The Intimidators (16 page)

Haseltine licked his lips and didn’t speak. After a moment, Harriet said brightly: “Haseltine. Haven’t I heard that name recently? Of course, you’re the man who landed a world’s record tarpon off Boca Grande last spring....”

Good girl. They were off; and I had to listen to lures and lines and rods and reels and striking drag and fighting drag and all the rest of the saltwater-angling routine. At the moment, it didn’t interest me greatly, but it carried us through dinner; and by the time we got to our coffee, Harriet had wheedled our tame Texas millionaire into a pretty good mood.

“Okay,” he said at last, condescending to acknowledge my presence once more, “okay, now let’s hear about this hunch of yours.”

I said, “You tell him, Hattie.”

“Matt thinks the place you want is somewhere along the coast of Cuba,” she said.

Haseltine frowned. “Cuba? Hell, that’s clear over on this side of the Bahamas, way south and west of the
Ametta’s
course. What makes you think they’re in Cuba?”

I said. “Assuming they’re alive, and not at the bottom of the Atlantic, they couldn’t be anywhere else, if you did any kind of a job looking for them.”

He bristled. “Damn it, man, we checked every scrap of land in the upper Bahamas—hell, the whole Bahamas—and every patch of water. And the authorities were just as thorough; although they didn’t carry their search patterns out quite as far as we did.”

I nodded. “That’s just the point. You all looked, and looked hard, in all the plausible places, figuring the yacht’s course and the prevailing winds and currents. Apparently, at that time, you were thinking in terms of a natural disaster of some kind, or a seminatural one like a collision with a ship. Then, Bill, for some reason you decide you were dealing with a criminal endeavor instead of an accident or act of God, and got me involved. I’d like to know what changed your mind.”

He hesitated, and shrugged. “I guess you’d call it the process of elimination. Collision, fire, explosion, foundering... in any of those cases there’d have been something left floating and we’d have found it, like I told you before. Anyway, Buster Phipps wasn’t that kind of a skipper, like I also told you. Therefore it didn’t just happen. Somebody made it happen; and I want the guy who did.”

It was plausible enough; but he didn’t look at us as he said it. This was no time to play boy detective, however, and I said: “Sure. Either somebody sank the boat and then hung around and carefully policed the area to make lure nothing drifted away to betray him; or he captured it and took it somewhere. Well, there have been two significant disappearances since the
Ametta Too
. Both involved rich individuals of some prominence, the kind who are generally considered more useful as living hostages than dead corpses. We can therefore at least hope that they, and the people from the
Ametta
, are all being held somewhere alive, for some purpose. We can also figure they were brought to this place, wherever it is, by the means of transportation they were using when captured. In other words, we can figure the kidnapings were inside jobs.” Haseltine started to speak, maybe to remind me that he’d had all the
Ametta’s
crew checked out without finding anything really damaging. He stopped.

It was Harriet who asked: “What makes you so sure of that?”

“Sure?” I said. “Who’s sure? I’m just guessing wildly. Maybe we’re dealing with a homicidal seagoing maniac who’s got a murderous grudge against anybody with a bank account exceeding five figures. But if we’re not, if we’ve got a series of kidnapings to solve, then they’re most likely inside jobs because one involved a plane. And while taking over one boat from another on the high seas has been done since the ancient days of piracy, capturing one flying airplane from another isn’t really practical under most circumstances—at the best, it would involve a serious risk of alerting nearby ground stations with a lot of melodramatic radio chatter. Well, if the plane was an inside job, a hijacking carried out by somebody on board, it seems likely that the boat disappearances were, too. Certainly it’s the method involving least equipment. Instead of armed pirate ships and planes, all you need is a few enterprising individuals with guns. So we have to find a place to which all the hijackers could sail or fly fairly quickly, a place where they could hide a couple of big yachts and a sizable airplane. And considering how hard everybody seems to have looked everywhere else, it’s likely that spot is in Cuba, the one island within reach that nobody can search without becoming the target for a lot of Castro firepower....” I stopped, as the waitress approached the table. “Yes, Miss?”

“Are you Mr. Helm? There’s a phone call for you. Over there, sir.”

