Big Kiss-Off

by Keene, Day

  Mimi shrugged again. “I did not. I followed their lights until they disappeared, then I kept on a few miles farther. Then I shut off the motor and waited until they came back again. And when they had passed me sitting in the dark, I went on in the direction from which they came an’ began to call.”

  Cade pressed the fingers stroking his face. “You’re okay.”

  Mimi was pleased. “You like?”

  “I like very much.”

  Cade attempted to digest what Mimi had just told him. They were, obviously, on one of the smaller islands in the mouth of the Bay. Pressed for time the two men following Moran’s orders hadn’t bothered to take him out into the Gulf. They’d dropped him in one of the passes, East Pass probably, hoping the suck of the tide would complete their work for them. That was why he’d reached land as soon as he had.

  The abortive landing of the helicopter and the fight at the lodge made less sense. Moran had admitted openly that until he and Janice had broken with Tocko, the latter had intended to use the lodge he’d built on land he didn’t own as a drop for smuggled aliens. Aliens willing to pay any price Tocko named to be put ashore on the mainland. The men the ’copter pilot had landed or had tried to land were undoubtedly aliens.

  But to whom did the cutter belong? It came under the head of big business. Who had advanced the money to build the expensive pier and pump in the beach and equip the radio shack? What was worth so much money? Why had Moran and Janice spent two months in New Orleans currying favor with city and state politicians? What was the deal Tocko intended to foul up if Janice didn’t come back to him?

  Only one thing was clear. He, Cade, was a fly in everybody’s ointment. Janice wanted him dead badly enough to give herself to him, merely to get at the shells in his gun. Either Tocko or Moran had tried to frame him by killing Joe Laval. When he’d asked Moran to make sense at the beginning of the fight on the landing strip, Moran had been amused. He’d said:

  “The little bastard couldn’t be a good sport and die in Pyongyang. He would have to come back.”

  For one reason or another all three of them wanted him dead. The dryness returned to Cade’s throat. He wished he had a drink of water. He wished he had a cigarette. He wished he was smart. The hell of it was he’d never pretended to be smart. All he was was a guy by the name of Cain.

  He did know Mimi’s legs must be cramped. He knew he should be up and on his way if he intended to kill Moran, and he did intend to. But he liked being where he was. It was the closest he’d come to his dream, the closest he’d come to following the medic’s orders. It was quiet and peaceful on the island. He liked the sun on his face. He liked the song the cardinal was singing. He liked lying with his head on Mimi’s lap. It was like being returned from the dead, like walking across the line at Panmunjom.

  Cade had never been more content or comfortable. There was something more than the normal biological attraction of the sexes between himself and Mimi. They were, as Latin-speaking people said, sympatico, in accord on all things, at least all things that mattered.

  “I’m tiring you?” he asked her.

  She shook her head and smiled. “I like.”

  Cade lay looking up into her face, almost afraid of pushing a miracle too far. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette?”

  Mimi nodded brightly and dug down into her borrowed shirt. “I ’ave just one and two matches. I knew maybe you might want.”

  She put the crumpled cigarette between his lips. It was perfumed like a cigarette carried loose in a woman’s purse, daintily fragrant, tasting more of her flesh than of tobacco. Cade was a little sorry when she lit it.

  He sucked smoke into his lungs and offered the cigarette to her. “We’ll smoke this and be on our way.”

  Mimi bent over him. “Where?”

  Cade wished Mimi would learn to button more than the bottom two buttons of his shirt.

  “Where?” Mimi repeated.

  “Back to the lodge.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to kill Moran.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mimi leaned down to blow smoke in his face. “It is for you to say. You are the man.”

  A thought suddenly struck Cade. “You remember that cutter docked at the pier?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did the men aboard it take any part in the fight?”

  Mimi shook her head emphatically. “No. All they did was watch. And while I was starting the keeker I could hear bells aboard and seamen began to haul in the lines.”

