She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern. I picked up the gun. It was a beautiful trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of engraving. I broke it, swishing it back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was still watching me.
The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been in the water 24 hours.
I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how bored and how cheap you could get.
She pulled us back to the pier. I made the skiff fast and followed her silently back to the car, carrying the diving gear and the gun. The trunk was still open. I put the stuff in, slammed the lid, and gave her the key.
Why not, I thought savagely. If this was good clean fun in her crowd, what did I have to kick about? Maybe the commercial approach made the whole thing a little greasy, and maybe she could have been a little less cynical about waving that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the stuff that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but still it was nothing to blow your top about, was it? I didn’t have to tear her head off.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, the gray eyes faintly puzzled.
This was the goddess again. She was cute.
“Am I?” I asked.
We walked back to the pier and went into the living room of the houseboat. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stood facing me a little awkwardly, as if I still puzzled her.
She smiled tentatively. “You really found it quickly, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. I was standing right in front of her. Our eyes met. “If you’d gone further up the lake before you threw it in it might have taken a little longer.”
She gasped.
I was angry and I stuck my neck out another foot.
“Things must be pretty tough when a woman with your looks has to go this far into left field—”
It rocked me, and my eyes stung; a solid hundred and fifty pounds of flaming, outraged girl was leaning on the other end of the arm. I turned around, leaving her standing there, and walked into the bedroom before she decided to pull my head off and hand it to me. She was big enough, and angry enough.
I dressed and was reaching for a cigarette when I suddenly heard footsteps outside on the pier. I held still and listened. They couldn’t be hers. She was barefoot. It was a man. Or men, I thought. It sounded as if there were two of them. They came aboard and into the living room, the scraping of their shoes loud and distinct in the hush. I stiffened, hardly breathing now.
Detectives? Wayne himself? Suddenly I remembered the way she’d doubled all over town getting out on the highway and how she’d kept watching the rear-view mirror. I cursed her bitterly and silently. This was wonderful. This was all I lacked – getting myself shot, or named co-respondent in a divorce suit. And for nothing, except having my face slapped around under my ear.
I looked swiftly around the room. There was no way out. The window was too small. I eased across the carpet until I was against the door, listening.
“All right, Mrs Macaulay,” a man’s voice said. “Where is he?”
Mrs Macaulay? But that was what he’d said.
“What do you want now?” Her voice was a scared whisper. “Can’t you ever understand that I don’t know where he is? He’s gone. He left me. I don’t know where he went. I haven’t heard from him—”
“We’ve heard that before. You’ve made two trips out here in 24 hours. Is Macaulay here?”
“He’s not up here, and I don’t know where he is—”
Her voice cut off with a gasp, and then I heard the slap. It came again. And then again. She apparently tried to hold on, but she began to break after the third one and the sob which was wrung from her wasn’t a cry of pain but of utter hopelessness. I gave it up then, too, and came out.
There were two of them. The one to my left lounged on an armchair, lighting a cigarette as I charged into the room. I saw him only out of the corners of my eyes because it was the other one I wanted. He was turned the other way. He had her down on the sofa and off balance with a knee pressed into her thighs while he held her left wrist and the front of her bathing suit with one hand and hit her with the other. He wasn’t as tall as she was, but he was big across the shoulders.
I caught the arm just as he drew it back again. He let her go. Even taken by surprise that way, he was falling into a crouch and bringing his left up as he stepped back. But I was already swinging, and it was too sudden and unexpected for even a pug to get covered in time. He went down and stayed down.
I started for him again, but something made me jerk my eyes around to the other one. Maybe it was just a flicker of movement. It couldn’t have been any more than that, but now instead of a cigarette lighter in his hand there was a gun.
He gestured casually with the muzzle of it for me to move back and stay there. I moved.
I was ten feet from him. He was safe enough, and knew it. I watched him, still angry but beginning to get control of myself now. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d walked into, except that it looked dangerous. I couldn’t place them. They weren’t police. And they obviously weren’t private detectives hired by her husband, because it was her husband they were looking for. Somebody named Macaulay, and she’d told me her name was Wayne. It was a total blank.
The one I’d hit was getting up. Pug was written all over him. He moved in on me clearing his head, cat-like, ready. He was a good six inches shorter than I was, but he had cocky shoulders and big arms, and I could see the bright, eager malice with which he sized me up. He was a tough little man who was going to cut a bigger one down to size.
“Drop it,” the lounging one said.
“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh and urgent.
The other shook his head indifferently. He was long, loose-limbed, and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. I couldn’t tab him. He might have been a college miler or a minor poet, except for the cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had something about him which told me he knew his business.
“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some more?”
I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch for very long without losing your head, and with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.
Tweed Jacket’s eyes flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, not with her boyfriend. Check the rooms, though; look at the ashtrays. You know his cigarettes.”
The pug went out, bumping me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was mutual.
There was silence in the room except for Shannon Wayne’s stirring on the sofa. She sat up, her face puffed and inflamed; her eyes wet with involuntary tears. She clutched the torn strap of her bathing suit, fumblingly, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. Tweed Jacket ignored us. The pug came back.
“Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”
He looked at me hopefully. “How about Big Boy? Let’s ask him.”
“Forget it. Stick to business.”