The Revengers (27 page)

As we drove past, I was aware, without turning my head that way, of the lighted windows of the houseboat, a fairly large vessel of its kind, fiberglass construction, once white but badly streaked and weathered now, with a topside steering station sheltered by a tattered white awning— Bimini tops, I think they’re called. The dock against which the craft lay had been a massive affair designed for heavy commercial barges, but half of it had fallen into the canal, leaving stumps of pilings sticking out of the dark water like broken black teeth. There was a small Ford station wagon, badly battered, with the fancy phony-wood decoration halfpeeled off, parked above the dock on the gravel area between the street and the sea wall. I caught a snatch of music as we passed, something loud with a heavy beat.

“Turn left up ahead,” Lawson said. “Those warehouses or whatever they are. Find a place to park out of sight over there. Ready, Helm?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. “Are you sure this trip is necessary?”

Reluctance is always diplomatic at this point in the proceedings. Nobody loves an eager hero.

“You wanted to come. We didn’t ask you.”

So much for diplomacy. Young Ellershaw found a slot between two dark cinder-block structures, both with broken windows speaking of desertion; he slid the sedan into it. We piled out. The weapons of the three-man submachine gun squad gleamed wickedly in the dark. I hadn’t been offered one of the rat-a-tat machines, but I wasn’t brooding about it. As far as I’m concerned, they’re for people who can’t shoot, and figure they’ll let ten inaccurate bullets try to do the job of one accurate one. Well, sometimes it works; but even so, it seems wasteful.

“Give us time to get set,” Lawson said.

‘Take ail the time you want,” I said. “Where I come from, the watchword is mañana.”

‘To hell with mañana. Give us fifteen minutes and move in.”

I peered at the luminous dial of my watch. “Fifteen minutes. Your wish is my command, Señor.”

He made a growling sound in his throat and moved off with his cohorts. I remembered, as I often do in such circumstances, the general who said he could deal with his enemies, but God would have to save him from his allies. I couldn’t remember his name. It was quiet in the alley once the soft footsteps died away; the distant rumble of the city barely reached this place. A car went by on the street or drive that followed the canal; I saw Lawson and Company duck back against the buildings and wait for it to get clear; then they were gone from sight.

I went the other way, around the rear of the warehouses. I swung wide across the vacant lot beyond, slipping from a clump of brush to an old car body to a dented white refrigerator somebody’d had no further use for. I reached the road well over a hundred yards downstream—well, toward the mouth of the canal, wherever it finally joined the Miami River or Biscayne Bay or the Straits of Florida or whatever, call it east to keep it simple. I moved a little farther east where the drive curved slightly, putting me out of sight of the houseboat and anybody near it as I slipped across the pavement and fought my way into the bushes bordering the canal. A jungle, Brent had said. I couldn’t tell you what the bushes were, maybe mangroves. A midnight botanist I’m not.

Then I was in the water wondering about snakes and alligators. It didn’t seem like a promising area for sharks, but barracuda came to mind; and I’d read a piece in the paper about pet-shop piranha that had been released somewhere in Florida and were finding the ecology very much to their liking. There had also been mention of a walking catfish; but I figured I was man enough to handle a catfish, ashore or afloat. This detour was not in the battle plan; and it was, of course, a stupid damned business. Probably I’d return from the wars soaked and dirty and ridiculous while the rest of the conquering army marched home dry and clean, laughing uproariously at my sorry state; but agents who worry about making fools of themselves don’t last very long. I’d be everlastingly damned, Bennett or no Bennett, if I walked up to' a door to which I’d been sent by an anonymous phone call without making at least a small attempt to find out something about the people behind that door.

Moving very slowly to avoid splashing, I fought my way along the bank under the tough overhanging foliage. I had a pitched battle with a boa constrictor that turned out to be a discarded tire, and I barked my shin on something hard and rectangular and submerged that could have been another discarded refrigerator. I thought of clear blue tropical waters and white beaches. I thought of Eleanor Brand and rather regretted not letting her come and get a firsthand taste of the wet and muddy delights of a secret agent’s life. The trouble with that was the screwball girl would probably have had a wonderful time sloshing along this mucky canal behind me, making notes in her waterproof notebook all the way. But it was just as well that Bennett had, unexpectedly, backed me up when I told her she had to stay home and play with her dolls, the only time he’d ever agreed with me on anything. . . .

