled with golf clubs, then I realised the Maggot was rescuing the best of his astonishing gun collection. “Are you abandoning this place?” I asked him.

He paused for a second. “Two dead policemen in my house? You bet I’m getting the hell out of here.” He tossed out two plastic garbage bags of clothes, a briefcase, then a silver-framed photograph that showed a delicately beautiful brunette dressed in a body-stocking and leg warmers. He had plainly been prepared to make a moonlight flight, knowing just which possessions he wanted to rescue and which he wanted to abandon. Then, leaving the house door open, he shouted at me to get in the car.

I still held the photograph. The engine snapped into life, the back wheels spewed dirt and dust as the Maggot let out the clutch, then we were fishtailing out of his compound and on to the road. He accelerated away.

I looked at the portrait. The girl had a fragile loveliness, raven-dark hair, bright eyes, and an impudently cheerful smile. Her body was lithe and taut. “Pittsburgh?” I asked the Maggot.

“Yeah.” He spun the wheel hard and I heard the guns shift in the boot.

“She’s very beautiful,” I said in real tribute.

“Yeah. Except now she’s giving blow jobs in the back room of a peep-show.” The Maggot’s voice was grim as death. “That picture was taken before she found cocaine. They don’t look so damn good afterwards.”

God damn it. I closed my eyes as though I could obliterate the misery in darkness. Ellen. The thought of her suddenly swamped me, making me want to cry. She had tried to catch a ferry to come back to me, and it was from the ferry that Jackson Chatterton had been pushed to his death. It had all gone wrong.

And now we were running.

W
e loaded everything into the Maggot’s Beechcraft. That, at least, he could take with him when he left the Grand Bahamas, though he was resigned to losing the car. He was fond of his Firebird. It had a bumper sticker which read ‘This Might Not Be The Mayflower, But Your Daughter Came Across In It.’ The Maggot tried to peel the bumper sticker away, claiming he might never find another like it, but the paper tore in his big fingers.

“For Christ’s sake!” I snapped. “Let’s get out of here!”

“I’ve got to file a flight plan yet. You wait.” He at last abandoned the bumper sticker and, snatching up a chart and a pile of papers, strode away towards the airport buildings.

I climbed into the Beechcraft. It was like a Turkish bath inside the plane, which was standing in the full sunlight, but at least I had the illusion of being hidden. I was nevertheless scared, expecting to hear the visceral wail of a police siren at any second. I watched a helicopter come beating in from the north, its rotors flashing light, and I was sure that it was bringing men to arrest me. I slunk down in my seat as the machine landed not far from the Maggot’s plane. I waited for the helicopter to disgorge uniformed men, but instead a hugely fat man in Bermuda shorts climbed out of the helicopter and, without a glance in my direction, walked away.

The Maggot seemed to have disappeared. Sweat was pouring off me. By now, I thought, the police would have found the bodies of their two colleagues. They must have found the bodies. The men who had fled the scene must surely have reported the killings and my description was doubtless already clattering out of telex machines in dozens of police stations across the islands. It was such an easy description: just look for Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. “Shit, shit, shit!” I swore aloud, pounding the plane’s broken dashboard, willing the Maggot to reappear from the control tower. He still did not come.

Two black men in white overalls strolled towards the Firebird. They stood admiring the car’s lines. The overalls were too clean, I decided. Each man wore the logo of an oil company, but I was sure they were policemen. One of the men lit a cigarette. Where the hell was the Maggot? I shrank down in the seat.

Ellen was gone. I had lost
Masquerade.
All I could now hope for was to get out of the islands alive, and then to run from the extradition lawyers. It was my own fault. Ellen had warned me not to get involved with the drug lords; she had warned me on the morning I had found the floating wreckage of the
Hirondelle,
but I had not listened to her, and now she, like Thessy and Jackson Chatterton, was dead. Or probably dead. Or worse. I shivered suddenly, not with cold, but with horror. I knew my grief was in a kind of suspense and that when it came it would be hard to bear, but not so hard as the ordeal that Ellen must already have endured.

The two white-overalled men strolled away. I could hear them laughing. A big passenger jet thumped down on to the main runway. Its engines went into reverse thrust and the thunder bellowed across the field. Where the hell was the Maggot? “Jesus!” I swore impotently. “Come on! Come on!”

Then a police car drove into a car park just a hundred yards away and a uniformed constable climbed out. He stared directly at me, then, as though drawing out my torture, he yawned and stretched his cramped arms. I was tempted to run. Not only would I be charged with murder, but probably with gun-smuggling as well, for the Beechcraft was crammed with weapons. One of the guns, astonishingly, was a Kalashnikov PKM, the general-purpose Russian machine-gun, which the Maggot claimed to have bought off a collector in Florida. The Beechcraft even had boxes of ammunition for the Russian gun, each box containing belts of one hundred rounds. The rope-handled boxes, I noticed, were all labelled
Oficina Economica Cubana.
Another bag held a clutch of little Czechoslovakian Scorpion sub-machine-guns, toylike weapons that were lethal at close quarters. What kind of a mind, I wondered, thought it important to salvage such things when doing a moonlight flit? And what kind of a man would strand me in his plane for so long? “Come on!” I encouraged the invisible Maggot.