  Cade wondered how he could have been so dumb. Of course. It had been so simple all the time. The big boys seldom interfered, openly, in inter-family quarrels. It wasn’t politic. They preferred a policy of watchful waiting, but now the bitterly contested states’ tide bill had passed, vesting all off-shore sovereignty in the states involved, there were a good many firms which might be vitally interested in certain types of waterfront acreage.

  Cade could think of five off-hand, all internationally known, all in the same line of business.

  15 Many a Slip

  Its long immersion in water had stopped Cade’s watch but from the position of the sun he judged the time to be close to four o’clock. It had seemed so simple while he’d been swimming through the fog. He would return to the lodge and kill Moran.

  How?

  He had no weapon but his hands. There was a chance that now, thinking he was dead, Moran and Tocko and Janice had worked out some sort of truce. In that case, he would have not only Moran but Tocko and the Squid to deal with.

  Cade parted the drooping branches of the water oak behind which he’d poled the skiff and looked out. He was not surprised to see the Sea Bird cruising fitfully off-shore. One of the two men in the cockpit was sweeping the irregular shoreline with a pair of glasses. As Cade watched, the cruiser moved on slowly. Cade followed it with his eyes.

  “Buy a boat,” the medic had told him.

  Mimi exhaled softly. “They saw us?”

  Cade shook his head. “No. At least, they’re moving on.”

  He debated waiting until dark before poling on again. It was one thing to beat his way back up the Bay with the throttle of a fifteen-horsepower kicker wide open. It was something else to pole his way along the shore line, following the contours of the land, moving from one point of cover to another. He hadn’t dared to use the kicker since they’d started. Its high-pitched whine was audible for miles and while Moran might think he was dead, the men in the boats combing the Bay were looking for a very alive girl in a fourteen-foot skiff powered by an outboard motor.

  Mimi had trouble swallowing. “I am thirsty.”

  “Yeah,” Cade said. “So am I.”

  He started to pole out from under the tree and stopped to look at the tilted motor attached to the metal transplate. His mind still wasn’t working clearly. Between the two tanks and the motor he had poled an unnecessary one hundred pounds all day. He detached the gas tank. It was empty enough to float. He threw it on to a tangle of exposed roots, then unscrewed the motor and the extra tank and dropped them overboard.

  Mimi looked at him, puzzled.

  “They’re no good to us,” Cade told her. “We don’t dare use them.” He looked out through the screen of leaves, trying to locate some familiar landmark. “We can’t be more than four or five miles from the lodge. I’ll pole a few miles closer if I can. About a mile from the lodge there used to be a spring. If it’s still there, we’ll have a drink. After that, I think we’d better go on by foot.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Cade poled out from under the tree and on up the shore line. Without the motor and the tanks, the boat was easier to handle. But the pole he’d broken off a dead tree wasn’t entirely straight. On a hard push it twisted in his hands. During the morning, blisters had formed on his palms. Shortly after noon, the blisters had broken and now it was torture to grip the pole. It had been a long time since he’d poled a boat and that had been
a pirogue, not a skiff.

  He’d been right about this portion of the Bay remaining unchanged. During the long hot day they’d passed four fishing camps but all of them were deserted. Animal life was abundant. There were ’gators on the mud slides in the bayous, snakes lying sunning themselves on partly submerged roots and sand bars. The muskrat population had increased since the days when he’d come to the Bay with his father. Twice he’d seen swimming otters. Several times, deer had peered out of tangles of brambles.

  Blood from the raw flesh on his palms began to stain the pole. Cain went on doggedly. The sun sank still lower in the sky. As it touched on the water and seemed to bounce, Mimi wet her lips with her tongue. “There will be trouble when we reach the lodge, perhaps shooting?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “And you have no gun.”

  “No.”

  She spoke, as always, dramatically, as if imparting a great secret, “Then instead of going to the lodge, why don’t we go to the policia?”

  Cade was hot and tired. His injured head and his swollen jaw ached. His pole caught in a submerged root and when he pulled it free, an angry cottonmouth came with it and tried to climb into the boat. Cade used the pole to throw the snake up on shore, and poled on. It was the first foolish question she’d asked. Even so, it was an effort for him not to be curt with her.

