The Getaway (Read a Great Movie) (15 page)

"We-el, let's see now," Ma said. "What you think it's been worth to you, Doc?"

"Why-" he kept his smile warm, but there was a cold lump in his stomach. Several times already he had mentally totted up the money in the belts and divided it by two. "Why, I wouldn't put a figure on it, Ma. It's worth whatever you say it is, and whatever you say is a hundred percent okay with me."

"How'd five grand strike you?"

Five!
He'd been expecting-well, he didn't know just what. But when people tapped you on a deal like this, it was usually for most of what you had. And there was nothing you could do but like it.

"It's not enough," he declared, generous in his relief. "I'd be getting a bargain at ten."

"Knew you'd take it that way." Ma wagged her head in satisfaction. "Told Earl you would, didn't I, son? But it ain't for us, Doc. What I had in mind was, if you're sure that five or ten won't pinch you…"

"Ten. And it doesn't matter if it does pinch!"

"Well, I'd like you to pass it on to Pat Gangloni. I told you he was down there, I guess. He wasn't carryin' very heavy when he skipped, an'! been pretty concerned about him."

"Good old Pat," Doc said. "I'll see that he gets it, Ma."

"I'd o' helped him myself. But he was in an' out awful fast, an' I didn't have nothin' I could get at in a hurry. So," she wrung his hand. "I'm right pleased you'll be lookin' out for him. Know you mean to or you wouldn't say so."

"It's as good as done," Doc promised. "After all, Pat's a mighty good friend of mine, too."

They rode in the captain's car with Doc in the front seat between him and one of his crew, and Carol in the rear between the remaining two crewmen. Fog was thickening over San Diego, slowly descending upon the bay. The car crept through it cautiously, coming into the quay from the north, then circling the city's civic center, and returning from the south.

The boat was a sturdy fifty-footer, tied up about halfway down the long wharf. There were other seagoing craft on either side of it, a shrimp fisherman and a pleasure launch, but both were silent and dark. The captain parked the car and put the keys in the glove compartment. (It would be picked up by one of his many kinsmen.) He opened the door, spoke quickly in Portuguese and English. "Now, we are in a hurry; so we must be to go out with the tide. But we are not running. We go slow fast, yes?"

His teeth gleamed in a nervous smile. He got out and the others followed him, and they moved with unhurried haste across the quay. The captain leaped aboard, held out his hands to Carol. Doc landed on the deck a second behind her, and calling low-voiced instructions over his shoulder, the captain showed them to his tiny cabin. It was to be theirs for the voyage. He himself would bunk with the crew.

He closed the door behind him; and there was a murmuring of voices, a blurred confusion of sounds. Then the roar-quickly muted- of the boat's twin diesels. And they moved out into the bay.

The captain came back, drew the shades over the portholes and turned on the light. "You will be very quiet, yes?" He smiled his white, nervous smile. "On the water, the sound she travels far."

He left again. Almost imperceptibly, the boat gathered speed. They slid deeper and deeper into the fog, and the gray mass of it closed in behind them.

Doc prowled about the cabin, automatically inspecting it as he did any place that was strange to him. He was looking for nothing in particular. Simply looking. Most top-drawer criminals have this habit. It had saved Doc's life several times, conversely bringing about the loss of another's life or other's lives on each occasion.

He checked the small shelf of books, and the first aid cabinet. He looked under the bunk, smiling an apology at Carol who had lain down on it. He poked through the pigeonholes of the desk, located a key ring, and unlocked and examined each of the drawers. Reloeking them-and leaving their contents exactly as he found them-he turned his attention to the heavy chest at the foot of the bunk.

It was padlocked at either end. Doc made a selection from the keys on the ring, found the appropriate ones on the first try and raised the heavy oak lid. There was a quantity of grayish blankets inside; also, bedded between them, several boxes of ammunition, two repeating rifles and two twelve-gauge double-barreled shotguns. Doc's eyes lit up. Then, almost absently, he loaded the shotguns, laid them at the top of the chest and lowered the lid. He put the locks back on their staples-not locked, although they appeared to be. That completed his inspection and its corollary activities, and he rehid the keys in their pigeonhole and fixed himself a drink.

