He whirled. Morrison was leaning against the ladder, naked except for a pair of shorts. He had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, a pack of them in his left hand, and a large kitchen match in his right, its head poised under his thumbnail. He grinned, and tossed the pack. “Smoke?”
12
Ingram let them fall into the gasoline. It’s all been for nothing, he thought, in some detached and icy calm that was beyond terror. That’s exactly the spot he was standing in that other morning three hundred years ago, and nothing has changed at all except he’s wearing a little less and he’s got a match in his hand instead of a Browning Automatic Rifle. Maybe there is no way you can defeat him; he’s a natural force of some kind. He’s waiting for me to panic, to scream. Don’t strike that match. Well, maybe I will; I don’t know.
He had to say something, but he was afraid his voice would crack. If he ever knows how near the edge I am, he thought, we’ve had it. And if he really is insane, we’ve had it anyway, but the only thing to do is try to wait him out. He pushed the cigarettes out of the gasoline with his foot, reached down, and tossed them onto the bunk. Then he heard Rae Osborne cry out. She’s even in the same place, he thought. Morrison didn’t bother to look up the hatch; he merely took a step up the inclined deck to starboard so as to be out from under it. Then he chuckled. “The gun, Herman.”
Ingram shook his head. Maybe he could speak now. At least he had to try. “When did you get aboard?” he asked. It seemed to sound all right.
“When you both ran back here to pull on the rope,” Morrison replied. “I ducked into that front cabin. About that gun, Herman. I don’t know whether you ever made a study of ‘em, but when you shoot one, some of the grains of powder that’re still burning come out behind the slug—”
“Yes,” Ingram said. “I know about that. Excuse me—” He raised his voice just slightly, and addressed the top of the ladder. “Rae, there’s a life ring on either side of the cockpit. Take one and go forward, right to the bow. And remember to go upstream, against the tide.”
Morrison shook his head. “You’re a pretty hard boy, Herman, but not that hard. Pass the gun over, and let’s get started to Cuba. It’s only a hundred miles. You land me—”
“Sure,” Ingram said. “We land you, and then we sail the boat back to Key West, the same way we were going to sail it back from Bahia San Felipe. As far as you’re concerned, I’ve had it, Morrison. I’m up to here. Go ahead and strike your match.”
Morrison’s eyes were cold. “You think I won’t?”
“I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “But if you do, don’t forget I’ll be the lucky one. I’ve got the gun.”
He saw that penetrate. Silence tightened its grip on the scene. The Dragoon rocked gently on some remnant of surge running in from the Santaren Channel and a little wave of gasoline slapped against the bulkhead and ran back to spread itself up across the steep incline of the cabin sole. He has to go with the bluff, Ingram thought; we’ve probably got less than a minute left before the fumes get us, and he knows he can’t take the gun away from me and get out of here alive. It would take longer than that. One of us has to crack.
He saw movement then in the hatch. A hand had reached in and lifted the fire extinguisher from its bracket on the bulkhead near the ladder, and was pointing it—quite steadily, he thought—down into the cabin. Something came up in his throat, and he didn’t know whether he was going to laugh or cry. She might as well try to put out hell with a damp Kleenex, but she was ready to tackle it.
“I don’t think you read me, Herman,” Morrison said. “In a deal like this, you’ve got to consider who has the most to lose. Now, you take you and Mama-san—”
Ingram breathed softly. He’s not quite so sure now, he thought; when he has to drive home his point by explaining the obvious. “Who’d you kill in Florida?” he asked. “Was it Ives?”
Morrison studied the match in his hand, and then looked across at him with a very cold smile. “That’s a good question, Herman. It was a cop.”
Ingram felt the dark fingers of panic reaching for him, and Barney’s flaming figure began to beat against the outer defenses of his mind. Here we go, he thought. Then suddenly, it was gone, and he was all right again; maybe the accumulated hours of bilge-diving in gasoline had earned him some sort of immunization against horror so that it no longer had the power to break him. He could feel himself growing drunk on the fumes, however, and knew that time was growing very short. Wait him out, he told himself. “What happened to Ives?” he asked.
Morrison grinned. “So you figured that out?”
“Sure.”
Everything seemed to be growing wine-colored, as if it were late afternoon. And he noticed now that the fire extinguisher no longer showed in the hatch. Rae Osborne had moved. Maybe she had fainted.
“This deputy sheriff stopped us on a back-country road just after we got the guns in the truck,” Morrison went on. “I think all he wanted was to give us a ticket because one of the tail lights was out, but that stupid Ives panicked and shot at him. The cop killed Ives, and I got the cop. I had to then. We dumped ‘em out in the swamp and took all of Ives’ identification so they couldn’t trace him back to us, but if he had a record they’ve probably got him made by now. So you figure out whether I’m going back or not.”
Ingram saw the nozzle of the fire extinguisher then at the porthole just above and to the right of Morrison’s head. So that’s where she went, he thought dully, as the cabin began to eddy slowly around him in the gathering darkness.
Morrison flourished the hand holding the match. “You call it, Herman. Toss me the gun, or up we go. And I mean now.”
The stream from the fire extinguisher hit his hand, and, as the soggy and harmless match dropped from it and he turned, he caught the carbon tetrachloride full in the face. He threw up an arm to cover his eyes. Ingram leaped, swinging the .45. He felt the shock as it connected with the side of Morrison’s head, and they were both falling, with Morrison on top of him. He clawed his way out from under the inert mass and tried to climb to his feet. His legs gave way under him and he fell, but one of his outstretched arms was across the bottom rung of the ladder. It was all dark now. He held his breath and started up. Don’t breathe till you’re off the ladder, he told himself. You’ll fall back. It’s the first breath of fresh air that knocks you out. Don’t breathe—
He felt a pair of arms catch him and pull him forward into the cockpit just as he fell.
Late the following afternoon, the Dragoon, under all working canvas, lay over gently on the starboard tack in a light northeasterly breeze as she stood up the Santaren Channel toward the coast of Florida. The breeze had come up shortly after ten that morning, and the treacherous sand bars and pastel blues and greens of the Great Bahama Bank were already over the horizon to starboard and astern as their course gradually took them farther offshore into the comforting indigo and the ageless heave and surge of deep water. Ingram was dead tired, but content. It had been a period of back-breaking labor at the pump, but there had been time for a little sleep and a bath and a shave. He stood now on the foredeck and took a quick look at the trim of the sails and the ventilating lash-up he had rigged. Everything was drawing beautifully. He ducked down the forward hatch, squeezing past the canvas throat of the wind chute. The air was sweet below.
Morrison lay in one of the bunks in the forward cabin with the air from the ventilator washing over him. His hands and feet were tied, and made fast to the head and the foot of the bunk. There were bad rope burns under his arms and across the naked chest from the sling and the tackle they’d rigged to get him up the hatch into the cockpit, and a lump on the side of his head, but otherwise he was all right. After the gasoline was overboard and the ventilator rigged, they’d brought him back down here. He lay now with his eyes closed. Ingram didn’t know whether he was asleep or merely faking it. He leaned over the bunk and checked his hands and feet for circulation. They were warm, and a healthy flesh color; the ropes were all right.