Choke
Page 28
“Twenty-two million dollars in bearer bonds, gold certificates, and other negotiable instruments,” Harry said.
“It was all on the wreck?”
“That’s right. You see, although I had a sizable sum in other, more visible investments, that was just to allow us to live well on the income while we were planning our final escape. I didn’t want all the rest of it lying around the house.”
Chuck spoke up. “Harry, I have a question, too. Why aren’t you dead? You looked dead to me, lying down there on the deck of the wreck with a tank full of carbon monoxide and blood in your mask.”
Harry smiled. “I was pretty convincing, huh?”
“You certainly were. How did you do it?”
“I had a little cylinder of clean air, just enough to get me to the wreck without breathing the noxious fumes.”
“But how did you get off the wreck and… here?”
“I had a rebreather kit, which leaves no bubbles, stashed in a locker on the wreck,” Harry explained. “When you popped up, I swam to the locker, started breathing oxygen, and got out of there.”
“But you were an awfully long time with no air, weren’t you? I mean, from the time I found you down there until I popped up.”
“Less than two minutes; I can hold my breath for a little over three. It’s a gift, like being able to run fast or jump high.”
“Where did you go after that? There were no boats around that I could see.”
“No, but there’s a little island to the northwest, about two and a half miles.”
“You swam two and a half miles underwater?” Chuck asked, incredulously.
“Partly. The last hour was on the surface; the Coast Guard had gone by then. I began swimming competitively at six; I would have made the Olympics, but my… personal sponsors didn’t want me to become famous before I started practicing law. The trip took me nearly three hours, against the current, but then it had to be far enough that nobody would believe I could make it.”
“And from the island, where?”
“I cruised around on the little boat that Clare used today-until we got this boat, which used to be Fugitive, out of Key West and to a little boatyard up the Keys, where we changed her name and made a few superficial alterations that would differentiate her from her old self. The three young men you encountered in the marina were not a delivery crew; they were shipwrights. They’re down in the wreck now, for some diver to find someday.”
Victor came back on board. “There’s about half a gallon a minute leaking into their bilges now,” he said. “I didn’t want to make it too big, in case anybody ever inspects the wreck. There’ll be enough for a big explosion in a few minutes.” He didn’t look happy about it.
“I get the picture,” Tommy said. “You take us out, put us aboard Choke, and then there’s a terrible accident?”
“You’re very quick, Tommy. We’re pretty far out from Key West, and I doubt if anyone will even see the explosion. If they do, then by the time they reach the site, the boat will have burned to the waterline and sunk. Those old wooden boats burn quickly. By that time, we’ll be thirty, forty miles south of here, headed for the Caymans, the other side of Cuba.”
“I see,” Tommy said. “Let’s get back to your mistakes, Harry. You asked me if you made any more.”
“By all means,” Harry said. “I want to hear this.”
“It’s kind of a daisy chain of mistakes,” Tommy said. “You trusted Clare, Clare trusted Victor, Victor trusted Clare.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you wondered how your mob friends found Clare?”
Harry frowned. “It was that detective, Carman.”
“Yeah, but Carman was tipped. Clare tipped him.”
Harry glanced at Clare. “Substantiate that.”
“Carman told me he got a telephone call from what sounded like a young woman. Who but Clare? Who else knew?”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Tommy; if they’d found me they would have found her.”
Tommy was shaking his head. “The tip was before you faked your death. Clare was depending on your mob buddies to take you out so she’d be free to disappear with the money, but you solved her problem with your plan to die. She did know where the money was, didn’t she, Harry?”
Harry looked appraisingly at Clare. “You have a rebuttal, sweetheart?”
“He’s crazy, Harry. I want to be with you; you know that.”
Tommy turned to Clare. “I’ll bet that’s not what you told Victor.” He turned to the tennis pro. “By the way, Victor, Harry and Clare have brand-new passports and ID. Do you have a brand-new passport?”
Victor looked at Clare. “No,” he said quietly.
“Victor, I have another question for you; when did you find out that Harry was alive?”
“The day before yesterday,” Victor said.
“Must have come as quite a shock,” Tommy said. “And Harry, you’ve known about Victor all along, right?”
“Oh, yes.” He looked thoughtful. “Well, nearly all along.”
“Ahh,” Tommy said, looking thoughtful, “so Clare has lied to both of you. You know, it strikes me that as soon as Chuck, Meg, Daryl, and I are out of the picture, somebody else is going to go.” He turned to Clare. “Tell me, have you figured out which one is next? I mean, you need one of them to get out of here in this boat, but not both. Three’s kind of a crowd, isn’t it? And I doubt if two would be company for very long.”
