Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (3 page)

           
He saw me coming. He turned, as soon
as the waves would let him, and tried to flee. It was kind of pitiful,
actually; just about as pitiful as me innocently chasing seals with his
telescope crosshairs tracking me. I shot down the bay at flank speed, mostly
airborne; but this time I throttled back in good time before hitting the heavy
stuff out past the point. He was plunging through it, or trying to, heading
hack the way he'd come. Actually, his light boat wasn't making much progress
against the waves and the wind. The extra weight and freeboard of my craft, not
to mention the extra horsepower, made it no contest. I simply walked up on him
as if his little motor had stopped running.

           
I don't mean to imply that it was
smooth and easy. It was a rough, wet chase while it lasted, with a lot of spray
flying; but the big crested rollers out of the northwest turned out to be more
frightening to look at than dangerous to ride. At fifty yards he went for the
rifle. This was ridiculous. He couldn't even hold the thing to his shoulder for
managing the boat, and he couldn't have found me in the big sniper's telescope
if he had, the way the seas were tossing him around. He fired a couple of
times, kind of one-handed and from the hip. I never saw or heard the bullets.
While he was working the bolt for a third shot, a wave threw him off balance
and he almost fell overboard. The firearm went into the sea as he grabbed the
gunwale with both hands to catch himself. So much for that.

           
The rest was simple. The most
vulnerable spot of his boat was the low stern, cut down to accommodate the
outboard motor. On larger boats like mine, that motor notch is protected by the
splashwell
inboard that I've already mentioned, that
catches a boarding wave and lets it drain back out again, but his little tub
had no such protection. Anything that came through the motor cutout wound up
right in the boat with him.

           
On my first pass, he kicked his
stern aside at the last moment by yanking desperately at the motor's control
handle. I swung around with him, using all the throttle I dared in that seaway,
and he took in some twenty gallons of my wake in spite of his evasive maneuver.
The next pass was a clean miss as a rogue wave threw us far apart at the last
moment, but I came right around and had a beautiful shot past his stern as he
hit the next sea too hard, shipped more water over the bow, and almost lost
headway completely, throttling back to keep from driving his little boat clear
under.

           
I had a good look at him as I came
up on him fast: a tallish man, not old, not Mexican, clean-shaven, kind of
boyishly handsome, with a tanned face amid wet brown hair cut short enough to
put him well into the ranks of the squares. It made no difference to me. Square
or hip, he'd tried to kill me. To hell with his haircut.

           
I gave a quick burst of power and
roared past at
planing
speed, missing his stern by less
than two feet. Looking back, I saw the white curling wake roll clear over his
motor and transom, right into the boat. An oncoming wave finished the job. I
got my bucking and plunging little nautical projectile under control, turned
her like a cutting horse between waves, and charged back there. He was clinging
helplessly to the swamped skiff that was still afloat, of course-they're all
loaded with plastic flotation these days so you can't really sink them-but when
lie saw half a ton of speedboat coming at him own the face of a wave, he kicked
himself clear and dove. I don't know what he thought I was going to do, run him
down, I suppose, or brain him with a boathook. Anyway, he submerged and
presumably swam off, making my job that much easier.

           
I didn't even bother to look for
him. I simply slowed down, swung around, and grabbed the braided nylon painter
trailing from the bow of the skiff. Then I headed for shore, towing the swamped
boat with me, leaving him swimming out there in the oncoming darkness.

           
According to the marina records, his
name was Joel W. Patterson. At least that was the name written down opposite
the registration number of the boat I'd towed in. He came from San Bernardino,
California. He had arrived in San Carlos two days after I had. He'd been
staying in a pickup camper at the trailer court across the road.

           
"Yes, senor, I remember him a
little," said the young lady behind the counter in the marina office,
where you could buy bait and tackle, arrange for dock space, and hire anything
from a single rod-and-reel outfit to a large fishing vessel complete with
captain and crew. She went on,

           
"He was expecting to meet a
friend here, someone from Arizona, I think. He looked through my book of
registration here. But I do not think the friend ever came. I never saw him
with anyone.

           
He was quite a~ handsome young man,
but alone, always alone."

