There was nothing to do but make the best of it. “We’ll be right with you,” Reno said.
“I can’t come alongside,” Griffin explained. “Not enough water there. Pull out in one of those skiffs. You can give it a shove back, and Mildred can tie it up. How about it, baby?” This last was addressed to Mildred Talley. “Or can you go too?”
“No,” she replied, pouting. “I’ve got to work.”
Reno caught the sidelong, icy look at Patricia, and was conscious that at last he understood the answer to something in this country. Mildred was jealous. She had her eye on Griffin, which accounted for the catty remarks about the dark-haired girl. Then, unaccountably, he was jealous himself. He angrily shrugged it off. What did he care?
He pulled the skiff alongside and Griffin helped her step up into the cockpit of the cruiser. He climbed aboard himself and shoved the skiff back toward the landing. He and Patricia sat down on leather-covered seats running along opposite sides of the cockpit, while Griffin pressed the starter.
Reno noted with surprise they did not turn around. The cruiser gathered speed, straight ahead up the channel. In a few minutes they had rounded the first turn and had passed the arm of the bayou that ran north, where he had gone yesterday.
Then he remembered the second highway bridge. “Can you get back to the ship channel up this way?” he asked Griffin.
“Yeah. About a mile up here. Bayou goes back across the highway.”
“Hutch, I like your boat,” Patricia said. “It’s lovely.”
“Handles like a dream,” Griffin said, glancing back over his shoulder and grinning. “When we get out to the ship channel you can take over.”
Her eyes were excited as she glanced across at Reno. “Do you think a landlubber could handle it all right?”
“Sure,” Griffin said easily. “Just like driving a car.”
In a few more minutes they had passed the old campground on their left, where he had discovered the trailer. Thinking of it reminded Reno that by now they would have been on their way up the bayou, and for a moment he was irritated and impatient. But whatever was up there could wait another few hours.
They swung left now and were headed south. As soon as they straightened out Reno could see the steel highway bridge up ahead. Whoever towed that trailer away, he thought, could have come right through here and dumped it in thirty-five feet of water in the ship channel itself.
Griffin looked around at them as they approached the steel span and said something Reno didn’t catch above the noise of the engine. He and Patricia got up and went over to stand beside him at the instrument panel, looking out ahead.
“I say there used to be a wooden bridge here years ago,” Griffin repeated. “Had a lot of piling under it, spans not over twelve feet apart, and Robert Counsel used to shoot it in those speedboats of his.”
At mention of the name, Reno and Patricia looked at each other. “Reckless, eh?” Reno said, hoping he would go on.
“Reckless? Mother, dear!” Griffin said, and whistled softly. “A lot of people used to have the idea Robert was kind of a mamma’s boy—I mean, all that money, private tutors, that kind of stuff—but they just didn’t know him. I was with him one day when he came through here in a souped-up job that could really get up and fly. There was a girl in front with him, and another in the back seat with me—we were all about sixteen, I guess—and when his girl saw that bridge ahead and the clearance we had to get through between the pilings she fainted. She fell right over onto Robert, and he took it through with one hand, trying to get her off him with the other. You could have reached out a hand and touched a piling on either side, and he was clocking around fifty-five miles an hour.”
“If you’ll pardon my saying so, Hutch,” Patricia said, “your friend Robert just doesn’t sound very bright to me.”
Griffin shook his head and grinned. “That’s the hell of it though. He was. Brilliant son-of-a-gun. But he was just easily bored.
“You take those speedboats and runabouts of his; he designed most of the hulls and propellers himself. Did it by feel, or instinct, or something, the way somebody else could write a symphony. There’s a hell of a lot of mathematics to hull design, even for a garbage scow, and when you start playing around with speed it gets rugged. Not that he didn’t know the math—he did; but I think he felt the answers instead of working them out.
“He had a nasty sense of humor, though,” Griffin went on. They passed under the highway bridge and in a moment came out into the ship channel. At this point it described a sweeping turn, leaving its course roughly paralleling the highway and running south for half a mile between high walls of trees. The dredged channel itself was marked by buoys.
“You want me to take it now, Hutch?” Patricia asked.
“In just a minute, honey,” Griffin replied. “As soon as we get past that dredge. It’s working around the next bend.”
What was that about Counsel’s sense of humor?” Reno asked.
“Oh.” Griffin leaned forward over the wheel and swung his head with soft laughter. “I wanted to tell you about that. Robert and I were in prep school together for a couple of terms, and about this time somebody started that goldfish-swallowing gag again. And there was this big blowhard of a joker who’d been trying to give Robert a bad time. Anyway, this joker was making a big name for himself swallowing fish and throwing his weight around, when Robert showed up from somewhere with one just a little bigger and bet him fifty dollars he couldn't swallow it. The joker gulped it right down, like a hungry pelican, and began hollering for his fifty. Robert gave it to him, real deadpan, and asked how he felt. ‘Fine,’ the joker says. ‘Why?’ So then Robert told him. It was murder. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Except I’d be careful about coughing. That goldfish had two dynamite caps inside it.’”
“Good Lord,” Patricia said, horrified. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” Griffin laughed again. “The joker just went limp and passed out. They eased him over to the infirmary and went to work on him with a stomach pump. They got the fish out.”
“But were there really two caps in it?”
“Nobody ever knew. The doctor and nurse wouldn’t say. But the joker’s family took him out of school the next week, and Robert’s mother took him to Europe. Personally, knowing Robert, I’d say there were.”
They rounded the turn and passed the busy rumble of the dredge just beyond. Some men on deck waved as they went past.
“What do they do with the mud?” Patricia asked. ‘”’I don’t see any pipes.”
“Hopper dredge,” Griffin explained laconically. “Fills up and runs back outside to dump the stuff offshore.”
“Does it work on the channel all the time?”
“No. They just started this section the first of the month. Going to dredge from here up five miles.”
They were past it now and the channel was clear. Griffin stepped back from the wheel and sat down on one of the leather seats, stretching out his legs and lighting a cigarette.
“Hey—” Patricia said, startled.
He grinned. “Honey, you’re driving now. Just keep to the right, and watch out for traffic cops.” He looked across at Reno and winked.
Reno felt the stirrings of jealous anger, but let none of it show on his face. Griffin was a likable guy, but there was just a little too much easy familiarity in the way he spoke to Pat. But hell, maybe he talked to all the girls that way.
A little over a mile below the dredge they passed a ferry and a small shrimp-freezing plant. Griffin nodded, “My place over there,” he said, indicating a dock at which two small diesel tugs were moored.
In a short while the heavy timber along the banks began to thin out and they were running through flat salt marsh. Reno could see the white tower of the lighthouse straight ahead. They ran on out between the twin rock walls of the jetties and past the light.