“Are you kidding? You speak it.” I stopped then, a little awkwardly. It just hadn’t occurred to me he might be illiterate.
He caught the hesitation and smiled again. “Oh, I can read and write. English. You see, my people came from Mexico and they spoke Spanish at home, but I was born in Corpus Christi and went to school there. So I spoke it, but never did learn to read it.”
“Oh,” I said. That seemed to be that. “I could probably get a few words of it,” he said. “But—”
“But what?”
“I don’t like the idea of reading a shipmate’s mail. That’s on top of the fact that if he caught me he’d kill us both.”
“I’m a seaman myself,” I said. “And I don’t like prowling through other peoples’ gear. But this is not just any shipmate. The cold-blooded sonofabitch drowned a girl in a bathtub about four hours ago. I’m positive he helped kill a policeman named Purcell. And if he’s the guy I think he is, he beat a seaman to death with a baseball bat about five years ago. So let’s don’t be too squeamish.”
“All right,” he said.
He slid the letters out one at a time, and went through them, frowning. It was intensely silent except for some bugs batting themselves against the chimney of the kerosene lamp. I looked uneasily around until I located the marlinespike; it was right beside the jimmied suitcase. Even with that, my chances of getting out of here alive were going to be very slim if Boyle showed up. He had the knife, he probably outweighed me about fifty pounds, and he was more or less a professional in the business of killing people.
Sanchez shoved the last letter back in its envelope and handed them to me. “I don’t get much of it,” he said. “They’re love letters and probably pretty hot stuff, but you wouldn’t be interested in that. Two or three times she says something about when he gets the money. I don’t know what money, or where he’s supposed to get it, but I think they’re going to buy a boat with it.”
”There are some pictures of a boat in his gear,” I said. “That could be it.”
He nodded. “Anyway, she mentioned it several times.”
“Any names?” I asked.
“Just this Mrs. Jiminez. And once somebody named Frances.”
I glanced up quickly. “Frances? Any last name?”
He shook his head. “No. Just Frances. I got the idea she meant somebody in Ybor City. That’s part of Tampa, you know. Lots of Cubans there.”
“I know,” I said. “How long has Boyle been on here, do you know?”
“Let’s see. He joined up in Tampa, about last September, I think. It was in the hurricane season, anyway. We had to run back and wait one out in Mobile the first trip he was aboard.”
“You were taking the catch into Tampa then?”
“Yeah. And sometimes Pensacola.”
“How long have you been running into Sanport?”
“Since the latter part of November, I think.”
“Did anybody ever come aboard to see Boyle when you were tied up here?”
“No. Not that I know of, Foley.”
“Has he taken a trip off since he joined her?”
“No. Been on here all the time.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Do you keep any kind of log book?”
He nodded. “Sure. We enter the catch every day. And our position—when we know it.” He grinned, the white teeth flashing. “We’re not like you guys, sextants, Loran, RDF’s, fathometers, and all that stuff. We navigate with a hand lead.”
“Can we look at the log?”
“Sure.” He went up the companion ladder, and I heard him going forward. He returned in a moment with a beat-up old ledger.
“Check back and see where the Marilyn was on December twentieth,” I said.
He flipped backward through the pages and moved over closer to the lamp. “Hmmm. Here in Sanport. We docked on the seventeenth, and sailed on the twenty-first. Seven a.m.”
I nodded. “Good. Now, January, twenty-eighth.”
He riffled some more pages.. “Here we are. Sanport Arrived here on the twenty-seventh. Sailed the thirtieth.”
So he was here when the Shiloh outfit was held up and again when Purcell committed suicide—or was killed. But it didn’t prove anything at all. Over half a million other people were also here at the same time.
“Thanks,” I said to Sanchez. He went back up the ladder with the log book. I picked up one of the letters and stared at it, trying to force my mind to remember some Spanish I’d had ten years ago. There must be something here. I heard Sanchez coming back along the deck, and then his shoes on the ladder.
“Just can’t stop bein’ nosy, can you, mate?”
I turned. It wasn’t Sanchez. Boyle was standing at the bottom of the ladder, seeming to fill it from one handrail to the other with enormous shoulders inside the dirty gray sweater. He had a loose-lipped grin on his face as he pulled the knife from his pocket and clicked it open. I picked up the marlinespike. He leaned against the ladder watching me coolly with the small black eyes. There wasn’t even any animosity. It was just a job he had to do. I swung the marlinespike against the base of the lamp chimney, and the fo’c’sle was plunged into total blackness.
I waited tensely, listening for any scraping of shoes against the deck. The silence went on. Then he spoke softly, still by the ladder. “Only way out’s over here, tanker sailor. Come and get it.”
I said nothing. It was impossible to see anything at all; it was a blackness like the end of the world. There was no point in talking just to let him know where I was. I knew where he was and where he was going to be all the time: between me and that ladder.
If I only had something to throw. Not the marlinespike, I thought. I had to hang onto that as long as I could; it represented the one slim chance I had for survival. The Luger! Sanchez had left it in the bunk where he was sitting. I tried to visualize it in the darkness, and moved one soft step to the left and forward, and put out a hand. I touched the railing of the bunk, slid my hand over onto the mattress, and moved it in a slow arc. How much longer would he wait? He knew he could come straight back and I couldn’t get past him in the narrow quarters without touching him somewhere. But he wanted to hear me cry out, or beg. My fingers touched the Luger. I pulled it toward me, transferred the marlinespike to my left hand, and picked it up in my right. I stepped softly back. There was still no sound from Boyle.
I touched the railing of the upper bunk on my left with my fingertips to be sure I was in the center of the fo’c’sle. He should be straight ahead of me, a little over twelve feet away. But maybe he was kneeling. I clamped the Luger under my left arm for a moment, reached into my pocket with my right hand and drew out two dimes. I tossed them, aft and a little to the right. They tinkled against the bulkhead to one side of him.
There was no sound of movement, but he laughed. “Mate, you didn’t think I’d fall for that stupid trick, did you?”
I grabbed the Luger in my right, leaned back, and slammed it forward as hard as I could throw, straight at the sound of his voice. There was a sickening sound of impact and something brittle and sharp like breaking bone, and he cried out in pain and rage. The knife clattered on the deck, and I heard him collapse against the ladder.
I rushed forward, swinging the marlinespike. It rang against the handrail of the ladder. I drew it back and swung it again, straight down, and felt it hit him. An arm encircled my legs, and he laughed. It was a terrible sound, bubbling and full of gravel, as if he had blood and broken teeth in his mouth. He heaved upward. I left the deck and crashed over backward, feeling the weight of him as he surged after me. I slashed at him with the marlinespike. It hit him. I put out a hand to find his head so I could hit him where it counted and I felt the hand slide as it came up against the bloody mess of his face, and I swung the steel again and again. A big hand caught my wrist and twisted, and the spike slipped out of my grasp. It rolled away in its crazy circle in the darkness.