Big Kiss-Off

by Keene, Day

  Cade looked from the pier to the lodge. However the fight had ended, it was over. The helicopter was gone from the landing strip. A half-dozen of the rooms on the first floor of the lodge, as well as the dining room and the lobby were brightly lighted. He could see no one on the pier or on the beach. As on the night before, the only sounds in the basin were the lapping of water on the shore, the shrilling of the cicadas, the booming of frogs and the thud thud of the plant powering the lights.

  “What are you going to do?” Mimi whispered.

  Cade told her. “Steal my own boat, if I can.”

  He poled away from the shore and was almost immediately in deep water. Cade let the pole slip from his bleeding palms and picked up the crude paddle he’d hewn. The wind was off-shore and brisk. It was as difficult to paddle the flat-bottomed skiff as it had been to pole it. No matter on which side he paddled it yawed off course. The distance from the point of land at which he’d started to the end of the pier was less than half a mile. Cade was breathless and drenched with sweat. Over an hour passed before he could reach out and catch a breather by holding on to the creosoted pilings. As new as it was, barnacles had already begun to form. The fresh creosote burned his raw palms. The skiff thudding against the pilings was even more difficult to handle in the chop under the pier than it had been in open water.

  Laboriously, Cade made his way inshore until he could grasp one of the sagging ropes that moored the Sea Bird.

  The men who had used it hadn’t bothered to put out the fenders and there was a nasty scar to starboard where the cruiser had rubbed against the lee aft piling.

  He pulled the skiff under the transom and held it as steady as he could while Mimi scrambled aboard. Then he followed her, casting the skiff adrift.

  The skiff drifted out into the bay. From time to time the off-shore wind carried a burst of laughter from the screened dining-room windows of the lodge. Once Cade thought he heard Janice laughing. He stood a moment panting in the dark, squeegeeing the sweat from his face and chest, then checked the controls by feel. Everything seemed to be in order.

  He cast off the slack aft line and hauled it in, then waited for the cruiser to yaw and cast off the line to lee.

  “What can I do?” Mimi whispered.

  “Nothing,” Cade whispered tersely. “I’m going to play it out between the pilings if I can and let the tide and the wind carry us out into the bay before I cut in the motors. Because the minute I do, all hell is apt to pop.”

  He scrambled up on the catwalk and moved forward, wishing it weren’t quite so dark. It was like trying to see through a solid black wall.

  The tide was out and the cruiser was riding three feet lower than the pier. Cade reached up through the dark to locate the bight making it fast and a strong hand grasped his arm and lifted him up onto the pier as easily as he might have lifted a bottle.

  His pinhead bobbling, his thin voice shrill with excitement, the Squid said, “It’s you. It’s you I bin watchin’ for an hour. They said you was dead but you ain’t. You come back, didn’t you, Cade? Back to the Squid.”

  Cade stood limp, depleted, beaten. He’d come to the end of his stick and there was no silk to hit.

  Mimi scrambled up on the pier beside them and beat at the Squid with her small fists. “You leave him alone.”

  The Squid used his free hand to hold her. “An’ you’re the girl who ran away.” The Squid was well pleased with the Squid. “Tocko is goin’ t’ like this. Maybe now Joe is gone he’ll even make me sheriff.”

  Mimi bit the hand holding her and the Squid squealed shrilly. “Do it again, huh?” he pleaded. “I like that.”

  The big man walked Cade and Mimi down the pier. It was useless to try to hold back. It was like being towed by a drag-line. Mimi continued to scream and fight. Cade walked stiff-kneed, beaten. He’d done his best and it hadn’t been good enough.

  As they reached the patch of loose sand the screen door of the lodge opened and a man called, “What the hell’s going on down there?”

  “I got the girl who run away,” the Squid called back. “Her an’ Cade come sneaking back, a-paddlin’ in a skiff. Tried to steal his boat.”

  The wind whipped away most of his words.

  “Who?” the man called. “Who did you say came back?”

