Where Is Janice Gantry? (24 page)

As Weber saw me, his eyes went wide. He released her and sprang back.

“Hold her!” Marty yelled in fury.

I reached him in two lurching strides. I could not make fists and so I chopped down on the nape of his neck with the underside of my right forearm. As he dropped, limp and sighing, Peggy rolled off the couch and up onto her feet, her face wild and vacant, looking at me and through me with no recognition.

“Run!” I yelled into her face. “Go over the side!”

I knew what Weber was going after, with great speed and direction. I knew I could not stop him, could not even reach him in time. I slapped her face with my flaccid hand. Her
eyes seemed to focus. “Over the side!” I yelled once more. She slid fleetly by me. I followed her, blundering, off balance, going too slowly, like one of those nightmares when, in panic, you run from some monstrous Thing, and it is like running through glue.

As I started to pull myself out onto the deck I heard the hard flat bark of the shot. My hand stung where I grasped the edge of the hatch, and tiny things bit into my cheek and throat. I stumbled out onto the deck, veering to my right to evade the line of fire, and I saw her going over the stern. Panic had made her run straight back to dive over the stern rail. I saw her stretched sleek and pale in the moonlight, and I knew that if she entered the water in that sort of dive, the layers of turbulence behind the cruiser would snap her back and her neck and break her legs, if she did not land in the dingy. But just before she fell away into the darkness I saw her curl herself into a ball.

I went over the port rail, hurling myself as far as I could. I smacked the water hard and went far under, wrenched and twisted, spinning, hearing the hard underwater chunking sound of the twin screws. When the water was more quiet I swam under water for as far as I could, hoping I was swimming away from the boat. I came up. The
Sea Queen
was twice as far away from me as I had dared hope.

I looked for Peggy. She was expert enough to handle herself in the water with bound hands. I knew she had jumped far enough to be clear of the screws. I looked along a path of moonlight. It was empty.

“Peggy!” I yelled her name and listened.

“Peggy!” I listened to too much silence and heard a faint reply. I swam in that direction for fifty yards.

“Peggy!”

“Sam,” she called. “Sam.”

I saw her forty feet away and swam to her.

“Sam, they were trying to …”

“I know. Snap out of it. We’ve got to be smart, honey. We’re going to have to spend a lot of time underwater.”

“I can’t stay under with my hands …”

“I know. So I’ll have to pull you down and try to keep you down. Here they come.”

The
Sea Queen
, back under manual steering, had finally circled back to search along the path. She came on fast and I could see the white water at her bow. I knew Weber would be up on the flying bridge. Once I could see which way he would pass us—on which side—I set about increasing the distance there would be between us. I slipped my right arm through her arms and slipped her bound hands up over my shoulder so I could tow her and still use both arms. She kicked with reassuring strength and we moved a little faster than I had hoped. When he was so close I was afraid he could detect movement in the moonlit water, we rested.

I said in a low voice, “Be ready to go under. He’ll use that damn searchlight.”

As I had hoped, he stopped short of where we had gone over the side. It is easy to underestimate distance and momentum on the water. He braked it by reversing both engines and then seemed to lay dead in the water. I put my head under to check, and I could not hear any slow churning of the twin screws.

He lay a hundred yards away. The running lights suddenly went off. There was silence. The big white beam came on suddenly. He began to work it back and forth in a random pattern. When it started to come close I said, “Dive.” We went down. The water was as warm as soup. It had a stubborn buoyancy that made me fight hard to keep us under. At last I had to surface. They were shining the big light on the water on the far side of the boat.

“They could have drowned easy,” Marty said. It was startling the way his voice carried over the water.

“Shut up!”

“Look, her hands are wired together, right? And you think you got him in the air on that second shot. So why shouldn’t they drown?”

“You were such big help.”

“It was Ben put the wire on him, not me, pal. He come up behind me and hit me a good one. How far is the shore?”

“Maybe four miles.”

“How long can you keep shining that light around before somebody sees it and thinks maybe it’s a boat in distress and reports it, Maurie?”