I went over there and talked a while with Mac, who, it seemed, had missed his flight to Washington or taken another back. I returned to the table.

“Your boys are going to be okay,” I said to Haseltine. “Everything seems to be under control, medically speaking. However, I’m afraid I’m going to have to split, as the cats say, and take Hattie with me. There’s a new lead we have to look into—”

“I’ll come with you.”

I looked at him wearily, reminding myself that he was after all a taxpayer, the man who paid my salary, such as it was.

“Don’t give me a hard time, Bill,” I said. “You got hold of me because I was supposed to know what I was doing, didn’t you? Well, just relax and let me do it. I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, as soon as you can, charter us a good-sized seagoing powerboat, something around thirty feet, say, that’ll really burn up the water, say thirty knots; the fastest thing you can lay your hands on large enough to carry a dozen people without getting low and slow in the water. Cruising radius, four or five hundred miles—”

“You’re dreaming,
amigo,
” Haseltine said. “There aren’t any fast thirty-footers around with that kind of range built in, unless you want to mess around with a lot of spare fuel-drums in the cockpit. You’ll have to get something bigger to go that far.”

I said, “Okay, you’re the expert. Pick what you figure we need and get it ready for a long haul. Your story, if anybody asks, is that you’re heading for the marlin grounds somewhere to do this hypothetical story of ours—”

“Off Yucatan, maybe? Cozumel? That’s better than a four-hundred-mile run from Key West. It would explain the extra fuel.” Now that he was being consulted, he was flattered and cooperative.

“Now you’re cooking,” I said, and we left him there.

Outside, I asked Harriet, “What the hell is a Cozumel?”

She laughed. “Like the man said, it’s off the south coast of Yucatan, over on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico. A Mexican resort island with a lot of fish around it.... Matt?”

“Yes?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but I do have a fairly fast cruising boat with plenty of range. I mean the
Queen
fisher,
not the outboard. She won’t do thirty, but she’ll cruise all day at twenty, and hit twenty-five in a pinch.”

“Sure,” I said. “So let’s keep him busy and happy scrounging up another. He can afford it, and maybe it’ll keep him out of my hair. Besides, what the hell makes you think I’d trust any boat and crew of yours any farther than I have to? Incidentally, where is your crew? You can’t run both those boats yourself, and a mate was mentioned; but I haven’t seen anybody around.”

She glanced at me sharply as we stopped at the car. I thought she was about to make an angry retort, but she laughed softly instead.

“That’s better,” she murmured. “That’s much better! I thought you were being just a little too trusting and forgiving. Yes, I do have a captain and mate for the
Queen
fisher,
but I let them take off for a couple of weeks. I didn’t want them hanging around just now, if you know what I mean. The outboard I handle myself when I’ve got a client for it.”

“I bet it’s fun, poling that big job across the flats. Well, get in. It makes me nervous as hell, standing around under these damn loaded palm trees.”

She was laughing again as I got in beside her. “You’re really something else, Matt, as they say nowadays. First you casually put two roughnecks into the hospital, and then you worry about getting conked by a stray coconut.” She hesitated. “Are you permitted to tell me what you learned over the phone, darling, or shouldn’t I ask?”

I grimaced. “Well, to be philosophical, it’s the great modern dilemma,” I said as I started the car and drove us out of there without a single heavy object bouncing off the roof. “It would be so simply marvelous if the human animal weren’t aggressive by nature, so a lot of people figure they can stop it from being so just by having everybody pretend it isn’t so. The only trouble is, they won’t sit down and calculate what’s going to happen if the prescription doesn’t work on everybody who takes it.”

“Yes, Professor,” Harriet said obligingly, “and what is going to happen, please?”

“Exactly what has happened,” I said. “Bunches of arrogant thugs—like those college creeps who came for me—shoving people around, serenely confident that none of their brainwashed, nonviolent fellow-citizens will be willing to, or able to, lift a hand in effective self-defense. Once you start raising whole generations on the lovely, unrealistic principle that the use of force is always evil and unthinkable, that you should be willing to endure any indignity and pay any price rather than spill a little blood, why, you’ve set yourself right up for them, haven’t you?”

“For whom, darling?”