  “Cade,” the Squid shouted. “You know. The guy Moran said was dead. Cade Cain. The guy who killed Joe Laval.”

  16 The Big Deal

  The dining room seemed filled with men. There were at least a dozen at three tables shoved together in the center of the room. A half-dozen more were grouped at a table in the corner. These glanced up apprehensively as the Squid pushed Cade and Mimi into the room ahead of him.

  The big room was fogged with smoke. The tables were littered with scraps of food and empty dishes and partially filled bottles. All of the men were in their shirt sleeves. Most were wearing guns. All of them turned and looked at him and Mimi. Two of the men stood up.

  They would be Fred and Roy, Cade decided. He looked for Janice and found her. She and Tocko and Moran were sitting at the same table that she and he and Moran and Mimi had occupied the night before. From the look on Moran’s face and the way Janice was fondling Tocko’s over-plump white hand, his former wife had changed sides and beds again.

  The Squid pushed him up to the table and looked accusingly at Moran. “Ya didn’t tell us the truth. Cade ain’t dead at all. Him an’ the girl come paddling up t’ the pier jist as alive as could be, usin’ a piece of board for a paddle. They was atryin’ t’ steal his boat when I caught ’em.”

  Tocko got to his feet and looked across the table at Moran. “I thought you said Cade was dead.”

  One of the two men standing at the other table said, “Goddamn, he has to be. He was out cold when we dropped him in the mouth of the pass. He should be thirty miles out in the Gulf by now.”

  Tocko continued to look at Moran.

  Moran spread his hands. “You heard what Roy just said.”

  Janice brushed the ash from the tip of her cigarette. There was begrudged admiration in her voice. “You’re a hard man to kill, Cade.”

  His feeling of weakness and depletion passed, Cade rested his hands on the back of an unoccupied chair. “You might try loving me to death. You did a pretty good job last night.”

  “You seemed to like it.”

  “A man who’s just spent two years in a Commie prison isn’t exactly a connoisseur.”

  Janice flushed angrily but made no answer.

  Cade studied the deeply tanned faces watching him. “Just what is this, a love feast?”

  “I guess you could call it that,” Moran said. “Although I can’t say I enjoyed my food.”

  “It would seem you lost.”

  Moran sipped at the drink in front of him. “So it would seem.”

  Tocko sat back in his chair and looked at the Squid. “Is there anyone on the pier?”

  The Squid shook his head. “Naw.”

  Tocko glanced at the six men sitting by themselves.

  “Then you’d better get back. Right at the moment it could be very embarrassing if Lieutenant Peyton or one of the other Coast Guard officers should take a notion to drop in unexpectedly to see how Mrs. Cain is getting along with her new resort.”

  “Sure,” the Squid said. “Sure. But I done good, didn’t I, Mr. Kalavitch?”

  “You did fine,” Tocko assured him.

  Janice watched the Squid leave the room. “Ugh. He gives me the creeps. Why do you keep that thing on your payroll?”

  “He’s useful,” Tocko said. “Just as Joe Laval was useful.” He looked reproachfully at Cade. “You shouldn’t have shot Joe, Cade.”

  Cade shook his head. “I didn’t.”

  Tocko studied his face for a long time. “I believe you.” He looked from Cade to Moran. “So shooting Joe was more of your work.”

  Moran palmed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it. “Prove it.”

  Tocko shrugged. “It doesn’t
matter. But the picture is beginning to clear. Joe was taking money from both of us. It was you who told him to order Cade off the river. For that I got a punch in the jaw. Then when Cade didn’t frighten, you were afraid he might look up Janice and interrupt your ill-advised idyll, so you killed Joe aboard Cade’s boat, hoping the law would relieve you of one of your minor problems.”

  “Prove it,” Moran repeated.

  The fat man shrugged. “As I said, it is immaterial.” He asked one of the men at the big table to bring over another chair and offered it to Mimi. “Do sit down, my dear. I tried my best to help you. I didn’t want you involved in this. You see, I happen to know Moran wasn’t legally married to you. That is why I reported you to Immigration, hoping they would deport you before you became mixed up in this mess.”

