Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Kim, listen,” he said, his voice still low, but with that tremor of urgency in it. “Some people are coming to the ship later tonight, to do us harm. We have to keep away from them.”

  “Curtis?” she asked, and wondered why he’d want to do her harm. Or do George Manville harm.

  “People of his,” Manville said. “Kim, if you’re dead, he can use that as a lever to pry Jerry Diedrich off his back. It’s that important to him, I don’t know exactly why, and he was hoping you’d die all by yourself, here on the ship. Since you won’t, he’s sending people.”

  She stared at him, not wanting to believe, but believing. “To kill me?”

  “Captain Zhang and I talked over what to do,” Manville told her. “We’re releasing one of the launches, to try to convince them we already got away.”

  “Well, why don’t we?” Feeling the urgency, she moved to sit up, and the stiff pain jolted through her, and she caught her breath with a sudden gasp.

  “That’s why,” he told her. “You’re mending, but you’re still very battered. Eight hours in a small launch, on the open sea, would be too much for you.”

  “You could get away. Then he wouldn’t dare do anything to me, because you could tell.”

  He shook his head. “Who would I tell? Who would I tell, and be believed against Richard Curtis?”

  They’ve thought this through, she realized, Manville and Captain Zhang. Stop struggling, stop arguing, just do it, whatever it is they want. You’re not going to have better ideas than theirs. “All right,” she said.

  “We’ll scuttle the launch,” he said, “so these other people won’t come upon it accidentally in the water. Then we’ll put you in one of the other launches, cover you with blankets, and hope they believe we already left the ship.”

  She could tell immediately that this was a very flimsy plan. “Where will you be?”

  “Keeping out of their way, or trying to.”

  Very flimsy. But maybe it was the best they could do. “All right,” she said.

  “I have jeans and a sweater here for you,” he said, holding them up for her to see. The jeans were faded, with bumpy knees, and the sweater was a dark green acrylic. “They’re clean,” he promised her, “and they should fit you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m afraid these are the only shoes we could find,” he said, and held them up.

  She couldn’t help it; she smiled at the shoes. She’d seen people wear shoes like this, when Planetwatch III docked sometimes, but had never guessed she’d one day wear them herself. The bottoms were roughly sawed out of the sidewall of an old tire, with a loose piece of canvas stapled across the top, and no heel. One size fits none.

  “Can I help you sit up?”

  “Yes,” she said, lifting an arm for him. “Thank you. I’ll be all right after that.”

  But she wasn’t, not really. He had to help her put the sweater on, pulling it down over the elastic bandage that held her together. Then he put her feet into the legs of the jeans, helped her to stand, and pulled the jeans up to her waist.

  “I’ve never been dressed by a man before,” she said, feeling awkward as she zipped the fly shut and fastened the canvas belt.

  Manville didn’t say anything to that. His concentration was on the shoes, as he held her elbow and said, “Just step into them. There you go.”

  Actually, they were better than she’d expected, the rubber firm but not too hard, the canvas stretching to hold her foot. “I’m ready,” she said.

  When she started to walk, she realized how weak and dizzy she still was, and she was grateful for his hand holding tight to her upper arm. They left the cabin and started down the corridor, and he said, “Only the captain knows about this, so we have to be quiet.”

  She was looking at her surroundings. How plush it all was, in comparison with Planetwatch III. Real wood floor, cream-painted walls, and actual carpeting on those stairs out ahead of her.

  Why couldn’t Richard Curtis be content with all he had? Why did he have to ruin the planet to get just a little more?

  Manville said, “I’ll carry you up the stairs. It’s just up one deck.”

  “Can’t I walk?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Kim.”

  It was stupid to be so weak, to have to be carried around like an invalid. But she knew he was right; those stairs looked a mile high, and already she could feel what little strength she had draining away. “All right,” she said, and stood obediently still, and he picked her up, one arm under her back, the other under her knees, and she put an arm over his shoulders, for balance.

  He carried her slowly up the stairs. At the head of the stairs, he let her stand again, but kept that supporting hand on her arm as they went down a corridor past open doors showing much larger and more elaborate cabins, with large windows rather than portholes to show the black night outside.

  At the end of the corridor he guided her through a wide teak door with two diamond-shaped windows in it, and then they were on deck, and immediately she could feel the movement of the ship more distinctly than when she’d been inside. Or was that just from seeing the dim whitecaps passing below?

  The captain stood in darkness off to the right, forward, where one of the launches hung in its divots, just beyond the rail. When they walked toward him, Kim saw that a part of the rail was hinged to open inward as a gate, next to the entry steps to the launch.

  “Good evening, Miss Baldur,” he whispered, and nodded a greeting. He looked and sounded very worried.

  “Good evening. Thank you for helping me.”

  “I wish it were not needed,” he whispered. “But since it is, I am happy that this is what I can do.”

  To oppose Richard Curtis, she understood him to mean, instead of to give him what he wants, even though the captain worked for him.

  Manville stepped onto the launch first, then took her arm to guide her aboard, the captain holding her other arm to steady her. “You’ll stay in the cabin,” Manville told her.