“For the intimidators,” I said. “For the people who haven’t the slightest qualms about using force or spilling blood. For the ones on whom the pretend-we’re-all-nice medicine didn’t work. All the bullies and dictators and little-league Caesars.
And
all the kidnapers and hijackers and political-action fanatics who’ve suddenly discovered the wonderful leverage we’ve given them by our terrified modern attitude toward violence. They’ve learned that the way to intimidate the whole tender-hearted world and make it do their bidding is just to wave a weapon at somebody, anybody. Just flourish a knife or a gun under the nose of one pretty airline stewardess and just like that you’ve got yourself a whole airplane and a million-dollar ransom....”

“I suppose there’s a point to all this,” Harriet said dryly.

I grinned. “I always say, there’s nothing like a woman making a man feel big by hanging breathlessly on his every word. Sure, there’s a point. That’s what this is all about, all these mysterious disappearances. To hell with the Voodoo Sea of Missing Ships. Just as we were guessing, it’s another lousy hostage-for-ransom deal; and why they spread the operation over a couple of months remains to be seen. I don’t know the details yet, or just what payment is being demanded or who’s demanding it, but there’s a man meeting us in my cabin who’ll brief us....”

It was a beautiful, cool, quiet, Florida fall evening with plenty of stars but no moon. That is, it was beautiful and quiet once we turned off the garish Keys highway and headed down past the Faro Blanco office along one of the treelined resort drives. My cabin was dark when we reached it. I kept on driving. Harriet stirred beside me.

“I thought you had Number Twenty-six,” she said.

“I never told you that,” I said. “You’ve been snooping. If you know so much, maybe you can tell me why the light isn’t on.”

She laughed. “Don’t overdo the secret agent bit, darling.”

I said, “A gent named Ramsay Pendleton, a fine, upstanding British operative, was supposed to be waiting for us in my place, with the light on. My chief knows I don’t like meeting people in the dark when I don’t have to, even people I know; and there’s no reason for us to be mysterious tonight. Well, the light isn’t on. Can you offer an explanation?”

Now she was angry. “Damn it, of course I can’t, Matt. How the hell could I?”

“I don’t know; I was just asking,” I said mildly. “After all, I never did learn just how the Mickey got into that drink you served me all those years ago, either.” I pulled onto the grass at the side of the driveway and grinned at her in the darkness. “Relax, I was just needling you. But this is for serious: wait here. You’re not dressed for prowling through the bushes, and it isn’t safe. That cabin of mine seems to have a fascination for unsavory and unfriendly people tonight; I’ve already been jumped there once. Maybe I’m imagining things, but as far as I’m concerned, once I’m out there, anything that moves is hostile and I’m going to shoot hell out of it. I’ll be sorry if it turns out to be you, but my abject apologies won’t do you much good if you can’t hear them. So please don’t set foot outside this car until I get back. Okay?”

I took the short-barreled Smith and Wesson from under my belt; and slipped out of the car, eased the door closed, and made my way back through the maze of trees and cabins and little concrete walks. Out here I could hear the occasional sounds of voices and television sets, but the small, dark, white building in which I was interested was almost silent. The windows were all closed, as I’d left them. The air-conditioner was running, making a small whirring sound, that was all. I remembered turning it on earlier. Well, maybe Ramsay Pendleton hadn’t got here yet; the question was why. Mac’s scheduling usually works as planned; he’d have made a good train-dispatcher. Maybe our British associate had been here and left, and again the question was why.

There was no easy way of doing it. There was only one door. I had to pass through it. It took me longer than it normally takes a citizen to enter a room he’s rented for the night; but once I started to go, I went a lot lower and faster. On the floor inside, gun ready, I waited in the chilly, air-conditioned dark for greetings, hostile or friendly. None came.

I got up, switched on the light, brushed myself off, and checked the little kitchenette and bathroom at the rear of the place, feeling, as always after taking a lot of unnecessary precautions, like a melodramatic damned fool. Well, it’s a better feeling than dead, or so I’m told.

Harriet looked around quickly as I slid into the car once more. “Well?”

“Nothing,” I said. “No booby traps, no splintered furniture, no bullet-holes in doors or walls, no pools of coagulating gore. I think the resort office was closed when we drove by just now. Where’s another phone booth?”