Man on the run

by Charles Williams

  I grabbed up the marlinespike and attached the lock on the suitcase, inserting the point and prying upward. It was tough, but after a couple of minutes it gave up and flew open. I felt a little flutter of excitement as I looked in; this one seemed more promising. Right on top, wrapped in a silk scarf, was a German Luger. Beside it was a whole deck of filthy pictures, held together by a rubber band, and three letters postmarked Havana, Cuba, and addressed in a feminine hand to Sr. Ernie Boyle. Under them was a photograph of a man and a girl at a table in a sidewalk cafe. There was something vaguely familiar about the man. I was just lifting it out for a closer look when I tensed up, listening. Somebody had come aboard. I heard his footsteps as he walked aft along the deck above me. I crossed to the lamp in two quick strides, and blew it out.

  The beam of a flashlight probed downward from the deck, splashing against the steps of the companion ladder. I leaned back against the bunks on the starboard side. He came on down the ladder. I could see nothing but the big black shoes and the light, pointed downward. He stopped at the bottom, some twelve feet from where I was standing and started to raise the light. It swept along the bunks on the port side and then came abruptly to a stop when it hit the jimmied suitcase. I could hear his breath suck in. “Ladrones!” he said, and began to curse in Spanish. The light swung and splashed against my face.

  I dived for him, but the light blinded me, and he was too far away. When I got there I met nothing but a fist, which crashed just under my ear, and the railing of the companion ladder. I plowed into the railing with my left shoulder and for a moment my whole arm went numb. I fell back against the bulkhead, straightened, and reached out for him. The light splashed against my face again, and at the same time the fist smashed against my jaw. I fell forward this time, grappling wildly with my arms, and caught him by the shirt. It tore. I swung and managed to hit him on the side of the face, but I was off balance and there was no power behind it. Then the light swung in a short, chopping arc, something smashed against my head, and I fell.

  A whole ocean of pain was sloshing around in my head, and when I tried to move, something was holding me and somebody was tugging at my feet. I opened my eyes. There was light in the room now; the kerosene lamp was burning again. I was lying on my right side in one of the bunks with my arms twisted behind me. My hands were tied. I looked down at my feet.

  He was a big Mexican or Cuban kid of twenty-two or so, dressed in a leather jacket and dungarees. He was muttering to himself in Spanish and tying my feet to the stanchion of the bunk. He had broad shoulders and a square and rather pleasant face, but when he looked at me his eyes were filled with nothing but anger and contempt.

  “Ladron!” he spat at me.

  “You speak English?” I asked.

  He checked the knots in the line, and straightened. “Sure, I speak English, Jack. And how low can you get? Coming on a pot like this to steal from the crew.”

  “I didn’t come here to steal,” I said.

  ”Of course not,” he said contemptuously, and turned away. He started up the companionway: “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Where else?” he said. “Out to the phone to call the cops.”

  Thirteen

  Listen,” I said quickly. “Wait a minute, will you? I tell you, I didn’t come here to steal anything.”

  “You think I’m that stupid?” he asked. But he did pause.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. And if you’ll just think about it or a minute you’ll see I’m telling the truth. Why the hell would I waste time breaking the suitcase open? I’d just carry it off.”

  He snorted. “Past the guard out there?”

  “I’ve got a boat tied up alongside. I could have had all your suitcases off here thirty minutes ago if I’d wanted them.”

  He made no reply. He went on up the ladder and I heard his footsteps going forward along the deck. Well, I’d tried. Then, miraculously, he was coming back. He stepped down the ladder and stood looking thoughtfully at me.

  “So you don’t steal suitcases. Just work boats,” he said. “Go ahead and make me cry.”

  “I’m going to put the boat back,” I said. “And I was going to leave the money here to pay for the suitcase—if I didn’t find what I was hoping to. The money’s in my left hip pocket.”

  He lighted a cigarette. “And what was it you wanted?”

  “I’m trying to find a man named Ryan Bullard.”