  Most of the launch was open, with plank seating along both sides, but the front quarter was roofed in gleaming wood, with a low door next to the steering wheel. Manville opened the door, then steadied Kim as she bent down to step in, finding it so low in here she couldn’t even kneel upright. There were two bunks side by side using most of the space, both neatly made with drum-tight woolen blankets, plus many storage bins and cabinets.

  “What you should do,” Manville said, leaning into the small space, “is lie on one of the bunks and cover yourself with the blanket from the other one. Cover yourself completely, if you hear anybody moving outside.”

  “I will.”

  He gave her leg an encouraging pat, and backed out of the doorway, then closed the door, leaving her alone in the dark.

  Not total darkness; it wasn’t completely black inside the cabin. Two narrow slit windows were in the forward end of the prow on both sides, just under the roof; some light from the ship leaked in through the window on the right. In its illumination, Kim pulled the blanket off the right-hand bunk, lay back on the other, and pulled the blanket over herself. And by then she was exhausted.

  But not sleepy, not the way she’d been before. Now she was too tense to be sleepy, too worried, too frightened. People coming here to this ship to kill her? It was unbelievable, and yet she had to believe it.

  Would she hear them arrive? Would they find her?

  Would Manville and the captain be able to help?

  She couldn’t sleep, not at all. She lay there in the darkness, eyes open, looking at nothing, and nearly two hours later she heard the distant thump.

  24

  Morgan Pallifer once had his own ship, but that was years ago, in a completely different ocean. He had the ship because he and the Colombians were useful to one another, and then he lost the ship because the situation changed.

  Oh, he was still useful to the Colombians; it’s just that he was useful in a different way. He became useful to the
Colombians as a bargaining chip in their sub rosa dealings with the American authorities. They would permit Pallifer and his lovely sloop, the Pally, to be caught by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration when he made landfall at South Carolina with the cabin of the sloop full of duffel bags full of white plastic bags full of cocaine. The Pally was impounded, having been used in the drug trade, and Morgan Pallifer spent seven hard years in a Federal maximum-security prison, and now, gracious me, Morgan Pallifer can’t vote in American elections anymore. Hah!

  Oh, he understood how it worked, he wasn’t bitter. The Pally had been in his name, but the Colombians had actually bought it for him, so it was really theirs, so they could take it away from him and give it to the DEA if it suited their needs. And he’d had four terrific years sailing the Colombians’ ship and spending the Colombians’ money, so it wasn’t a bad deal to pay for it with seven years cowering like a cur in that Federal kennel. The American authorities were enabled to rack up yet another wonderful public success in their war on drugs— success after success, and yet nothing changes—and they got to do it by putting away some scruffy unimportant American citizen without harming their vitally important geopolitical interests with the Colombians.

  Morgan Pallifer wasn’t bitter, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He did his seven years hard, he worked in a marina in Newport Beach, California for the three years of his parole, and the instant he was a completely free man he applied for and got a new passport and got the fuck out of that country. He’d been a citizen of the Pacific Rim ever since, nearly thirty years now, working when he had to, stealing when he could, living on the sea as much as possible, working other men’s boats but never his own.

  Sometimes the boats belonged to Richard Curtis, a good man in Morgan Pallifer’s estimation, who occasionally needed to get around various regulations by bypassing the normal import-export routes, and when that happened, Curtis knew Morgan Pallifer was someone he could depend on, and Pallifer knew Richard Curtis had good money and good boats.

  Today, Morgan Pallifer was 62, lean and leathery and mean as a snake. His faded blue eyes could almost look kindly at a distance, but they were not.

  Tonight’s work was straightforward, and lucrative. Pallifer had a good power launch of Curtis’s, and a three-man crew of his own, people he could rely on. He’d done this kind of thing before, though not for Curtis, so this was a new level of their business relationship, and one that Pallifer was happy with. He would do his customary efficient job tonight, and Curtis would be pleased, and who knows what other interesting work might lie ahead? He might even have his own ship again one of these days, in waters not polluted by the Americans’ high piousness and low dealings.

  They came out from Brisbane Bay after dark, and made their approach to the Mallory keeping the bigger ship to port, so the bulk of Moreton Island lay behind them, to make them just that much harder to be seen. They swung around behind the white yacht, as it sluggishly moved shoreward like some fat nun waiting for the bandits, and Pallifer, at the helm, saw the space along the starboard side of the yacht where a launch was missing.

  Did the birdies fly away? Or do they want poor old Morgan Pallifer to think they flew away?

  Pallifer was good with boats. He brought this launch in tight to the Mallory’s flank without quite touching her, and behind him Arn swung the grappling hook forward and back, and in the darkness it looked like an unlit chandelier. Arn flung it high, and the curved arms of it cleared the rail up there, and at once Pallifer turned the wheel, so that the launch eased away from the white side of the yacht, making the rope more taut, out at an angle from the ship, so skinny little rope-muscled Arn could shinny up it without trouble.

