Dead Low Tide (23 page)

Swim the pass at nine forty-three. Ten minutes to get to the bridge. Call it ten o’clock at the bridge.

I went over it for Christy. She was thoughtful. I told her what I had in mind. She became more thoughtful.

“Well,” she said at last, “I guess they’d remember seeing him go over the bridge. It wouldn’t hurt anything.”

“It’s an animal instinct to double back on your tracks, throw off pursuit. That guy has lived most of his life as something being hunted. And he knows the area. It would be as good a way as any. A hell of a lot more devious than taking the stolen boat south a way, but actually a hell of a lot more effective.”

“It would be better than just sitting around here.”

“O.K., then?”

“I guess … O.K., Andy.”

“I’d rather have you with me than locked up here. I don’t ever want you out of my sight again, Christy.”

I went out cautiously, checked the area, moved the Cad closer to the door and opened the far door of the car. I honked and she came scuttling out, piled in and banged the door shut as I backed it around. I drove out our road, turned south on the trail and drove a fast five miles before turning
right into the obscure little road that led to the Vera Key bridge. One day it won’t be obscure. It will have become another fat rich Key, loaded with heavy money, homes out of the architectural magazines. Right now Vera Key is just a half step ahead of the bulldozers, but it is already too late to expect to come down and grab yourself good land and wait for the rise. The rise has happened, and the land is sewed up and the boys are waiting.

It was a mile in to the bridge. The bridge was open. Two big cars with northern plates were waiting. A fat, elderly, red-faced man stood indignantly in the sun with his hands on his hips, glaring at the bridge.

I looked up and down the channel and there wasn’t a boat in sight. I got out and the indignant man turned on me as though I were personally responsible.

“I’m trying to get onto Vera Key to look at some land there, and by God, what kind of a way is this to run a goddamn bridge!”

“Shush!” his wife hissed at him from the car. “Shush!”

“You can bet your life I’m going to have something to say about a bunch of lazy crackers going away and leaving the bridge open. What the hell kind of a way is this to run a …”

“Shush!”

“Stop shushing me, dammit! I …” He looked beyond me and I saw the usual Hallowell reaction cut him off in mid stride and leave him with a wondering, enfeebled smile.

Christy came up beside me. “What is it, Andy?” The bridge tender’s house was on the Vera Key side. It had an ominously silent look.

“There isn’t anybody there,” the man said. “I blew my horn until I was afraid my battery would run down.”

I knew I wanted a look. The bridge was of the kind that turns on a central pier. It is turned by standing on the bridge itself and walking around and around with a big crank gadget, like an ox turning a millstone. When it is turned at right angles to its usual position, a boat can go through on either side of it. The crank affair was sticking up out of the socket in the bridge floor.

I walked over and looked at the gap. About twelve feet. I had no great urge to try to jump twelve feet and clear the bridge rail on the far side. The tide current was running in swift below me.

Down the bank to my left I saw an old skiff pulled up on shore without oars. But it did have a claw anchor tossed up into the brush at the end of about twenty feet of sturdy-looking rope. I went down and removed the anchor line from the bow, brought it back up.

“What are you going to do?” Christy asked.

“Just watch and cheer in the right places.” I tossed the anchor over the bridge rail. It pulled free the first time. The second time it caught. I yanked on it hard, then fastened it to the front bumper of the car of the indignant citizen and got him to back up slowly until the line was taut.

I then went across it, hand over hand. It pulled my shoulders practically free of the sockets, and by the time I got both hands on the bridge rail, all I could do was hang there for a minute. Then I got my knee up, pulled myself up the rest of the way and climbed feebly over the rail.

I bowed and Christy clapped. I unhooked the anchor and tossed it back and over to one side, and Christy busied herself returning it to the skiff. I began to walk around and around pushing on the big crank and the bridge slowly returned to
its normal position, coming to a jarring stop when it had turned as far as it should. I took the crank out and tossed it out of the way by the rail and trotted off the other end of the bridge.

