The Sure Thing (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  When Dev clambered out of the camper's rear I said to him, glancing back toward that abandoned well where we'd just been, “A hundred million barrels, huh? Of real—which is to say saleable, and not for peanuts—oil. Tell me again you weren't kidding or joshing."

  “Straight arrow. Honest injun. Spoken in wondrous virtue—"

  “OK, you don't have to lie about it to convince me. What are we getting per barrel these days? A buck? Two?"

  “Call it three bucks and a half for this quality crude. More if it's low-sulphur—less polluting, thus more dear, more expensive. And the price for all grades is bound to go up, and up, you can count on it."

  “What I'm getting at, Dev, assuming you're not laying some carefully designed weirdness upon me—you'll have to forgive me if I still possess a few reservations about your absolute rightness, candor, motives, and even your sanity—is this: You are talking about maybe three hundred and fifty million bucks, waiting right over there short of the cow pasture, to be picked up by the first guy who smells it, and drills to it, and sucks it up."

  “Excellent, a hundred million barrels at three-fifty a barrel equals three hundred and fifty million dollars. You did that in your head, didn't you?"

  “It's a gift. So, OK, if it's there, since we're not talking about loose change, why tell me?"

  “Why not? You seem like a”—he snapped thumb and finger smartly—“fairly nice chap."

  That was all.

  So as he started to climb behind the joystick of his GMC rocket I said, “I am, actually. And I'll bet you overtip.” Then I thought about that for a moment and added, “But I'm going to have some dark suspicions, if I find out you don't."

  When I was settled in the passenger's seat—with belt buckled and feet planted solidly on the floor—Dev glanced across at me and said, “You mentioned motive, motivation, a minute ago. That, and your further mention of millions, gave rise in me to an amusing thought. Only you and I know about that field, and if you were not the fine, upstanding, righteous and noble towheaded lad you may, or perhaps may not, be, wouldn't what I've told you provide a splendid motive for your murdering me?"

  “I'm glad you thought of that,” I said. “Seriously, I can't think of a much more amusing murder motive than three hundred and fifty millions bucks."

  “I can. Four hundred million. Or a few billions."

  “Uh-huh. But I was also thinking, Dev, right after you were thinking. And I couldn't help wondering, what if, bubbling over with slyness and greed, I did knock you off, murdered you cruelly, then cashed in all my worldly goods and hired a rig and drilled three-fourth of a mile more than sixty-seven-hundred feet straight down, and there struck a great pool of alfalfa?"

  “Of what?"

  “Never mind. All this oil around here is upsetting my head. Let's go."

  Needless to say, not more than half a second after suggested it, we went.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The trip back was better. I didn't squeeze my eyes shut once on the way, and we were even able to carry on a conversation much of the time.

  Most of the talk was about oil, Morraigne's Holaselector, a few odds and ends concerning my own work. But, nearing home, Dev made a couple of comments about “aspects” and other astrological terms, and I said, “That's right, you and Cynara Lane are good friends, aren't you?"

  “We sure are. She's a sweetheart, remarkable girl—and a remarkable astrologer. Best I've known."

  “You sound like you've known several."

  “A few."

  “You go for that stuff, huh?"

  He kept his eyes on the road, but I saw him smile.

  “Why not?” he said. “Fact is, I thought it was all hogwash a few years back, so I decided to prove—to Cynara—that it was baloney. Took me a year, but I learned enough about astrology to prove it was phony, if it was, but by then had discovered I could not prove it."

  “Huh. Couldn't prove it was phony, huh? That's strange."

  “Not so strange. A great many of the really competent—and well-known—professional astrologers today got started the same way, studying astrology in order to prove it was a false science, or fraudulent art, and found they couldn't do it."

  “Couldn't do it, huh? That's strange...."

  “You won't buy it, will you?"

  “I won't even put a down payment on it."

  “And you haven't studied astrology at all?"

  “Hell, no."

  “Significant."

  “How?"