  Pallifer had not brought with him the ship’s plan of the Mallory that Curtis had loaned him, but he remembered the layout, and had planned accordingly. Just ahead of him on this side was the door to the storage area, for loading supplies, a plain white metal door in the ship’s white skin that was barely visible and that would be at deck level when Mallory was in port. Now, once Arn was aboard and had tossed the grappling hook back down into the sea between them for Frank to reel in, Pallifer eased the launch forward to that door. Above, Arn would be scurrying inside the ship into the main corridor, racing down the interior stairs, and then hurrying forward to the storage area. In just a minute, this door would open, and there it was, and there was Arn.

  Frank and Bardo were the muscle. While Pallifer held the launch steady beside the open door, those two leaped across the moving space, holding onto the ends of ropes. Aboard, they looped the ropes around small stanchions just inside the doorway, to make the launch fast to the yacht, causing only one thump to sound when the two vessels came together. Once they were secure, Pallifer switched off the launch’s two engines and stepped aboard the Mallory.

  This wasn’t his kind of ship. It was more like a country house than something seaworthy, with its carpeted stairways and expanses of glass. This wasn’t the sort of vessel Pallifer loved to sail on and craved to own.

  But he wasn’t here to put an option on the Mallory, was he? No, it was a simple killing he was here for, that’s all. Two killings, to be turned into one natural death and one disappearance.

  Except that the subjects weren’t where they were supposed to be. Pallifer and Arn and Frank and Bardo padded through the ship, undisturbed, knowing the crew would all be asleep and the captain obediently blind and deaf on the bridge, and when they got to cabin 4, where the disappearee was supposed to be bunked, the place was empty. No clothing, no personal possessions left behind. He’d moved out.

  They went down one deck to cabin 7, where the natural death was to be waiting, and it, too was empty, but here at least the bed had been used and left mussed. And so had the bed in the cabin across the way, number 6. So the man had come down here to guard the woman, but then they’d both gone somewhere else.

  Where? Off the ship? Pallifer didn’t believe it, not from Curtis’s description of the girl’s condition. No, more likely, the two of them had set loose that launch and then hidden themselves somewhere aboard the Mallory, because they’d be thinking all they were up against was some simple stupid riff-raff. They wouldn’t be expecting Morgan Pallifer.

  The four men stood in the corridor between cabins 6 and 7, and Pallifer said, “All right, we’ll find them aboard somewhere, but I’d best check in first with Curtis. He wanted me to ring if there was a complication.”

  They all went back up to cabin 1, which was Curtis’s when he was aboard, and where the telephone was located. Pallifer dialed the number Curtis had given him, and the man answered on the second ring; so he’d been waiting right there for the call, it was that important to him. “Yes?”

  “Not in their cabins,” Pallifer said, being terse because there was no real privacy on a phone like this. “One launch is gone.”

  “No,” Curtis said.

  “I agree. We’ll look around.”

  “Crew last.”

  Of course; only disturb the crew if it was absolutely necessary. Pallifer said, “Do you suppose the captain’s been talking to them?”

  There was a silence on the line, filled with electronic rustle, and then Curtis said, “I don’t think so. I think he noticed it slowed down.”

  “That’s possible,” Pallifer said. “Means he’s pretty smart, though.”

  “He is.”

  “Should I discuss it with the captain?”

  “If you think you should,” Curtis said. “But discuss it gently.”

  Palliser shrugged, a little irritated. Gentle discussion never accomplished anything, “I’ll call you before we leave,” he said.

  25

  Manville moved back from the doorway to cabin 1 while the leader was still telling his men what he wanted done. The leader hadn’t believed for a second that he and Kim had fled on that launch, had he? No. A waste of time.

  Manville had heard the thump of the two ships meeting, and had looked over the rail to see the last of them,
the leader, as he moved from their launch into the Mallory. He’d trailed them ever since, as they went first to his cabin and then to Kim’s— Curtis had prepared them thoroughly, all right—and then back to cabin 1 for the leader to make that call.

  What now? If he were alone, Manville would try to circle around them, get into an area they’d already searched, and then possibly get to their own launch and take off in it. But he also had Kim to consider, who couldn’t run, who could barely walk, and would not be able to defend herself.

  What he needed was a weapon, some sort of weapon. Those four all had pistols stuck down into their belts, and at this point he had nothing. But if he could find something, and then get his hands on one of those pistols…

  He’d always been a pretty good shot, against targets, never against anything alive. He’d belonged to a gun club for a few years, people who liked to plink at targets, try to compete against their own previous scores, but then the club was taken over by a group of hunters, “sportsmen” who wanted to politicize the organization and make it a mouthpiece for their own ideas, and Manville was one of those who’d dropped out. But he thought he was probably still pretty good, against something that didn’t move, and didn’t shoot back.

  But the first thing was to find a weapon, some way to defend himself, and the second thing was to stay ahead of the search until he could circle around behind it. They were starting to look at the top deck, ignoring for the moment the bridge, moving from forward to aft, two of them on each side of the ship, taking their time. So Manville moved on ahead, and entered the large glass-domed dining room, and from there he went into the small service kitchen.

  There were a lot of knives in here, some big cleavers, too, but Manville hoped for something better. Something like a club, to knock somebody out. He didn’t want to go around cutting people, wouldn’t know how to do it, probably didn’t have the stomach for it. The idea of stabbing another person made him queasy.