When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared in my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.
Six
I tried to roll over. I was conscious she was on her knees beside me, helping.
“The animals,” she said. “The filthy—unspeakable-animals—” Her voice broke.
When I could sit up I slid backward and sat propped against the side of the car while the waves of sickness subsided. My whole right arm prickled and felt numb except for the hard welt of pain above the elbow, and I couldn’t move the hand. I rubbed it with the left. She sat down on the sand beside me, took the arm gently in her hands, and massaged it.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said. The left hand clenched, down against the ground, and sand ran between my fingers I opened and tightened it again, and swallowed, conscious of the dry, metallic taste in my mouth. After another deep breath some of the shaking went away. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I just fell down.”
In a minute we got back in the car and sat down. She lit a cigarette for me; I held it in my left hand and tried to work some feeling into the right. I could hear the surf swishing dreamily behind us. All the violence had washed out of the night as suddenly as it had come. They’d given me their little demonstration and were gone. They didn’t have to stick around and tell me what would happen if they caught me again. That was understood. And in just a few more hours they were going to start wondering what had happened to that little thug. When they did they’d come and ask me.
Some of the numbness was leaving my arm now and I could drive. We started back. Neither of us said anything about the way I had kissed her when she put on that act for them. It would only be embarrassing.
“What did Macaulay do to them?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“It’s all right,” I said. “If it’s none of my business—”
“No,” she said slowly, staring ahead at the headlights probing the edge of the surf. “It isn’t that. It’s just that I don’t know the whole story myself.”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Most of it. But not all. He says I’ll be safer if I never know. It happened about three months ago. He had to go to the Coast on business, for about a week, he said. But three days later he called me late one night, from San Antonio, Texas. I could tell he was under a bad strain. He said for me to pack some bags, put as much of our stuff in the car as I could, and leave right away for Denver. He didn’t explain; he just said he was in trouble and for me to get out of New York fast.
“I did, and he met me in Denver. He said it was something that happened at a party he went to, in some suburb of Los Angeles. I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but he finally admitted a man had been killed, and he had seen it—”
“But,” I said, “all he has to do is go to the police. They’ll protect him. He’s a material witness.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “One of the people involved is a police captain.”
“Oh,” I said.
It sounded too easy and too pat, but on the other hand there wasn’t any doubt she was telling the truth. I tried to discount the fact I’d probably have believed her if she’d told me the other side of the moon was an amusement park, but it still came out the same way. She wasn’t lying. But what about Macaulay himself?
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Eight years.”
“And he’s been with that marine insurance firm all the time?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s been with them ever since he came out of law school, back in the thirties, except for three years in the service during the war.”
I shook my head. There was nothing in that. We came into town. The traffic lights were flashing amber now, and the street-sweeping trucks were out. I stopped beside her car and got out with her. She put out her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “It’ll be bad, waiting for that card.”
There was nobody on the street. I was still holding her hand, hating to see her leave. Then I remembered the awkward thing I’d said in that bar as a result of looking at her like this, and let it drop. “Don’t go out of the house at night while I’m gone,” I said. “If you have to come downtown, do it during rush hours when there are lots of people on the streets.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said.
“If you see a car behind you on the way home, don’t worry about it. It’ll be mine.”
I followed her out. It was an upper-bracket suburb out near the country club. She pulled into a drive and stopped under a Carport beside a two-storied Mediterranean house with a tile roof and ironwork balconies. I stopped at the curb, looking along the streets where the old, peaceful trees made shadowy patterns in the lights and all the lawns were sleek and well-kept. Violence? Here? Then I turned my head and stared at the house across the street. The windows were all dark. But they were in there, watching her as she got out of the car and fumbled in her bag for the key. She waved a white-gloved hand, and went inside.
I went on, looking the place over. It was the second house from the corner. I turned at the intersection and drove slowly down the side street. There was an alley behind the house. A car was parked diagonally across the street from the mouth of it, in the shadows under the trees, and as I went past I saw a man’s elbow move slightly in the window. They had it covered front and back. There’d be one at the other end of the alley.
All I had to do was get Macaulay out of there alive. And by that time they’d be after me, too.
* * *
I drove the car out on the pier and as I got out I thought of him down there somewhere below me in the impenetrable blackness of night and silt-laden water, and for a moment he wasn’t a vicious little hoodlum but just somebody who’d been alive a few hours ago looking at sunlight and feeling hungry and thinking about girls and inhaling smoke from a cigarette. I brushed it away savagely. There wasn’t any time for being morbid about a dead gangster. I’d be dead myself very shortly if I didn’t get out of there.
I hurried down the ladder. The waterway was dark and still, like a jungle river, and it was hot in the thick clots of shadow below the side of the pier. When I opened the door and went inside the trapped air was stifling. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three.
I went out in the galley and put some water on to heat in the big electric percolator, and then examined my face in the bathroom mirror. The puffy places were worse. That was all right, leaving here, because I wanted them to remember me, but I had to start work on them so they’d be gone by the time I returned. My stomach felt as if I’d been run over by a tank, but at least that wouldn’t show.
While I was waiting for the water to heat I pulled the bag from under my bunk and began to pack. Carter was going to think I was a sad bastard, quitting with ten minutes’ notice, but if I wanted eulogies I could stick around and there’d be lots of them at the funeral. I shaved, and put the toilet gear in the bag. The clothes hanging in the bathroom were still wet. I rolled them in a newspaper and packed them anyway.
The water was hot. I poured it into a pan and started a new batch heating. Sitting on the side of the bunk with the pan before me on a chair, I shoved the hand in and let it soak until it was, as red as fire coral while I squeezed out a cloth with the left and held it against the puffed places on my face. It was intensely still except for the humming of the fan, and the minute I stopped moving and planning the room was full of her. Knowing it was absurd didn’t make any difference. She was everywhere.