I stopped. The white houseboat was less than fifty yards ahead of me now, with the black shape of the dock almost level with the upper deck at this stage of the tide, if they had tides in Miami. I thought they did, but I didn’t really know. There were a great many things I didn’t know, of varying degrees of importance; but the most important at the moment, I realized suddenly, was that I didn’t know why a confirmed publicity seeker like Mr. Bennett of the OFS had been unwilling, tonight, to let a journalist accompany this expedition and record in deathless prose his organization’s triumph over the forces of evil and terrorism, Brent had already noted this phenomenon casually, but I’d been thinking of other things and let it pass. And then, I reflected grimly, there was also the very interesting fact that, to the best of my recollection, neither Mac nor I had actually insisted on my coming along. Bennett had simply assumed we’d insist; or he’d pretended to assume it. . . . The thought that came into my mind was fairly incredible; but I’d survived in the business longer than most, and I hadn’t done it by dismissing the incredible anymore than by avoiding the ridiculous.

I drew a long breath and moved forward again very cautiously. A small night breeze had come up, sending ripples across the canal that helped to hide the water I disturbed as I moved, and the small splashing sounds I couldn’t avoid making. Then the dock was above me and I slipped between the black pilings and paused in the darkness beyond. Here the thump-thump music was louder and I could move more quickly without fear of being heard. I saw that the occupants of the houseboat had constructed a clumsy ladder to help them reach the deck from the dock above. It was a contraption of rough two-by-fours spiked together inaccurately by somebody who took no pride in his carpentry. I made my way there, finding the water quite deep where the houseboat lay; I had to swim a cautious stroke or two to reach the ladder. I raised myself slowly and cautiously, grateful for the loud music that covered the sound of water draining from my clothes.

Two rungs above deck level, I could peer through the ladder, straight into the big deckhouse window opposite. It had been broken at one time, perhaps by a casual rock pitched from the shore by a passing vandal. Thin, transparent plastic had been taped over it, but this had ripped and now hung in shreds that stirred faintly in the breeze, letting the music—and presumably the air conditioning Brent had mentioned—escape almost unobstructed. I had a pretty good view of the interior of the deckhouse and it was an intriguing sight. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen a boat carpeted with money.

There were bills everywhere, like dead leaves in autumn. They littered the shabby sofa, the scarred table, and the two armchairs with their tom upholstery, not to mention the threadbare indoor-outdoor carpeting. There were even bills on the stove and sink of the galley visible in the far corner of the deckhouse. In the middle of the floor sat a small, rather pretty girl with a moderately dirty face and stringy blond hair. She was wearing an elaborate and obviously new and expensive cream-colored satin negligee, lavishly trimmed with light, coffee-colored lace—ecru is the word that comes back from a long-ago brush with fashion photography. The inadequate fastenings of the garment made it obvious that she was wearing nothing else. She had a rather nice little body. She was holding a plastic champagne glass, the kind that comes in two pieces, stem and bowl, and you stick them together. With her free hand, she was tossing bills into the air from a sizeable suitcase that was full of them, and laughing happily as they fluttered down around her and on her. She tossed a handful playfully at somebody I couldn’t see.

Abruptly, the music came to an end; a moment later there was a sharp sound that made me wipe my hand on the wet stuff of my turtleneck and get a fresh grip on my revolver. A man came into sight holding a foaming champagne bottle with which he refilled the girl’s glass. She made a helpless gesture toward her shining negligee as the stuff fizzed over.

“Oh, dear, I’m getting it all spotty,” I heard her say.

“Forget it, you’ll have a closet full of them where we’re going. I just brought you a small sample of the beautiful life so you could try it out. But now you’d better get your clothes back on. You can’t travel like that, although it would be nice.”

He was the older one who’d been described to us, the one Brent hadn’t actually seen, on the tall side, dark, with a neat, pointed, devilish little beard that contrasted oddly with his ragged denim shirt and grimy jeans. He waved the bottle invitingly, and the third sinister member of this deadly terrorist gang came into sight: a plump boy, also in jeans, who had no beard, simply because he hadn’t managed one yet. Only a feeble blond fuzz decorated the lower part of his chubby face.