  “Most of the bigdomes and alleged scientists who keep putting down astrology, calling it quackery and worse—especially the astronomers, who aren't even aware that their own science is an outgrowth of astrology—don't know any more about it than you do. Probably know even less than you—at least you've had a little education lately."

  “I guess I have. From....” I paused, looked to my left at Morraigne. “Yeah, but how did you know that? We only met an hour ago, and—unless I missed a curve—you never heard of me before then."

  “To keep the record straight, I'd never heard of you until about half an hour before we met. Incredibly, even though I had never heard of Shell Scott, my life had not seemed empty—"

  “Half an hour before?"

  “That's right. After talking with friend Gippy Willifer, who was feeling so well he alleged you weren't a bad sort, and Audrey Willifer, who blushingly confessed to me that she had kissed you, somewhere near your ear, I believe, which you undoubtedly tantalized her with deliberately, I spoke at some length to the beautiful Cynara."

  “In the hospital? Cynara was there?"

  “No, she phoned to speak with Gippy. Specifically, to assure him she'd been studying his chart and was convinced the worst of his many problems were now behind him and he could meander forward with Audrey over Lemon Drop Road and into the Yum-Yum—"

  “She didn't put it like that, for God's sake."

  “Hardly. This is my translation, for a nonbeliever. If you prefer, I can give it to you as progressed Scorpio Sun in the eighth applying to a trine with his fifth-house Jupiter in Cancer, while Jupiter transits Pisces and Gippy's Ascendant, trining both Progressed Sun and radical Jupiter on its way toward his money-oriented second house, and Saturn has at last—"

  “Into the Yum-Yum is OK. Ah ... did Cynara mention me?"

  He glanced my way, crooked smile aslant on his deeply tanned face. “She told me you'd probably ask that."

  “Goddamnit, she can't see what I'm going to ask, ask you, whom I haven't even met, from those dingdong doodles—"

  “Of course not. Who said she could? I gathered this was woman's intuition breaking out. She had some things to say about you also, some terrible things, but guardedly alleged you might not be a bad sort, over the long haul."

  “She called the hospital, during the brief time you were there, huh? That's an interesting ... coincidence."

  “Not at all. It was planned. Merely one more devious move in the tricky game she and I are playing, designed to snow you, steal Gippy's eighty-two dollars, and overthrow the government—"

  “Cynara had to go and blab everything—"

  “She did mention that you come on strong as a sincerely suspicious type, and, sincerely, as a suspiciously strong type. This is no doubt due to your constant association with low individuals who drag you down to their level, from which point you sink. However, Shell, I consider this a fine thing—"

  “She's got a busy mouth, she has—"

  “—or at least not hopeless, since if you failed to be suspicious of us innocents you might get snowed by the guilties."

  For the last couple of minutes we'd been on Granite Ledge Road, and I noticed Dev was slowing down even more. He swung right, gunned up the steep drive next to his home and braked to a stop.

  “I wonder how what's-her-name is doing?” he asked idly.

  “You mean the lovely Lydia? I imagine she's painting her nose blue by this time."

  “Seems the most logical thing,” he said, c
utting the ignition.

  Before opening the car door I said, “Speaking of Gippy reminded me of something he said to me yesterday. About you, I mean. Didn't you just locate a sunken ship or something? In the Persian Gulf?"

  “Yeah, only I didn't ‘just’ locate it, that was nearly three months ago. This ship—actually, it wasn't a very big thing, more of a good-sized boat—is supposed to have foundered in the waters off Abu Dhabi a couple hundred years ago. A group of men, young guys who could still get excited about treasure, which this barge was supposed to have been carrying from Bandar-e Lengeh across the Gulf on the coast of Iran”—he smiled that bright crooked smile—“called Persia then, which falls more sweetly on my ears, dug into the available records and got hot to dive for the wreck. So they contacted me and I flew over there to see if I could locate the thing for them."

  “How'd they hear about you? And is it true your ding—Holaselector—works to find other stuff besides oil? Apparently it does."