  “And you thought he might be in that suitcase?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t be short a few of your marbles, would you?”

  “No. I mean it,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I think he is in there. There’s a photograph—but never mind. There’s nobody on here named Bullard?”

  “No.”

  “Then he may be using another name. Or the guy I’m looking for may not be Bullard at all, but I still want him. Is there a big joker about six-three or six-four, heavy all the way up and down, black eyes, flat nose, mostly bald, with a fringe of black hair?”

  He nodded. “That’s Ernie Boyle.”

  I felt the stirrings of excitement. Maybe I was getting somewhere at last. “He’s the one I’m after.”

  “Then you must be crazy, Jack. I mean like crazy crazy. You better let me call those cops. If I’d broke open his suitcase, I’d be screamin’ for ‘em.”

  “I know what he’s like,” I said. “I’ve already run into him once tonight. But with the trouble I’m in, anything Boyle does to me is just a short-cut.”

  “Who are you, anyway? And why did you come out here in a boat?”

  “I’m Foley,” I said.

  His eyes widened. “Oh. That tanker third mate that killed the cop.”

  “I didn’t kill the cop.” I explained about the fight and how I’d left Stedman’s apartment. It was impossible to tell what he thought of it.

  “And you think it was Boyle?”

  “I think he had something to do with it.”

  “Wait a minute, Foley. When was this cop killed? It was about a week ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Last Tuesday.”

  “Uh-uh. That’s what I thought. We didn’t even get in port till Friday.”

  I’d been afraid of that. “And he was aboard last trip?”

  “Yeah. And Tuesday we’d still be on the Campeche Bank, about four hundred miles from here.”

  “I didn’t say he did it,” I said. “I know who that was. But I think he had something to do with it. Did you ever hear him mention the name Frances Celaya?”

  “No-o. It’s new to me.”

  “How about the name Danny?”

  “No dice.”

  “What’s yours?” I asked. “Raoul Sanchez.”

  “All right, listen, Raoul—” I told him about the ambush by the playground and about Frances Celaya’s being killed. “This guy Boyle is mixed up in it some way and I’ve got to find out how. There may be something in that suitcase. So how about untying me?”

  “Sure. That’d be great. And when he gets back I’m sitting here watching while you go through his gear? So he’ll kill both of us instead of just you? Try again.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “When he starts down the ladder, jump me and fake a fight. Say you just got here and caught me.”

  He thought about it for a moment. Then he shrugged and began loosening the knots. “All right, but don’t try anything, Foley. I can take you, any day in the week. I was a pro for a couple of years.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I sat up and moved my arms. “Then you must figure this Boyle is a wrong one yourself?”

  He sat down in one of the bunks and crushed out his cigarette in a sardine can ashtray. “Maybe. But I don’t bother him.”

  I strode over to the suitcase in the opposite bunk. Picking up the Luger, I checked to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t. I started to turn, still holding it in my hand, but paused when I saw the expression on his face.

  There was anger in it and chagrin. “Pretty cut
e trick, ladron. And I went for it like a sucker, huh?”

  I caught on then. “Here,” I said, and grinned. I tossed the Luger to him. He caught it, staring at me unbelievingly.

  “It’s not loaded,” I said. “But if you hear Boyle coming, point it at me. Say you just got here and took it away from me.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “I guess you’re really telling the truth, Foley. But you’d better see if you can find some ammunition and load this thing, and keep it yourself. That’s the only thing that’ll save you if he comes back.”

  “I don’t want to have to shoot him,” I said. “He may be the only person in the world who knows I didn’t kill that cop. As long as he’s alive there’s one chance in a million he might talk. But if he’s dead—” I turned back to the suitcase again.

  The photograph was first. The man in it was definitely familiar, but the girl was somebody I’d never seen before. She was Latin and very pretty, but she wasn’t Frances Celaya. I passed it to Sanchez. “Is that Boyle?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. But it must have been made several years ago. When he still had most of his hair.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “And it’s the same guy that opened the phone booth to get a look at my face. Where would you say it was taken? Havana?”

