The Detonators (20 page)

She threw me a rather shy and uncertain glance as she freed herself, obviously knowing exactly what was in my mind, or on it. She spoke behind me as I turned to unlock the main hatch.

“If you’re going to have your usual drink before dinner, make me one, too.”

There was a note of defiance in her voice, but she wasn’t defying me, just her own inhibitions.

“Goody, at last I’ve managed to corrupt her totally,” I said. When I emerged from below, she’d kicked off her shoes and made herself comfortable along the cockpit seat to port, her feet up, a life preserver cushion behind her shoulders. I put one glass into her hands and seated myself to starboard nursing the other. I looked at her for a moment, wanting to ask if she’d known that Mrs. Williston was around, but I could think of any way of putting it that didn’t sound like an accusation. “Tired?” I asked.

“It’s been a long day. Matt…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to seem… well, uncooperative, but I’ve had only one skinny airport hamburger all day and I’m very hungry.”

“Sure. Down, Rover!”

“Nice Rover.” She smiled faintly, in a preoccupied way. “Let’s take our drinks downstairs… below. If you want another one, you can have it watching your pretty little bride cooking up a storm. Or is it considered bad luck to mention storms on shipboard?”

There were obviously things on her mind; but I sensed that she didn’t want to tell me about them, and it was better not to pressure her. So we moved below, and I lounged in the compact main cabin watching her, in the tiny adjacent galley, as she found the last two steaks in the icebox, peeled some potatoes and cut them up so they’d cook faster, and broke out the last of the broccoli.

“Johnny…”

“Yes, Penny,” I said.

Working at the stove, she didn’t turn her head to look in my direction. She said, “You know practically everything about me, and I know hardly anything about you. Tell me something about yourself. The real you.”

It wasn’t very smart, and it didn’t go with our Mr. and Mrs. Matthews cover at all. On the other hand, if anybody knew enough about us to listen in, he probably knew too much already. So as she made dinner I told her about a mission that had taken me to the wilds of Scotland—which are wilder than you’d think—and about the lady who’d accompanied me although she was officially on the opposing side, since it was supposed to be a joint operation for the good of humanity; and how she’d finally double-crossed me by slipping knockout drops into my coffee as we picnicked on the desolate moors.

“What happened then?” Amy asked when I stopped.

I shrugged. “The mandatory response. It’s right there in the manual. If you’re stupid enough to swallow a Mickey, and the situation is at all critical—and this one was—you have no choice. I shot her before I passed out, of course.” I watched Amy look around quickly, shocked, and I said without expression, “You’d better flip those steaks before they burn.”

“Yes.” She licked her lips. “Yes, of course.”

It was a pretty good meal, in the cozy little cabin, but a silent one. Several times she started to say something, but each time she changed her mind. Then we collaborated on the dishes in good matrimonial fashion, wifey washing, hubby drying. She put away the dishrag, and I handed her the damp towel, which she hung neatly over the rail above the stove that kept you from falling into the burners when things got rough. But we hadn’t had it that rough yet. Nautically speaking.

She spoke at last without looking at me. “I’m all sticky after all that traveling and I smell of cooking; I’d like to take a shower.” Then she turned to face me, startled by the laugh I couldn’t help. “What’s so funny?”

I said, “I was just betting myself that would probably come next. First the dinner and then the dishes and then the shower.”

She licked her lips. “Yes, I know. I’m stalling. I… I wasn’t much good to you last time and… and I don’t really know if I want to try again.”

I said, “You were sweet and honest; and now you’re turning into a goddam phony. Where did you get the word, Amy?”

“Word?” She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Was it in that Chinese jewelry store while I was making my telephone calls? Or later when you disappeared into the john so long in the Miami airport? Except for a few minutes in the sanatorium, which seems an unlikely place for a contact, those are the only times you’ve been out of my sight all day.” After a long silence, I said, “No, I’m not clairvoyant, sweetheart. But I do this for a living, remember? What are your orders? What do they want you to do?”

“I thought…” She swallowed hard, then tried for a little indignation. “I thought we’d decided that I was really innocent!”

“You were, but you aren’t anymore. Something happened today, didn’t it? Somebody happened.”