  He nodded, one arm looped over the steering wheel. “I'm not sure how they found out about me, really. It's enough that they wanted to hire me—for my expenses, plus a piece of any treasure we recovered. And it's much easier to locate a sunken hulk with the Holaselector than to map oil reserves. After all, if it's there, it sticks out like a sore thumb, nothing else man-made, nothing but rock and sea bottom. Well, we located the wreck on the second day. Just a matter of finding the right area for search."

  “You actually found the thing, then?"

  “Do you have to sound so incredulous? Hell, yes, I found the thing. Some treasure aboard, but not much. I may get five, ten thousand from the job, a year or so from now. But it was fun, that was the main thing."

  “You stuck around long enough for these guys to paddle down and take a look at the wreck, huh?"

  “Yes. I watched the first couple of dives, but salvage operations will go on for a long time. I stayed for another week, though—and a memorable seven sweet days it was. Man, that was the best part of the trip, spending a week with—"

  He cut it off suddenly, and there was a kind of thick silence before he went on, “A week at Azdrak, near Azdrak, that is. Great country over there, different from the States. Very different."

  “Seems to me Gippy also mentioned a palace of some kind?"

  “Let's move into the house, Shell. OK?"

  He got out. I opened the door on my side, waited while he retrieved his instrument. Dev didn't say anything as he climbed from the mobile home's rear end, carefully as before, watching his step and hugging the black box close to his chest.

  But as he turned and stepped toward the house I moved up alongside him and said, “Dev, I was wondering about that Roman Number One—"

  And that was the last word for a while.

  Right then, between one word and the next—I never did get the next word out—there were four shots.

  I knew they were rifle shots, and from not very far away, less than a hundred yards away. They were loud, flat, and ugly, like thick bones breaking.

  It might have been a different story if they'd all come in a carefully timed, and aimed, sequence but there was one shot and a two- or three-second pause, then the other three in a bunch, too fast, as though rushed—maybe because the bastard squeezing that trigger knew he'd missed with the first slug and could see us moving. For we were sure as hell moving in a hurry, at least I was.

  A fraction of a second after that first sharp crack hit my ears I was in the air, jumping forward. My foot hit the ground and I took off in a second leap as the flurry of other shots were fired and I heard a slug hit the asphalt, somewhere near where my flying feet had been, and zingg as it ricocheted away.

  But Dev, the idiot, was still no appreciable distance from where I'd been two bounds ago. He was bent over, hugging the heavy black box to his chest and moving forward at a pretty good clip, but planting his feet almost as carefully as when he'd climbed from the camper and therefore not generating nearly the speed he could have achieved without that damned dingus slowing him down.

  And if ever, I thought, there was a moment when speed was of the essence, this had to be it. So I skidded on the asphalt, got turned around, took off in another jump, but this time back toward imbecilic Devin Morraigne.

  His eyes were fixed on something ahead of him, apparently something very important, toward which he was scuttling like a big lame crab, eyes practically straining at the—I didn't have the faintest idea what they were straining at.

  I'd started out a good ten feet from Morraigne and was still a yard away when, having taken a very speedy glance toward the area which so gripped Morraigne's attention, I realized there wasn't anything over there except a rock. A big rock, true, actually a great huge boulder, but that was all, just—a rock.

  That's what Devin wanted. This guy was unreal, I told myself; the only thing that made sense was, he greatly desired to reach that rock and there place his black-box dingus, where it would be safe from all the bullets flying around, and that didn't make any sense at all.

  As I say, I was still a yard from him when this realization came to me, and as it turned out that was as close as I got. When I'd started leaping forward to knock the dumb bastard down and save him from getting killed, I'd yelled, "Drop that damned thing, you crock, and get down!"

  So, already, I'd attracted some of his attention. Quite a bit of his attention. I was almost at him, turning to smack into him with my shoulder and knock him to safety, when I became aware that Morraigne's head was turned toward me and, though his legs were still going fairly speedily in that shuffling movement, his right arm was stuck out straight and stiff toward me. I became aware of it because the heel of his open hand smacked me squarely in the middle of my forehead.