  Mimi sat looking at Janice. Her eyes were sullen and slitted. “Gracias.”

  Tocko returned his attention to Cade. “And you, Cade. You look like you’ve had a rough time of it. I’m afraid you’re in for an even rougher one. But there is no need for us to be ungentlemanly about it. Sit down. Have a drink.”

  Cade paid Tocko the same begrudged admiration Janice had shown him. Tocko had grown. He was no longer that Kalavitch boy. He’d parlayed guts and shrewdness and an utter contempt for the law into big business.

  The fat man poured four fingers of whiskey into a clean glass. “Your chief failing, as I see it, is in not being a good judge of wives.” He patted Janice’s hand. “She is smart, this one. As our Greek friends would say, she can nail a horseshoe on a fly. Her selling me the acreage after her power of attorney had been nullified by the final decree of divorce was very shrewd.”

  Cade tasted the whiskey in his glass. It tasted good. “Then I still legally own the land?”

  “That would seem to be the crux of the matter.” Tocko smiled. “But there is also the will you entrusted to Janice, leaving everything ’of which I die possessed, real and personal, to my beloved wife, Janice Cain’.”

  “The divorce also nullified that.”

  “True, but as there are no other heirs and as several prominent local politicians have already been promised a cut of the spoils, I doubt if there will be any official investigation into just when you died. Officially you never reached Bay Parish.”

  “You can’t make it stick.”

  “I think I can.”

  Cade felt cold sweat start on his spine. “But I don’t give a damn about the land. I’d almost forgotten I owned it.”

  Tocko shrugged. “Unfortunately for you, we are not concerned with your feelings. Alive, you are a very serious obstacle in the wheels of progress.”

  “With who turning the wheel, Sun, Shell, Sinclair, Standard Oil, Sunoco?”

  “You’re shrewd.”

  “I saw the cutter at the pier.”

  Janice sucked in her breath and exhaled slowly. “Gee-Sus. I never knew there was so much money in the world.”

  Tocko continued to beam. “The amount of money involved at the same time complicates and simplifies things for us all.” He looked across the table at Moran. “To give Jim credit, he was the first to see the possibilities, once the new state’s tide law had passed. He also saw the advisability of interesting certain local politicians so there wouldn’t be any legal complications to hurdle.”

  Moran poured himself another drink. “So here I am.”

  “Wrapped in cotton,” Tocko assured him. “As I have been telling you since morning, as long as we agree I am the head man and certain domestic problems are resolved, there is plenty for us all. You are a good man. I admit it. If you hadn’t been I wouldn’t have engaged you in the first place.”

  Moran gulped the drink he’d poured. “Thanks.”

  Cade looked at the larger table. None of the men at it were paying any attention to the conversation. All they were interested in was the individual sums they had been promised. He asked, “And the landing of the ’copter and the gun fight on the strip this morning?”

  Tocko’s smile returned. “Was merely a successful attempt on my part to resume a pleasant and profitable business and physical association. Also, shall we say, a club.”

  Cade’s sunburned face felt uncomfortably warm. His cut feet and raw palms pained him. The whiskey failed to ease the constriction in his throat. He said, “Just as a matter of curiosity, let’s see if I have this right.”

  “By all means,” Tocko smiled.

  “You met Moran shortly after his discharge from the Army. Still posing as an officer, he spent some months flying in aliens your boats had collected in La Guaira. It was for that purpose, as a drop, that you built this lodge.”

  “That is correct.”

  “While in Caracas, Moran met Mimi. We know that angle.”

  Mimi’s eyes grew more sullen.

  Cade continued. “Shortly after that, Janice showed up in Bay Parish and you bought or thought you bought the old Cain house and the acreage here on the Bay. As lagniappe, you insisted on certain favors from Janice — and grew to like them.”

  “Very much,” Tocko admitted. He ran a plump hand down the small of Janice’s back and patted her. The thought seemed to amuse him. “I might even marry her. Because outside of these favors of which you speak, she is the most unscrupulous woman I have ever met. We should go far together.”

