Gulf Coast Girl (11 page)

“He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in another plane. We learned that another man had been with him, a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, incidentally, couldn’t swim a stroke. As soon as we learned of the diver, of course, we knew what had happened. The metal box containing the diamonds had fallen into the laguna during those few hectic moments when Macaulay’s friend was killed.

“Our only hope lay in staying so close to Mrs. M. she’d have to lead us to him eventually. But just about that time we began to have a strong suspicion he was back in Sanport. Perhaps you missed the little item in the paper, but just about five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a castaway it had picked up in a rubber life raft on the Campeche Bank. This man, the captain said, gave them some vague story about being a pilot for some Mexican company and having crashed while en route from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. But he had, strangely, just vanished the minute the fishing boat docked.”

“I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. He’d gone back to the
laguna
with a diver to hunt for the box. But how do you know he found it, or even got there? Maybe he crashed on the way down.”

“No. He crashed on the way back. So the box is in the plane.”

“I see. And from the fact that he was trying to hire me to do some more diving for him, you realized he knew where the plane was and could go back to it?”

Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was right there in the house, but that taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed, and very scared.”

“The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meat-headed thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”

“We weren’t certain she knew
then.”

“But you are now. Why?”

He hooked a leg over the tiller and used both hands to light a cigarette. The glow of Sanport’s lights was fading on the horizon.

“It’s really quite simple,” he explained, filling his lungs with smoke. “As a matter of fact, I’m a little ashamed I didn’t think of it before. I merely wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago and pointed out the advisability of telling her where it was.”

I shook my head. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. You wrote him a letter—where?”

“Addressed to his house, naturally. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”

“And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Don’t be stupid. There’s no reason at all he’d do it.”

He smiled again. “I disagree, old boy. There was a very good reason he would tell her. Remember, Macaulay was in the insurance business. He didn’t sell life insurance, but he was familiar with the necessity for it as well as any married man and probably more so than most. I simply pointed out that inasmuch as there was always a chance something might happen to him, it behooved him to protect her.”

“By telling her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” he said.

“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?” I said. “That way he could guarantee she’d be kidnapped and beat up and put through the wringer by you and the rest of your sadistic bastards—”

He shook his head gently. “I’m afraid you still don’t see it, at least not from Macaulay’s point of view, old chap. There was no doubt as to her being interrogated; he knew that. But suppose she
didn’t
know where the plane was?”

I turned and looked at him, and it took perhaps a full second for the slow horror of it to catch up with me. “Good God—”

“Precisely, old boy. Life insurance, you see. He was leaving her the only thing that could stop the questions.”

I saw then what Macaulay must have gone through in those last few hours. He couldn’t turn to the police because he had already left the protection of the law. There was a good chance he would be killed, and he was going to leave her right in their hands. He had to tell her.

“Hostage to fortune, you see,” Barclay murmured. “The exposed nerve end again.”

I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at him.
“You dirty son—”

I stopped. I’d forgotten him. A number of things were beginning to click in my mind, all at the same time. She’d told the truth about his job. She’d told the truth about their trying to get away to Central America. Barclay had sent that letter to Macaulay only two days ago. Macaulay had told one lie, to his company, about where he’d been going when he left New York. Maybe—

No. He’d been on his way
back
when he crashed. She’d still been lying when she said he’d been trying to get to Central America. But I had to talk to her. I stood up.

“I’m going below,” I said.

“No.” Barclay shook his head. “George is asleep.”

I was tight with rage. “I said I was going below. Wake him up. Tell him to hold his goddamned gun with both hands. Tell him to sit on it. Tell him to come up here and jump overboard. I’m going down there.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I want to talk to Shannon Macaulay.”

I could see it in his face in the glow from the binnacle. He was smart. He had more pure intelligence than anybody I had ever known. He saw the possibilities of it and knew what I wanted to ask her. And not only that. He was already adding it up on his side of the ledger. He hadn’t wanted to prove she was lying, in the first place. Always increase the areas of vulnerability; don’t decrease them.

“George,” he called. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” came the weary answer from inside the cabin. “What’s biting our stupid friend now?”

I went below and switched on the chart lamp. He was lying in the starboard bunk smoking a cigarette with his jacket and tie off and his collar unbuttoned. The gun was in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He was big and tough, and his eyes blinked sourly at the light.

