A Deadly Shade of Gold (28 page)

I sat and tried to read that bloody little man from long range. I could presume he had been with Menterez a long time, and had done him many violent favors, and had had the protection of Menterez to hide behind. He had had years of exile from the homeland. He would know that Menterez was an attractive target. Assume a hell of a lot of pride. The shot which had nearly killed Menterez would have been a personal affront to Miguel. Possibly his duties aboard the boat were more as bodyguard than mate. Assume he had itched to take care of the men aboard the Columbine IV, and could perhaps have handled that part of it alone, but Sam had to be along because it had to be done silently, and Sam would know just how to set up the controls to send them on their way. So it was done, and then the king was laid low when something burst in his head. The partner in murder took off.

Then there was the next affront, a bold invasion of protected ground, the treasured dog killed, a head broken. Perhaps the collapse of Menterez had made Miguel begin to feel a little insecure.

He was, after all, a murderer. There can be an end to loyalty. This was not his country. Things were beginning to fall apart. The invasion would alarm him. And then, perhaps, he would see Menterez's woman come home, soiled and sick, dazed and broken. That special look would be meaningful to Miguel. It would be something he had seen before. The marks on the wrists would be significant. And he would know she had known about the boat business. Chucho's revolver had been taken. A revolver had been found in the room of a hotel guest, a big brown man who looked as if he could come over a wall in the night. The same man had been seen in the red car with the dark woman who was at the hotel with him.

Loyalty must stop, and a small bloody man must start thinking of his own skin.

Once aboard the boat and clear, he had a lot of choices. Angostura. Topolobambo. A little brown spry man with a sad face, and some pesos in hand, abandoning the boat and melting into an alien countryside.

I shook myself out of it like a wet dog. Imagination is useful, but it turns treacherous if you depend too much upon it. But it was like a picture hanging crooked on the wall. I wanted to go over and straighten it. If that violent little man was leaving, I did not think he would leave quietly.

Nursing another bottle of beer, I waited and watched. A half hour later the Datsun came back and parked along the road at a place I could not see. Miguel came down the path, heavily laden, and pounced aboard. He had comported himself in that super-casual manner of someone who wishes to avoid attention by seeming to perform perfectly ordinary acts. He went and got the batteries, one at a time, and brought them back and spent enough time aboard so I was certain he had strapped them in and hooked them up. The cruiser rode higher. The bilge outlet was spitting dirty spray. He took his power line off the dockside connection and it stopped. He coiled the power line, knelt and tied it, and took it aboard. Again he hurried back up to the truck and went back up to the last house at the crest of the knoll.

What if Carlos' condition had suddenly worsened? Miguel would know it would make sense for him to take off the moment Menterez died. I could not imagine him being very close to the other Cubans in the compound. Those little deadly ones are loners, just as his dog had been.

I went to the desk and made arrangements about the bill. The fun-loving, sun-loving tourists were milling around. Arista was looking for an opening, perhaps to cover himself in the absurd eventuality that I had some sort of official status. I told him we would pay cash for breakfast, so he could have the account ready. The luggage would be ready to bring out at ten-fifteen. Yes, the bus would leave at ten-thirty, and make the air connection in Culiacan in plenty of time.

"I shall turn your property over to you upon departure, sir."

"What property?"

"Uh... the weapon, sir.

"I don't know anything about any weapon, Arista."

"But, sir, you admitted that....."

"I don't know what you're talking about. You don't have anything of mine. If you think you have something of mine, why you just keep it."

"But it was found...."

"I'm not responsible for what other guests leave in the rooms."

When I looked back at him he was dry-washing his hands, and I think his underlip was trembling.

The rooms were empty. I went looking for Nora. I found her coming out of the bar. She was
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looking for me. She had changed. She wore a very simple sleeveless white dress with a sun back.

She had flattened her hair, fastened it into severity. The white dress deepened her tan. She looked very composed. I steered her back into the bar, back to the far table where we had first sat. She wanted bourbon on ice, and I got two of them.

"Get some sleep?"

"No. I just... did a lot of thinking, Travis."

"Any conclusions?"

