She slid toward me and I kissed her again with that odd sensation of being suddenly overrun and flooded with her like a compartment below water line when the bulkhead buckles under pressure of the sea. One minute there’d been only that unstoppable trickle of her running through the mind, and the next I was drowning in her.
Nuts, I thought irritably. Who ever heard of anything as stupid? And there was another slight matter. She was Macaulay’s wife. Maybe I should try to work that into my thoughts from time to time so it didn’t elude me altogether.
Who was Macaulay? I stared at a parboiled hand in a basin of water, looking for Macaulay, and found nothing at all. There wasn’t even the framework on which to start building a Macaulay. An executive in an insurance firm who was being hunted down by gangsters who wanted to kill him—what did you get from that?
Nothing.
He could fly a plane. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her how it happened he could fly? Of course, lots of people could nowadays; maybe I was the only one left who couldn’t. But flying came in sizes. Even I could see that. Hopping a Piper Cub sixty miles from Booster’s Junction to East Threadbare along two sets of railroad tracks and a six-lane highway was one thing; taking off across 500 miles of empty Gulf and God knows how many miles of green broadloom jungle was something else. You had to be a good dead-reckoning navigator, and you had to know you were good, to tackle it.
And if he knew exactly where that crashed plane was, he wasn’t only a good navigator—he was a superb one. Of course, she had said it was within sight of the coast, but that didn’t mean much. One part of a coast line can have a hellish knack of looking just like another part of a coast line, even when you’re approaching it under sail at five knots, and I imagined it was a lot more so when it was flying back toward you at a hundred miles an hour. Of course, you were higher; but that probably didn’t help a great deal. You could just see more things you were probably wrong about.
Then suddenly I thought of something else that was odd. The plane was in sixty feet of water, but still it was within sight of land, near enough to see some landmark to identify the spot. Off Yucatan? I’d never been down there, but I’d seen it on the charts plenty of times, and it was my impression the ten-fathom curve was a lot farther out than that. I shrugged. Maybe she had meant something else was near enough to get a bearing on, an old wreck, or a shoal.
I went on soaking the hand and holding hot compresses on my face. At dawn I drove out to the nearest cafe and drank some coffee. I was beginning to feel people behind me now. It had been nearly twelve hours since he’d disappeared.
I drove downtown to the bus station. There’d be an eastbound bus at 10:35. I got in line with a few other people at the window. When my turn came I asked for a ticket to New York. After the man had filled in the blanks on a yard of paper and stamped it in half a dozen places I looked in my wallet and made the awful discovery I was seven dollars short of the price.
Actually I had it, of course, but I slapped all my pockets and turned them out and looked stupidly through my wallet three or four times while the line behind me grew longer and people began to mutter. I milked it until his patience began to wear thin, and then told him to set the ticket aside and I’d be back later with the rest of the money.
I went out in the street again. It was a hot, still morning, but the cold place between my shoulder blades was growing larger all the time. I watched in shop windows, and stopped suddenly, looking around as I lit a cigarette. Sure, there were people behind me. There were hundreds of them, going to work.
As soon as the used car lots began to open I drove around to one. A man with a cigar glanced at the Ford with complete indifference, told me tearfully how bad business was, and offered me half what it was worth. I knew I wouldn’t get any more, but I screamed like a wounded rug merchant and drove away. Twenty minutes later I came back and turned the papers over to him and he gave me a check. He’d remember me, too. I’d cried louder than he had.
I took a taxi out to the pier, looking at my watch every few minutes now. This was the first place they’d come when they began to wonder what had happened to him, and I was cutting it too fine. There was no one around the gate, however, and the watchman shook his head when I asked if anybody’d been looking for me.
“But you got a telegram,” he said.
It was from Carter. There’d been a delay in opening the bids for the salvage job and he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. We drove out to the end of the pier and I asked the driver to wait while I picked up the bag. We met no one coming out. I turned the keys over to the watchman, said something vague about sickness in the family, and told him I was leaving for New York.
Back at the bus station the ticket agent gave me a surly grunt and reached for the ticket before I’d opened my mouth. I checked the bag through, and looked at my watch again. It was 10:10. I walked over to the bank, cashed the car check, and drew out my account.
There was a telegraph office in the same block. I wrote out a wire to Carter so he’d have a chance to pick up a new diver around New Orleans. It was the least I could do.
The last ten minutes were rough. I kept looking around for them, knowing at the same time it was stupid because I’d never seen any of them except Barclay. After a long time they called the bus over the P.A. system and I went out and climbed aboard. I got a seat on the aisle, away from the window, and just sat there, enduring it. At last the driver swung the door shut and we rolled out of the station into traffic.
The little man in the seat next to the window wanted to know where I was going and when I told him he said, no offense, but he just couldn’t stand the place. All them foreigners, he said.
While he was telling me what was wrong with it the driver cut in the air-conditioning unit and we began to roll faster through the outskirts.
I unwound all at once. It was something like melting.
I straightened suddenly and looked around. It must have been some time afterward, for we were out in open country. People in near-by seats were staring at me, and the man who didn’t like New York was shaking my arm.
He grinned apologetically. “Thought I ought to wake you up,” he said. “You was having a nightmare.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” I was clammy with sweat.
“Must have been a fire in it,” he said. “You kept moaning and saying something about smoke.”
Seven
We came into New Orleans at ten-fifteen p.m. Through passengers going east were scheduled to change busses, with a layover of forty minutes. I hunted up the baggage room, caught the eye of a colored boy, and gave him my claim check and a dollar.
“See if you can find this bag for me,” I said. “I want to clean up a little between busses.”
He located it. I went around the corner toward the washroom, ducked out a side door, and caught a cab. At a little hotel just off Canal Street I signed the register James R. Madigan and when I was up in the room I looked at the marks on my face. They were better, and in another few hours they’d be hardly noticeable. I drew a basin of hot water and went to work on them again, soaking the hand at the same time. The swelling was going down.
They might find out I’d left the bus, and they might even trail me to this hotel and eventually start looking for somebody named Madigan, but there the whole thing would end. Harold E. Burton was only a check for $15,000, and the last place they’d ever expect me to go would be back to Sanport.