“Look, Snerd,” he said. “Why don’t you flake out somewhere and get off my back?”

I walked over and stood staring down at him. “Get out,” I said.

He started to rise to his elbows. “Why, you dimwit—”

“George, come here a moment,” Barclay called from the cockpit.

“Better run along, baby,” I said. “Your boss is whistling for you.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and slowly sat up. The gray eyes looked hungrily at me for a moment, and then Barclay called out again.

“Just keep on asking for it, Snerd,” he said. He turned his back and went out.

I parted the curtains and went into the forward part of the cabin. She was lying on the starboard bunk with her face in her arms.

Shannon,” I said.

“What, Bill?” Her voice was muffled.

“How long have you known what these gorillas are after?”

She turned slowly on her back and looked up at me. The gray eyes were dry now, but they were washed out and dead.

“Since three o’clock this afternoon,” she said.

I sighed, and felt suddenly weak with relief or joy, or both. I’d been right. All the cancerous growth of bitterness was gone and I wanted to kneel beside the bunk and take her in my arms. Instead I lit a cigarette and put it between her fingers. “I want to apologize,” I said.

Her head moved almost imperceptibly. “Don’t. I sold you out, Bill.”

“No,” I whispered. “You didn’t know. I thought you had lied, but you hadn’t. It doesn’t matter that he was lying to you.”

“Don’t make it any worse, Bill. Don’t you see? I still betrayed you. I had six hours to call you, and you could have got away. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I thought I owed him that, in spite of what he did. Maybe I was wrong, but I think I’d still do it the same way. I don’t know how to explain—”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “You were telling the truth all the time. That’s the only thing that matters.”

She stared up at me. “Why does it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I did know. It was the only thing I knew, or even had room for in my mind. I wanted to shout it out to her, or sing it, but I kept my face blank and lit a cigarette for myself.

“I’m sorry about it,” I said gently.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “It’s all right. He didn’t have a chance, anyway. I think they knew he was in the house, and anything we tried would have failed.”

The ash was growing long on her cigarette. She glanced at it dully and cast her eyes about for a tray. There was one made of half a milk can in the rack on the bulkhead above the bunk. I reached it down and held it for her. She tried to smile. Just looking at her made my breath catch in my throat. I squatted on my heels with my back braced against the other bunk and my face on a level with hers.

“Why hadn’t he ever told you?” I asked.

“Ashamed, I think. He wasn’t a criminal, Bill. He wasn’t even dishonest. There was just too much of it, and it was too easy, and no one would ever know.”

“It’s too bad,” I said. “It’s a dirty shame.”

She turned her face a little, and her eyes met mine squarely. “You know I must have suspected it, don’t you? Nobody could be stupid enough not to guess there must be more to it than he told me. I did suspect it. I can’t deny it. I was cheating when I told you what he told me, because I was afraid it wasn’t the truth, or not all the truth. But what could I do? Tell you I thought my husband was lying? Did I owe you more than I did him? Doesn’t eight years of time mean anything, or the fact he had never lied to me before, or that he’d always been wonderful to me? I’d do it again. You’ll just have to think what you will.”

“If you’re selecting a jury,” I said, “I’ve already formed an opinion. I’ll tell you about it, some day.”

What some day?
We had about five left, if we were lucky.

“Wait, Bill,” she whispered. “You don’t know all of it yet. When you do you’ll think I’m a fool. You see, he wasn’t on his way down there when he crashed. He was coming back.”

I realized I’d forgotten that. “I know. To Sanport.”

“Not to Sanport. To somewhere on the Florida coast, where he was going to destroy the plane and disappear. Don’t you see? He was leaving me.”

I got it then. “And you’d have gone on to Honduras, thinking he would be there? And when he wasn’t, you’d have been certain he was dead? Down somewhere in the Gulf, or in the jungle?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she smiled a little bitterly. “But I wasn’t the one he wanted to convince. He was just trading me, you see—”

“Oh.” I really saw it at last. “So if Barclay and his men had managed to follow you down there, they’d give him up as dead, too. That was what he was after.”

She nodded.

“Maybe it gets easier as you go along,” I said.