Lying in the bunk, Carol watched her husband for a few moments, then turned on her side and closed her eyes. His behavior was merely another variation of a norm. If there was anything more than that behind it, he would tell her. When and if the telling became necessary.

She slept.

Almost immediately, it seemed, she came awake again.

Out there in the night, there was a peculiar echo to the boat's diesels. Or, no it wasn't an echo, but the mounting purr of another engine. And against the blinded portholes, pushing stubbornly through the fog, was a fuzzy beam of light.

The cabin was dark. There was silence-tense, expectant-and then Doc's harsh whisper. Carol could see him now, feel him sitting at her side. And near the door, she saw the white flash of the captain's teeth.

"You do what I tell you to, Pete. My wife and I will do the rest."

"No! Please, senhor! I cannot-it is not necessary! Only a small launch, no more than three men, I know! All…"

"That makes it all the better."

"Please! I tell you we do not have to! I swear it, and I know thees Coast Guard. Am I a stranger to them? Have I not made this same run many times? We will chat for a few moments, perhaps, and…"

"And they'll hold you up in the meantime. Find out who you are, where you're headed. Get all the dope they need to have us nailed by a cruiser."

"But-but-" there was a desperate sob in the darkness. "But later, senhor? What of that? His position will have been known, and it will be known that I, my boat, was…"

"You can blame it on me. My wife and I slipped on board without your knowledge, and took charge of your guns and ammunition."

"Ha! They will believe such a story?"

"Why not? It's a pretty good one." Doc paused ominously. "In fact, I'd say it was a lot better than the other one."

"You say! It is easy for-what other one?"

"The one you'd have to tell Ma Santis. Not that it would do you any good, Pete. Nothing you could tell her would do any good."

"But…"

The captain sighed heavily. The purr of the motor launch swelled to a sluggish drone.

"I don't like it either, Pete," Doc said earnestly. "I hate killing, and I particularly hate this. But what else can I do?"

"What else?" It scarcely sounded like the captain's voice. "Yes, what else, senhor? What could possibly be dearer than one's own life?"

He turned and left. A moment later there was a cry of "Ahoy, there! Ahoy,
Elena Isabella!
" Then a gentle bump and the scraping of wood against wood.

Doc cocked the shotguns. He handed one of them to Carol, and silently opened the two portholes.

There were three men in the launch: a gunner, the steersman, and its captain, a young lieutenant j.g. He stood with one foot braced on the side of his boat, cap pushed back on his head. The steersman slouched nearby, an elbow hooked over the windshield. Hands in his pockets, the gunner stood by his stern-mounted machine gun.

Doc studied him. He put a restraining hand on Carol's arm. Wait! Perhaps the three would draw closer together.

"What's the big hurry, Pete?" The lieutenant spoke in an amiable drawl; a friend addressing a friend. "Weren't trying to run away from me, were you?"

"R-run?" the captain laughed shakily. "Who runs? Who is in a hurry?"

"Didn't bait up tonight, did you? Why not?"

"Why? Because I did so this afternoon. Also I iced, fueled, provisioned, keesed my wife…"

"Okay, okay," the lieutenant chuckled. "Got any coffee in the galley? Jack, bring us our bucket back there."

The gunner came forward with a tin lunch pail. The lieutenant extended it upward, holding onto him for support.

"
Now
!" said Doc.

He got the two of them, almost cutting them in half at the waist with one double blast. They doubled over, toppled down into the dark water between the two boats. Carol's shot got the steersman in the face and chest. He was still alive when two of the fisherman's crew tossed him over the side, and blinded, faceless, he managed to struggle to the surface. Mercifully one of the men crushed his skull with an axe. Then they chopped a hole in the bottom of the launch, and leaped back aboard their own craft.

The diesels roared frantically. The boat lunged at the waves, lunged through them like a terrified thing. Running as though it could never run far enough, as though it would run forever. And then, as the hours passed, slowing. For what was done was done, and for now, at least, there was no need to run.