The policeman turned and strolled towards the airport terminal. Dust blew across the tarmac. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. The reality of her fate had not sunk in yet, or else the horror of what had happened to her was so great that my mind refused to face it. Sweetman had surely had her killed, or kidnapped. I tried to think of something I could do to find her, or to avenge her, but there was nothing. I was utterly helpless for I did not know where Jesse Sweetman was, and even if I did know I was not sure what I could do, and then I suddenly wondered just why the Maggot had been so certain that Deacon Billingsley had sent the policemen to kill me at his house. I had never learned of any connection between Sweetman and Billingsley, so why had the Maggot assumed there was?

The Maggot at last appeared in the far doorway. He strolled towards me as though he had all the time in the world, even stopping to chat to the men in white overalls, then wandering with blithe unconcern around the plane as he inspected its wings and tail. “Nothing’s fallen off,” he reassured me as he climbed into the cabin, “and we’ve got clearance for Fort Lauderdale.”

“Thank Christ for that.”

“Not that we’re going to Fort Lauderdale, of course. I thought we might visit Coffinhead Porter instead. Do you know Coffinhead?”

I knew Coffinhead, though not as well as the Maggot did. Coffinhead was a Bahamian who had become rich through years of lucrative smuggling, though of late he had retired to a small, but legitimate, marina in the Berry Islands from which he ran a very quick fishing boat and a fleet of diving boats. Coffinhead, whose nickname arose from his oddly elongated and boxlike skull, had sometimes helped out our charter clients by taking them to dive on some especially exotic coral reef, but so far as I knew Coffinhead Porter was not a lawyer, so he could not fight a murder charge on my behalf, and nor did Coffinhead Porter own an airline, so he could not fly me away from Deacon Billingsley’s vengeance. “Just why the hell are we going to see Coffinhead?” I asked the Maggot in a very bitter voice.

“Because Senator Crowninshield’s there, of course,” the Maggot said as though that was the most obvious answer in all the world, “so hold on to your underwear and we’ll see if this thing flies.”

The thing flew, and it felt wonderful as the wheels left the ground and, second by second, we climbed higher into a police-free sky. Yet I knew there would be more policemen wherever I landed, and I wondered if I would ever be free of their pursuit. I stared regretfully down at the impossibly blue sea that was scarred with the white wakes of pleasure boats and tried to make sense of all the things that had happened to me since the morning. Nothing clicked into place, nothing. “What on earth is Crowninshield doing at Coffin-head’s place?” I asked the Maggot.

“He wants to see you. Perhaps he likes you?” The Maggot offered me a suggestive simper.

“Maggot, what the hell is happening?”

He looked at me as though I was mad. “What the hell do you think is happening? The senator wants to get his children back. He’s asked me to help him, and I said I wouldn’t do it unless you were included in the fun and games. That’s why I know Ellen isn’t at Streaker’s Cay, because I went there to find you.”

“Does the senator know where the twins are?”

“Of course he does!” The Maggot was astonished that I needed to ask.

I felt the day’s first pulse of hope, though it was a very feeble pulse. If the senator knew where the twins were, then that was surely the place where Jesse Sweetman could be found, and where Jesse Sweetman was, so also was Ellen, if she was alive. As a straw it was not very strong, but it was something to cling on to all the same. “How the devil did the senator find out?” I asked.

“He didn’t find out. You did.” He banked towards the south, lancing bright sunlight across the cockpit. Cool air was at last venting out of the nozzles.

“I did?” The world was out of joint.

“There,” the Maggot pointed to one of the back seats where, among his papers and guns, a brown envelope lay.

I opened the envelope to find that it held a sheaf of black and white photographs. They were the pictures I had taken of Murder Cay on the last occasion that I had flown with the Maggot.

They were not good photographs. One was a distant view of the island, but the picture was so hazed by heat that it was difficult to see anything except the outline of surf and coral and a mass of palm trees on the island itself. There was a reasonable photograph of the dog-leg entrance channel, and there was a perfect picture of two of the island’s houses, which looked much bigger than I remembered, and both of which had lavish swimming pools, tennis courts, elegant landscaping, white stone terraces and satellite dishes on their pantiled roofs; but most of the other pictures were horribly blurred, though I could just make out one of the two trucks which had been parked to block the island’s runway and, beyond the truck, the elongated painted cross at the end of the airstrip.