“He was scared. He’d been hunted too long, and I guess it does things to you.”

“But running out on you? Deserting you, leaving you stranded in a foreign country?”

“Not quite stranded, if you mean money,” she said. “You see, it wasn’t in the plane. I thought it was, but it was in a bag of his I was supposed to bring down with me. None of it’s clear-cut, Bill. He was leaving me, and he had to double-cross his friend who bought the plane, but he wanted me to have the money. Maybe he thought it was just sort of a ball game. I was being sacrificed to advance the runner to second.”

And maybe the money was a way of buying off his conscience, I thought, but I said nothing. Macaulay was a little mixed up for me.

Suddenly her eyes were full of tears and she was crying silently. “Does it make much sense to you that I still didn’t call and tell you, after that?”

“Does it have to?” I asked.

She put both hands alongside her face and said slowly, around the tightness in her throat, “I would like to explain it, but I don’t know how. When he told me that, I knew I would leave him, but I couldn’t run out on him until he was safe.”

I tried to see Macaulay, and failed again. How could he inspire that kind of loyalty on one hand and be capable of the things he had done on the other? I said nothing about it because it might not have occurred to her and it would only hurt her, but he had killed that diver, or intended to until the airplane crash saved him the trouble. The way he had it planned, there couldn’t be any second person who knew he was still alive. He’d probably have killed him as soon as the poor devil brought up the box in that Mexican
laguna
. And he would have killed me, in some way.

That was the only way it would add up. He didn’t want his wife to know what he was mixed up in. So when I went down into that plane he had to tell me what he was really after, and when he’d done that the chances were I’d have fallen overboard the next night. He was a great Macaulay, I thought. He’d started out with an itching palm and wound up itching all over.

“How much chance do you think we have?” she asked.

I tried to think of something to say. But what? They were going to kill us. Everything said they had to. Escape? At sea in a small boat with two of them watching us? And if we did get rid of them some way, what then? I was wanted by the police. In a very short time she would be, too. We had nowhere to go. The trap had double walls.

Then I thought of something else, even worse. “Do you really know where that plane is?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes. He told me very carefully. And I memorized everything he said.”

I wondered. She thought she did. Barclay was convinced she did. But apparently I was the only one aboard who had any idea of the immensity of the Gulf of Mexico and the smallness of an airplane. If you didn’t know within a few hundred yards you could drag for a thousand years and never find it.

Not that I cared if they found their damned diamonds or not. It was something else. If they didn’t, Barclay would think she was stalling, “—suppose she
didn’t know,”
he’d said softly. The implication was sickening.

“He didn’t show you on a chart?” I asked. “Or make a drawing?”

“No,” she said. “But it’s near a shoal. The shoal is about fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef, and is around a half mile long, running north and south. The plane sank two miles due east of it.”

“Was there white water, or did he just see the shoal from the air before he crashed?”

“He didn’t say.”

It was silent in the cabin except for the swish of water across the deck above us. I didn’t say anything for a moment. It was pretty bad. You had to assume too many things. You had to assume, to begin with, that Macaulay had known where he was himself. Then you had to believe the water was shallow enough at that spot to cause surf, so we could find it. If he’d merely seen a difference in the coloration of the water from above, we didn’t have a chance. Then you had to have faith in his ability to estimate his bearing and distance from the shoal in the wild scramble to get out of the plane and launch the rubber raft before he went down.

I tried to reassure myself. He could navigate, or he wouldn’t have tried to fly the Gulf in the first place. He gave the location in reference to Scorpion Reef, so he must have sighted Scorpion. Fifty miles was only a few minutes in a plane, so he couldn’t have gone far wrong in that distance. And there had to be visible white water. He’d been intending to go back to it in a boat, hadn’t he? He must have known what he was doing.

Then something else struck me. “Wait,” I said. “Barclay told me to set a course to the
west
of Scorpion Reef. Are you sure you told him east?”

“Yes. He must have misunderstood. I said north-northeast.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I went out into the after part of the cabin and leaned over the chart. Barfield was still on deck. With the parallel rulers I laid down a line 22 degrees from Scorpion Reef, picked fifty miles off the edge of the chart with the dividers, and set them on the line. I stared. There was no shoal there. The only sounding in the vicinity was 45 fathoms. I grew more uneasy.