  “It could be,” he said. “Or it might be Vera Cruz. They have cafes like that too.”

  “Did Boyle ever talk about Cuba?”

  He shook his head. “Boyle never talks much about anything. But he speaks Spanish like a whiz, I know that.”

  It all added up a little at a time, I thought. Bullard was supposed to have done time in a Cuban prison. I went on ransacking the suitcase. The filthy pictures I disregarded; Havana wasn’t the only place you could buy those. In another envelope I found three small photographs of a boat. There were no people in the pictures, and nothing written on the back to indicate where they had been taken, or when. It was a sailboat with a ketch rig, apparently forty to fifty feet long.

  And that was all. There was nothing else beside the usual clothing and toilet articles. I went through it again, just to be sure, and even investigated the pockets in the clothing and checked to see if the bag had a false bottom or hidden compartments. There wasn’t even any ammunition for the gun.

  Nothing remained except the three letters. I looked at the envelopes. Two of them were postmarked last October and the third in November. All three had been addressed to Sr. Ernie Boyle in care of a Señora Jiminez in Ybor City, Florida, but the last one had been forwarded from there to Boyle on the Marilyn in care of the Tinsley Seafood Packing Co. of Sanport. I slid out the first letter. It was written in Spanish in a none too legible hand. I’d had one year of the language in high school, but I’d forgotten what little of it I’d ever learned, and combined with the poor script it was hopeless. I checked the other two. They were the same. The only thing I learned was that they were all from the same girl. She signed herself Cecilia.

  Then I shook my head, and wondered how stupid I could get. I handed them across to Sanchez. “Will you read these letters and tell me what they say? I can’t read Spanish.”

  He grinned. “This’ll kill you, Foley. Neither can I.”

  “What?”

  ”Oh, I can puzzle out a word of it here and there. That’s all.”

  “Are you kidding? You speak it.” I stopped then, a little awkwardly. It just hadn’t occurred to me he might be illiterate.

  He caught the hesitation and smiled again. “Oh, I can read and write. English. You see, my people came from Mexico and they spoke Spanish at home, but I was born in Corpus Christi and went to school there. So I spoke it, but never did learn to read it.”

  “Oh,” I said. That seemed to be that. “I could probably get a few words of it,” he said. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t like the idea of reading a shipmate’s mail. That’s on top of the fact that if he caught me he’d kill us both.”

  “I’m a seaman myself,” I said. “And I don’t like prowling through other peoples’ gear. But this is not just any shipmate. The cold-blooded sonofabitch drowned a girl in a bathtub about four hours ago. I’m positive he helped kill a policeman named Purcell. And if he’s the guy I think he is, he beat a seaman to death with a baseball bat about five years ago. So let’s don’t be too squeamish.”

  “All right,” he said.

  He slid the letters out one at a time, and went through them, frowning. It was intensely silent except for some bugs batting themselves against the chimney of the kerosene lamp. I looked uneasily around until I located the marlinespike; it was right beside the jimmied suitcase. Even with that, my chances of getting out of here alive were going to be very slim if Boyle showed up. He had the knife, he probably outweighed me about fifty pounds, and he was more or less a professional in the business of killing people.

  Sanchez shoved the last letter back in its envelope and handed them to me. “I don’t get much of it,” he said. “They’re love letters and probably pretty hot stuff, but you wouldn’t be interested in that. Two or three times she says something about when he gets the money. I don’t know what money, or where he’s supposed to get it, but I think they’re going to buy a boat with it.”

  ”There are some pictures of a boat in his gear,” I said. “That could be it.”

  He nodded. “Anyway, she mentioned it several times.”

  “Any names?” I asked.

  “Just this Mrs. Jiminez. And once somebody named Frances.”

  I glanced up quickly. “Frances? Any last name?”

  He shook his head. “No. Just Frances. I got the idea she meant somebody in Ybor City. That’s part of Tampa, you know. Lots of Cubans there.”

