Now neither of us had a weapon. I wondered what I could do to him with my bare hands when I couldn’t even hurt him with a solid steel bar. A big fist crashed against the side of my face, and lights exploded in back of my eyes. I rolled, trying to get away from him, and kicked at him with my feet. And then, miraculously, I wasn’t in contact with him anywhere. We were separated and lost from each other in impenetrable darkness like two eyeless and primitive forms of life circling in combat in the ooze at the bottom of the sea. I didn’t know where he was nor where I was myself. All sense of direction was lost.
I knelt, absolutely motionless, and tried to quiet the tortured sound of my breathing. My ribs were pressed against the rail of a bunk, but there was no way to tell whether it was a starboard bunk and I was facing forward, or a port bunk and I was facing aft. I held my breath and listened for him but could hear nothing for the pounding of blood in my ears. He would try to stay between me and the ladder, but he didn’t know where he was either. For some reason, I thought of Suzy Patton. He had probably killed her. I was filled with rage and wanted to get my hands on him. That was insane, and I knew it; the only way I’d ever get out of here alive was to stay away from him until I could find the ladder. I couldn’t fight him. He was like a gorilla; he could kill me with his hands as easily as he’d killed Frances Celaya.
Then I heard something. It was a hollow, tinny sound, and I knew he’d brushed against one of the lockers or bumped it with a shoe. He was completely away from the ladder, at the forward end of the foc’sle. The sound had come from my left, so I stood up and started to move softly in the opposite direction. I put out a hand and touched one of the railings of the ladder. Then he hit me. I fell against the steel steps with his weight on top of me. He was trying to get his hands on my throat. I pushed up with my arms and legs and we fell backward off the ladder and rolled. We crashed into the stanchion of one tier of bunks and it gave way and mattresses spilled down on top of us. I twisted from under him and then I was across his back with both arms locked around his neck. I pulled back. He came up to his knees, carrying me with him, and then to his feet. I tightened my grip and he lurched sidewise and fell, and we plowed headlong into the row of sheet metal lockers. They came adrift and fell over on us.
He broke my grip around his neck and threw me off him. The lockers rattled and crashed as we fought our way out from under them. A fist caught me on the jaw and slammed me back against the bulkhead. It dazed me. I tried to get up and fell over one of the lockers. He caught me and slammed my head back against the bulkhead. One of the big hands tightened around my throat. I was strangling and beginning to lose consciousness. I thought I heard somebody running along the deck above us.
The beams of flashlights stabbed downward from the deck, and men were coming down the ladder. Boyle released me and sprang up. I pushed myself up to my knees, and swayed, just in time to see him lunge for something shining in the lights that splashed on the deck near us. It was the marlinespike.
“Police!” a voice barked. “Stay right where you are!”
Boyle grabbed up the piece of steel and lunged toward the lights. “Drop it!” a voice warned. He took one more step and the gun crashed. He fell forward against the bulkhead near the ladder and slid to the deck.
I tried to stand up. Everything drained out of me at last and I started to fall. And my last thought as I slid into blackness was that now I had lost them all. Frances Celaya was dead, and now they’d shot Boyle, and there was nobody else who knew how it had really happened.
Fourteen
I opened my eyes. I was lying on a hospital bed in a small white-painted room. It was daylight. Across from me a uniformed policeman was seated in a chair tilted back against the wall, reading a paper. He glanced up and saw I was awake.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. He went to the door and spoke to someone just outside it. I couldn’t hear what he said. He came back and sat down again. I moved my arms and legs, and everything seemed to work except that I was sore and stiff and my side hurt. I felt the right side of my face. It was painful.
I thought of Suzy. They might know what had happened to her, but I couldn’t even ask. There was a chance she was still all right, and if I even mentioned her name it would implicate her. They knew somebody had been helping me.
“Can I make a telephone call?” I asked the uniformed man.
“No,” he said.
“Is Boyle dead?”
He put down the paper. “Don’t ask me any questions. There’ll be a man here in a minute that’s been wanting to ask you some for a week. All I’m here for is to see that you don’t run down the drain in the wash basin or through the keyhole or something and disappear again.”
I lay back on the pillow. In about twenty minutes the door opened and a big man in a rumpled suit came in. He had a tough, competent look about him. There was a stubble of beard on his face, and the rather hard eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn’t slept for some time. He nodded to the uniformed man, who got up and went out.
He lighted a cigarette, stared at me for a moment, and sighed. “I suppose if I killed you, I’d find out there was some stupid city ordinance against it. But it’s a beautiful thought. Who was hiding you?”
”What do you care now?” I asked.
He rubbed a hand across his face. “I guess I don’t, really. I just get scared when I think there might be two of you loose on the same continent. What was her name?”
“What makes you think it was a girl?”
“Because you said ‘he’ when you talked to me on the phone. You could see that was real subtle.”
“Then you’re Lt. Brannan?”
“I’m Brannan. I’ll see whether I’m a Lieutenant when I get back to the office.” He pulled the chair over by the side of the bed and sat down, “Brother, it’s a lucky thing for you that Mexican guy Sanchez ran out and called us. In about one more minute you’d have been dead.”
“Is Boyle dead?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I said nothing. I’d tried, but maybe it had been hopeless from the start.
He sighed and gestured with the cigarette. “All right. You win. I was going to make you sweat, you pig-headed mick bastard, but I guess I haven’t got the heart. Boyle didn’t die until about an hour ago, and we got a statement from him.”
The breath oozed out of me, and I seemed to melt. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. “Here,” he said. He stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lighted it..
“Was he Ryan Bullard?” I asked, when I was able to talk again.
He nodded. “He was shot through the chest, and the medics said he didn’t have much chance. He asked for a priest, and Father O’Shea got him to make a complete statement. We checked his prints, of course, after he died, and verified the identity. He was Bullard.”
“Will the statement do any good?” I asked. “He wasn’t even there when she killed Stedman. He was at sea.”
“Sure,” he replied. “There’s no doubt about any of it now. It was a death-bed confession, and it all ties together. He admitted plotting with her to kill Stedman, the same way they got Purcell, but she jumped the gun when she saw the chance after that stupid fight of yours there in his apartment. He almost killed her then, when she told him about it, because it was a dumb thing for her to do. If you’d surrendered when you found out he was dead, and made a sensible statement, there’d have been an investigation that’d have turned the two of ‘em up. It might have taken a little time, but you’d have been in the clear. But you had to take off like a ruptured duck so we spent the next seven days chasing you all over the goddamned country. Naturally, everybody thought you were guilty.”