  “Where do you think you are?” he asked her. “In Times Square or on the corner of Canal and Royal? The nearest local law, if any, is on Grand Isle. Moran’s men would pick us up before we got two miles across the Bay. The only real law down here is the Coast Guard and we’ve no way of contacting them. Besides, you’re in the country illegally. Remember?”

  The sun had burned a deep V on Mimi’s chest. In the morning her nose was going to peel. She looked down at her bare feet. “After you kill Moran, if you can do it, what are you going to do with me?”

  “I don’t know,” Cade admitted.

  Once it touched the water, the sun sank rapidly. Cade hoped he was as close to the lodge as he thought he was.

  The next spit of land looked familiar. As Cade recalled, there had been a huge water oak near the spring. The tree was still there, only shattered. A storm blowing in off the Gulf had split and partially uprooted it and lightning had completed its destruction.

  Cade beached the boat on the shelf of sand in front of the tree. “This is it. I mean the spring. We’re not more than a mile from the lodge.”

  He led the way inland through the trees, with Mimi following closely behind him. The spring was where he remembered it, but also changed. Some fisherman or squatter had bricked it in and built a crude cabin in the clearing. The cabin, as the others he had seen, was empty.

  Cade lay on the moist ground with Mimi beside him and showed her how to make a crude cup of her hands. When she had drunk what he considered enough, he stopped her.

  Mimi’s eyes turned sullen. “But I am still thirsty.”

  “Even so,” Cade said.

  He drank sparingly, then sat with his back against a tree. Now that he was almost to the lodge, the impossibility of what he hoped to do appalled him. Cade wondered if he were turning chicken. He doubted it. It was just that he was one man against perhaps a dozen and the other twelve men would be armed.

  “Why can not I drink?” Mimi asked.

  “It might make you sick,” Cade told her. “Wait. After we’ve rested a few minutes we can drink some more.”

  While he waited he searched the shack. There was a crude bunk, a wood-burning stove, a few shelves to hold provisions. On a hunch, Cade felt along the shelves. On the top shelf, pushed back and forgotten, were a rusted can of beans and a small tin of sardines. The rust didn’t seem to have eaten through the can. The sardines were easy to open. There was a key on the can. The beans were another matter. Cade kept up his search of the cabin and the small clearing around it and near what had been a woodpile, he found a dull axe with a broken handle. He used the blade of the axe to open the beans. He divided them and the sardines equally on two leaves from a wild mango tree.

  They ate beside the spring, Cade watching Mimi, feeling as he had during their first meal together aboard the Sea Bird. A dozen times during the day they’d had to climb out and push the boat over ankle-deep grass flats. Her bare feet were cut and torn by shells. The sun had tortured her flesh. She’d been through hell all day without one word of complaint. Now, as during their first meal together, she was starved. Still, hungry and frightened as she was, squatted beside a wilderness spring in the deepening dusk, she managed somehow to look as if she were eating Huitres en Coquille a la Rockefeller at Antoine’s. There was no doubt about it. She was people.

  “Is good,” Mimi smiled at him. “Now may I drink again?”

  Cade nodded. “Yes.”

  His own hunger left him as he looked from the drinking girl to the faint trail barely distinguishable in the darkening mat of vegetation. He had no right to risk Mimi’s life, especially after she’d saved his. So he would manage to kill Moran. There were still Tocko and the Squid. There were Harry and Fred and the bronze-faced ’copter pilot, all living outside the law. With the exception of the Squid, any one of them would be very pleased to get their hands on Mimi.

  Cade was sorry now he had jettisoned the motor and the tanks. The girl had been right. He should run for Grand Isle and turn Mimi over to the local authorities. Even being sent back to Caracas couldn’t possibly be as bad as what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of any of the men at the lodge. They might even share her. To men of their type a woman had only one purpose. She was a vessel to be filled. And when they had finished with Mimi the light would be gone from her eyes. If she didn’t use a knife on herself, she would be just another waterfront jade perched on a bar stool somewhere, willing to sell, for food and lodging and drink, that on which she no longer placed any value.

  Mimi was concerned. “You are not eating.”

