Keefer returned about an hour later. I introduced them. Baxter was polite and reserved. Keefer, cocky with the beer he’d drunk and full of the merchant seaman’s conviction that anybody who normally lived ashore was a farmer, was inclined to be condescending. I said nothing. Blackie was probably in for a few surprises; I had a hunch that Baxter was a better sailor than he ever would be. We all turned in shortly after ten. When I awoke just at dawn, Baxter was already up and dressed. He was standing beside his bunk, just visible past the edge of the curtain, using the side of his suitcase as a desk while he wrote something on a pad of airmail stationery.
“Why don’t you use the chart table?” I asked.
He looked around. “Oh. This is all right. I didn’t want to wake you.”
I threw the third cigarette over the side, and stood up and stretched. There was nothing in any of that except the fact that Baxter’s flannels and tweeds were a little out of place in Panama. But maybe he merely hadn’t wanted to spend money for tropical clothes, especially if the job had looked none too permanent.
It was dusk now, and the glow over the city was hot against the sky. I snapped the padlock on the hatch, and walked up to the gate. Johns looked up from his magazine. “Goin’ out for supper?”
“Yes. What’s a good air-conditioned restaurant that has a bar?”
“Try the Golden Pheasant, on Third and San Benito. You want me to call you a cab?”
I shook my head. “Thanks. I’ll walk over and catch the bus.”
I crossed the railroad tracks in the gathering darkness and entered the street. The bus stop was one block up and two blocks to the right. It was a district of large warehouses and heavy industry, the streets deserted now and poorly lighted. I turned right at the corner and was halfway up the next block, before a shadowy junkyard piled high with wrecked automobiles, when a car turned into the street behind me, splashing me for an instant with its lights. It swerved to the curb and stopped. “Hey, you,” a voice growled.
I turned, and looked into the shadowy muzzle of an automatic projecting from the front window. Above it was an impression of a hat brim and a brutal outcropping or jaw. “Get in,” the voice commanded.
The street was deserted for blocks in each direction. Behind me was the high, impassable fence of the junkyard. I looked at the miles of utter nothing between me and the corner. “All right. The wallet’s in my hip pocket—”
“We don’t want your wallet. I said get in!” The muzzle of the gun moved almost imperceptibly, and the rear door opened. I stepped toward it. As I leaned down, hands reached out of the darkness inside and yanked. I fell inward. Something slashed down on my left shoulder. My arm went numb to the fingertips. I tried to get up. Light exploded just back of my eyes.
My head was filled with a running groundswell of pain. It rose and fell, and rose again, pressing against my skull in hot waves of orange, and when I opened my eyes the orange gave way to a searing white that made me shudder and close them again. Muscles tightened spasmodically across my abdomen as nausea uncoiled inside me. I was conscious of a retching sound and of the sensation of strangling.
“Prop him up,” a bored voice said. “You want him to drown in it?”
I felt myself hauled upward and pushed against something behind me. I retched and heaved again. “Throw some water on him,” the voice commanded. “He stinks.”
Footsteps went away and came back. Water caught me in the face, forcing my head back and running up my nostrils. I choked. The rest of it splashed onto the front of my shirt. I opened my eyes again. The light burned into them. I reached for it to push it away, but found it was apparently glaring at me from some incalculable distance, because my fingertips could not reach it. Maybe it was the sun. Maybe, on the other hand, I was in hell.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond my own little cosmos of light and pain and the smell of vomit, a voice asked, “Can you hear me, Rogers?”
I tried to say something, but only retched again. More water slapped me in the face. When it had run out of my nose and mouth I tried again. This time I was able to form words. They were short words, and very old ones.
“Rogers, I’m talking to you,” the voice said. “Where did you put him ashore?”
I groped numbly around in my mind for some meaning to that, but gave up. “Who? What are you talking about?”
“Wendell Baxter. Where did you put him ashore?”
5
“Baxter?” I put a hand up over my eyes to shield them I from the light. “Ashore?”
“He couldn’t be that stupid.” This seemed to be a different voice. Tough, with a rasping inflection. “Let me belt him one.”
“Not yet.” This was the first one again—incisive, commanding, a voice with four stripes.
A random phrase, torn from some lost context, boiled up through the pain and the jumbled confusion of my thoughts. . . . Professional muscle . . . That policeman had said it. Willard? Willetts? That was it. Sounds like professional muscle to me. . . .
“We’re going to have to soften him up a little.”
“Shut up. Rogers, where did you land him? Mexico? Honduras? Cuba?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“We’re talking about Wendell Baxter.”
“Baxter is dead,” I said. “He died of a heart attack—”
“And you buried him at sea. Save it, Rogers; we read the papers. Where is he?”
My head was clearing a little now. I had no idea where I was but I could make out that I was sitting on a rough wooden floor with my back propped against a wall and that the light glaring in my face was a powerful flashlight held by someone just in front of and above me. Now that I looked under it I could see gray-trousered legs and a pair of expensive-looking brogues. To my right was another pair of shoes, enormous ones, size twelve at least. I looked to the left and saw one more pair. These were black, and almost as large, and the right one had a slit along the welt about where the little toe would be, as if the wearer had a corn. In my groggy state I fastened onto details like that like a baby seeing the world for the first time. Water ran out of my clothing; I was sitting in a puddle of it. My hair and face were still dripping, and when I licked my lips I realized it was salt. We must be on a pier, or aboard a boat.
“Where was Baxter headed?”
Maybe they were insane. “He’s dead,” I repeated patiently. “We buried him at sea. For God’s sake, why would I lie about it?”
“Because he paid you.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but closed it. A little chill ran down my spine as I began to understand.
‘Let me work him over.”
“Not yet, I tell you. You want to scramble his brains again and have to wait another hour? He’ll talk. All right, Rogers, do you want me to spell it out for you?”
“I don’t care what you spell out. Baxter is dead.”
“Listen. Baxter came aboard the Topaz on the night of May thirty-first in Cristobal. The three of you sailed the next morning, June first, and you and Keefer arrived here on the sixteenth. Baxter paid you ten thousand dollars to land him somewhere on the coast of Central America Mexico, or Cuba, and cook up that story about the heart attack and having to bury him at sea—”
“I tell you he died!”
“Shut up till I’m finished. Baxter should have had better sense than to trust a stupid meathead like Keefer. We know all about him. The night before you sailed from Panama he was down to his last dollar, mooching drinks in a waterfront bar. When you arrived here sixteen days later he moved into the most expensive hotel in town and started throwing money around like a drunk with an expense account. They’re holding twenty-eight hundred for him in the hotel safe, and he had over six hundred in his wallet when his luck ran out. That figures out to somewhere around four grand altogether, so you must have got more. It was your boat. Where’s Baxter now?”