Mike was grinning at me and his thin, moist face looked satanic in the yellowy light. That crazy bastard was having the time of his life.
"Jim,"-he was playing Israel Hands again-"I reckon we're fouled, you and me, and we'll have to sign articles."
He made a quick snatching motion with his left hand to whip out the match and I chucked my handful of dirt at his face as he pounced toward me, and just like that we were in total darkness again and I dropped to the ground in a lump and felt his shins collide on my shoulder, and then I was up and going while Mike was still in a heavy crashing fall in the underbrush.
I broke through an opening between huge-trunked trees by sheer blind luck and started to run and I could hear Mike scrambling right behind me, and just then a christly tree jumped up and I ran smack into it with both arms outflung and all I could do was hug it dazedly like a witless man making love to a knothole.
I felt Mike brush past me in a rush and there was a thud and a rattle of dry branches and a gasp and a sense of something running into nothing and falling through it, and finally a clatter of stones and a throaty cry like Uuuah! And then nothing.
I stepped back from the tree I had been loving and felt my face over for something broken. Nothing seemed to be. I took a step forward and stopped. A black patch of mystery fell away in the darkness below me. I was standing on the lip of a ridge. The black patch down at the base was some kind of pit.
I climbed down the slope and realized I was standing in Flint's Treasure Pit. Mike Ransome was there too, but he wasn't standing.
I rolled him over and fished out a match and struck it. The light sparked in his eyes. He was staring up at me but he was seeing something else, somewhere else.
He had put his hands in front of his chest to break his fall. But he had forgotten that May's knife was in his right hand.
19
May was pacing up and down through a grayish garland of cigarette smoke when I opened the cabin door. She came to a full, abrupt stop and looked at me and it was a look I had never seen on her face before. Pure shock.
"Thax." She barely said it.
"Why don't you sit down, May?" I said.
I don't think she consciously heard me. She didn't sit down. She didn't make a move. She stared at me and her obsidian eyes seemed to grow in her porcelain-perfect face.
I said, "He's dead, May. He fell on your knife."
She kept staring at me and her black pupils glowed with a dull red light.
"You filthy bastard," she whispered.
"I wouldn't lie to you now, May. If I'd killed him I'd admit it. But I didn't. It was an accident."
Then she sat down, all at once, and it was a good thing the table bench was right behind her or I think she would have gone out on the deck. She seemed to have forgotten the cigarette that was smoking itself between her pale, tapered fingers. She looked blankly at the floor.
"I loved him."
I think she was telling herself, and I think she meant it. At least I think she thought she meant it, which made it just about the same thing. I went over and picked up Gabby's automatic and shoved it under my belt.
"What are you going to do?" She didn't look at me.
"Tell Ferris. I want out of this thing with a clean slate."
She looked at me. "He won't believe you."
"I think he will. He isn't stupid, you know, May. I think he just needed a little more time to get it sorted out. A good cop doesn't like to jump until he has all the facts down pat."
Her cigarette must have started to burn her fingers. She looked at it as if wondering what it was doing there. Then she dropped it on the floor and tapped at it with one red pump.
"Should I run, Thax?" It was not May's voice at all. It was quiet, grave, almost detached. I shook my head.
"It's too late to run, May. You couldn't get far enough fast enough. Besides, it doesn't really matter now, does it?"
"No," she said in the same nothing voice, "I guess it doesn't."
I left her sitting in the cabin. I closed the door very quietly and then I gathered up the rowboat they had used to reach the island and the one I had used and I tied the bow of the one to the stern of the other and rowed back to the Admiral Benbow dock.
The moon was just starting to come out from behind the black scud for another look around. It was nearly three AM.
They burnt the trash every night in a big furnace room behind the bunkhouse and I made a trip over there because it seemed like a good place to dry out my soggy clothes.
Nobody was in the baked room but an old man asleep on a blanket pallet. He had been making love to a gin bottle and he had neglected to put the cap back on it and there was that ginny perfume scent in the hot air that I could do without.
I capped his bottle for him. If it had been anything except gin I would have had a snort. I have no scruples when it comes to booze.
It didn't take long for my duds to dry out in that heat, and when I was dressed again I went over to the bunkhouse to use the phone.
Four or five of the rummies were sleeping it off in there but they were too far gone to be bothered by the electric light I snapped on.
A typical POed desk-sergeant voice told me no, Ferris wasn't at headquarters and what did I expect at that time of night, or maybe I didn't know what time of night it was?
I told him yes, I knew and that I also knew that another man had just been killed at Neverland and I thought maybe Ferris might want to be cut in on it.
The desk sergeant's 'voice got excited and he wanted to know who I was and who was killed and who had done it and everything except the color of my socks, and I kept asking for Ferris until finally he gave in grudgingly and switched the call to Ferris' home.
Mrs. Ferris answered and she was sleepy and mad and she said yes, her husband was there but didn't I know what time of night it was? Then Ferris came on by growling yeah?
I told him about it, most of it. How I had figured the plot and how I had gone over to Treasure Island and presented it to May and Mike and how they had tried to kill me.
Ferris didn't get very excited about the news. He said huh. Then he said, "You were just about one giant step ahead of me."
"You mean you had already figured them for it? Mike Ransome in with May Cochrane?"
"Well, I was just rounding that bend," Ferris said. "We got a healthy line on them last night. Seems for the past two-three months they've been renting a room here in town under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Millard Rankin. From all indications they'd shack up there whenever old man Cochrane's back was turned. That sort of put the whole deal in a new light."
There was a pause on his end, and then he said, "I take it things went sour for you tonight, huh?"
"How's that?"
"Well, I'll tell you, Thaxton. I get the impression you went out there with some idea of blackmail in mind. What happened? You couldn't come to terms? That why you're calling cop on them now?"
I let out my breath and shook my head.
"Look," I said, "you're forgetting that I'm supposed to be a rapist, not an extortionist. But believe it or not, none of us had blackmail in mind. They were on to me and they set up a trap to eliminate my troublesome personality. I went out there with the idea I could outfox them, but it misfired on me."
"Yeah," Ferris said and I could tell from his tone just how much he believed me. "So then Ransome accidentally falls on his own knife. Uh-huh. And how did your ex-wife accidentally kill herself?"
"She didn't. She's still out there."
"How's that?"
"I left her on the island."
"Jesus! You just walked off and left her there?"
"It's all right," I said. "I took both rowboats and she doesn't know how to swim. She'll keep."