Key West Connection (16 page)

“Bimini, no. I told you no, and I mean no.”

She sort of shook herself, pouting. “Why must you be so mean? There are so many men that I could have.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that! But you! Oh!”

I hugged her, laughing. “Mean? Me? Your friends are coming down here in a few minutes to kill me, and you call
me
mean?”

She drew away from me. “They are not my friends. Do not ever say that again—I hate them!”

“I'm sorry, Bimini. So tell me, then—how did you get involved? How did you come to know the Senator?”

She took a deep breath and sat back. I could tell the subject was distasteful to her. I sat and listened and said nothing.

“When I was a little girl, I grew to hate that pretty little island. I was stupid, as are most children who hate their homelands, and I dreamed of someday escaping. Up on Landrail Point, at the small marina there, they had a wireless radio. When I could sneak away from our little shack, I would go there and listen. I could hear the voices and the music of Miami and Nassau and Havana coming to me, and I dreamed of going to those places.

“Do you remember Landrail Point? Yes? Once a week, the mailboat came there. All the way from Nassau. To me it seemed as if it had come halfway around the world. I made friends with one of the men who ran the boat. He was a fat man, a fat black man, and he said that if I pleasured him, he would take me away. I pleasured him—but I never let him . . . take me.” There was a fierce, proud look on her dark face. “I never let any of them take me, ever! Not even the Senator! I knew how to make them feel good, to make them happy, to make it so they didn't care. So he took me to Nassau. Oh, if I had only known what a dirty, nasty place that was! I trained as a nurse. I worked there. One year, two years. I sent most of the money to my mother—my father had died. To make more money I became a dancer in the Ahora Club. A very good dancer. Many rich men wanted me. But the Senator, he was so . . . so convincing. I left with him. I have been with him almost a year now. And I hate him. He has me trapped here; he lets me go nowhere alone. He is so jealous, so afraid that . . . that he won't be the first!”

“I'm surprised he didn't force you.”

“Hah! No man on earth could force
me
.”

“Ellsworth forced you.”

“He took nothing from me. But I should have let him kill me anyway. I know the Senator will kill me if I ever let him take me. That's why I have been with him so long. He hates failure of any kind. And once he succeeds he will dispose of me the way a child rids himself of an old toy. That's why I must escape soon. Before it's too late. Before he takes me too far away from my old home.”

I wanted to ask her more questions. I wanted to listen to that fine West Indies voice of hers. She was a strong woman. And she would be a fierce lover. And for some strange reason, she wanted me to be her first. I wondered why. I remembered Vietnam. It was not unusual for the nurses to fall in love and marry a wounded man they had cared for. Perhaps that was it. She had given me my life. And now she wanted to give me hers.

I wanted to ask why, but I couldn't force myself. What terrible instinct of intellect is it that always makes us want to investigate another's motives for wanting to love us?

So instead, I said nothing.

I lay back and closed my eyes, patting her leg tenderly.

And that's when I heard them coming to take me away.

I heard footsteps. And then the click of a deadbolt. And then the door open. And then a voice.

It was the surly, well-modulated voice of Benjamin Ellsworth.

And I knew that I was dead.

“He hasn't woken yet?”

“No. I think he's nearly dead. Poor man.”

It was Bimini trying to cover for me. I flinched a little when she called me “poor man.” Too much sympathy wouldn't go over well with Ellsworth.

I heard the sound of a match striking, and smelled the monoxide odor of a cigarette.

“He hasn't spoken? Not even a word?”

Bimini's voice was even, professional, unconcerned. I admired her for it.

“He cried out a few times. Let's see, that was . . . yesterday. He mentioned some woman. Janet? Yes. Since then, nothing.”

I heard Ellsworth walk toward me; heard the movement of other men behind him. I felt him lean over me: smelled the heat of him, his sour tobacco breath. I had some idea of what he might do. And he did it. A trick from Vietnam to see if a gook was really dead.

I felt the radiant glow of the cigarette before it actually touched my eyelid. I forced myself to relax; forced my mind to go blank to pain. It hurt. God, how it hurt. And just when I could take no more, just when I was about to take a swing at that bibliophile face of his, Bimini screamed, “Stop that, you bastard! Stop it this minute!”

I heard a short scuffle, shook off the urge to join in, and then:

“You black bitch—if you ever touch me again, I'll kill you!”

And Bimini hissed at him, biting off each word: “You ain't man enough to kill me!”

There was a silence, as if Ellsworth was trying to regain some composure in front of his men. “Bimini, for your information, this big ugly bastard has already killed at least two, and perhaps more, of the Senator's people. I was just checking—”

“I don't care who he's killed. And you can kill
him,
for all I care. But I don't like to see any living thing mistreated that way. He's dead, can't you see that? His heart's still beating, but his brain died when you hit him with that club.”

In the silence which followed I heard someone cough; the shuffle of feet. And then:

“Okay, men. Load him onto that cot. Take him out to the powerboat. Sammy, you find something heavy. Some chains, some concrete blocks—it doesn't matter. And Jones, get some stout rope. I'll want you two to go with me.”

So they carried me up the stairs, through the house, outside. I concentrated on being heavy, limp weight. I wanted them to think of me as something already dead; a big troublesome chunk of meat that they wanted to be rid of.

The two men huffed and puffed as they struggled with me up the stairs and down the loose footing of the shell mound.

“This son of a bitch am some kinda heavy, ain't he, Sammy?”

“Goddam, I guess! Those friggin' shoulders mus' weigh a hundred pounds by themselves! . . . Aw, shit!”

