She busied herself. She was very gentle. “Travis?”
“Yes, Jan.”
“He was going to kill us both, wasn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“I know he was. From the way he looked at me. After he… I thought when you came in and snipped me loose, it was him coming back.”
“Did he give you a bad time?”
“Sort of. After he chained me up, he hit me on the head again. Very very lightly, and it was just enough so everything seemed to go far away and I couldn’t move or speak or see. I wasn’t awake or asleep. I could feel what he was doing. Just with his hands. Sort of… to see what a woman was like there. And when I could move, I grabbed his hands and pushed them away. And he looked at me and blushed and then sort of half smiled and shrugged and I knew he knew I wouldn’t ever be able to tell anybody about whatever he decided to do to me. I knew he’d come back… but it was you. And then I was sure he’d killed you like he killed Tush and… I knew I could kill him. I knew he couldn’t stop me. And so… I did.”
“You didn’t quite make it, honey. I took care of it.”
“Don’t try to be sweet and protective and all. I looked at him in there. I had to touch him and turn him over to make sure. I even felt it in my hands when it hit him, a kind of looseness, the way his head went. I’m not proud of it or full of joy or anything. But I can live with it… There. I think that’s better than the way it was, Travis.”
“Thanks,” I said and rolled onto my back. She took the basin and towel and gear away.
When she came back, she stood at the foot of the bed and said, “What do we do now?”
“I called Meyer while you were still out.”
“And told him about this?”
“No. I said we might cruise around for quite a while.”
“You did?”
“Until we’re both healed up enough so people won’t ask questions. If we go back, we make statements. Everybody will want to see how much front page space they can get, how many times they can get their pictures taken with us. What good will that do you or your kids?”
“No good at all.”
“Or do Freddy’s people?”
“They might as well think he’s alive in the world, somewhere.”
“And I couldn’t take that kind of hot publicity, Jan. I can’t start wearing a public face. It would put me out of business. I don’t need a lot of official interest. There’s a little bit now. All I can handle. So we deepsix him and say nothing. Not a word, Jan. Not ever, to anyone. Can you handle that?”
Her face was quiet, her eyes thoughtful. In the seanight there was the tangible presence of death aboard. A head-knocker whose luck turned very bad, who’d never make it to the Caicos, who’d had something rancid going on in the back of his mind, some warped thing all mixed up with darkness and helplessness and sexual assault. The sickness had begun to stir and move under stress, had begun to emerge, but his life had stopped before it had gone out of control.
She said, “What if you don’t heal right? What if we have to find a doctor?”
“We have a story. We were potting at beer cans with a thirty-eight. The kick startled you. It slipped out of your hand, went off when it hit the deck.”
“Does… anyone but us know he was aboard?”
“Not likely.”
She nodded. “I’ll be all right, Travis. I’ll be fine.” I got up and went on deck and discovered I had completely forgotten the anchor lights. We were well away from any course a small boat might take, but a darkened boat at night invites investigation. I put us back onto legal status. We were riding well. The night was soft, the stars slightly misted. Miami was a giant blow to the north.
I stayed topside a long time. When I went below, she was curled up on the yellow couch in the lounge, sound asleep. I looked down at her and hoped that she would have enough iron in her to help a one-armed man with some curiously ugly chores. She had dark patches under her eyes. I turned off the small dim lamp nearby and felt my way through dark and familiar spaces back to the master stateroom.
I didn’t really know if she could last, if she could handle it, until the neat morning when I sat on the edge of the freshly made bed in the guest stateroom and watched her using the curved sailmaker’s needle and the heavy thread, sewing Freddy into his sea shroud. She had cleaned and dressed my wound afresh. I had wired a spare anchor snugly to the deputy’s ankles, and tucked his gun and cuffs and the black leather sap in beside him.
When she ran out of the hank of thread, and clipped it off and took a fresh end from the spool and moistened it in her lips before threading the needle again, she looked up at me for a moment. It was a flat, dark look, and it made me think of old stories of how warriors dreaded being taken alive and turned over to the women.
At the end of day she wrested the anchor free when I ran the Flush up to it, and brought it aboard. We ran outside, creaking and rocking in the swell. I put it on automatic pilot at just enough speed to hold it quartering into the sea, and together we clumsied him up and out onto the side deck. She held the book and tilted it to catch the light from where the sun had gone down, and she read the words we thought would be appropriate to the situation.
She laid the book down and with my one arm and her two, we lifted the stiffened body upright, and as she held it propped against the rail, I bent and grasped the tarp at the feet and lifted and toppled it into the sea. It sank at once. And then I took the wheel and came about and headed for the buoy that marks the pass back into Biscayne Bay.
Seventeen
ONCE SHE accepted the need to stay by ourselves, to heal in order to avoid questions, a strange new placidity came over her. She had long times of silence, and I could guess that now that she knew what had happened, and how it had happened, part of it was over and the part about finding an acceptance of Tush’s death had begun.
She began to eat well and spend some of the sun hours basting and broiling herself to the deep tan her skin took readily, and she began sleeping long and deeply, gaining the weight that softened her bone-sharp face, that filled out the long concave line of the insides of her thighs, that made her fanny look a great deal less as if it had been slapped flat with a one by six.
I called Meyer from shoreside phones. I wore the arm out of the sling for longer periods each day, reslingfng it when the knitting muscle structures began to ache.
She phoned Connie when the trip with the kids was over, and Connie accepted the notion that a little more time cruising would do her good. She talked to each of the boys. They were fine. They missed her. She missed them.
Meyer eased out of the last of her holdings in Fletcher on the Wednesday, the last day of January, at a good price, and when we talked again the following Monday evening-I had phoned him from Islamorada-he said with undisguised glee that Fletcher had gotten up to forty-six dollars a share at noon, and the Exchange had suspended trading in it fifteen minutes later, pending a full investigation of a tip that the earnings reports had been misstated, that a syndicate of speculators had been boosting the price, and that the company officers had been quietly unloading all their own holdings at these false and inflated values. The word on the Street was that it might be another Westec case, and it was rumored that a Florida-based speculator named Gary Santo was deeply involved in the artificial runup of the price.
“If they ever approve it for listing again,” Meyer said, “it will open at about six dollars, and even that is more than a realistic book value per share.”
The next morning the Flush was tied up at the marina dock at Islamorada, and after breakfast I had Jan peel the final dressing off the wound. The entrance wound was a pink dime-sized dimple, vivid in the middle of the surrounding tan. She made careful inspection of the exit area, held the back of her hand against it to check for any inner heat of infection and said, “This last little piece of scab is going to come off any day now. If we could have had it sewn up, there wouldn’t be so much scarring, Trav. It looks as if… somebody stabbed you with one of those wood rasp things.”