  “Is that a nice thing to say?” Janice asked, but she was smiling.

  There was an open package of Camels on the table. Cade offered the package to Mimi, put one in his mouth and lighted both cigarettes. “Meanwhile,” Cade waved out the flame of the match, “Moran returned to Bay Parish and used the possibilities in the recently passed tide law to pry Janice out of your arms.”

  “It wasn’t difficult,” Moran said, thickly.

  Janice scowled at him over her glass. “You keep your dirty tongue off of me.”

  Moran began an obscene reply and thought better of it. Cade looked from one flushed face to the other and realized both of them were drunk, that they had probably been drinking since morning. The chances were, the same was true of the men at the big table. It was a love feast, but an armed one. Janice and Tocko were sitting with their backs to the wall. Cade looked over Janice’s shoulder at the open screened window behind her and the big veins in his temple throbbed visibly.

  If he could create a diversion, if he could get them to quarreling among themselves, if he could get out of the room for five minutes, it might just be he could do what he had hoped to accomplish in the first place — with Janice and Tocko thrown in for his lagniappe. It was at least worth trying. He and Mimi had nothing to lose.

  Tocko suggested suavely, “Suppose we leave personalities out of this.”

  Cade shook his head. “We can’t. After leaving Bay Parish, Janice and Moran went to New Orleans together and spent several months getting to know and greasing state and city politicians who might be useful to them. As a cover they talked about a swank fishing lodge, a cheater’s paradise in an unspoiled wilderness; but Janice also let it be known in the right places that she was sole owner of several thousand acres of tideland on a deep-water basin in the Bay. A basin with a deep ship’s channel leading to the river and the city — a perfect spot for a storage dock or a refinery, not to mention the submerged potential oil land that went with the acreage. One of the larger oil firms was interested; interested enough to advance her sufficient money against possible future royalties to complete and furnish the lodge; to build a pier; to build and equip a radio shack with which they could keep in touch with their mobile test outfits working the Bay and Gulf.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” Janice said. “You should have been a fortune teller instead of a flyer. You’d have gone a lot farther with a crystal ball than you did with a Sabrejet.”

  The men at the big table were listening to the conversation now. Cade glanced over his shoulder at them, then snuffed his cigarette and looked at Tocko. “This morning you crashed back into the picture,” Cade said, “by making Moran an unwilling accomplice to th
e illegal landing of six aliens. This gave you the bluff of calling in the law, with the certainty you’d all go to jail if Janice didn’t return to you and you weren’t permitted to resume your rightful position as head man.”

  Tocko was amused. Moran said, “You’re good, guy. That was just what happened. And with my record I don’t dare call his bluff. So there it stands. I’m damned if I do and the same if I don’t.”

  “Why?” Cade asked flatly. “Why not play it smart?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Why not dump Tocko and play along with me? The land is legally mine. If you let Tocko take over, all you’ll get is crumbs. I’ll cut you in for a full half.”

  “Shut up, Cade,” Janice said thickly. “You’re trying to make trouble.”

  “How?” said Moran.

  “By having him indicted for conspiracy in the murder of the six aliens he had one of his boats maroon on big south mud lump when a Coast Guard boat got too close.” Cade added, “I saw the bodies. You must know the details.”

  “And Janice?”

  “Janice isn’t mine to offer, but with Tocko out of the way I don’t imagine you’d have any trouble with her.”

  Tocko got to his feet slowly. His plump face was pink with anger. “Words, words words. Use your head, Jim. Let’s not have any more trouble. We have everything ironed out.”

  Cade laughed. “Sure. With you taking both Janice and nine-tenths of the money and Moran being kissed out of the picture because of his past record.”

  Janice stood up beside Tocko. “Don’t be a fool, Jim. All Cade is doing is trying to save his neck.” She laid her hand on Moran’s arm. “Can’t you see? He wants us to fight among ourselves.”