It didn’t make sense to me. I had no illusions about Zo. She’d never sprout any wings. I hadn’t asked her how she’d lived during the three years I’d been in prison. It hadn’t mattered. A jealous boyfriend was the obvious answer. But why in the name of time should he pop up and try to beat in my brains when I’d just announced I was going back to my wife?
Then I thought of the voice I’d heard when I’d gone into the bedroom.
“You got him, eh?”
Zo had denied there was a voice. But there obviously had been. In the light of what had happened, it began to look like she had contracted to deliver me to the cabin on Dead Man’s Bay like so much beef.
On the other hand, she had screamed, “No. Don’t!” just prior to the first blow.
I gave up trying to think and got to my feet. The interior of the cabin was as black as a fish wholesaler’s heart. I tried to find the light switch and, failing, struck a match instead.
According to the alarm clock on the mantel I had been out for hours. It only lacked a few minutes of midnight. The rum bottle was standing on the table. I rinsed my mouth with a drink. Then, striking another match, I walked on into the bedroom – and wished I hadn’t.
Zo was lying on the bed, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. But they weren’t seeing anything. I struck another match and looked closer. She was cold. The flat slap of a pistol I had heard had been meant for her. She had been dead as long as I had been unconscious.
I lighted a third match and looked around the room. The sense of unreality persisted. A chair had been tipped just so. A shattered rum bottle lay by the side of the bed. Another had drained out its contents on the rug.
Catching sight of a dark object in her hand, I bent over the bed and looked at it. It was the leaded gaff hook with which I had been slugged.
I walked out into the other room and found my coat. The pistol with which she had been killed was in my right-hand coat pocket.
I could see the scene as described by the papers. A recently released con and his moll had rented the cabin to celebrate his release. A drunken brawl had ensued and during it I had killed her.
There was a metallic “pong” as the alarm clock on the mantel passed the hour. A hundred and some odd miles away, in Raiford, Swede was taking the big jump. He knew all the answers now.
“Here. And I mean right here,” he had told me.
Swede had been right about a lot of things. If only I’d listened to him. If only I’d opened the letter from Beth before I had met Zo.
The match burned down and burned my fingers. I didn’t feel it. This was murder and I was tagged. I walked out the door and stood on the screened-in porch. The night was black but filled with stars. The tide was out and the sweet-sour smell of the tide flats filled the air. I’d never wanted so much to live or felt I had so much to live for. I thought of what I’d told Zo.
“Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six red-headed kids and be disgustingly honest.”
That was a laugh. The only place I was going was back to Raiford. A half-dozen guards had seen me get into the jeepster. The waitresses at both Gainesville and Cross City would testify that they had seen us together and I had been drinking heavily.
The jeepster was still in front of the cabin. The smart thing for me to do would be to drive to the nearest phone and call the state patrol and get it over. No one would believe my story. I couldn’t describe the guy I’d seen. He was as vague as my testimony concerning Señor Peso.
The big veins in my temple began to pound. Señor Peso. The guy was beginning to haunt me. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d still be operating the Beth II out of Bill’s Boat Basin as a deep-sea charter cruiser. It had been his voice on the phone the time I’d been behind in my payments that had started off all of the fireworks.
“This is Señor Peso, Captain White. How would you like to make a quick five thousand dollars?”
How would I like to drop a mullet net around ten ton of pompano? All I had to do for the money was meet the Andros Ancropolis, a converted sponge boat, eighty miles out in the gulf and bring in a few small waterproof packages that fit easily in my bait well. I didn’t know what was in them. I was afraid to ask. I needed that five thousand bad.
That had been the beginning. A trip to Veracruz had followed. Then one to Pinar del Rio. Then one to Havana where I’d met Zo. After that I was in so deep it hadn’t mattered. I met who I was ordered to meet, took what I was ordered to get, and brought it back to various points ranging from drops in the Ten Thousand Islands as far north at Palmetto City with a few trips up the bay to Tampa.
I only made one restriction. I refused to run wetbacks. I hadn’t spent three years of my life in the navy fighting for the so-called American way of life only to turn around and smuggle in for pay the very guys who were trying to destroy it.
After the one proposition along that line, Señor Peso hadn’t mentioned the subject again. All of the Coast Guard boys knew me. The older officers had known my father. I never had any trouble getting clearance papers. No one ever stopped me. Until that last time.
Then only my good service record, a purple heart, all the cash I had in the bank, the confiscation of my new boat, and me pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon during the fracas that followed the boarding, had saved me from a long Federal rap. That trip, my bait well had been filthy with forty grand worth of Swiss watches and French perfumes on which no duty had been paid.
But I still hadn’t ever met Señor Peso. All my instructions had come by phone. My money came in the mail, in cash. And once the law had laid its arm on me, he had run out on me cold. When the prosecution had asked me for whom I was running the stuff, all I could offer was a mythical Señor Peso. It was a wonder I hadn’t gotten life.
Not that it mattered now. Zo was dead and I was tagged. And if he hadn’t come forward before, I couldn’t expect Señor Peso to come out in the open now. Staring up at the stars, I remembered the dead girl’s words at the prison.
“And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup.”
It sounded logical. He’d made good to the tune of $36,000.00. Zo with her talk of Havana and a converted sponger putting in had obviously been under instructions that – if they had been carried out – would have proven profitable to me. No. I couldn’t blame Señor Peso for this. This was a personal affair between the dead girl and myself and the man who had killed her.
The night was cool. I put on my coat and lighted a cigarette just as a pair of headlights turned off the highway a quarter of a mile away and bounced down the rutted sand road toward the cabin. I kicked the screen door open and walked out and stood with my hand on the butt of the gun in my pocket, in the shadow of a big slash pine fifty feet from the wooden porch.
The car was blue and white, a state patrol car, with two uniformed troopers in it. They skirted the yellow jeepster and parked in front of the porch.
Getting out, one of them said, “It looks quiet enough to me. Probably a false alarm.”