“I think that light way back there is Boca Grande, Marty. So we’re maybe seven miles south of there, and this is empty country.”

“I still don’t like it. I told you something would go wrong, dint I?”

“For Chrissake, shut up!”

“Amateurs always get too damn fancy.”

“You get on the light. I’m going to make some big circles around here and keep looking.”

I heard the engines go into gear. He started making his first circle, going much too fast for an effective search. I guessed he was losing his temper and his patience. I could predict the path of the cruiser, but not the crazy pattern of the light. I was afraid he would blunder onto us. His second circle carried him dangerously close, and we went under when he went by. His third circle swung out around us, and after we were under, I saw the water all around us lighted up by the searchlight beam.

When I came up, Peggy was coughing and retching. “I … swallowed some,” she said. “You stayed under so long.”

She barely had time to recover before he came around again, and it seemed as if he would run us down. I waited as long as I dared and saw the bow swing slightly, so when I went down I tried to move in the opposite direction. When
the turbulence caught us and rolled us, I knew how close it had been.

That was the last time he came anywhere near us. We floated and watched. He was two hundred yards, five hundred yards, and then a mile away.

“Darling, darling,” she said.

“There is one last thing I want to see,” I told her. And then I saw it. The running lights came on. He straightened away on course, running south, leaving us in the bland emptiness of the sea.

“We’re so far out, darling,” she said.

“Just a little swim on a hot night. Refreshing.”

“But which way do we go?”

“We go that way until we walk up onto dry land, girl. It should be LaCosta Key.”

“Can you undo my hands, darling?”

I tried. My fingers were still like breadsticks. “Later, maybe. I’ll try again later, honey.”

“But I can’t help us at all. It will all be up to you.”

“You can help us a little.”

I had been able to kick my shoes off shortly after jumping off the boat. My pockets were empty. The shirt and slacks were light weight. I was tempted to shed them until I realized they might be very useful when we reached shore.

Had I been alone, I could have paced myself and had no trouble. You swim until you feel as if your arms are turning to lead, and then you float for a while, and start off again, using a different stroke.

There weren’t enough ways I could haul her along and make any kind of time. The best way was to have her behind me, holding onto my belt, floating along between my legs, adding her kicking to my lumbering crawl stroke. But I could not keep that up very long. We would rest and then shift so that I did a back stroke with Peggy clinging to one ankle, being towed along, helping us with her kicking. Our least
effective method was when I hooked her clasped hands over my shoulder and did a side stroke.

In water less warm and less buoyant, we could not have made it. And for a long time I doubted whether we could make it even under these most favorable conditions. Water is an alien element. It saps strength. It became a blind feat of endurance. Each time I tired more quickly.

After a long, long time I realized she was speaking my name. I rolled onto my back, gasping, trying to will the tensions out of my muscles which made it difficult to float.

“You go on and get help,” she said. “I can float around for days, happy as a clam, really.”

When I could speak I said, “Nonsense. I’m enjoying every minute.”

“My God, aren’t we bright and brittle and gay,” she said, her voice breaking. “We’ll make our crummy little quips right to the end, won’t we?”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t!”

“Well, I’m sick of gallantry, Sam. I love you with all my heart. Leave me right here. Swim to shore.”

“Quips or no quips, Peggy, I’ll never leave you. We’ll make it together or we won’t make it.”

“Then we won’t make it, Sam. You were groaning with every breath.”

“I’ll rest a little. Then I’ll be okay.”

“How far are we from shore?”

“Halfway, at least.”

“If it ends like this, it’s such … a dirty cheat.”

“It won’t. Believe me, it won’t!”

“Don’t kid me, Sam. I’m a big girl.”

We floated in the darkness and the silence. I added it all up, and there was only one way in the world I could make it come out right.

“I better see what I can do with that knot again, honey.”

“That’s the way I figured it out too. Darling?”

“What?”

“Good luck.”

I found the knot in the darkness and the short ends of wire. My fingers had more feeling, but they were still clumsy. I was exhausted and the effort kept pushing me underwater. I pawed at the knot and gnawed it and suddenly I had to rest.