  This is queer as hell, I thought.

  In my mind was the vivid picture of many guys I'd seen in similar situations, but all of them were playing football. What was happening to me was exactly what star quarterbacks did to pro tackles when they didn't want to get tackled—smack ‘em in the head with a good stiff-arm shot and, if it worked, hug their football and keep on galloping toward the distant goal.

  Well, maybe in addition to racing cars for fun, Morraigne had put in a jolly season with the L.A. Rams. Hugging his box, he kept on moving toward his goal—the rock—but what happened to me shouldn't happen to a pro tackle.

  Partly, what happened to me was due to the fact that I wasn't all set, ready, balanced, to get a shot in the head, since that was the very last idea in my mind. So, one instant I was three feet from Dev Morraigne and there was still time to knock him out of the way and maybe save his life, and then SMACK and I was, oh, twenty or thirty feet from him, rolling at first, then skidding, and at last coming to a stop with my chin apparently squashed between the rest of me and the asphalt driveway.

  “Hey!"

  I assumed that was from Devin Morraigne, for whom I felt no great warmth, at the moment. I also remembered somebody had been shooting at us, but that danger seemed to have lost much of its previous urgency. Besides, it was my impression that had been quite a while ago. So I lifted my head cautiously, and worked my neck, and got turned around enough so I could see him.

  Yeah, he'd made it. He was there at his rock. The black box was on the asphalt against its base, and Dev was hunkered down next to it.

  “Hey!"

  “Ah, shut up."

  “Shell, are you all right?"

  “Now you ask me. Where were you when I didn't need you?"

  “What the hell happened? Did you get hit? I mean, by a bullet?"

  “No, it wasn't a bullet."

  I realized, then, however, that if the rifleman was still around and wanted to shoot me, he wouldn't have to adjust for a moving target this time. Therefore, he almost certainly was not still around. I got up, and hobbled toward Morraigne and his rock, and nothing very exciting happened except that I realized I had probably sprung my butt.

  Dev looked at me soberly. “You all right?"

  “I
think I've sprung my butt—"

  “My God, somebody was shooting at us—"

  “But otherwise I'm in great shape. Except for—"

  “—actually trying to kill us. Or you—"

  “—my chin, which is very likely ruined, and some skin off my arms—"

  “—or me. Who the hell would shoot at us?"

  “—and legs and chest, and ... I'm afraid to check anything else. Who'd shoot at us? Beats the hell out of me. But that's a good question."

  It was a good question. That part was easy. What we needed was a good answer.

  As we started into the house, I asked Dev what the hell he thought he'd been doing, tiptoeing over the asphalt as might one among the tulips, when slugs were flying. He told me his Holaselector was basically very sturdy, but had a couple of components—one of which was essentially a thin film of the element mercury forming the heart of his “Multiphase Vibron” component—that even a small jar or shock could ruin.

  The explanation didn't quite satisfy me. Maybe because I had not the faintest idea what a Multiphase Vibron was. And I couldn't help wondering if anybody else did, either.

  Inside the house, I immediately walked to the living-room phone and picked it up, and—just as immediately—Dev took the phone from me, dropped it back onto the receiver.

  “I assume you were about to call the police—” he began.

  “Hell, yes, I was calling—"

  “Forget it."

  “But, Dev, it's at least eight to five that guy was trying to kill you. It'd be different if this had happened somewhere else, at my apartment, say, but this is your house—"

  “Forget it, Shell."

  Same as before. So, the same as before, that's where we left it. With the small exception that Dev said if I wanted to tell the law somebody had shot at me, that was OK, but to leave him absolutely out of it. I didn't argue.

  We did sit and talk about what had happened, for a little while—not long, five minutes or so. And a couple of those minutes were lost, if that's the right word, when Petrushka toddled in once again, bare-assed—actually, bare-everythinged—and did a gay impromptu little dance before Dev sent her away. Not far away, just out of the living room.