As for Carol and Doc…

They lay in one another's arms; replete, reunited at last. And Doc held her very close, stroked her head protectively. For she was his wife, much dearer to him then the average wife to the average husband. And if circumstances compelled him to think of her as an opponent- and he was not sure that they did, just yet-it was with no less love and a very great deal of regret.

She shivered against him, made muffled sounds against his chest. He emitted a few husbandly there-threes, murmured that everything was all right now. Then, realizing that she was laughing, he gave her a tender kiss. "Now, what's so funny, hum?"

"Y-you! I-I-don't be angry, Doc, but…"

"Of course I won't be. Now what did I do that amused you?"

"N-nothing! It was-well, just you!" She snickered delightedly. "You never really planned on staying in Mexico, did you? You never stopped hoping you could. Someday, somehow, you intended to do it. I could tell. I watched your expression when we were coming down on the train to San Diego, and-and…"

"And?"

"Well, you know. Now you can't. Not after that deal tonight."

"Correction," Doc said. "Now
we
can't."

Well, you see?

But it is there, all right.

Lying in a small coastal group of mountains, it suffers from sudden and drastic changes in climate. It is almost impossible to dress for it, the barely adequate clothes of one hour become a sweltering burden the next. And somehow, doubtless as an outgrowth of these climatic phenomena, one is always a little thirsty. Still, many tropical and semitropical climates have these same disadvantages, and worse. And there is this to be said for El Rey's kingdom: it is healthy. Disease is almost unknown. Even such man-created maladies as malnutrition and starvation are minus much of their normal potency, and a man may be almost consumed by them before he succumbs to them.

It is an excellent place in many ways. Healthy. Possessed of a climate to suit every taste. Protected by the largest per capita police force in the world. Yet there is constant grumbling among its expatriate guests. One of the commonest causes of complaint, strangely, is that all accommodations-everything one must buy-are strictly first class.

Not that they are exorbitantly priced, understand. On the contrary. A four-bathroom villa, which might cost several thousand a month in some French Riviera resort, will rent for no more than a few hundred. But you can get nothing for less than that. You must pay that few hundred. It is the same with food and drink, nothing but the very best; with clothes, cosmetics, tobacco, and a hundred other things. All quite reasonably priced for what they are, but still worrisomely expensive to people who have just so much money and can get no more.

El Rey manifests great concern over these complaints, but there is a sardonic twinkle in his ageless old eyes. Naturally, he provides only the best for his guests. Isn't it what they always wanted elsewhere? Didn't they insist on having it, regardless of cost? Well, then! He goes on to point out that less exquisite accommodations and material goods would encourage an undesirable type of immigrant; persons his present guests would not care to be identified with. For if they did, they obviously would not be what they were nor be where they were.

Watching their assets trickle, nay, pour away on every side, people scheme and struggle feverishly to economize. They cut down on food, they do without drink, they wear their clothes threadbare. And the result is that they are just as much out of pocket as if they had bought what they did without.

Which brings us to the subject of El Rey's bank, another cause for bitter complaint.

The bank makes no loans, of course. Who would it make them to? So the only available source of revenue is interest, paid by the depositor rather than to him. On balances of one hundred thousand dollars or more, the rate is six percent; but on lesser sums it rises sharply, reaching a murderous twenty-five percent on amounts of fifty thousand and under. Briefly, it is almost imperative that a patron keep his account at or above the one hundred thousand figure. But he may not do this by a program of skimping and doing without. When one's monthly withdrawals fall under an arbitrary total-the approximate amount which it should cost him to live at the prevailing first-class scale-he becomes subject to certain "inactive account" charges. And these, added to his withdrawals, invariably equal that total.

This is just about as it has to be, of course. El Rey must maintain an elaborately stocked commissary; and he can only do so on a fixed-patronage basis. Such is the rule in almost every first-class resort. A certain tariff is collected from every guest, and whether he uses what he pays for is strictly up to him.

