She said she would find some way to do so without making Ken Gilly suspicious. “After all, it’s our house. I have a right to go out there anytime I want to. Maybe I want to put it in shape to be sold.”
I asked her when she’d been out there last.
She said, “Not since shortly after your trial. For a long time I didn’t care what happened to it. Now, if we can straighten out this mess you’re in, we’re going back there to live.”
I got up to go while the going was good and Beth walked to the door with me. “I love you, Charlie.”
I said that went double. I felt some better. I felt a lot better. But we still had a long row to hoe. I didn’t see how anyone could possibly prove I hadn’t killed Zo.
I wanted to stay. I knew Beth wanted me to. But Ken Gilly was nobody’s fool. When I didn’t show at the roadblocks he’d know I had slipped into town before they had been established and would put a stake-out on Beth’s apartment without telling her anything about it.
Beth kissed me at the screen door. “I’ll be out – soon. With good news to report.”
Keeping close to the wall and out of the moonlight, I tiptoed sideways down the stairs to the alley and made my way towards the nearest street. I’d gone perhaps twenty yards from the foot of the stairs when the big guy stepped out from behind the bole of a pineapple palm.
“You there,” he stopped me. “What’s your name? And what are you doing prowling an alley at two o’clock in the morning?”
My first thought was, Ken left a stake-out after all.
I thought fast: I didn’t know the man. He was obviously new to the force, at least since I’d been sent to Raiford. If he took me in, I was dead. I still had the murder gun in my pocket. They’d burn me like they’d burned Swede. My only chance was to bluff and run.
“Why, my name is Olson,” I lied. I tried to feint him off guard by making him look where I was pointing. “I live in that house back there, officer. And I’m on my way downtown to try to locate an all-night drugstore.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
There was a glint of silver in the moonlight. I thought at first he was throwing a gun on me. Then his arm reversed itself and started up in a familiar arc and I knew what he had in his hand. Backing a step, I let it rip air where my belly had been.
Then, stepping in before he could recover his balance, I smashed a hard right to his jaw that smacked him off his feet and his head into an empty garbage can with sufficient force to make it ring like a bell-buoy.
He was out, cold. Striking a match I leaned over him. I still didn’t know him. But whoever he was I doubted if he was an officer of the law. If he was, he was the first cop I’d ever seen who carried a six-inch fish knife.
Then the light in the window of the apartment just over my head came on and some old dame asked nervously:
“What was that? Who’s that out there in the alley?”
I said, “Me-arrh.”
“Oh,” she said. “Bad kitty.”
Then I tiptoed out of there fast before she stopped to think that kitty cats didn’t strike matches.
4. Dead Man’s Bay
The water was warm but the air was cold. The tide had changed and was going out. The pull of it was terrific. It had been three years since I’d done any swimming. I thought when I reached mid-channel that the tide was going to sweep me out into the gulf. As it was, I lost one of my shoes off the length of plank on which I had piled my clothes and which I was pushing ahead of me.
It would have been much easier to steal a boat. But I knew how most bait-camp men were. They hated to lose a boat almost as badly as a wife. A good boat cost two hundred dollars. You could get married for five. And I didn’t want to direct any attention to the island.
The knife man worried me. Who was he? How had he known I would be coming down that alley? Why had he tried to kill me? He wasn’t the man who had killed Zo. That much I knew. It hadn’t been his voice that had said, “You got him, eh?” Nor was he the man who had slugged me with the butt of the gaff hook. He was a much larger man whose muscles strained the shoulders of his coat. If he had swung the gaff, it would have caved in my head.
As the low-lying trees grew to their proper place in the night sky, I felt for bottom and found it. The storms of the last three years hadn’t changed the coast line of the island, not on the lee side at least. The deep water extended to within a few feet of the shore. I waded up on to the sand and slapped and tramped myself dry and warm before I put on my clothes.
Now, I was really home. My rotting nets, unused since before I had gone into the Service, still hung on their long drying racks. A half-dozen hulks and stove-in row-boats lay buried in the sand, including the bare ribs of the fifty-foot bottom that had been my father’s boat. I was glad the old man was dead. I was the first of our family to do time and the disgrace would have broken his heart.
Dressed, I turned for a last look at the mainland. It was a good mile and a half across the channel. I couldn’t see the running lights of any boats. My passage, so far as I knew, had been unobserved.
I padded, barefoot, up the weed-overgrown path toward the house, hoping I didn’t step on a snake. The path was a jungle of vines. I wiggled my way through them, being careful not to disturb them any more than I had to. I didn’t know how long I would have to stay on the island. And when both his roadblocks and stake-out failed, Gil would undoubtedly make a perfunctory search of the home place.
Then I thought of something both Beth and I had forgotten – food. Unless there were some canned goods in the pantry, food was going to be a problem. But I’d face that when I came to it. As long as I knew I was going to live, I could live on fish and rabbits if I had to.
The house itself was set well back from the shore in a clearing that we had farmed from time to time. Now the ground was sour and overrun with saw palmetto. Even in the waning moonlight I could see the fifteen-foot wide porch across the front was sagging badly in spots, supported only by the thick-trunked red and purple bougainvillea and flame vine that had been old before I was born.
I picked an orange from a tree and tried to suck it but the grove was as sour as the garden. I wondered why Clifton had offered to buy the place from Beth. Probably out of pity or in the hope of buttering her up so she would say yes to his proposal. The old place was out of the world. I mean that literally.
No one but a typical cracker fishing family or a pair of kids as much in love as Beth and I had been would want to live in such a place. And the rest of the island was as bad. It was still as wild as it had been when the wreckers had been a power in Key West and Billy Bowlegs had terrorized gulf shipping.
I walked up the stairs to the porch. Coiled in a pool of moonlight, a ten-button rattlesnake watched me from the shredded canvas of a once-expensive chaise longue I had given Beth when we’d first been married.
I opened the door and went in. The big front room smelled old and musty. By striking a match I found a lamp with some oil in it and lit it. Even as old and decrepit as it was, after three years in a six by eight cell, the house looked good to me. At least here I could breathe. There were some canned goods in the pantry but not much, enough perhaps for three or four meals.
The more I thought about Beth asking Mr Clifton to suggest a good private detective to prove I hadn’t killed Zo, the screwier it sounded. If the guy was really in love with her, he wasn’t going to cut off his prospects by sweeping the legal sand spurs out of her husband’s path to her side.
When she contacted me, I’d suggest she try to arrange passage for us both and meet me somewhere down in the Caribbean. I was pretty certain that Matt Heely would run us down, for a fresh piece of change, if not for the money he owed me. Matt was as bad as I’d been. He made good money but he threw it away with both fists and was always in financial hot water when it came time to pay his insurance or the installments on his boat.