She stared at me bleakly for a long time. At last she asked, “Why did you tell me that horrible story?”

“You know why,” I said. “We’ve had it very easy in a way. Lots of lies but no bullets. No violence at all. Only a distant noise and a puff of smoke on the horizon. Somehow, during all this peaceful time, you may have come to the ridiculous conclusion that I’m a nice guy. Just because after over a week in my company you still have all your teeth and can see out of both eyes and retain the use of both arms and don’t limp on either leg. And maybe because, just like you, I was kind of awkward in bed the one time we tried it. Who ever heard of a dangerous secret agent who had a hard time getting it up, for Christ’s sake? So I thought I’d better impress on you the fact that I’m really a very vicious fellow; and I hope you aren’t letting anybody talk you into playing some stupid amateur tricks on this mean old pro.”

She looked at me gravely and reached out to touch my face with her fingertips. When she spoke, there was sadness in her voice: “I wouldn’t ever try to trick you, Matt.” Then she turned away to take some stuff—a towel and a small beach bag—from the shelf over the port bunk that was her bunk when pulled out to its full width. At present, in its narrow configuration, it was serving as settee for the big dropleaf cabin table on which we’d eaten. She squeezed past me in the narrow space and turned to look back at me, her eyes oddly wide and shiny. She rose on tiptoe to kiss me lightly on the mouth. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, darling. Be good.”

I heard her make her way up to the dock and walk away. After a little, I moved out into the cockpit, wishing I still smoked a pipe—the antitobacco boys and girls may have done great things for our lungs, but they’ve deprived us of a lot of solace.

It was another pleasant Bahamas evening with the water glassy calm between the docks. I could hear the heavy, sexy beat of rock-and-roll music from the vicinity of the hotel swimming pool. Well, the
thump
-bump-bump, bump-bump-bump of the waltz was considered very erotic and wicked in its time, I’ve been told, making susceptible young ladies quiver ecstatically inside their whalebone stays and lacy pantalettes and multitudinous petticoats.

I went below again, and, just to make sure, looked around her side of the boat and found that the purse we’d bought her to replace the one that had been snatched in Miami—with the passport, driver’s license, and credit cards we’d got her to replace the ones she’d lost—were missing, of course. She’d said goodbye as clearly as she could without actually saying it. And I’d let her go because she’d served her purpose as far as I was concerned; she was Doug’s problem now. We’d hoped she’d take off so he could follow, hadn’t we? But it was still an empty boat without her.

Now I had to wait and see what the people who’d ordered her away had in mind for me. I didn’t expect them to leave me lonely very long. However, I still had to go through the motions of being a moron, it’s always expected of you; so I went searching for my lost love. I made a production of sneaking a peek into the ladies, unoccupied at this hour, thank God. She wasn’t there, and none of the three grubby shower stalls had been used very recently. She wasn’t in the lighted pool area with its handful of guests and its little outdoor bar and its noisy loudspeakers; and she wasn’t in the dark indoor bar with its dance floor and its powerful, blaring sound system that also fed the pool speakers; and she wasn’t in the restaurant and she wasn’t in the lobby.

I made the phone call that would be expected of me:
Subject contact lost, relocate ASAP.
Okay. I’d complied with the rules, the Hollywood rules that require everybody to be stupid and never figure things out for themselves. As if I wasn’t bright enough to know, just from her behavior, that my child bride had slipped away from me deliberately after refraining from dirtying our relationship with some hasty and deceitful last-minute sex, although she’d probably been instructed to use it to keep me unsuspicious.

I walked back down to the docks. As I started out the long pier, I saw smoke rising from
Spindrift
’s main hatch. My first impulse was, of course, to break into a run; hell, my boat was on fire. Then I reminded myself firmly that it wasn’t really my boat, and that a man in my line of work who rushes blindly toward a supposed disaster makes a fine target for somebody who doesn’t like him. I checked myself and stepped quickly alongside one of the concrete lightposts at the edge of the pier—not a hell of a lot of protection, but it might deter somebody who wanted to be quite sure of his shot. Peering past the post, I realized that the smoke was too thin for a real fire. It didn’t come from the hatch but from the cockpit area just aft.