To strike another analogy: no one is compelled to deposit his money in El Rey's bank. But the resort management, specifically the police, will assume no responsibility if it is stolen-as it is very likely to be. There is good reason to believe that the police themselves do the stealing from non-depositors. But there is no way of proving it, and certainly nothing to be done about it.

So the complaints go on. El Rey is unfair. You can't win against him. ("You would argue fairness with me, senor? But why should you expect to win?") He listens courteously to all grievances, but you get no satisfaction from him. He tosses your words back at you, answers questions with questions, retorts with biting and ironic parables. Tell him that such and such a thing is bad, and suggest a goodly substitute, and he will quote you the ancient proverb about the king with two sons named Either and Neither. "An inquiry was made as to their character, senor. Were they good or bad boys, or which was the good and which the bad. And the king's reply? 'Either is neither and Neither is either.'"

People curse him. They call him the devil, and accuse him of thinking he is God. And El Rey will nod to either charge. "But is there a difference, senor? Where the difference between punishment and reward when one gets only what he asks for?"

Most immigrants to the kingdom come in pairs, married couples or simply couples. For the journey is an arduous one, and it can seldom be made without the devoted assistance of another. In the beginning, each will handle his own money, carefully contributing an exact half of the common expenses. But this is awkward, it leads to arguments, and no matter how much the individual has he is never quite free of the specter of want. So very soon there is a casual discussion of the advantages of a joint account, and it is casually agreed that they should open one. And from then on-well, the outcome depends on which of the two is the shrewder, the more cold-blooded or requires the least sleep.

And whoever is the survivor, and thus has the account at his disposal, will not be alone long. He will be encouraged to seek out another partner, or one will seek him out. And when their association terminates, as it must, there will be still another.

The process goes on and on; inevitable, immutable. As simple as ABC.

Mention was made of El Rey's police; the protection they provide the populace. But this is a word of broad implications. If one is to protect, he may not annoy. He must remember that life belongs to the living. He will be wise to refrain from stepping over the line of his obvious duty to harry down a miscreant who may not exist.

Sluggings are unheard of in El Rey's dominion. No one is ever shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled, or brought to death by the usual agencies of murder.

In fact, there are no murders. Officially, there are none. The very high death rate derives from the numerous suicides and the immigrants' proclivity for fatal accidents.

The fine swimming pools of the various villas are rarely used. The horses in the public stables grow fat for want of exercise, and the boats stand rotting in their docks. No one fishes, no one hunts, no one plays golf, tennis, or darts. Briefly, except for El Rey's annual grand ball, there is almost no social life. Anyone approaching another is suspect or suspicious.

Doc hardly knew what to do with himself. One day, a few months after his arrival, he took a walk up into the hills; and there, nestled in a pleasant valley and hidden from the city, he came upon a village. The one street was attractively cobblestoned; the buildings were freshly whitewashed. Drifting to him on the breeze came the smell of roasting peppery meat. The only people in sight were two men down near the end of the street, who were sweeping the cobblestones with long-handled brooms. Doc recognized them; he had nodded to them a time or two in the city. He raised his hand in a half-salute. But not seeing him apparently, they finished their sweeping and disappeared inside a building.

"Yes, senor?" A blue-uniformed
carabinero
stepped out of a nearby doorway. "I may be of service?"

"Nothing," Doc smiled. "I thought for a moment that I recognized those two men."

"The streetsweepers? They are friends of yours?"

"Oh, no. Not at all. Hardly know them as a matter of fact."

"I see. Well, they are newly arrived, those two. They will live here now, in case you should wonder about their absence from their usual haunts."

Doc looked around; commented on the pleasing appearance of the place. The
carabinero
agreed that everything was indeed well kept. "It is required. Each resident contributes such labor as he is able to."

"Uh-huh," Doc nodded. "It's a cooperative, right? The labor is contributed in lieu of money."

"That is right, senor."

"Mmm-hmm." Doc took another appreciative look around. "Now,! was wondering. My wife and I have a very nice villa in the city, but…"

"No, senor. You would not be eligible for admittance here."

