He looked down at her, stepped over her and sat in a chair just out of my reach. He yawned hugely. There was a faint family resemblance to LaFrance. He was a big, stringy, slope-shouldered boy, and he looked stone tired. He held the spring-handled tranquilizer in his right hand and gently bounced the leaden end off the open palm of his other hand. It was of black leather, intricately woven, greasy with much handling.
The only other time I had seen him was when he and another deputy had backed up Sheriff Burgoon when he had picked me up in the lobby of the old hotel.
I sat and hitched around to where I could lean my back against the bulkhead, the stanchion between my flexed knees, forearms resting on my knees.
“Why did you come here, Freddy?”
He was so exhausted his mind was moving slowly. “I remembered two days ago my Uncle Press telling me about this houseboat of yours. I was trying to sneak aboard one of the freighters heading out of Tampa. They watch them too close. I figure I can get out of the country somehow, I can get myself all sorted out and get some time to think what to do next.”
“What you ought to do next is pick up that phone over there and call Sheriff Burgoon and tell him where to come get you.”
“Too late for that.”
“You’ve got a lot of friends in Shawana County. They’ll work things out for you. They think you were defending yourself from Bannon and hit him too hard and got scared. They’ll make sure that old couple where you got the clothes and car won’t press charges.”
“I tell you, Mr. McGee, it’s too late. I had some more bad luck. That’s the only kind I’ve had lately. There’s a woman I killed, not meaning to, over west of Dade City. I tunked her perfect, light and easy and just enough, and she took two steps more than she should have been able to, and when she fell, it was right on a garden rake acrost her throat, and no way in the world to stop all that blood. God, there was a lot of blood! He run into the brush and I don’t know If I winged him at all. Anyway, I couldn’t find him and I had to get out of there. No sir, it’s too late for anything but running and hiding. Things start to go wrong, they just seem to keep right on.”
“How did they go wrong with Tush Bannon?”
“I was patrolling and seen him at just about first light walking the shoulder of the road, carrying a suitcase. I stopped and he said he’d come in on the bus and phoned out to his place and no answer at all. He was worried about Miz Bannon. It’s easy to know later on what you should have done. My daddy had said Mr. Bannon was sure a hard man to discourage. I should have taken him in where we were holding the stuff his wife left and the letter from his wife, and told him his place was all foreclosed and Koaled up with the notices and all. Uncle Press had to have that ten acres, and he was sure going to get it. It had been a real quiet night, so I decided what I’d do was run him on out there so he could see with his own eyes, without me telling him, how he’d lost the whole works for good. I think I wanted to do that because he didn’t act whipped at all. He acted like he had some way out of the mess he was in. So I said maybe the phone wasn’t working and took him out. We got out there and he got ugly when he figured out I had to know that he’d been all foreclosed. Then I told him his wife had left him and left his stuff and a letter with the sheriff and he called me a liar. He walked at me, half yelling at me and I tunked him on the skull. It should have taken him down, but it just bent his knees some and he shook his head and kept coming. So I knew he had a hard skull, and he was big, and he felt ugly, so I made sure the next one would take him down. I put a lot of wrist in it and I figured to lay it right onto his forehead, but he was quick for a big man like that, and he tried to snap his head back.” He sighed. “It hit him right square on the bridge of the nose, Mr. McGee. That’s a real bad place because it drives two little thin bones right back into the brain. I squatted there beside him in the morning light, sweaty and cold, and held my fingers on his wrist, and felt his heart go slower and slower and softer and softer and then it stopped all the way and he shivered sort of, and after a while I figured out it would seem likely he had enough troubles to want to kill himself, and figured out how to make it look like he did and at the same time cover up the places I’d tunked him. You see, I knew if I had to tell what happened, I’d get run out of police work for good, maybe, and it’s the only way I feel good, with the uniform and people listening when you tell them something.”
“But Arlene Denn saw you.”
He shook his head slowly. “All those weird kids. I thought I was in the clear on Bannon. Then she said she watched. I stood out there in the night trying to think of some way I could kill all of them. Like tunk them all on the head and an overdose or something. Or a fire. But I was on the dispatch book because they gave me the complaint. I had those pictures, and I had that stuff I took off them. She didn’t want trouble. I could give her a lot. So when she was off her high and made sense, I asked about maybe if Mrs. Bannon was playing around, or if there was some friend she could say she saw instead of me. So… ”
There was a stir beyond the yellow couch, a grunting sigh. Freddy got up quickly and went to Janine. When he bent down over her, he was out of sight. I heard the tone of his gentle voice but not the words. It sounded as if a lover were murmuring to his beloved, comforting her fears. I heard the tiny thud once more.
When he came back and sat as before, I said, “That isn’t going to do her any good, Deputy.”
“Or no harm, Mr. McGee. I know just where and how hard. It just kind of puts a jolt onto the brain, with hardly even a headache afterward. I’ll be thinking on what I should do so I can get some sleep without worrying about either one of you. You know, if you’d only been right here on this boat when Shawana County made the request to have you picked up and held, everything would have been all smoothed over.”
“Don’t count on it. No matter how good you make it look, Freddy, the people I was with at the time you killed Tush would have come forward and cleared me and left you with a lot of explaining.”
“By then there would have been no Arlie to change her story. It maybe would be a big mystery, but there’d be no way to get me mixed up in it.”
“So Tush was an accident, and the woman with the rake in her neck was an accident, but Arlie Denn was going to be on purpose.”
“You get pushed so far there’s only maybe one little narrow way out of the corner. I better get you two…”
I awakened lame and sore, with no knowledge of time or place. Daylight came from overhead, around the edges of a hatch cover that did not fit as well as it should. I had what I thought was a hangover headache, and when I realized that I was in the forward bilge area of the Flush, curled close to the anchor line well, the old frame members of the hull biting into my side, I thought that only a sorry drunk would pick that as a place to sleep. But when I tried to bring my right hand up and rub my face, it stopped with a jolting clink of chain. I turned my head and saw that my right wrist was handcuffed to one of the forward braces made of two-inch galvanized pipe, braces I had installed long ago to give her more forward rigidity in rough water. And I wasn’t going to yank one of those loose, not without a chain hoist and a power winch.
I fingered my skull with my left hand and found a tender area above the right ear and a little behind it. I could not remember being “tunked,” or where the conversation had stopped. My thinking gear was sluggish. It took me a long time to realize that my houseboat could not be moored at Bahia Mar. The motion was wrong. She was at rest, bow into a gentle swell, lifting and falling. Sometimes she would get out of phase with the swell and I could feel the soft tug of the anchor line snubbing the soft of the bow.