           
He'd undoubtedly been looking for my
name and boat number, to make sure I'd arrived so he could get to work on me. I
said, "Well, he's still alone, I guess."

           
"
Si
,
senor. It is a terrible thing. I have sent one of the party boats out to
search, but in the darkness and in this wind there is not much hope. You did
not see him at all?"

           
"No, I was fishing along the
shore and I saw something white drifting off the point," I said.

           
"I went out to have a look and
there was the boat full of water with nobody on board. I cruised around it a
bit, but I couldn't see anybody swimming, so I just grabbed the rope and
brought it in." I rubbed my sore hands together. "It wasn't easy. The
damn thing towed like a dead whale."

           
"You did what you could, Senor
Helm." She was a very attractive young lady, and she ran the marina
operation very efficiently, but what really impressed me was that she turned up
for work each morning in a simple cotton dress. A US female in her job with her
figure couldn't have resisted appearing in a ducky little sailor-boy pantsuit
plastered all over with cute gold anchors, just to show how nautical she was.
"You are staying at the Posada San Carlos? The authorities may wish to ask
you some more questions, Senor Helm."

           
"Sure," I said. "I'll
be there until tomorrow morning some time-well, if they insist on my staying
on, I suppose I'll have to."

           
"I do not think that will be
necessary."

           
"In that case," I said,
"I'll pay my bill and pick up my boat tomorrow. Is there any chance of
getting somebody to wash it down for me after I get it on the trailer?"

           
"Certainly, senor. The price is
six dollars. You had better come early while the tide is high so you have
plenty of water at the launching ramp. .. . Excuse me."

           
She turned to take a call on the
electronic gizmo behind her, speaking Spanish too rapid and colloquial for me
to follow. She put down the microphone and sighed, turning back to me.

           
"That was the captain of the
boat I sent out. He says it is very dark out there, and he has found nothing. I
told him to come back in." She moved her shoulders. "If they will
insist on taking such little boats out in such bad weather. . . . They cannot
be made to understand that this is a big and dangerous body of water, senor.
They see it so calm and smooth in the morning and will not believe how it can
get rough by evening."

           
"Sure."

           
I went back down to the dock to get
the tackle I'd left in the boat, although I'd had no trouble with pilferage,
and neither had anybody else with whom I'd talked. Gear that would have
vanished in an hour from a US parking lot had stayed safely on board week after
week, but it seemed unfair to strain some poor Mexican's honesty with a couple
of expensive rods and a pair of good binoculars.

           
After lifting the stuff onto the
dock, ready to carry ashore, I checked the lines and rearranged the canvas
bumpers so she wouldn't chafe. Then I went over to the aluminum skiff docked
astern, still full of water, just the way I'd brought it in but not quite the
way I'd found it.

           
I'd taken the precaution, once I'd
got it into relatively calm water, to check it over. There had been a soggy box
of 7 mm Remington Magnum rifle cartridges, partly used, tucked under a seat.
Lashed to one of the braces I'd found a long, soft, black plastic fishing rod
case that was arranged a little differently inside from what you'd expect. I'd
slipped the cartridge box into the case, for weight, zipped up the case, and
dropped it overboard in exactly one hundred and ten feet of water-assuming that
the electronic depth-finder on my fancy little borrowed ship was properly
calibrated.

           
Now I frowned down at the
registration number on the bow of the skiff, a
California
number of course, amid debated whether or
not to risk a visit to Mr. Joel Patterson's camper across the road, but I
couldn't think of anything I might find that would be worth the attention and
suspicion I might attract. I found myself wondering how long he'd lasted out
there, and dismissed the thought.

           
Then I deliberately brought it back
out and examined it, because if you're going to do it you'd damn well better be
able to look it in the eye. I have no respect for these remote-control killers
who can happily push a bomb release in a high-flying airplane as long as they
don't have to see the blasted bodies hundreds of feet below; but who can't bear
to pull the trigger of a .45 auto and produce one bloody corpse at ten yards.