  “I know,” I said. “How long has Boyle been on here, do you know?”

  “Let’s see. He joined up in Tampa, about last September, I think. It was in the hurricane season, anyway. We had to run back and wait one out in Mobile the first trip he was aboard.”

  “You were taking the catch into Tampa then?”

  “Yeah. And sometimes Pensacola.”

  “How long have you been running into Sanport?”

  “Since the latter part of November, I think.”

  “Did anybody ever come aboard to see Boyle when you were tied up here?”

  “No. Not that I know of, Foley.”

  “Has he taken a trip off since he joined her?”

  “No. Been on here all the time.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Do you keep any kind of log book?”

  He nodded. “Sure. We enter the catch every day. And our position—when we know it.” He grinned, the white teeth flashing. “We’re not like you guys, sextants, Loran, RDF’s, fathometers, and all that stuff. We navigate with a hand lead.”

  “Can we look at the log?”

  “Sure.” He went up the companion ladder, and I heard him going forward. He returned in a moment with a beat-up old ledger.

  “Check back and see where the Marilyn was on December twentieth,” I said.

  He flipped backward through the pages and moved over closer to the lamp. “Hmmm. Here in Sanport. We docked on the seventeenth, and sailed on the twenty-first. Seven a.m.”

  I nodded. “Good. Now, January, twenty-eighth.”

  He riffled some more pages.. “Here we are. Sanport Arrived here on the twenty-seventh. Sailed the thirtieth.”

  So he was here when the Shiloh outfit was held up and again when Purcell committed suicide—or was killed. But it didn’t prove anything at all. Over half a million other people were also here at the same time.

  “Thanks,” I said to Sanchez. He went back up the ladder with the log book. I picked up one of the letters and stared at it, trying to force my mind to remember some Spanish I’d had ten years ago. There must be something here. I heard Sanchez coming back along the deck, and then his shoes on the ladder.

  “Just can’t stop bein’ nosy, can you, mate?”

  I turned. It wa
sn’t Sanchez. Boyle was standing at the bottom of the ladder, seeming to fill it from one handrail to the other with enormous shoulders inside the dirty gray sweater. He had a loose-lipped grin on his face as he pulled the knife from his pocket and clicked it open. I picked up the marlinespike. He leaned against the ladder watching me coolly with the small black eyes. There wasn’t even any animosity. It was just a job he had to do. I swung the marlinespike against the base of the lamp chimney, and the fo’c’sle was plunged into total blackness.

  I waited tensely, listening for any scraping of shoes against the deck. The silence went on. Then he spoke softly, still by the ladder. “Only way out’s over here, tanker sailor. Come and get it.”

  I said nothing. It was impossible to see anything at all; it was a blackness like the end of the world. There was no point in talking just to let him know where I was. I knew where he was and where he was going to be all the time: between me and that ladder.

  If I only had something to throw. Not the marlinespike, I thought. I had to hang onto that as long as I could; it represented the one slim chance I had for survival. The Luger! Sanchez had left it in the bunk where he was sitting. I tried to visualize it in the darkness, and moved one soft step to the left and forward, and put out a hand. I touched the railing of the bunk, slid my hand over onto the mattress, and moved it in a slow arc. How much longer would he wait? He knew he could come straight back and I couldn’t get past him in the narrow quarters without touching him somewhere. But he wanted to hear me cry out, or beg. My fingers touched the Luger. I pulled it toward me, transferred the marlinespike to my left hand, and picked it up in my right. I stepped softly back. There was still no sound from Boyle.

  I touched the railing of the upper bunk on my left with my fingertips to be sure I was in the center of the fo’c’sle. He should be straight ahead of me, a little over twelve feet away. But maybe he was kneeling. I clamped the Luger under my left arm for a moment, reached into my pocket with my right hand and drew out two dimes. I tossed them, aft and a little to the right. They tinkled against the bulkhead to one side of him.