Harry turned toward Clare. “My dear, would you like to respond to that?”
“No,” she said, getting to her feet, “I don’t think I would.” She started across the saloon toward her purse, next to the stereo. “What I’d like is some aspirin.” She reached into the handbag.
Suddenly, there were guns everywhere. Clare’s hand came out of the purse with an automatic in it, Victor clawed at his belt, where Tommy’s and Daryl’s guns were, and Harry had to make a choice.
Harry and Clare fired simultaneously; Harry staggered backward into the cockpit as Clare received a load of birdshot in the face and went down. Victor didn’t seem to know what to do, and while he was thinking about it, Chuck used the moment to swing a bottle of rum at the back of his head.
Then it was very quiet. No one moved. Except Clare.
Bleeding, blinded, she raised herself on one elbow and began firing wildly. She got off half a clip before Chuck’s dive ended on top of her. By the time he twisted the pistol from her grip, she had died.
“Daryl,” Tommy said, getting up, “check on Harry, and be careful.” He produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them onto Victor’s wrists. “Chuck, you go and stop the gas leak on your boat and pump out the bilges.”
“Good idea.”
“Meg, please find a bar towel and apply it to Victor’s head. We don’t want him to bleed to death before we get him back to Key West; he’ll be useful in explaining what happened here.”
Daryl came in from the cockpit. “Harry’s bought it. Clare was a good shot with a handgun, wasn’t she?”
“She was some piece of work,” Tommy said. He walked behind the bar and started looking at bottles. “I believe I need a drink,” he said. “Will anybody join me?”
While Daryl applied first aid to Victor’s scalp in the saloon, Tommy, Chuck, and Meg sat in the cockpit of the big yacht, sipping rum and tonic and watching the Coast Guard cutter coming toward them.
“Tommy,” Chuck said, “you know what surprises me most in all this? Victor. I wouldn’t have believed him capable of any of this.”
“Victor’s a sociopath,” Tommy said. “He’s a charmer, but he’s one of those people who is completely without a conscience. I think Clare must have seen that in him. Remember, she dangled the bait in front of you, briefly, but you didn’t take it. That’s when she picked Victor. She knew the difference between the two of you.”
Chuck shrugged. “If it hadn’t been for you, Tommy, her plan would have worked. I’d have been a goner.”
“Chuck,” Tommy said, “if it hadn’t been for you tonight, we’d all have been goners; Victor wouldn’t have left anybody alive. You should always remember: When the pressure was on, when you had to come through, you didn’t choke.”
The three of them finished their drinks and got up to meet the Coast Guard.
February 20, 1995
Key West, Florida
Author’s Note
I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.
However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at www.stuartwoods.com, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all of my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.
If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.
Remember: e-mail, reply; snail mail, no reply.
When you e-mail, please do not send attachments, as I never open these. They can take twenty minutes to download, and they often contain viruses.
Please do not place me on your mailing lists for funny stories, prayers, political causes, charitable fund-raising, petitions, or sentimental claptrap. I get enough of that from people I already know. Generally speaking, when I get e-mail addressed to a large number of people, I immediately delete it without reading it.
Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published. Buy a copy of Writer’s Market at any bookstore; that will tell you how.
Anyone with a request concerning events or appearances may e-mail it to me or send it to: Publicity Department, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
Those ambitious folk who wish to buy film, dramatic, or television rights to my books should contact Matthew Snyder, Creative Artists Agency, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90067.
Those who wish to make offers for rights of a literary nature should contact Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit, 445 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022. (Note: This is not an invitation for you to send her your manuscript or to solicit her to be your agent.)
If you want to know if I will be signing books in your city, please visit my website, www.stuart woods.com, where the tour schedule will be published a month or so in advance. If you wish me to do a book signing in your locality, ask your favorite bookseller to contact his Penguin representative or the Penguin publicity department with the request.
If you find typographical or editorial errors in my book and feel an irresistible urge to tell someone, please write to David Highfill at HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Do not e-mail your discoveries to me, as I will already have learned about them from others.
A list of my published works appears in the front of this book and on my website. All the novels are still in print in paperback and can be found at or ordered from any bookstore. If you wish to obtain hardcover copies of earlier novels or of the two nonfiction books, a good used-book store or one of the online bookstores can help you find them. Otherwise, you will have to go to a great many garage sales.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Victor Mulcahy for being a good sport about all this and for teaching me everything he knows about tennis. If I got any of the tennis stuff wrong, it’s his fault.
I am also grateful to my editor, HarperCollins vice president and associate publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff for all their hard work, and to my literary agent, Morton Janklow, his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the people at Janklow and Nesbit for their careful attention to my career over the years.
Stuart Woods
***
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