The second one, Sammy, had lost his footing. I felt the stretcher collapse atop him, and I rolled out of it, down the mound, limp as a rag.

I should have made my move then. Just two of them. I wasn't tied. Ellsworth would probably be down at the docks, readying the boat. I should have. But I didn't. I thought about it just a second too long. I wasted that precious second of surprise I needed to take them. What is the saying? He who hesitates . . .

Well, I was lost. No doubt about it. Silently, I swore at myself. Poor man, old wounded killer, seven pounds overweight, and now a second too slow to save his own life.

They were on me in no time.

“Christ, Sammy, watch it, will ya? You like to give me a rupture, droppin' him that way!”

“Well, I didn't mean to, I guaran-goddam-tee you that! I got a bad back as it is. Told the Senator that. Shouldn't be makin' me do this heavy shit.”

They grumbled on as they carried me down to the boathouse, their feet clicking and echoing on the wooden dock in the silence of three a.m. They set me down finally, and I could hear the steady wash of water beneath me, and the cracking of pistol shrimp from within their tunicate hideaways on the pilings.

“Okay, get the boat started.”

It was Ellsworth.

“You two get him loaded—no, wait a minute. Wrap this canvas around his head. I don't want a trace of him on this boat. And Jones, check him for a weapon—just in case.”

I felt big hands pat my legs, thighs, chest, and underarms—a thorough, professional job. I thanked God I hadn't brought the knife. Bimini would have been dead within ten minutes: a soft brown body to join mine in the eternal dark of death and deep water. They dropped me into the boat like a big sack, wrapped my wounded head so that I would not stain the plastic bristle of boat carpet, then, to the roar of twin engines, jetted me toward my final destination.

 

I kept a map in my mind as we went, sensitive to every shift of direction, every turn, every variation of impact of sea on bow.

I felt us roar northwest, then turn south, probably picking up Big Spanish Channel. I hoped they would stop and get it over with. Why not drop me into the deep water of the pass?

Divers, probably. They were afraid I would be found by the sport divers who hunt the holes and coral heads for Florida lobster. The divers flock to the Keys every August for the sport season.

They were smart. Or Ellsworth was smart. And it was my bad luck. Had they dropped me there, and if I could get loose once underwater, then I knew I could make it back to land.

But offshore? With my battered head and in my dubious physical condition?

I doubted it.

I heard the roar of a passing car, then the echo of our own engines, and I knew I was in trouble. We had just passed under the Bahia Honda bridge, heading for open sea.

How fast were we going? I tried to calculate time and distance. At least forty-five and maybe sixty miles per hour. It was hard to tell. The sleek cruiser knifed through the roll of sea so cleanly that it was difficult to judge speed. But I was familiar with the area, and I knew that if we put more than ten minutes between us and the bridge, I was a goner. An offshore reef line edges the Florida Keys. It runs from five to seven miles out, most of the way up. Once you pass the reef line, the water depth drops off sharply: from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. In the Navy, my deepest free dive was to 190 feet. A life-and-death plunge one golden dawn in the South China Sea. And 190 feet is not all that great when you consider the free-dive mark set by a fellow Navy diver in 1968: 240 feet—a new American record. I had had nothing wired to my legs back then. And I was in top condition. But at night? With a concussion? Well . . . if they took me over the reef line, I was just as good as dead.

But the odd thing was, I wasn't scared. Death? How can you fear death when life suddenly becomes one absurd succession of breaths and heartbeats which link you to some ghostly otherworld, a world where you used to laugh and love and function with reason? What had I to fear? A few minutes of darkness? The frantic, inevitable attempt to inhale a little life from the nocturnal sea, and then strangulation? If I was going to die, I wanted it that way. I wanted it to be under the water, away from prying eyes and the cold deathwatch of nurses and physicians in the sterile confines of a hospital.

No, I did not fear this death. But I wanted life—life not to
live,
but life to use as a vehicle. A vehicle for revenge. I lay there listening to the damp roar of racing engines, feeling the moist sea wind move across me, and I planned my escape.

“Sammy! Wire him up, Sammy! We're almost there.”

Almost there. I did some calculating. We could have come no more than five miles from the Bahia Honda Bridge. That would mean what? Hawks Channel? Yes, Hawks Channel. A deepwater cut between the mainland and the reef. It began narrowly at Key West, then funneled open, wide like a river, skirting the outside archipelago of Florida Keys. I knew how deep the channel was around Key West: from thirty to thirty-five feet. And I knew that it was deeper off Bahia Honda. But how much deeper? Certainly no more than forty-five or fifty feet deep. That wasn't bad. If I could loose myself from my bonds. If I could make it back to the surface. If they didn't hang around to make sure I was down forever. And if I could make the long swim back to shore.

They used wire. Wire and concrete blocks. I could hear the dull impact of cement on cement when Sammy dropped one.

“Jesus Christ, Sammy—are you trying to ruin the Senator's boat?”

“Sorry, Mr. Benjamin, but I got this bad back.”

The two flunkies huffed and puffed, rigging me for my last dive.

I was glad it was wire. Some kind of wire cable. It wouldn't bight like good rope. The knots would slip if forced. And I was going to force them. I expanded my chest, my arms, and my legs as much as I could. An old escape artist's trick. A ten-in-one show veteran had showed me how to do it. Julian Ignazio. Let them tighten the rope or wire on the flexed muscles, the inflated chest. And then, when you relaxed, the bonds were already loose enough to work.

“Put most of the weight on his legs. Some on his stomach. That's right—nice and tight. Don't worry about his arms. Mr. MacMorgan will be going nowhere after this.”