"A few. I felt very savage about Sam. It all seemed so black and white. Maybe that's my flaw, to see everything as totally right or totally wrong. But it isn't like that, is it?"

"You mean the bad guys and the good guys? No, it isn't like that, not when you know enough about it."

"I can't be some sort of abstract and objective instrument of justice, Trav, when I don't even know what justice is any more. I don't think I ever really knew Sam. I know that you brought me along as... as a disguise."

"And because you had to get it out of your system one way or another."

"One way or another," she said. She nodded. "Did you know that all that thirst for vengeance was going to sort of... fade away?"

"No. But I knew it was possible."

She took the last swallow and the ice clicked against her teeth. She shook her head. "It's such a...

such a lot of bloody confusion And here I am, wandering around in it with my dime store morality. I feel like such an ass."

"It got to me yesterday. It shouldn't have. God knows I've been dry behind the ears for a long long time. But the little mental image of Sam holding the arms of the woman they didn't know was there, and that bloody little monster sliding up behind her with.... "

"Don't!" she whispered. "Please."

"I'd be better off without a little taint of idealism, Nora. Then I could accept the fact that man is usually a pretty wretched piece of work."

"You asked for conclusions. Okay. I'm dropping the dime store morality bit, darling. Yesterday you had it up to here. I don't care what you did. I don't even care if you slept with that Felicia.

Maybe it would have been a kind of brutal therapy. I don't have any special privileges. I haven't asked for any or granted any. If you left me in kind of... an agony of suspense, I should have had the sense to know that whatever you had to tell me would keep. So I am still in your bed, if I please you."

"You do."

"Everybody is so damned lonely, you have to take what there is. And if there are any good guys
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at all, you're one of them."

"You'll turn my head."

"Further conclusion. When we leave here, I would be perfectly content to head all the way back.

I'll reimburse you for everything, and I want no argument on that. But if you want to take it further, in California, and you think I'd be of any use to you, I'll go with you and do as I'm told. I can let it all drop right here. But I can understand that you... might feel as if you'd left something unfinished."

I went over and brought back two more bourbons. I thought it over and said, "I don't know.

Tomberlin interests me. Maybe I better try the California thing alone. In one sense, he started the whole mess. In another sense, Menterez spent profitable years building it up to the ultimate mess, and it had to happen sooner or later. Let me think about it. The first thing we have to do is survive that airplane ride to Durango."

"If you hold my hand, we'll make it."

"You sank those nails in pretty good the last time."

"And we made it."

"Did you get any lunch at all?"

"No. Look. It's after five. I can last. I may get kind of glassy if you force another drink on me, but I can last. If you forced another drink on me, you could lead me off to the room and have your way with me, sir."

"Even without another drink?"

"One never knows unless one tries, does one."

Fifteen

SHE WANTED to put on something else, but I asked her to put the white dress back on. I liked the way she looked in it. We went out onto the sun deck at the end of the corridor and sat where we could look down upon the pool people and, at the further level, the boat basin.

I told her about Miguel and the boat. Jose brought us drinks and a plate of little hot pastries with something baked into the center of each one-shrimp, steak, ham. She gobbled like a shewolf, licking her fingers, making little sounds of pleasure not entirely dissimilar to the sounds the previous pleasure had elicited. The tautness was entirely gone out of her face, and she laughed more readily than ever before.

Then I finally realized that I had to do what I had been trying not to think of doing. The sun was low. The shadows were turning blue. And I told her I had to walk up the road and see if I could get a word with Almah. I said I would wear a disarming smile and stand well away from the gate and bellow Senorita Heechin por favor until the guard understood the message. I said I had to find out what shape she was in, and if she came out to the gate, I had a few questions about Tomberlin which might be helpful. I said that if there was any imminent ugliness, I would dive for the brush. It made her nervous for me to go up the road. She wanted to come along. I told
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her to stay and keep an eye on the boat. It was a make-work project, to make her feel useful.

