Gavey's topcoat pocket became doubly flame- burned, as another slug tore out of it and into a man's body. The plump man seemed to shrivel as he fell.
“Get the slug, Slim,” Gavey said, turning his back. “No calling cards for the damn microscopes to work on. There's to be no trace of a link between this mortuary job and Check Gavey.”
Pujo prowled the white wall behind where the plump man had stood, while Gavey checked two coffins on trestles at the back end of the room.
He grunted as he found the right one. John Hiram Harvey, the small silver plate said. And on the shipping tag, the name of the widow, Mrs.
Dolores Harvey, with a Guatemalan address.
“Here's the slug,” said Pujo, prying battered lead from the wall.
Gavey put it in his vest pocket with the ejected cartridge shell, began unscrewing the casket lid.
“You'll take the stiff in here and get rid of it,” he said. “The river—with plenty of weights. You'll screw this lid back down, after I'm inside, leaving a couple air holes for me. Then, when the guys come to take the casket to the Moravia, you'll hand it over like you worked here for Abel.”
“And Check Gavey, with half the cops in New York on his tail, goes out of the country in a coffin to Central America!” said Pujo admiringly.
“Right.” Gavey nodded, with a respect for his cleverness as impersonal as though it had been that of someone else.
THE Moravia was twenty hours out of New York. It bobbed in the warmth of the Gulf Stream, poking its nose ever farther south.
In the hold, boxes and bales creaked a little with the lift and fall of the hull. It was dark down there. But into the creaking darkness a man came stealthily, with a flashlight boring an uncertain path.
The man was undersized and scrawny, in a white steward's jacket. He had prominent teeth and mouse-colored hair that stuck up stiffly in a cowlick at the back and sagged limply over his left eye in front. In his left hand he carried food wrapped in a none too clean napkin. Under his arm was a thermos bottle with water.
He walked between swaying piles of merchandise to a long black box in a corner. A coffin. He set the food and water down and, holding the flashlight in his left hand, unscrewed the lid of the coffin with a pocket screwdriver.
The lid slanted off and Check Gavey sat up. He stretched his arms and flexed his legs with a groan.
“Tough, lyin' all cramped up like that for so long,” whispered the steward.
Gavey scowled at him.
“You should know! Try staying on the flat of your back for a day! But it's better than the electric chair.”
He took the food and water, and ate. Then he smoked a cigarette, with the steward jittery because the red glint or the smoke might give them away. Finally, with a grimace, Gavey got back into the coffin.
“My God, I won't ever want to lie down again. Screw the lid down like it was. I'd give twenty grand to leave it unscrewed so I could get out and ankle around once in a while. But I can't take the chance of somebody noticing if it was unscrewed.”
The steward wiped sweat from his forehead. He put the lid back in place and screwed it down. Then with a furtive triple-knock to assure Gavey that everything was all right, he left.
In the coffin, Gavey managed to doze. He sought after sleep, fought for it, to help pass the horribly slow hours—
Footsteps brought him wide awake. Footsteps, in here! But many men had entered and left the hold while he lay here. There was no reason to think this visit meant anything.
However, as the steps came closer and closer, he began to sweat in the long black box. Then, through the air holes, he heard someone say: “There it is.”
The steps stopped right beside the coffin.
“Yeah. John Hiram Harvey. This must be it.”
“You squarehead—we've only got one coffin aboard, ain't we? How could a mistake be made?”
In the black box, Gavey lay with his breath clogging his throat while great drops of perspiration coursed down his face and onto the soiled black satin on which he lay. What was this? Had the cops connected the bump-off of Abel's man with the coffin shipped to Central America the same night? Had they radioed the ship?
Under Gavey's right hand lay his automatic. He clutched it. He'd shoot his way out. No matter what happened—how many he had to plug—he wasn't going back to the chair!
He expected to hear the rasp of the lid's screws being turned. But instead he felt the coffin being lifted. Going to take him to the brig or some place before opening the casket, huh?
That fool steward must have been trailed here with the food—
Gavey found himself standing upright for an instant as the coffin was held on end. Then he felt the thing jerk a little and heard a voice: “Catch it! It's slidin' out of my hands—”
Wildly, Gavey tried to throw his arms up and out to brace himself against a fall as he felt himself tipping forward. The cramped space of the coffin made such attempts futile, of course. His forehead banged against the coffin lid and unconsciousness claimed him as darkness claims a room when the light is snapped off—
THE ship's bell tolled midnight. It was silvery on deck. The moon laid a metal path behind the ship, with the creamy wake from the slowed propellers embroidering it. The coffin bearing the nameplate John Harvey, retired sea captain, rested on the ship's rail. With bared heads the ship's officers and such of the passengers as cared to come to the afterdeck, stood while the last words of the short burial ceremony were spoken by the captain. Then the flag-draped casket, weighted, was slanted forward.
It slid out from under the flag and splashed into the sea. The splash was almost inaudible in the murmur of the ship's wake.
Near the rail a middle-aged woman in black, with the great dark eyes of the Latins, sobbed on the shoulder of a girl with black hair and grey eyes.
“There, there,” the girl soothed, biting back her own tears. “Clean night and cool depths— It was Dad's wish, Mother. He always said he wanted to be buried at sea.”