30
The two kids gave up on the fish and left. I watched them go, arguing with each other about who had the most near misses.
Eddie Mars showed up about twenty minutes later. He had on a heavy white turtleneck sweater and a long-billed boating cap. Blondie was with him, looking especially pale and citified in the salt air and sand of the cove. He wore sunglasses and a tan garbardine windbreaker. They parked the long black car on the pier and walked out toward the shack where I was homesteading.
“Simpson out there?” Mars said with a nod toward the yacht.
“I’m betting he is,” I said.
“I’m a gambling man myself,” Mars said. “Got a boat coming.”
“How soon?”
“Be patient, soldier, takes a little while. Let’s all just settle back here in the sun and sip something cold.”
Blondie went into the shack and bought some ginger ale and went to the car and got a pint of good bourbon and brought it back and we poured it into paper cups that the geezer provided and added ginger ale and had a drink. The geezer looked at it like a drowning man eyes a lifeguard, but Mars ignored him.
“I spent a little time thinking about how you found this place,” Mars said, “and I figure you had to be tailing Bonsentir.”
“Yeah.”
“How long you been on him?”
“About three days,” I said.
“No help?”
“No.”
Mars shook his head and grinned. His grin had all the warmth of a pawnbroker examining your mother’s diamond.
“Got to hand it to you, soldier. You work at it.”
I had nothing much to say to that, so I let it pass and sipped a little of the bourbon and ginger ale. Out around the yacht some gulls rode easily on the waves, waiting for something to turn up. We sipped our drinks. Blondie made us a second one. We sipped some of that. Around the point from the north came a big cabin cruiser with a flying bridge and a swordfishing rig off the prow.
“That’s us,” Mars said.
It was no more noticeable than a crocodile in a bathtub.
“Be no problem sneaking up on them,” I said.
“It’s not that easy,” Mars said, “to come up with a boat on short notice. This one belonged to a guy used it to smuggle before he got old. Got a lot of engine.”
The cabin cruiser churned in past Randolph’s Ranger and slid up alongside the float at the foot of our pier.
“All aboard,” Mars said and finished his drink. We went on down the pier and down the ladder and onto the cabin cruiser. It was old, but it was well kept. The brass was polished and the teak and mahogany gleamed with years of hand-rubbing. At the wheel was a tall leathery specimen with a straw hat tilted way forward over the bridge of his nose. He held the boat easily against the landing float while we climbed on board. On board with him was the pug with the clubbed ear and broken nose that I’d seen before, and three other hard-looking characters that I didn’t know. None of them looked like fishermen. Mars nodded at the helmsman and he eased the boat away from the pier with a deft movement of his hand. We were barely idling as the boat moved back toward the yacht.
“You got a plan, soldier?” Mars was leaning on the rail with one hand in his pants pocket, thumb out, manicured nail gleaming.
“We should sit offshore a little and wait. If they move we’ll follow them. Otherwise, when it gets dark I’ll go aboard.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah. We all go aboard and it’ll be a gunfight and I don’t want Carmen caught in the middle.”
“She’d love it,” Mars said, staring out at the water. “She’d giggle and suck her thumb and probably wet herself.”
“I wasn’t hired to get her shot.”
“How much do you go for?”
“This job, a dollar.”
Mars laughed.
“Well, you earn your money, soldier.”
“Yeah. I can’t wait to invest it.”
“How you planning to get over to the yacht?” Mars said.
I nodded toward the skiff, stored upside down on the foredeck.
“I figure someone can row me over.”
“And they’ll pipe you aboard?”
“Maybe they won’t notice,” I said. “Let’s find out.”
Mars shrugged.
“Keep the yacht in sight,” he said to the helmsman in the hat. Then he went back to looking at the horizon. We idled south of the cove and hung off the point, staying steady against the wind. The yacht stayed put and the day dragged on, the minutes dawdled by like reluctant schoolchildren. Mars studied the horizon. I studied the yacht. The guy in the hat kept the bow into the wind, and the rest of the crew played cards. Marlowe and the pirates.
From where we rested, I had a good view of Randolph’s Ranger. The landing float at the back was still out, and the speedboat rode at a short tether beside it. It didn’t look like they were going anywhere soon. On the deck occasionally a figure in white moved, circling the deck slowly without any apparent mission. All the action was belowdecks.
The minutes continued to crawl past, pushing huge boulders ahead of them. The sun remained overhead it seemed forever, making no movement toward the west, getting no closer to the rim of the Pacific, hovering overhead while I waited.
Once, late in the afternoon, the speedboat made a wake-curling run back into the shack for more ice, but that was all. The gulls bobbed patiently on the dull blue water. We hung motionless, in suspended animation, off the southern point of Fair Harbor until finally, as I was about to pass my ninety-fifth birthday, the sun disappeared, in fact quite suddenly, behind the horizon and darkness began.
When it was as dark as it was going to get, we got the skiff into the water and Blondie got in to row me across.
“He’ll wait around, near where he puts you aboard,” Mars said. “He’ll be there when you’re ready to come back.”
“Can he row?” I said.
Blondie paid no attention to me. He was in the skiff with his hands resting on the oars.
“Blondie’s good,” Mars said. “Don’t underestimate him.”
“Sure he is, so am I. I’ll go over, dance two numbers with Simpson, and be back with Carmen. They’ll think pirates boarded.”
“How long before we come in and get you?” Mars said.
“Use your judgment. But give me some time. Simpson has a private army everywhere he travels and you may not have enough firepower.”
Mars smiled his bleak smile at me.
“We’ll see, soldier. We’ll see.”
I climbed down into the stern of the skiff and Blondie pulled easily on the oars and we slid quietly over the dark still water toward the yacht.
31
It was not as dark as I would have liked. The stars were bright and a nearly full moon loomed over the black water and the motionless yacht. Blondie pulled the skiff expertly up against the landing platform. I could hear the faint sounds of what sounded like it might be revelry, though it could have been an ax murder in progress. The voices were indistinct. The calm water lapped gently against the hull of the yacht. I could hear nothing else. No sounds of sentries on the deck. I stepped out of the skiff onto the float, and Blondie pulled away without comment. I felt the reassuring weight of the gun in my shoulder holster, then moved softly up the ladder toward the deck. It was a balmy night, with just enough coolness stirring off the ocean to make everything fresh. The deck seemed empty when I stepped on it, but I knew I had seen someone in a sailor suit earlier, and I stayed motionless behind a bulkhead and listened. Only the sound of the water and the faint human voices from below. I waited. The rigging creaked faintly. Looking off toward Mars’ cabin cruiser, I saw nothing. It was sitting with no lights, behind the point. I couldn’t see Blondie in the skiff. From below I heard kind of a pealing giggle, much higher pitched than the other sounds, that had a chilling quality to it, like the shriek of someone wailing for her demon lover. Carmen! On deck suddenly I heard the gentle scuff of feet wearing sneakers. And then I saw him, in a white sailor suit, wearing a web belt, with a regulation side-arm. Just like the real Navy except for the sneakers. A little sleepy, bored with the endless circuit of the boat, he went by me without seeing me and continued on along the deck toward the bow. I went aft toward a hatchway and reached it and was inside, quicker than the passing of youth.