When I approached warily, the woman lounging in the cockpit flipped the cigarette she’d been smoking over
Spindrift
s stern. It made a little red arc in the night before it was extinguished by the water of the harbor. She’d changed from the fashionably wide shorts in which I’d last seen her, but her current costume was just as far-out: a voluminous white jumpsuit with billowy sleeves and baggy harem pants. It had narrow cuffs at the wrists and ankles and a wide gold belt at the waist. You’d have to search a week to find the woman inside all the droopy draperies. If you wanted her.

“Good evening, Mrs. Williston,” I said, looking down at her from the dock.

“So you checked me out, after seeing me at the telephone. I hoped you would; that’s why I showed myself to you like that.” She smiled up at me. “That’s nice. I like intelligent men.”

“But what do they think of you?”

She said, “I believe there’s a vacancy in your crew, Captain. I thought I’d apply for the position. Two Bermuda races and one transatlantic cruise. I swing a mean sextant; and I can even cook a little if I have to. Since women’s lib hasn’t made much impression on the yachting scene yet, I usually have to.”

I looked down at her bleakly. I was tempted to tell her to haul her fashionable ass the hell off my ship. I felt bereft and lonely and not up to coping with lean, tanned females in far-out costumes. But she’d apparently ordered Amy away for a purpose and come here for a purpose; and it was obviously part of my job—maybe even the most important part of my job—to find out what that purpose was. I shrugged in answer to her little speech and dropped to the deck below. It wasn’t quite as far below as it had been. The tide was rising. I made my way aft.

“A drink, Mrs. Williston?”

She nodded. “Amy said you were a fast man with a bottle. I liked that.”

“It’s a wonder you’ve managed to live without me all your life, admiring me the way you do,” I said dryly. “We’ve got Scotch.”

“Scotch will do very well.”

“Short or tall?”

“No water. Easy on the ice.”

Drinks made and distributed, I shoved aside the gear she’d brought with her: a shoulder-strap purse and a canvas seabag, the modern kind that zips open lengthwise instead of making you dig down from one end when you want to find your clean socks. I sat down facing her.

“Where’s Amy Barnett?”

“Alias Penelope Matthews?” The woman smiled thinly. “That really wasn’t much of a cover, Mr. Helm, to use your correct name. It didn’t take us very long to find you, after you tried to pull down the curtain, so to speak, in Miami. We traced you to the marina in Coral Gables, and it wasn’t hard to learn, there, that you were heading for the Bahamas. We determined that you hadn’t stopped in Bimini, or in West End at the tip of this island; but the third marina we checked here in Freeport…”

“Jackpot,” I said. “And Amy?”

“She refused to have anything to do with the nasty plans we’ve worked out to deal with you. So we pulled her out of the action, shall we say, and here I am instead, you lucky man.” After a moment, Mrs. Williston went on: “Your little girl is quite all right. She’ll be taking the first plane home in the morning, that’s all. Do I get her job?”

“Why would you want it?” I studied her handsome, tanned face for a moment before asking, “What nasty plans does your PNP have for me, Mrs. Williston?”

She gave me her thin smile again. “Hell, you’re the macho establishment warrior who carries a gun and thrives on danger, aren’t you? And knocks the ladies dead, one way or another. Why should you worry about the feeble plots concocted by a silly bunch of do-gooders represented by a helpless social butterfly like me? You can cope with them when the time comes, can’t you? And in the meantime I
am
damned good with boats, and you apparently aren’t. What’s the bigger risk, my slitting your throat while you sleep, or your trying to get this tub to Nassau and beyond all by yourself? Hell, you’ll either capsize her in a squall while you’re still in deep water or run her onto a coral head the minute you try to negotiate those tricky banks.”

It was an intriguing approach, the way she was warning me in advance that I’d be taking an enemy aboard if I let her come. It was also a deliberate challenge: Was I scared of a pampered rich bitch in a fashionable umpteen-hundred-dollar monkey suit? That was supposed to get my machismo up in arms so I’d rush to embrace the danger and maybe even the dame herself; there was more than a hint in her attitude that while I might die if I made this passage with her, she’d see I died happy. All of which was totally irrelevant, of course. You don’t survive in the business by accepting stupid challenges from arrogant females or anybody else.