The corridor was empty and silent. The doors that lined it were closed. I went along the corridor, listening at each door. There were no sounds except snoring in one cabin. There was no way to know who was snoring. I continued along, and at the last door on the port side I heard the familiar giggle. I tried the door. It was locked. I looked at the lock and tried a key that looked like it would match from the key ring I’d taken from the Mex. It fit and I opened the door gently.
Carmen was there all right, and Simpson. The lights were on. He was handcuffed to the bed, facedown, and Carmen, in a condition I was beginning to tire of, was naked as a minnow. She stood over Simpson, giggling her giggle and spanking him with a gold-inlaid ivory hairbrush.
I closed the door softly behind me and stepped into the room. Carmen looked up with her big eyes all iris and smiled.
“I know you,” she said. “You’ve got the funny name.”
“Doghouse Reilly,” I said.
Simpson turned his head to look at me and I smiled at the thick white tape over his nose and the beginnings of a wonderful pair of shiners starting to darken under his eyes. He opened his mouth and I stepped over and put the gun barrel into it.
“Not a peep,” I said.
His eyes widened but he was silent. Without clothing, his soft body was fleshy and white. I looked around the room. On the wall next to the bed, hanging on a hook, was a lacy peignoir. With the gun still in Simpson’s mouth, I said to Carmen, “Put that robe on.”
She smiled at me that loopy void smile that she had and put her thumb in her mouth. As always, it was supposed to make me jump in the air and click my heels. As always, it didn’t work.
“If you make a sound I’ll kill you,” I said.
I took the gun out of Simpson’s mouth and went and got the peignoir off the hook and slipped my gun under my arm while I forced Carmen’s arms through the sleeves and buttoned the two buttons, which didn’t do a very good job of holding the thing together. There was a sash, too, and I tied it around her waist. Then I took my gun out from under my arm again, pulled the sheet and two blankets up over Simpson’s head, took a firm grip on Carmen’s wrist, and went out of the room and into the corridor. As I closed the door behind me I heard Simpson, muffied through two blankets, yell “Help!” Five feet down the corridor I couldn’t hear him.
“Where are we going?” Carmen said. She didn’t seem scared. She seemed excited. Her lips were pulled back over her small white teeth. They were sharp teeth and whiter than teeth had any business being.
“Home,” I said.
We went up the ladder well to the deck, with my gun in my right hand and my left with a death grip on Carmen’s wrist. On deck there was only the boy in the sailor suit at the stern, gazing out over the black water at the shoreline.
“Shhh,” I said to Carmen.
She giggled, her little sharp teeth showing even in the pale moonlight, and screamed as loud as she could. The boy in the sailor suit whirled, clawing at the gun in its regulation holster. I fired once and he yelped and staggered against the rail and then pitched forward. I heard doors open below me and footsteps on the ladder wells. I dragged Carmen to the rail and stowed my gun again under my arm. Behind me I heard the hatchway open and someone yelling, “Over there, by the rail.”
I got my arms around Carmen’s waist and heaved her up. She screamed again and I pitched her over the rail into the darkness, and dove after her. The water stung when I hit the surface and then I was in it and went under maybe ten or fifteen feet before I was able to turn and start up. My wet clothes dragged me back, and the weight of the gun under my arm was no longer comforting. My lungs had already been abused once this evening and they didn’t enjoy further abuse.
At about the time I began to get the panicky feeling that I wouldn’t make it to the surface, I did, and came back into the world in the ebony water and started looking for Carmen. I saw her twenty feet away, floundering. I swam toward her as someone on the yacht began to sweep the water with a flashlight. It must have been one of those long affairs with six batteries, because the beam was strong and the circle of light was large. I reached Carmen, who was giggling and crying and spluttering at the same time.
The flashlight swept by us and started back and then Blondie was there in the skiff and reaching for Carmen. The light hit us and a shot splashed the water near the skiff and then from somewhere in the darkness south of us a chatter of shots sounded and bullets spanged off the hull of the yacht and the flashlight went out and someone yelled, “Get down!” Then Carmen was in, and I was, rolling in over the gunwales of the skiff without quite knowing how I had and Blondie was silently pulling in the direction of the gunfire.
“I never thought I’d be glad to see you,” I said to him.
“Sure,” he said.
34
“I don’t want to go home,” Carmen said. She was sitting with a blanket wrapped around her in the tiny below-decks stateroom of Mars’ cabin cruiser. We were heading for the landing pier in the very earliest gray hint of dawn. Simpson’s yacht had too much draft to follow us in. It was under full power, running north around the point.
I was there with my jacket off but the rest of me still soaking wet and Mars was looking fresh and comfortable as he leaned against the bulkhead.
“I still say we should have gone in and finished it,” Mars said.
“Bad idea, Eddie. Simpson’s got about a regiment with him whenever he travels. You’d have gotten wiped out.”
“I got some pretty good boys with me, soldier.”
“We came for Carmen,” I said. “We’ve got her.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Carmen said.
“It’s not going to end here, soldier.”
“I know,” I said. “We have assault charges, and kidnapping, illegal restraint, attempted murder, murder, probably two counts. We have a witness.” I nodded toward Carmen.
“Not much of a witness,” Mars said. “You think you can make any of them stick against Simpson?”
“If we ever get Simpson alone,” I said, “in a quiet room, with maybe a couple of tough cops who know how it’s done, he’ll babble like a brook. It’s Bonsentir that keeps him together.”
“You know any tough cops like that?” Mars said.
“One or two,” I said. “When we get ashore I’ll call one.”
“Be a good thing,” Mars said, “if you kinda leave me out of it. Cops would like to tag me anyway, and what we pulled off here may not be exactly one hundred percent legal.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me a thing, soldier. I wasn’t doing it for you.”
“I’ll keep you out of it anyway.”
The cabin cruiser slowed to an idle and bumped gently broadside against the landing. It was early dawn and the sky was a lighter gray in the east. I collected Carmen and went ashore to find my car and find a phone and make a phone call.