“Who wants a sandwich?” Morrison asked.
Ingram shook his head; it was too hot to eat anything.
“Makes me sick at my stomach to think about it,” Rae Osborne said. She sat up and dug listlessly in her purse for a cigarette.
Ruiz went below and returned a few minutes later with two sandwiches. He and Morrison ate in silence. Morrison threw the remainder of his overboard, watched it float away on the tide, and set the gun behind him on the deckhouse. “Mind the store,” he said to Ruiz, and went below. Ingram looked at the gun. Ruiz intercepted the glance, and shook his head, the slim Latin face devoid of any expression whatever. It was useless, Ingram knew. They were a team, and a good one, in the skilled profession of violence—whatever their particular branch of it was.
When Morrison returned he was carrying a tall glass containing some colorless fluid and three ice cubes. Rae Osborne looked at it with interest. “What’s that?”
“Rum,” he said.
“Is there any more?”
“Whole case of it, Toots. You’ll have to use water, though. We’re out of Cokes.”
She brightened visibly. “You’ve convinced me. Which way’s the bar?”
“Straight ahead till you come to a room full of dirty dishes. Bottle’s on the sink, reefer’s under it. Bring Herman one while you’re at it.”
“I don’t want any,” Ingram said.
She disappeared below. Well, maybe that was the practical attitude; if you couldn’t whip ‘em, join ‘em, especially if they had anything to drink. He removed the soggy leather case from his shirt, found a cigar that might be dry enough to burn, and lighted it. He stepped back to the binnacle, removed the hood, and looked at the compass again. The heading had changed to 012. He nodded thoughtfully. Rae Osborne came up the ladder, carrying her drink, and sat down with her feet stretched out across the cockpit.
“This is more like it,” she said to Morrison. “What about these guns? Where are you going with them?”
“A place called Bahia San Felipe, just north of the Canal.”
“You going to start a revolution, or what?”
Morrison shook his head. “We’re just supplying the stuff this time.”
“How did Patrick Ives get mixed up in it? It’s a little out of his line.”
Morrison chuckled. “Money. That’s in his line, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I think you could say that. And then say it again. But just how did you meet?”
“I ran into him in a bar in Miami two or three weeks ago. We got to talking about gun-running, among other things. It was a big business around there for a while during the Cuban fracas, you remember, and the Feds were still uncovering a batch now and then. Anyway, I happened to mention I knew where there was a whole shipment hid out in an old house down near Homestead—”
“How did you know about it?” Rae Osborne asked.
“From one of the boys that’d been flying it in for this particular outfit. I was in the racket myself, and knew quite a few of ‘em. Anyway, this Hollister—or Ives as you call him—got interested in it and wanted to know what I thought the shipment was worth. I told him probably a hundred grand—that is, delivered to somebody that needed it bad enough. So he wanted to know if it would be possible to lift the stuff and maybe peddle it somewhere. I told him getting away with it would be a cinch, but that there wasn’t much market for it at present. Then I remembered Carlos. We’d been in a couple of Central American revolutions together, besides the Cuban one, and he knew most of the politicos-in-exile that Miami’s always full of, and could probably come up with a customer if we could figure out a way to deliver. That’s when Ives got the idea of liberating the Dragoon. He said he could sail it, and knew how to navigate. The only trouble was, it’d been some time since he’d been aboard the boat, and he didn’t know what kind of condition it was in—naturally, we couldn’t steal it and then go in a shipyard somewhere—so we’d have to look it over first. He couldn’t go himself because the watchman might recognize him and blow the whistle on him afterward, and Carlos and I didn’t know anything about boats, so we had to send somebody else.”
Rae Osborne took another sip of her drink. “Do the people who owned the guns know who got away with them?”
Morrison shook his head. “Not a chance. We took ‘em out of the house at night with a truck we rented under a phony name.”
“How did you get them aboard the Dragoon?”
“We brought her into a place down in the Keys after dark and put ‘em aboard with a couple of skiffs, along with the supplies and gasoline we’d picked up at different places. We spent the rest of the night slapping a coat of paint on her, and got out just before daylight. That was still before anybody even realized she was stolen.”
“And you’re still determined to deliver the guns?”
“Of course.”
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Less than two weeks. After we get loose here, I mean. What do you think, Herman?”
“It would depend on the weather,” Ingram said. “And to a great extent on whether you ever got there at all.”
“You’ve got a negative attitude, pal. Learn to look on the bright side.”
Rae Osborne shrugged, and drained her glass. “Well, I’d have given odds I’d never be in the gun-running business, but I guess you never know. I think we ought to have another one.”
“Sure.” Morrison grinned. “I’ll go with you. I could use one too.”
They went down the ladder. In a moment the sound of laughter issued from below. Ingram puffed his cigar and tried to read Ruiz’ expression, but it was inscrutable. He knows it, though, he thought; we’re headed for more trouble, if we didn’t have enough already. The two of them came back shortly with fresh drinks.
“You’re sure I get the Dragoon back?” she asked.
“Natch. What do I want with it? As soon as the guns are off and we get paid, Carlos and I take it on the Arthur Duffy, and you and Herman can sail it back to Key West. We’ll see you get enough supplies and fresh water for the trip. What’s to complain about—a Caribbean cruise, with me along as social director? Hell, if we’d advertised, we’d have had to fight the girls off with clubs.”
She laughed. “You know what I like about you? It’s your modesty.”
Ingram looked at her with disgust, thinking that boredom must be a terrible thing. She was already telling people about it at cocktail parties. All the way across the Caribbean, darling, with this whole load of guns and bullets and stuff that might blow up any minute or something, and this absolute brute of a man that looked like Genghis Khan except he was kind of cute in a hairy sort of way if you know what I mean, and always carrying this awful machine gun in his arm ... It was just a lark, like trying to get an extra carton of cigarettes past the Customs inspector.
He wondered if it would do any good to tell her the chances were excellent she’d never even get across the Caribbean in a boat loaded as the Dragoon was, and that if she did and was lucky enough not to be killed outright by the Guarda Costas she’d probably have her boat confiscated and spend several years in a verminous prison where the United States State Department couldn’t do anything for her at all. Then he shrugged. It didn’t seem worth the effort.