I was a good two hundred yards from the pier and the barge now. The flashlight was coming along the shore in my direction. I eased back out until just my head was above water, and waited. I could hear them talking. When they were almost opposite me, they turned and went back. A few minutes later a car started up, near the landward end of the pier. The twin beams swung in an arc, and I watched the red taillights fade and disappear. I waded ashore in the dark. The reaction hit me all of a sudden, and I was weak and very shaky in the knees, and I had to sit down.
After a while I took off my clothes and squeezed some of the water out of them. I still had my wallet and watch and cigarette lighter. I pressed as much water as I could out of the soggy papers and the money in the wallet and threw away the mushy cigarettes. It was hard getting the wet clothes back on in the darkness. There was no wind, and mosquitoes made thin whining sounds around my ears. Far off to my right I could see the glow of Southport’s lights reflected against the sky. I stood up, located Solaris to orient myself, and started walking.
“Where is it?” Willetts asked. “Can you describe the place?”
“Yes,” I said. “It must be eight or ten miles west of town. I walked about three before I could flag a patrol car. It’s a single wooden pier with a shed on it. There’s a steel barge moored to the west side of it. The buildings ashore apparently burned down a long time ago; there’s nothing left but foundations and rubble.”
He exchanged a glance with Ramirez, and they nodded. “Sounds like the old Bowen sugar mill. It’s outside the city limits, but we can go take a look. You better come along and see if you can identify it. You sure you’re all right now?”
“Sure,” I said.
It was after ten p.m. We were in Emergency Receiving at County Hospital, where the men in the patrol car had brought me. They had radioed in as soon as I gave them the story, and received word back to hold me until it could be investigated. A bored intern checked me over, said I had a bad bruise on the back of my head but no fracture, cleaned the barnacle cuts on my arms, stuck on a few Band-Aids, and gave me a cigarette and two aspirins.
“You’ll live,” he said, with the medic’s vast non-interest in the healthy.
I wondered how long. They’d given up for the moment, but when they found out I hadn’t drowned they’d be back. What should I do? Ask for police protection for the rest of my life? That would be a laugh. A grown man asking protection from three pairs of shoes.
Who was Baxter? Why did they want him? And what in the name of God had given them the idea we had put him ashore? I was still butting my head against the same blank wall twenty minutes later when Willetts and Ramirez showed up. They’d been off duty, of course, but were called in because Keefer was their case. I repeated the story.
“All right, let’s go,” Willetts said.
We went out and got in the cruiser. Ramirez drove—quite fast, but without using the siren. My clothes were merely damp now, and the cool air was pleasant; the headache had subsided to a dull throbbing. We rode a freeway for a good part of the distance, and the trip took less than fifteen minutes. As soon as we came out to the end of the bumpy and neglected shell-surfaced road and stopped, I recognized it. Willetts and Ramirez took out flashlights and we walked down through the blackened rubble to the pier.
We found the doorway into the shed, opposite the barge. Inside it was black and empty. The floor against the opposite wall was still wet where I’d vomited and they’d thrown water on me, and nearby was the fire bucket they’d used. It had a piece of line made fast to the handle. Willetts took it along to be checked for fingerprints. There was nothing else, no trace of blood or anything to indicate Keefer had been killed there. We went out on the pier. Ramirez shot his light down into the water between the piling and the side of the barge. “And you swam under it? Brother.”
“There wasn’t much choice at the time,” I said.
We went back to the police station, to the office I’d been in that morning. They took down my statement.
“You never did see their faces?” Willetts asked.
“No. They kept that light in my eyes all the time. But there were three of them, and at least two were big and plenty rough.”
“And they admitted they killed Keefer?”
“You’ve got their exact words,” I said. “I wouldn’t say there was much doubt of it.”
“Have you got any idea at all why they’re after Baxter?”
“No.”
“Or who Baxter really is?”
“Who Baxter really was,” I said. “And the answer is no.”
“But you think now he might be from Miami?”
“At some time in his life, anyway. I don’t know how long ago it was, but that picture they showed me was taken on Biscayne Bay. I’m almost positive of it.”
“And they didn’t give any reason for that idea you’d put him ashore? I mean, except that Keefer turned up with all that money?”
“No.”
He lighted a cigarette and leaned across the desk. “Look, Rogers. This is just a piece of advice from somebody who’s in the business. Whatever happened in Panama, or out in the middle of the ocean, is out of our jurisdiction and no skin off our tail, but you’re in trouble. If you know anything about this you’re not telling, you’d better start spilling it before you wind up in an alley with the cats looking at you.”
“I don’t know a thing about it I haven’t told you,” I said.
“All right. We have to take your word for it; you’re the only one left, and we’ve got no real evidence to the contrary. But I can smell these goons. They’re pros, and I don’t think they’re local. I’ve put the screws on every source I’ve got around town, and nobody knows anything about ‘em at all. Our only chance to get a lead on ‘em would be to find out who Baxter was, and what he was up to.”
“That’s great,” I said. “With Baxter buried at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.”
“The thing that puzzles me the most is what the hell he was doing on that boat of yours in the first place. The only way you can account for that money of Keefer’s is that he stole it from Baxter. So if Baxter was running from a bunch of hoodlums and had four thousand in cash, why would he try to get away on a boat that probably makes five miles an hour downhill? Me, I’d take something faster.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It gets crazier every time I look at it. The only thing I’m sure of any more is that I wish to Christ I’d never heard of Baxter or Keefer.”
“Okay. There’s nothing more we can do now. I’ve got a hunch the FBI is going to want to take a long, slow look at this, but they can pick you up in the morning. We’ll send you back to your boat in a squad car. And if you have to go chasing around town at night, for God’s sake take a taxi.”
“Sure,” I said. “They struck me as being scared to death of taxi drivers.”
“They’re scared of witnesses, wise guy. They all are. And you’ve always got a better chance where they can’t get a good look at you.”
It was 12:20 a.m. when the squad car dropped me off before the boatyard gate and drove away. I glanced nervously up and down the waterfront with its shadows and gloomy piers and tried to shrug off the feeling of being watched. It was as peaceful as the open sea, with nobody in sight anywhere except old Ralph, the twelve-to-eight watchman, tilted back in a chair just inside the gate reading a magazine in his hot pool of light. He glanced curiously at the police car and at my muddy shoes, but said nothing. I said good night, and went on down through the yard. As I stepped aboard the Topaz and walked aft to the cockpit, I reached in my pocket for the key. Then I saw I wasn’t going to need it.