Beyond, another 20 or 25 miles, lay the Northern Shelves, a wide area of shoaling water and one notation that three fathoms had been reported in 1907. Could he have meant that? But if he had, we didn’t have a chance. Not a chance in the world.

In the first place, if he couldn’t fix his estimated position within 25 miles that short a time after having sighted Scorpion Reef, his navigation was so sloppy you had to throw it all out. There went your first assumption, the one you
had
to have even to start: that Macaulay had known where he was himself. And in the second place, that whole area was shoal. God knew how many places you might find white water at dead low tide with a heavy sea running. Trying to find an airplane with no more than that to go on was so absurd it was fantastic.

Fumbling a little with nervousness, I swung the rulers around and ran out a line NNW from Scorpion Reef. Barclay had said she’d told him that direction. I looked at it and shook my head. That was out over the hundred-fathom curve. Nothing there at all. And if he’d been headed for the Florida coast he wouldn’t have been over there in the first place.

I thought swiftly. We’d never find that plane. To anybody even remotely acquainted with salvage work the whole thing was farcical, except there was nothing funny about it here, under the circumstances. They were going to think she was stalling. She’d already contradicted herself once, or Barclay had misunderstood her.

Three quarters of a million dollars was the prize. Brutality was their profession. I thought of it and felt chill along the back.

I was still looking at the chart when the idea began to come to me. I hurriedly slid the parallel rulers over on our course and looked at my watch. It was just a little less than two hours since we’d cleared the sea buoy. Guessing our speed at five knots would put us ten miles down that line. Growing excited now, I marked the estimated position and spanned the distance to the beach westward of us with the dividers. I measured it off against the edge of the chart. It was a little less than nine miles.

Hope surged up in me. We could do it. There was still enough glow in the sky over Sanport to guide us, and if there wasn’t, all we had to do was keep the sea behind us and go downwind. The water was warm. You could stay in it all day without losing too much body heat.

Sure, the police would get me, and her, too. We wouldn’t have a chance, half clothed and with no money. But that was nothing compared to what lay ahead for us here. She might go free. If we could sell them the story soon enough, the Coast Guard might pick up the sloop and take them. There was a chance it would clear her. I’d go to prison, but that was better than going crazy out there when they started getting rough with her.

But we had to have a life belt. She probably couldn’t swim anything like that distance, and it was just a tossup whether I could or not. But how to get one out there on deck without their seeing it? They were big and bulky, and even down here in the cabin Barfield would notice it as she went by. I looked swiftly around the cabin and had an idea that might work. Taking one of the big, cork-slab belts from under the starboard settee, I put it on top of the icebox, which was right beside the companionway.

I hurried back through the curtain and knelt beside her again. Leaning close, I whispered, “Can you swim?”

Her eyes widened in surprise, but when she replied her voice was low. “Just a little,” she said.

“Good,” I whispered. “Listen. We’ve got to get off here. Now. There’s not a chance in the world of finding that plane with the information you’ve got, and when they begin to find it out it’s going to be murder. And even if we could locate it, they’d probably kill us anyway. So we’ve got to swim for it. Maybe we make it, maybe we drown; but it’s better than this. How about it?”

“How far?” she asked quietly.

“About nine miles.”

“I can swim about a hundred yards, in calm water.”

“That’s all right. I’m pretty good at it, and we’ll have a life belt. It’s our only chance.”

The big eyes looked at me gravely, without fear. “All right,” she whispered.

“Fine,” I said. “Now, I’m going back on deck. As soon as I’m up there, Barfield will probably come back down here and turn in. Wait about five minutes, and then come on deck yourself. If he tries to stop you, make a gagging sound and pretend to be seasick. Say you’ve got to have fresh air. Now look—” I pulled the curtain back a little so she could see straight through to the companionway. “There’s the life belt, on top of the icebox. He won’t see it, because I’ll turn the light out before I go back up. When you’re on the step, grab it fast and hug it to you and come on up in a hurry. Don’t try to put it on. Just hold it. The minute you step out onto the bridge deck, head for the rail, and go right over the side. By the time Barclay sees you’ve got a life belt it’ll be too late. Got it?”

“Yes,” she said.