Christy was right behind me when I found the bridge keeper and his wife. The old couple were on the floor, facedown, side by side. Their wrists were fastened behind them with leader wire, twisted cruelly tight. Their ankles were fastened in the same way. The pliers with which it had been done were close at hand. They had a cutting edge. I snipped the wire from her wrists and ankles first. She sat up at once and began to untie the rag tied around her mouth. Christy helped her up as I unsnipped the old man. He got the rag off his mouth and started cursing. Most of it, it seemed, was directed at some damn fool who sat over there the other side of the bridge and blew his damn fool horn until you couldn’t hear yourself think. He went spryly out, rubbing his wrists, to inspect his precious bridge.

The old lady was willing to talk. Almost too willing.

“He come here around ten o’clock and he asked if we had bait, and he waited while George opened the bridge for a boat and closed it again, and while George was closing it, he came right in here and tied me up before I could hardly squeak. And then he got George when he came in. I swear he was like a crazy man. I heard him out in my kitchen, eating and talking to himself, like. And then a boat blew for the bridge to open, and he went on out and opened it himself. Then I heard some yelling and I heard the boat going off down the channel.”

I told her he was a crazy man, a murderer, and she looked as if she might faint.

“Which way was the boat headed?”

“South.”

I saw the telephone and told her I wanted to use it. I couldn’t get Wargler or George. I got the young one they called Jimmy and told him and he said he’d get word to them out on the Key right away.

The old man was still cursing. I went outside with Christy.

“It’s pretty obvious, now, Christy. He opened the bridge for a boat and then dropped onto the boat from the bridge and took over. The boat was headed south.”

I called to the old man, “About what time did that boat go through?”

“Quarter to eleven. He hung around a while after he tied us up like he did.”

By my watch it was nearly one-thirty. Two and three-quarter hours. Roy Kenney was still widening the gap. Assume fifteen knots. He could be nearly forty miles away in a straight line. Or he could have made the commandeered craft put him ashore at any number of places. He had moved so quickly and boldly and well, that it gave me the hopeless feeling he was going to get away.

From the air they could search for a cabin cruiser drifting someplace, or aground. Maybe the people aboard would be lucky, the way the old couple had been lucky. Spared by a whim.

There wasn’t anything else we could do. With Christy beside me I drove slowly back toward Tickler Terrace. Out on the trail two police cars went by us headed in the opposite direction, sirens lusty. I caught a glimpse of Chief Wargler’s florid face in the second car.

WARGLER STOPPED
at four-thirty to tell us his troubles, and find out how I’d happened to go down to the bridge at Vera Key. He seemed depressed.

“By God, son, we’ve done about everything I can think of. Got four planes working now, checking every boat in a hundred mile area headed away from here. Pilots say the damn fools wave at them. Put an alert on the ship-to-shore. Even got that Air Force crash boat out of Sarasota working for us. Tying up all waterways traffic. Not a trace of the guy. This is going to look awful bad for me. I hate to think about it, even.”

“He can’t get away, though, can he?” Christy asked.

“There’s one way I hate to think about, girl. Suppose he sees an empty dock. O.K. Herd the people below, kill ’em, tie up the boat and take off. And we can’t check every cruiser tied up to a dock on the coast. He’s had enough time, with
luck, to be out of the state by now, if he’s running. But I keep getting the funny feeling he’s hanging around. Maybe it isn’t so funny after all. He didn’t have any money on him. He must have hid that forty thousand someplace. It would be nice to use it for running. Maybe he doesn’t want to run. Maybe he wants to wait for it to get dark and start killing some more people.”

Christy shuddered. “Hey! Cut it out.”

“You can’t figure those crazy people. They play God. Our rules don’t mean a damn to them. Well, I’m going back to see what’s happening, if anything.”

He drove off. With all that talk about darkness, daylight seemed very precious. And there didn’t seem to be enough of it left. Not nearly enough. If he was still loose at dusk, I was going to take Christy into town and ask to have her put in a cell.

We wandered aimlessly down to the bank of the creek and out to the mouth of it where it flows into the bay. It was as good a place as any, because we were on fairly open land there, the brush way behind us. Some trout fishermen were circling slowly in the flats, over the weeds. One of the commercial fishermen went by straining his eyes to spot the surface whirls that mullet make.