  “No,” Cade said, shortly.

  He’d been mad. He could see that now. He couldn’t go back to the lodge. He couldn’t attempt to kill Moran. His revenge would have to wait. He wasn’t all river Cajun, after all. He’d carried rank on his shoulders too long. If rank carried privileges, it also carried responsibilities. And the succession of gold and silver bars and maple leaves had burned into the flesh of his shoulders. His first duty was to Mimi. Once he got her to a place of safety, he could think of himself.

  He drank from the spring and stood up.

  Mimi stood up with him. “Now we are going to the lodge?”

  Cade nodded. “Yes. But not to kill Moran.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m going to try to steal a boat and get you to Grand Isle.”

  “But you said Jeem’s men would catch us before we ’ave gone two miles.”

  “Possibly not at night.”

  Cade led the way back to the shore. It was completely dark now and the water was slightly phosphorescent wherever it was broken. The power plant at the lodge had resumed its monotonous thud thud. The high-watt bulb on the pier head was lighted. He could see it through the trees on the next spit of land. Whatever he did he would have to do before the moon rose.

  Mimi’s fingers bit into Cade’s forearm in sudden comprehension. “You are doing this for me.”

  “Let’s say for both of us.”

  “You are afraid something bad will happen to me.”

  “Moran hasn’t had his men searching the Bay all day because he wants to hold your hand.”

  “No,” Mimi agreed with him. “I should nevair ’ave come to the States. I should nevair ’ave stowed away in La Guaira.”

  Cade squeezed the hand on his arm. “If you hadn’t, I’d still be back on that island, possibly snake bit or ’gator bait by now.”

  Mimi shook her head. “No. You would still be in Bay Parish an’ everything would be fine for you. The law would know by now that you deed not keel Señor Laval. It was because I insisted on finding Jeem, insisted you take me to New Or
leans, that you are in all thees trouble.”

  Cade studied the pole he’d left lying across the stern thwarts of the boat. “That’s water over the dam.”

  “Water over the dam?”

  “Spilled milk.”

  “Thees I do not know.”

  Cade continued to study the pole. It would be useless in the basin in front of the lodge. The water in the basin was at least six fathoms deep almost all the way to the shore, another reason why the big firms might be interested in the land. “Over and done with,” he told Mimi. “You got mixed up with a heel. I married a sex-propelled cash register. The best we can do is forget the whole affair and get out of this with as much skin as we can.”

  “But ees your property.”

  “I’ll live. That is, if I’m not executed for killing Joe Laval.”

  Cade walked back the way they had come, tore a four-foot piece of twelve-inch clapboard off the shack and shaped a rough paddle with the dull axe-head.

  There were luminous eyes around the spring now, as the night things of the swamp and hammock began to stir. As he worked, he heard a thrashing in the underbrush as some wild thing made its kill and once a dry slithering whisper as a snake crawled through the grass.

  There were things to be said for flying an F-86. The worst that could happen to you was for a Gook to lob a .37 shell into your cockpit, or forget to turn off the emergency fuel system after you took off and have the pump accidentally kick on and the excess fuel pouring into the engine literally burn you alive. Either way was quick. The Delta and the creatures in it, human and otherwise, worried a man to death.

  Mimi was sullen-eyed when he returned. “No,” she said.

  “No what?” Cade asked her.

  “You ’ave your pride,” she said. “You are doing thees as you ’ave done everything else, for me.”

  Cade lost his temper. “Goddamn it, get into the boat.”

  Mimi’s lower lip trembled. For a moment Cade thought she was going to cry. She didn’t. “Whatever you say,” she said, with simple dignity. “You are the man.”

  Cade poled along the shore and out to the extremity of the next spit of land. The basin lay just beyond it. The pier looked the same as it had the night before but the cutter was gone. The three work boats and the Sea Bird were still in their slips. The men who had used the Sea Bird to look for Mimi had had to gas the boat. If he and Mimi could get aboard the cruiser undetected, what he hoped to do would not only be feasible, it would be relatively simple. The Sea Bird could run away from any of the other three boats.