"Well, now, I don't know about that," Doc began. But the officer cut him off.

He
was
sure that Doc was not eligible. When he became so, he would be notified. "You may depend on it, senor. Meanwhile, perhaps you would like to walk around-see what your future home will be like."

Doc said that he would, and they started down the wide, sparkling street. Smoke rolled up from the chimneys of the houses, but no one stood in their doorways or looked out their windows, and hardly a sound came from any of them. The high dry air seemed unusually warm, and Doc paused and mopped his face. "Where's the
cantina?
I'll buy the drinks."

"There is none, senor. You can buy no drinks here."

"Well, some coffee then."

"That neither, senor. No drink or food of any kind."

"No?" Doc frowned. "You mean everything has to be brought out from the city? I don't think I'd like that."

The officer slowly shook his head. "You would not like it, senor. But, no, that is not what I meant. Nothing is brought from the city. Nothing but the people themselves."

The words seemed to hang suspended in the air, a brooding message painted upon the silence. The
carabinero
seemed to study them, to look through them and on into Doc's eyes. And he spoke gently as though in answer to a question.

"Yes, senor, that is the how of it. No doubt you have already noticed the absence of a cemetery."

"B-but-" Doc brushed a shaky hand across his mouth. "B-but…"

That smell that filled the air. The odor of peppery, roasting flesh. Peppers could be had anywhere, for the picking, the asking, but the meat

"Quite fitting, eh, senor? And such an easy transition. One need only live literally as he has always done figuratively."

He smiled handsomely, and the gorge rose in Doc's throat; it was all he could do to keep from striking the man.

"Fitting?" he snarled. "It-it's disgusting, that's what it is! It's hateful, hideous, inhuman…"

"Inhuman? But what has that to do with it, senor?"

"Don't get sarcastic with me! I've taken care of better men than you without…"

"I am sure of it. That is why you are here, yes? But wait-" he pointed. "There is one who knows you, I believe."

The man had just emerged from one of the houses. He was well over six feet tall, some five or six inches perhaps. And his normal weight should have been- indeed it
had
been-no less than two hundred and fifty pounds. But what it was now could not possibly be more than a third of that.

His eyes were enormous in the unfleshed skull's head of his face. His neck was no larger than Doc's wrist. It was incredible that he could be alive; but, of course, the climate is very healthy in El Rey's kingdom and many people live to a hundred years and more.

He staggered toward Doc, mouthing silently in his weakness. In his helpless silence, the exaggerated slowness of his movements, he was like a man caught up in some terrifying nightmare.

"Pat-" Doc's voice was a sickened whisper. "Pat Gangloni." Automatically, he recoiled from the apparition; and then, bracing himself, he stepped forward deliberately and took Gangloni into his arms. "It's all right, Pat. Take it easy, boy. You're okay now." He patted the skeleton's shoulders, and Gangloni wept silently.

The
carabinero
watched them, an unaccustomed sympathy in his eyes.

"A sad case," he murmured. "Oh, but very sad. He is unable to resign himself. Already he has been here far longer than many."

"Never mind that!" Doc turned on him angrily. "Can you get me a car-a cab? Something to get him out of here?"

"We-el, yes. It will take a little time, but I can do it."

"Well, do it then! Go on!"

"Your pardon, senor." The
carabinero
didn't move. "You would take him out of here, you said. Out of here to where?"

"Where? Why, to my home, naturally! Someplace where I can take care of him. Get him back on his feet."

"And then, senor?"

"Then?"

"You will continue to provide for him?"

"Why, uh-" Doc slowed down a little. "Well, yes, of course. I suppose so. I mean-uh. –

"You would be required to, senor. As long as you were able to provide for yourself. It would be so pointless otherwise. So cruel. Inhuman, as you said a moment ago."

Gangloni began to shudder violently. He could not talk, but he could hear; like the man in the nightmare, he knew what was going on. Doc made a feeble attempt to free himself, and the skeleton arms tightened around him.