The doctor said, ‘Quit moving around. Do you want me to patch you up or don’t you?’
England said, ‘Why? Why should we take you along. Your part is finished, Parker, don’t you know that?’
Parker told him, ‘He isn’t anywhere you can put a legal collar on him, not yet. That’s where you want him, isn’t it? Where you can put a legal collar on him. You still need me, to take him from where he is and put him where you can grab him.’
England didn’t like it. He chewed it like a cow chewing its cud, and finally he nodded and said, ‘We’ll see,’ and Parker knew that was that. He told the doctor, ‘I’ll sleep till morning if you’ll get off me.’
The doctor was irritated. He left without saying anything.
In the morning, other people did the searching. ‘We could do nothing by ourselves,’ England said. ‘We have a hundred men doing the searching.’
Carey was back with England now, the two of them sitting with Parker on the deck of the Navy ship. Carey said, ‘All they’ll do is find Baron, let us know where he is. Then we’ll go get him.’
Parker still had trouble standing, and almost as much trouble sitting. He was stretched out on his side on a cot set up on deck. He felt like a fool, and he felt impatient. He said, ‘Your hundred men better be good.’
But they didn’t find anything, not all day long, and after dark they had to quit again. Parker was up by now, limping up and down the metal corridors, raging. ‘You need a hundred men to zip your fly, you people. You and Karns’ crowd, you’re all alike. No one of you can do a damn thing, so you figure a whole crowd of you can do everything.’
Carey had gone away, and only England was around to listen to it. ‘We’ll find him,’ he kept saying. ‘He must have gone to shore by now, and tomorrow that’s where the search will concentrate. Every possible inch of Gulf coastline he could have reached.’
‘They’ll lose their planes by morning,’ Parker said.
But in the morning they found the boat, run aground on a barren stretch of Mexican coastline about two hundred miles down from the border. ‘They saw the boat,’ England told Parker, ‘but they didn’t see Baron.’
‘The question is, did Baron see them?’
‘They said the boat looked abandoned,’ England said. ‘It looked to them as though he’d run out of gas.’
‘Do we go look?’
‘Surely.’ England nodded his head, showing he was sure. ‘They’re getting a chopper ready for us now.’
A chopper turned out to be a helicopter, a rickety-looking thing like a cross between a Sten gun and a beanie, with a plexiglass bubble in front where the pilot and passengers sat. Only three of them were going, Parker and England and the pilot. England didn’t say anything to the pilot about who Parker was, and the pilot didn’t ask.
The ship they’d been on had been moving south all night and lay now off the Mexican coast, about forty miles from where the boat had been sighted. Parker and England got there in the helicopter in less than half an hour. The pilot landed near the beach, and waited at his controls while Parker and England went over to the boat.
Parker could walk on the leg now, but stiffly; he was bruised on that side from hip to knee. A bullet from a Colt .45 punches more than it cuts, and the one that had hit Parker had left him with a leg that operated all right but that ached as though it had been worked over with a baseball bat.
Walking towards the boat, limping, he wished he was armed. England had a service revolver on him, but it was tucked away in its hip holster now under England’s suitcoat. The boat looked empty, but that didn’t mean anything.
The leg gave him trouble, wading the last part out to the boat. England had to help him aboard, and then they searched the boat and found it deserted but odd. The hideaway bed in the main cabin was standing open, without its mattress, which Parker found shoved under a bed in the fore cabin. He and England pulled it out of there gingerly, both of them half expecting to find a body rolled in it, but there was nothing. Just the mattress, no reason, no explanation.
There were bloodstains on the carpet in the main cabin, so maybe Baron had been hit, though Parker had no idea who might have shot him. There was also evidence that a couple of meals had been eaten down here, and the yachting cap Parker had put on that first day he’d seen the island, when he’d gone out in this boat with Yancy, that cap was now missing.
So were the suitcases. Man in a yachting cap, carrying two suitcases, probably wounded. ‘He’d head inland,’ Parker said, thinking of the suitcases. ‘Let’s go in after him.’
‘We have no jurisdiction,’ England said.
‘That’s why you brought me along, remember?’
England said, ‘You think you can get him to the States from here? We might be better off asking the Mexican police to pick him up for us. They’ll usually co-operate in a case like this.’
Parker shook his head. ‘I hear Baron’s got connections with Cuba. Mexico still recognizes Cuba, right? Baron contacts the Cuban embassy, Cuba says he’s ours we want him, Mexico lets him go.’
England said, ‘I never liked this operation, not from the beginning. If things had gone the way you wanted, you’d have doublecrossed us, you’d have taken the money, left Baron, and disappeared.’
‘You wanted us to help,’ Parker told him. ‘But you didn’t ask right.’
‘Is that what it was?’ England looked at him. ‘I don’t understand you. Why should I trust you now?’
‘Because you don’t lose anything. Without me you don’t get Baron at all. With me you get Baron maybe.’
‘I’ve got you now,’ England said. ‘If I let you go, then I don’t have Baron and I don’t have you either.’
‘You don’t want me. Remember? You’re a specialist.’
England said, ‘So are you. I’m beginning to find out in what.’
Parker could visualize the suitcases moving away across the horizon, while he and this fool stood here talking crap. England didn’t know about the suitcases, because Parker had let him understand the loot had burned up in the fire back on the island. England had believed it because it satisfied his need for poetic justice. But now there was no justification for Parker being in such a hurry, and if he kept on pushing, England might begin to wonder.
Still, England himself should be in a hurry. Parker said to him, ‘Make up your mind. Do you want Baron or not?’
England shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll see it out. I was told to co-operate, I’ll co-operate. But if we ever get our hands on Baron through you I’ll have a heart attack.’
They went back to the helicopter and told the pilot what they wanted; their quarry would be heading west, or towards the nearest town, or. both. ‘We don’t know how long ago he left. England said, ‘so we aren’t looking just for him. We’re also looking for signs that he’s passed a certain way, so we’ll be sure which way he’s headed.’
For the next hour and a half they made tic-tac-toe in the sky, north and then south and then west, north and then south and then west, until ahead of them they saw the black man-shape spread out on the ground and Parker pointed forward, saying, ‘There’s something there.’
‘I see it,’ said the pilot.
The helicopter lowered, and Parker saw no suitcases, and then he made out that the figure on the ground was Grofield, which was impossible.
The pilot landed twenty yards away, and Parker hurried across the rocky ground, limping, wanting to get there before England, to keep Grofield from saying anything he shouldn’t.
Grofield had his eyes closed, and very faintly he was smiling. He looked as though he’d been wandering out here for a week, with dirt caked on his face, with his lips dry and cracked, his clothing filthy. Parker knelt beside him and said, low and fast, ‘England’s with me. Keep mum on the money.’
Grofield opened his eyes as England came running up. Grofield said, ‘Come off it, Parker, you’re a mirage.’