“Are you getting anywhere?” she asked, too calm.

“I’m pretty sure I am,” I lied.

“If you can’t do it, I’ll make you leave me. I’ll move away from you, Sam. You won’t find me in the dark. I won’t answer you.”

“Stop that! Stop that stupid goddam nonsense!”

I tried again until I was exhausted, but I kept my hand on her wrist while I floated and rested. On the third attempt I went underwater, and got a dog tooth wedged in a loop of the knot, felt the edge of wire gash my gum, yanked my head like a wolf tearing meat, and felt the miraculous loosening.

Moments later the wire was on the floor of the Gulf, and she was sobbing and laughing, glorious in that moonlight.

Then she swam slowly around me, working the circulation back into her hands. She came to me, pressed salt lips against mine and said, “Race you to shore, mister?”

“More quips?”

“Now it’s different, darling. We can afford them.”

“I have the feeling you’ll win.”

“Tell me when you’re ready to start.”

“Right now, but slow.”

“Make the pace, Sam.”

We swam side by side. She adjusted her pace to mine. I thought it would be a lot easier without her, but I soon learned I had expended almost everything in the account. There was very little left. If I didn’t husband it with great care, I would not make it.

She was calling to me again and she came over and caught my arm, stopping me. I felt like crying childish tears because
somebody had stopped me and I didn’t know if I could get going again, ever.

“Sam,” she said. “Look, darling.”

I looked. I saw the darkness of the shoreline.

I found I could start my arms moving again. And after a long time my knee touched bottom. I staggered up onto my feet and fell forward, and tried to get up again and could not. I was crawling onto wet sand when she caught my arm and helped me up. I leaned too much of my weight on her as we plodded up to where the sand was dry and still warm with the lingering heat of the sun that was long gone. I slid down onto my knees and rolled over onto my back, chest heaving, heart laboring. She knelt beside me and sat back on her heels.

After a long time I was able to look at her. She was mostly a shadow that blotted out the stars. But the moonlight made her hair bright, and it came down at an oblique angle, touching her here and there with a faint silver wash. It touched her cheek, the tip of her nose, her shoulder, half of one breast and the tip of the other, a faint curve of hip, a bold roundness of flexed thigh. The Gulf lapped at the sand, tame as a puppy.

“Old hero type,” my girl said softly. “Stubborn, durable, and so forth.”

“It ain’t often I take a moonlight swim with a naked gal.”

“I’m being sweet to you because I’m actually after your shirt.” She moved to spread herself sweetly across my chest and kiss the side of my throat and nestle there. I ran my hand along the firm satin of her back.

“Everything from now on,” she whispered, “is all profit.”

“All for free, honey.”

“How did you get loose?”

“When you were screaming it turned out I was able to bust that wire. I think it broke where you weakened it with the file.”

She shuddered against me. “They took that nasty sponge
out of my mouth because that Marty one wanted me to scream. I was hoping to get a chance to bite him.”

“Did he manage to …”

“No, darling. But let’s just say that it couldn’t have been timed any closer. He’d clubbed me over the ear with his fist and I was fighting in a sort of daze. It wasn’t going to take him much longer. Hey, do you know that I loooove you?”

“What you feel is gratitude, woman.”

There was a small multiple whining that kept increasing in its ominous volume. My girl began to twitch. She sat up. “Sam, there’s a hundred billion mosquitoes here! We’re going to get eaten alive!”

“Lucky thing a tourist like you has a native along.”

I sent her out into the water. I stripped down to my shorts, wrung out the shirt and trousers and spread them on driftwood sticks stuck into the sand. And then I joined her in the shallows. When too many of them started to swarm around our faces, we would duck under and move away from them. As my strength returned there came with it a special urgency of desire for her. Any nearness of death seems to quicken the needs of the body. The warm and shallow water and the faint almost imperceptible swell and the moonlight, making the beach sand into snow, had aphrodisiac qualities, and she was creamy and supple beside me, with a gaiety that had a semi-hysterical quality about it, a gaiety marked by constant awareness of the narrow margin of our escape.