The girl said uneasily, “Are you . . . are you sure it’s safe now?”

The dark one said, “Hell, the tricky pickup I worked out went slick as silk; and I let things cool off for several days before I came back, didn’t I? Nobody followed me here, I’m sure of that.” He grinned. “Well, kiddies, let’s disband the Sacred Earth Protective Force. Jeez, I still can’t really believe anybody’d be a sucker enough to hand over all this lovely loot on a wild yarn like that.” He shook his head incredulously. “Well, it beats smuggling pot, you’ve got to admit that.”

“I thought you were crazy when you started it,” the girl said. She giggled. “You were crazy all right, crazy like a fox.”

The plump boy asked, "But. . .who really sank all those ships, have you any idea?”

The bearded one shook his head sharply. “Don’t know and don’t want to know. People who sink ships are dangerous.” He glanced at the bottle, poured judicious amounts of champagne into the glasses that were held out to him, and finished the rest by putting the bottle to his lips, wiping his mouth afterward. “You know, I could make a habit of this stuff,” he said. “Well, who’s to stop me now? Drink up and let’s gather up our tax-free wealth, split this dismal scene and go join the idle rich.”

It was time and past time; twenty-five minutes had passed since I’d left the car. Well, a little waiting wouldn’t hurt the creeps in the bushes, or wherever they were hiding, holding their cute little stutter-guns in their sweaty little hands. I drew a long breath, eased myself out of the water, and swung myself around the ladder to put a foot on the houseboat’s rail, transferring my weight to it very slowly. Even a large boat will react noticeably to a couple of hundred pounds landing suddenly on deck. Easing myself down at last, I scuttled below the window, straightened up, and moved swiftly around the comer of the deckhouse to the aft-facing door. I rapped on it hard with my gun barrel.

“Office of Federal Security,” I said loudly. “This boat is surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

Then I took two quick strides to the rail away form the shore and vaulted it, dropping into the canal feet first. Even so, I wasn’t quite fast enough. The first submachine gun burst was smashing into the door before I’d finished speaking; if I hadn’t already been in rapid motion sideways, it would have riddled me. As it was, one of the nasty little 9mm slugs burned my arm before I got clear. I could hear all three rat-a-tat guns chattering and racketing behind me as I hit the water. It sounded like World War III on a busy day.

No wonder Bennett’s boys had been a trifle nervous, riding into action in the same car with the gent—well, one of the gents, and ladies—they were planning to kill. And no wonder Bennett hadn’t wanted a sharp-eyed lady reporter along to watch the massacre.

I’d gone in feet first remembering Brent’s report of old car bodies and hunks of concrete and two-to-three-foot shoals; but there was plenty of water where I hit. I must have gone down at least eight feet before my feet touched bottom, a rather soft and unpleasant bottom with which I didn’t want to associate any longer than I had to. On the other hand, I reminded myself, there was a certain amount of unpleasantness awaiting me on top, also. I got myself turned around and struck out underwater in the direction of the houseboat, the shadow of which—if shadow is the proper word where gunfire is concerned—seemed to be the safest place for the moment. Those little jacketed submachine gun bullets have considerable penetration, and they’d certainly make a sieve of the deckhouse, but I didn’t really think they could penetrate both the deckhouse and the heavier hull at the plunging angle they were being fired.

Surfacing cautiously, I winced as a bullet screamed overhead with the nasty wavering sound of a ricochet, or a projectile that’s been deformed and destabilized by passing through something moderately solid. There were splashes in the water beyond me, but none close in where I’d come up. But the guns were still going. It didn’t seem possible that anything could be left intact at the focus of all that firing; but there was still a glow of light inside the deckhouse. Apparently all the electric bulbs had not been shattered in there. Even in the dark, I could see that the sides of the superstructure facing me were torn and splintered by emerging bullets. The windows were all smashed. It was lucky that nobody’d ever tried taking that cheapo tub to sea, I reflected, lightly as it seemed to have been constructed, with what seemed to be ordinary window glass, for God’s sake, instead of the much stronger stuff normally specified for marine use. Well, houseboats weren’t made for open water and big seas, but still. . . .