“What’d you give her?”
Sail wet his lips. The sweat had come out on his forehead enough to start running.
“Truth serum.”
“You louse!”
Two sailors, one without his shirt, went past, headed for the slot machines.
Blick said, “Bud, I think I got you figured. You’re a guy Andopolis rung in. He’d still try to get a boat and another guy.”
Sail squinted out of one eye. Perspiration was stinging the other.
“Andopolis was the one who didn’t digest the knife?”
“You ain’t that dumb!”
“Was he?”
“You know that was Abel!”
Sail said, “Believe it or not, I’m guessing right across the board. Abel was to do the dirty work while you and the girl hung around on shore. Abel tried to take something from Andopolis on the dock. Abel had something that had something to do with whatever he wanted. He tapped it inside his coat as he talked. Abel got knifed, let out a bellow, and went off the dock into the drink. Andopolis ran after he knifed Abel. You headed him off in the park. He got away and ran some more. You did a sneak to my hooker while the cop looked around.”
“Did you guess all that?” Blick sneered.
They were nearing Biscayne Boulevard and traffic. On the News building tower, the neon sign alternately spelled WIOD and NEWS. Sail took a deep breath and tried to watch Blick’s face.
“I’d like to know what Abel wanted.”
Blick said nothing. They scuffed over the sidewalk, and Blick, walking as if he did not feel as if he weighed much, seemed to think to a conclusion which pleased him.
“Hell, Nola. Maybe Andopolis didn’t spill to our bud, here.”
Nola did not answer. She seemed about asleep. Blick pinched her, slapped her, and that awakened her somewhat.
A police radio car was parked at the corner of Biscayne and Blick did not see it in time. He said, as if he didn’t give a damn, “Stagger, bud! This should be good.”
Sail shoved a little to steer the girl to the side of the walk farthest from the prowl car. Blick shoved back to straighten them up. The result was that they passed close enough to the police machine to reach it with one good jump. Sail shoved Blick and Nola as hard as he could, using the force of the shove to propel himself toward the car. He grabbed the spare tire at the back and used it to help himself around the machine to shelter.
Blick’s revolver went off three times about as rapidly as a revolver could fire. Both cops in the car brayed, and fell out of the car onto Sail.
Blick carried Nola to a taxicab forty feet down the street, and dumped her in. He stood beside the hack, aimed, and air began leaving the left front tire of the police car. The cops started shooting in a rattled way. Blick leaped into the taxi. An instant later, the hack driver fell out of his own machine, holding his head. The taxi took off. The two cops sprang up, and piled into their machine, one yelling:
“What about this one in the street?”
“Hell, he’s dead.”
The cops drove after the taxi, one shooting, his partner having trouble steering with the flat tire.
Sail, for a fat man, ran away from there very fast.
Sail planted his heaving chest against the lunch stand counter, held on to the edge with both hands, and stood there a while, twice looking down at his knees and moving them experimentally, as if suspecting something was wrong with them. The young man, who looked as youths in lunch stands somehow always manage to look, came over and swiped the counter with his towel.
“What’ve you got in cans?” Sail asked him, then stopped the answering recital on the third name. Beer suds overflowed the can before it hit the counter. Sail drank the first can and most of the next in big gulps, but slowed down on the third and seemed tied up in thought. He scraped at the tartar on a tooth with a fingernail, then started chewing the nail and got it down to the quick, then looked at it as if surprised. He absently put three dimes on the counter.
“Forty-five,” the youth corrected.
Sail added a half and said, “Some nickels out of that.”
He carried the nickels over to the mob around the slot machines. He stood around with his hands in his pockets. He tried whistling, and on the second attempt got a good result, after which he looked more satisfied with himself. His mouth warped wryly as he watched the play at the two machines. He took his nickels out, looked at them, firmly put them back, but took them out a bit later. When there was a lull, he shoved up to the slot machines.
The one-armed bandit gave him a lemon and two bars, with another bar just showing.
“You almost made it,” someone said. “A little more and you’d have made the jackpot.”
“Brother,” Sail said, “you must be a mind reader.”
He backed up, waited, still giving some attention to his private thoughts, until he got a chance at the other machine. It showed a bar, a lemon, a bar. Sail rubbed his forearms, looked thoughtful and walked off.
A telephone booth was housed at the end of Pier Four. Sail, when a nickel got a dial tone, dialed the 0, said, “Operator, I believe in giving all telephone operators possible employment, so I never dial a number. Give me police headquarters, please.” He waited for a while after the operator laughed, said, “I want to report an attempted robbery,” then told someone else, “This is Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. A few minutes ago, a man and a woman boarded my boat and marched me away at the point of a gun. I do not know why, except that the man was a drug user. I feel he intended to kill me. There was a police car parked at the corner of Biscayne, and when I broke away and got behind it, the man tried to shoot me, then drove off with the woman in a taxi, and two officers chased them. I want to know what to do now.”
“It would help if you described the pair.”
The man and woman Sail described would hardly be recognized as Blick and Nola.
“Could you come up to headquarters and look over our gallery?” asked the voice.
“Where is it?”
“Turn left off Flagler just as you reach the railroad.”
When Sail left the telephone booth, the youth with the hot-dog-stand look was jerking the handle of one slot machine, then the other, and swearing.
“Funny both damn things blew up!” he complained.
Sail walked off wearing a small secret grin.
Two hours later, Sail pushed back a stack of gallery photographs in police headquarters and said in a tired, wondering voice, “There sure seem to be a lot of crooks in this world. But I don’t see my two.”
The captain at his elbow said heartily, “You don’t, eh? That’s tough. One of the boys in the radio car got it in the leg. We found the taxi. And we’ll find them two. You can bet on that.” He was a big brown captain with the kind of jaw and eyes that went with his job. He had said his name was Rader.
Sail rode back to the City Yacht Basin in a taxi, and looked around before he got out. He walked to Sail. While adjusting a spring line, he saw a head shape through the skylight. By craning, he saw the head shape was finished out by a police cap. Sail walked back and forth, changing the spring lines, which did not need changing, and otherwise putting off what might come. Finally, he pulled down his coat sleeves, put on an innocent look and went down.
One policeman waiting in the cabin was using his tongue to lather a new cigar with saliva. The tongue was coated. He was shaking, not very much, but shaking. His face had some loose red skin on it, and his neck was wattled.
The second policeman was the young bony cop with the warp in the end of his mouth. He still had his flashlight.
The third man was putting bottles and test tubes in a scuffed brown leather bag which held more of the same stuff and a microscope off which some of the enamel was worn. He wore a fuzzy gray flannel suit, had rimless, hookless glasses pinched tight on his nose, and had chewed up about half of the cigar in his mouth without lighting it. The cigar was the same kind the other policeman was licking.