When I started up the road, I looked back. I saw her going down the steps toward the pool, a slender distant figure in white. I stretched my legs and made pretty good time up the curves of the road. I was better than halfway to the pink house when I heard the pounding of running footsteps. An instant later the young lawyer appeared around the next curve. He wore pink shorts, a knit shirt, white sweat socks and tennis shoes. Those heavy white muscular hairy legs were not built for running. He was making a tremendous effort, but not covering much ground.

The handsome face was mostly gasping mouth.

"Hay-yulp! Hay-yulp!" he bawled, and tried to point behind him and run at the same time. He ground to a stop in front of me, gasping hard, and said, "My God! He.... My God, the blood!

Almah! My God... with a knife...."

With a sudden rising roar, the Datsun came rocketing and sliding around the curve, and got a good grip and charged at us. I got the lawyer around the chunky waist and churned hard for the side of the road, with the tan vehicle aiming at us in a long slant. I scrabbled at the side hill beyond the ditch and almost pulled him clear, but the vehicle swerved into the ditch, bouncing hard, and one wheel caught his thick ankle against the stones in the ditch bottom and crushed it like pottery. He yelled and fainted.

I left him there and took off after the vehicle. I came around a bend in time to see him pass the top of the path and brake hard and swing down the little steep side road to the boat basin. I swerved into the path. I was going too fast, slipped on loose stones, fell on one hip and skidded off into the brush. I got up and went on, running more slowly, and with a slight limp.

When I got to the top of the steps, I could see the vehicle below me and see Miguel out on the finger pier, snatching the lines off and tossing them aboard. I raced down the steps and around the truck. I thought I might have a pretty good chance of running out and leaping aboard before he could get it started. He was aboard and scrambling toward the controls. Off to my right I suddenly saw Nora out of the corner of my eye, just past the sign saying boat owners and guests only, her hands clasped together, her eyes wide with alarm.

I didn't know how good an idea it might be to leap aboard with that desperate murderous little man, but I thought that if there was a handy boat hook, I might do some good.

The problem did not arise. A white blooming flower of heat picked me up and slammed me back against the side of the Datsun. I rebounded from it onto my face in the dust, too dazed to comprehend what had happened.

Once upon a time I had been a hundred yards from a damn fool in a Miami marina when he had stepped aboard his jazzy little Owens and, without checking the bilge or turning the blowers on, had turned the key to start the engines. The accumulated gas fumes in the bilge had made a monstrous Whooompf. His fat wife was on the dock, and it had blown the sunsuit off her without leaving a mark on her. The owner had landed twenty feet away, in the water, with second degree burns and two broken legs. His crumpled beer cooler had landed on top of a car in the nearby parking lot. And what was left of the little cruiser had sunk seconds later.

This was no whooompf. This was a hard, full throated, solid bam. It silenced that immediate portion of the world, and sent a thousand water birds wheeling and squalling. I picked myself up and fell. I saw Nora fifty feet away, trying to sit up. I started crawling to her. I stood up and took
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a dozen lurching steps and fell again and crawled the last few leet. She could not sit up.

The white dress was not soiled. Her hair was not mussed. The only new thing about her was a crisp, splintery shard of mahogany. It looked as if it had been blown out of a portion of the rail.

The rounded part of it was varnished. It was about twenty inches long. It was heaviest in the middle, tapering toward both ends. The middle of it was about as big around as her wrist. It was socketed into the soft tan hollow of her throat, at a slight angle so that the sharp splintered end stuck out of the side of her throat, near the back. She was braced up on one elbow, and with the fingertips of the other hand she touched the thing where it entered her throat.

She looked at me with an expression of shy, rueful apology, as though she wanted me to forgive her for being such a fool. Her lips moved, and then she frowned and coughed. She put her hand to her lips and coughed a bulging, spilling pint of red blood. She settled back. On hands and knees, I looked down into her eyes. She gave a little frown, as though exasperated at being so terribly messy, and coughed once again, and the dark eyes looked at me and then suddenly they looked through me and beyond me, and through the sky itself, glazing into that stare into infinity. She spasmed once, twitched those stupendous legs, and flattened slowly, slowly against the ground, shrinking inside that white dress until it looked too big for her, until she could have been a thin child in a woman's dress.