“I just wish it was over,” Christy said. “If he gets away I’ll never … really feel safe again.”

The channel curves to within twenty yards of the mouth of the creek before cutting back out into the center of the bay. A cruiser came slowly down the channel with two girls in bright skimpy clothes sitting in the trolling chairs, rods over the stern. I put my arm around Christy.

“They’ll get him.”

“Gosh, I hope so.”

I wondered vaguely what the girls were after, trolling down the channel. Reds, maybe. But the rods looked a bit hefty for that. And they weren’t working the rods at all. And then, far behind the cruiser I saw an unweighted spoon prancing foolishly on top of the water. Anybody that stupid, I decided, doesn’t deserve a fish. A hell of a waste of a nice big mahogany cruiser, about twenty-eight foot. The girls looked like store window dummies, the way they were sitting, as though heat and monotony had paralyzed them.

Maybe part of it was the ridiculous demonstration of how not to fish. And part of it could have been their very rigidity. But the metallic glint from the shadow of the cabin overhang brought it all into focus. It froze me for one tenth of one unbelievable second, and then I grabbed Christy’s wrist and nearly yanked her arm off. She let out a startled yelp punctured by a flat crackling sound that came across the water. I wasted no time looking back. Christy caught panic from me and did her share of running and zigging and zagging until we crashed, stumbling and falling, into the delightful brush. There was another crack and something that whipped through the leaves. I rolled over and over, shoving her ahead of me.

Beyond the fringe of brush we scrambled up again and headed for my house. I dared then, to turn and look back, just in time to see Roy Kenney in smeared white shirt and khaki pants climb on top of the cabin roof, rifle in his hand. A twenty-two, from the sound of it. He stared toward us, and I shoved Christy around a corner of the house. The cruiser rocked then, oddly, and came to a stop, staggering Kenney a bit. He turned and yelled down at whoever was at
the wheel. They had gone aground and Roy, for a while, had lost interest in pot-shooting.

He was a pleasant target against the blue late afternoon sky. I went into the garage and grabbed the big spinning outfit. Eight feet of glass surf-casting rod, with a big Rumer Atlantic spanning reel carrying three hundred yards of fifteen pound monofilament. It is a luxury I bought myself, and I use it for tarpon and kings. That character silhouetted against the sky, yelling and waving his arms, had taken a shot at my lady. He had tried to choke her and drown her.

The rod was rigged with a big number six Reflecto spoon, and a heavy rudder sinker a foot from the spoon, wire leader connecting them. I had used it last for surf casting when the kings were running close off shore.

The cruiser was grunting and straining in full reverse. Christy gave a despairing cry as I ran out with the rod in my hand. I ran down to the open place near where we were first standing. Roy Kenney had his back to me. He was bent forward a bit from the waist, peering down at the bow where the craft had gone aground. I could read the name on her.
The Sea Flight
, out of Tampa.

I didn’t know how soon he would turn. I took the line off the pickup, hooked it around my finger and swung back. I knew I could reach the distance easily. I was used to the rod and the line and that particular amount of weight and what I could do with it.

I let go, ready to turn and run like a rabbit if it was a bad cast. The big spoon twinkled in a high arc, the line bellying after it. I saw Kenney straighten up. I saw then that it was in a perfect line, but too far beyond him. I nipped the flowing line with my finger, and hooked the line onto the manual
pickup. I saw the twinkling spoon fall over his shoulder, fall in front of him, and as it did so, I reared back and set the hook with a hard slanting swing of the big glass rod.

There is never any doubt when you set a hook. There is either resistance or there isn’t. I hit something solid. I saw arms flail wildly, saw the rifle fly, saw the man stagger backward off the edge of the cabin roof and fall into the water with a mighty splash, completely missing the narrow catwalk around the cabin.

He came up, and he splashed and struggled and took some line. Not the clean, good, thrilling run of a tough fish, but a few nasty, dull little tugs. I kept pressure on him. He tried to turn back to the cruiser but I swung him around and began to reel him in. He had the same inertness as a big grouper after the first hard effort to get free. His arms splashed at the water.