The man was a Negro.
He was wearing a blue shirt and blue pants, and he was holding a rifle in one huge hand, the hand wrapped around the middle of the piece, just about where stock joined barrel. There was a scar across the Negro’s nose, and his eyes looked bloodshot. For an instant Bobby had the notion the man was an escaped convict. For an instant only, he was sure the man would demand food and drink and civilian clothing.
“You awake?” the Negro asked.
Bobby blinked and said nothing. The Negro shook him.
“Don’t do that!” Bobby said.
“You awake?” the Negro asked again.
“I’m awake, goddammit! Stop shaking me.”
He freed his shoulder from the Negro’s grip and sat up in bed. He looked around the room, as though trying to ascertain that this was really the back of his small shop, where he slept every night of the week, those were his nets hanging there, that was his picture of Ava Gardner which he had cut out of a magazine and pasted on the white wooden wall, that was his empty bottle of bourbon lying on the floor next to the bed, those were his flowered curtains leading to the front of the shop, Bobby’s Bait and Tackle Shop, the only goddamn thing he owned in the world.
“Is this a stickup?” he asked.
The Negro grinned and said, “He wants to know if this’s a stickup, Clyde.”
“Tell him, Harry,” the other man said, grinning back. He was white and tall, wearing the same blue clothes, his rifle hanging loosely at his side as though he recognized Bobby Colmore would be no threat to anyone in this room.
“No, sir,” Harry said, “this ain’t a stickup. Now, Mr. Colmore, we would like you to get out of that bed there and put on some clothes, because we has to take you over to the marina.”
“How do you know my name?” Bobby asked.
“We know it,” Harry answered. “Would you put on your clothes, please?”
“Why?”
“Why, because we asking you to.”
“Suppose I don’t want to?”
“Mr. Colmore, we gonna take you over to that marina whether you want to go there or not. Now, it’s entirely up to you whether you leave here dressed up Sunday-go-to-meetin’, or whether we carry you over in your skivvies. I think I ought to tell you, though, there might be a lady or two present. Now, which’ll it be?”
“Suppose I won’t let you take me?”
Grinning, Harry said, “I’d have to shoot you dead, Mr. Colmore.”
Bobby wiped his hand across his mouth and then looked up at Harry. Very slowly he said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Mr. Colmore, the reason we’re taking you over to the marina is because we don’t want you acting like a old drunk, you dig? A old drunk is what you’re acting like right now, which is just what we expected from you. But we can’t take no chances, is why we’re getting you out of this shop. You dig, Mr. Colmore? Put on your clothes.”
“I’m not an old drunk,” Bobby said with dignity.
“I guess our information is wrong, then,” Harry said. “Any case, put on your clothes. We ain’t got time to fool around here with you.”
Bobby Colmore did not answer. He got out of bed and walked to the chair where his trousers and shirt were draped. Silently, sullenly, he began dressing.
The Ocho Puertos Diner was a classic diner in the shape of a railroad dining car, with silvered sides, and a sign running the length of the building. In the entrance box — a small four-sided glass square appended to the main body of the diner — there was a second, smaller sign upon which was lettered the information that Lester Parch was the proprietor of the place. Lester had been proprietor since 1961 when he had floated a building loan and put in his eating place shortly after Fred Carney built the waterfront houses. The marina was not built until later. It had been good for Lester’s business, but he had not counted on it when he built the diner. All he had counted on was the state-maintained road running off U.S. 1. He figured he was bound to catch at least some of the truck traffic heading for Key West, and he was right. Even before Luke built the marina, Lester Parch was taking home a fat paycheck each month.
The entrance doorway to the diner divided it exactly in half. There were four leatherette booths to the left of the entrance, and six to the right. The counter ran the length of the place with twenty stools in front of it. The rest rooms and telephone booth were on the left-hand side of the diner, adjacent to the kitchen which occupied the entire rear half of the building. The men who dropped from the back of the truck and ran to the rear of the diner that morning knew that Lester Parch and his wife lived in the first house on the beach and would not be rising until at least eight o’clock. All they were supposed to do was knock out the alarm wires in the box at the rear of the diner, and then force the lock on the kitchen door and enter. For the remainder of the day, and throughout phases two and three of the operation, they were to stay inside the diner and use it as a makeshift guard post, stopping anyone who tried to enter the town on S-811.
They did not know what kind of wiring the alarm box alongside the rear door contained. They had cased the area near the garbage cans out back on two separate occasions the week before, and knew definitely that the diner was wired, but they could not tell whether they would come up against an open-circuit alarm system, a closed-circuit system, or a combination system. They knew that in an open-circuit system, the cheapest kind, the alarm would sound the moment the current was closed. In order to knock out this type of alarm, they would only have to cut the wires. The closed-circuit system, on the other hand, always had a weak current running through the wiring, which meant that even if the wires were cut, the alarm would sound when that current was broken. The combination system was the most modern and the most expensive, and it combined both the open and closed circuits. The men did not expect to find such an elaborate system in a chintzy little diner on a crumby little island in the middle of nowhere. The first of the two men pulled over a garbage can, climbed onto it to reach the wiring box and then unscrewed the cover, studied the system and discovered that it was closed-circuit. He nodded to his companion, and then smiled.
In ten minutes’ time they had made their cross contacts, cut the wires, and forced open the rear door.
They closed and locked the door behind them, and then walked to the front of the diner. One man carried a Winchester. The other, because he was a group leader, carried a .45. They drew all the Venetian blinds except the ones in the corner booth on the right. Through the wide corner window they could see the full sweeping curve of S-811 as it ran up to U.S. 1. One of the men lighted a cigarette, and the second adjusted the corner blinds to keep the rising sun out of his eyes.
The truck had dropped off twenty of the men, leaving the last two at the Tannenbaum house at the end of the beach, and then gunning the engine and making the steep climb up S-811 to where it rejoined the main highway. Goody Moore, still at the wheel, made the sharp right turn and then stepped on his brake pedal and pulled to the side of the road. He opened the cab door, climbed down onto the road, and then walked swiftly to the back of the truck where Jason was just lifting the tarpaulin flap.
“Here you go,” Jason said, dragging a wooden road barricade to the back of the truck and then handing one end of it down to Goody. In the cab of the truck Clay Prentiss watched the road ahead through the windshield, turning his eyes to the rearview mirror every few seconds to check the road behind. He could see Bahia Honda ahead, and beyond that the Seven Mile Bridge racing off into the sky in the distance, pink and gold, the water stretching on either side of it like cotton candy.