           
There was a chance that he'd made it
ashore or would still make it. I'd known men who could have, but I didn't think
he was one of that select group of amphibious humans. His specific gravity had
been too great, for one thing: he'd had too much bone and too little fat for
adequate flotation. I've got the same problem myself. He'd looked like a lean,
tanned, swimming-pool hero to me, good only for impressing the bikini babes
with a couple of smoking-fast laps between drinks, not the chunky, buoyant,
durable fish-man type it usually takes to survive in stormy waters a couple of
miles offshore.

           
I stood there a moment longer,
feeling baffled and irritable. In my line of work, I have killed several
people; in fact you might go so far as to say that is my line of work. However,
I'm usually given a few compelling reasons why the touch, as we call it, is
necessary for the continued welfare of the human race and the
United States of America
. In this case I'd been struck at, and had
struck back, without having any idea what the hell it was all about.

           
The sound of a motor made me look up
quickly. A boat was coming through the narrow entrance of the yacht basin with
running lights on; I'd seen it before. It was the snub-nosed I/O runabout that
had gone out to test the big waves earlier in the day and come racing back in
again. When it came under the marina lights, I saw that spray was crusted on
its windshield and that the five kids on board were pretty wet. There was a
short-haired girl, two long-haired girls, amid two long-haired boys. They were
laughing and joking and passing cans of beer around as they coasted up to an
empty dock space some distance away.

           
I picked up my rods amid tackle box
and carried them up to the station wagon that had been part of the package I'd
picked up in
Tucson
: a big Chevrolet with a monstrous 454-cubic-inch engine. The mill was
fairly sluggish for all those cubes; the best that could be said for it was
that it worked pretty well on the low-test gas that's all that's readily
available in
Mexico
.

           
The wagon itself was one of those
delectable styling exercises whipped up by the butterfly boys to make the
salesmen happy, and to hell with the customers who'll eventually have to live
with it. It had a lot of tricky features to generate sales appeal-a vanishing
tailgate; vanishing windshield wipers-but big as it was it had no leg-room at
all, certainly nowhere near enough for my six feet four. I'd had to have the
front seat moved back several inches to make it just marginally inhabitable. Furthermore,
although it had seats for six passengers and space for a mountain of luggage,
it had springs stolen from a baby carriage designed for very light babies.

           
I'd had to have the rear suspension
drastically beefed up to keep the tail from dragging in the road-with a load of
just me, one suitcase, a little fishing tackle, and a relatively light boat
trailer with a tongue weight of considerably less than two hundred pounds!

           
Add to these major aberrations
various minor, uncorrected new-car ailments that I'd had to have put right, and
you can see why I wasn't unreceptive to the idea, once it had occurred to me,
that I might be the first person to use the outfit, regardless of what Mac had
told me. To be sure, there had been several thousand miles on the odometer when
I got the heap, but that can be arranged by the specialists we keep handy,
without moving the car out of its tracks. Apparently my superior had gone to
sonic trouble to have the boat and motor checked out-I'd had no trouble with
them-hut he'd kind of taken for granted that a new ear was bound to be
satisfactory, which showed how much lie knew about modern cars. Well, it was
nice to know he wasn't infallible in all areas.

           
I threw my stuff into the wagon
through the trick tailgate and started the thing by fighting the trick starter
switch that locked the shift lever, locked the steering wheel, and bawled you
out if you left your key behind-it did everything, in fact, except start the
car easily. I drove to my hotel a mile away. It was an attractive, rambling
collection of low buildings on a beautiful curving beach at the head of a
spectacularly beautiful bay. Of course, I couldn't see it in the dark, and I
wasn't really in the mood for scenic beauty, anyway.

           
I stopped by my room to make a quick
change from my fishing clothes into something respectable. Then I went into the
lounge-the place had no real bar as such-found a big chair near the fireplace
in which nothing was burning this late in the spring, and took a grateful slug
of the martini that was brought me promptly. Presently I was aware that
somebody had sat down in the chair to my left. I looked and saw that it was the
short-haired girl from the runabout I'd just seen docking.

           
She said softly, "So you
couldn't leave it alone, Mr. Helm. You couldn't just give thanks for your
escape and leave it at that. You had to go after him and drown him!"