John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 17 - The Empty Copper Sea

by The Empty Copper Sea(lit)

  For all of me, the whole area could strangle in angel dust. All I wanted to do was find some way to pick up my woman and run, preferably in the Busted Flush, once Van Harder had turned her back over to me.

  I steered around the deeper potholes. The sun was sliding down the sky, off to my right. A rabbit sat up and stopped munching as I drove slowly by. There was a small hawk perched on the mailbox, and it went arrowing off as I turned in. Soon the stilt house was in view, with the square green Fiat still parked under it. I popped the horn ring a couple of times as I drove into the yard. I got out and looked up, expecting to see her come out onto the veranda. Empfiy. There was not the slightest breath of a breeze. There was not the slightest stir of leaves or grass. Nor any bird sound.

  The creak of the weathered stairs seemed loud as I went quickly up to the veranda deck.

  "Hallo? Hey! Gretel? John?" Nothing.

  I walked around to the Gulf side of the deck, looking in the windows as I passed them. I tried the screen door and it opened. The table was set for two. There was driftwood and paper in the fireplace, ready to light against the possible evening chill.

  "Hallo?"

  I noticed the old ten-power binoculars. They were on the deck, looking as if they had fallen from the rough railing. I picked them up, thinking that probably Gretel and her brother were somewhere along the beach and I would be able to spot them. When I tried to look through them, it felt as if my left eye was being pulled out of the socket. Apparently they had fallen, and the prisms inside the left half had been knocked a little out of line.

  There were clouds on the horizon, the sun moving down toward them. Squinting against the sun, I looked through the right half, adjusting it to my vi sion. I swept the beach off to the right and saw no one. I swept around to the left, looking south, and saw no one. I saw something against the concave seaward slope of a dune where the beach swung slightly westward. The sun made a bright glare against that angle of sand. I braced the binoculars against one of the uprights that supported the overhanging roof, made an additional adjustment to the focus, lost the object, found it again, and suddenly saw that it was a figure flattened against the sand, face down. It was a female, I thought. It was Gretel. It was too far away for anybody to be sure it was even female. I would have needed a forty-power spotting scope on a tripod to make it out properly. It could not be Gretel. But I was over the dune and on the beach and running hard on the packed sand, groaning as I ran, still telling myself it was not Gretel, running with no clear memory of ever having left the veranda.

  It is curious how many things can go on in your mind simultaneously. If it was Gretel, she was sunbathing. She was upslope to present a better angle to the late sun. Of course. She would laugh when I came running at her like a maniac. (But she had looked too flat and too still.) A person can fall asleep in the sun. (Face down in the sand?)

  When I was fifty yards from her, I heard that flat, sharp, lathe-snapping noise which a small-caliber high-velocity rifle shot makes in the open air. I had the general impression it was fired from somewhere in front of me, somewhere beyond where Gretel lay. I made two more long running strides before, simultaneously with the second crisp, abrupt sound, something tugged at the short sleeve of my sport shirt and burned my upper right arm.

  I plunged through soft sand, away from the wet packed beach sand, running as I had been taught long ago, moving without pattern from side to side, keeping low, and feeling once again that area of belly-coldness which seems to mark the spot where the whistling slug will impact. I dived and scrambled the last twenty feet, rolling fast to end up close to Gretel. There had been nobody on the beach, nobody visible on the dunes. The rifleman had to be up on the crest, just over the crest, peering over to aim and fire. Here the slope was so steep that when I looked up I could not see the crest, only a smooth round of sand partway up the slope.

  Her dark hair was matted to a chocolate thickness at the crown of her head. Two green-bellied flies walked on her hair. Her face was turned slightly away from me. Her fingers were stubbed into the sand as though she had been trying to pull herself up the slope. She wore rust-colored shorts and a white T-shirt, dappled on the back with the brownish spots of dried blood. She wore one white boat shoe. On the left foot.

  A great desolation chilled my heart. It was an emptiness stretching from here to infinity, from now to eternity.

  Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon. I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.

  A lone gull came winging in across the water, angling in, at a height just sufficient for him to clear the ridge of the dune.

  The gull would have crossed the crest about two hundred feet ahead of me and to my right. When he neared the crest he suddenly squawked alarm and veered to the left of his line of flight and sharply upward before flying on.

  So there he was. X. For unknown. The rifleman. I raised up very quickly and dropped flat again. If you lift slowly, you give them time to put a third eye in the center of your forehead. I retained the afterimage of the empty crest. Nothing. No glint of metal. No round shape of head or bulk of shoulders. Just the wind-smoothed tan sand. I took another look. And another. Nothing at all.

  The terrain promised no advantage. I could not hope to run up the slope. I could get up there to the crest by churning and floundering and clawing my way up through the coarse sliding sand, as easy to shoot as a deer in deep snow. I could make good time down the slope, right down to the open beach, where I would make a pretty good target there as well. I could move laterally, but not very far. The slight concavity which hid me from the crest grew shallower to my left and was gone within twenty feet. Ten feet to my left I saw an object protruding from the sand, the end of something thrown up by a storm of long ago. It looked as if it might be wood, but it was difficult to tell in that golden-red glow. I wanted a stick, a stone, a switch-anything. It is an ancient instinct. Man is the tool user. Even as the saber-toothed tiger was disemboweling him, man was reaching for a branch to club the beast. It did not matter that nothing I could find on a beach would help me ward off the tiger or the bullet, I wanted something in hand. A tool. Comfort of a kind.

  I edged over to it. Wood. A good shape and size for grasping. Was it too short or too long? Too short to use, too long to extricate from the sand? I worked it back and forth and pulled it free. It was the handle end of a canoe paddle. The piece was two feet long. I had grasped it near the break. On the other end, the end normally grasped, there were dead barnacles, tough, sharp, and firmly seated.

  It had an incongruity like the red light that filled the beach. Canoes were summer lakes, frocks, big hats, and music coming across the water.

  The initial panic had settled into a reliable flow of adrenaline. It is my fate and my flaw to have learned too long ago that this is what I am about. This is when I am alive and know it most completely. Every sense is honed by the knowledge of the imminence of death. The juices flow. In the back of my mind I tried to tell myself that I had been turned into a murderous machine by the sight of Gretel. But it was rationalization. There was a hard joy in this acceptance of a total risk. I knew that if he got me-whoever he might be-he was going to have to be very damned good at it, and even then I was going to create some astonishment in him. I would live totally on this th
in edge until it was over, and then I would either be dead for good or partially dead until the next time.

  The copper sea made no sound at all. I eeled slowly upslope, angling to my right, knowing that I would be exposed to him, would be in his line of fire before I could reach the crest. I worked it slowly, peering toward the area where the bird had veered. I kept muscles poised and bunched so that in an instant I could hurl myself back and to the left, hoping to fall back into the sanctuary of the concavity near Gretel. As I came closer to the crest, I diminished the chance of regaining the concavity undamaged. On the other hand, it was easier to watch for him. Or her. Or them. Or it. The dune was about fifty feet high, much higher than in front of the shack. Perhaps if someone suddenly appeared to fire at me again, at shorter range, it might be better to plunge over the crest, race and roll down the shaded side, taking a chance of finding some kind of cover.

  At last I was close to the crest. The wind had given it a sharp, wandering edge. I was, on about a fifty-degree slope. I dug my fingers into the sand just short of the ridge. My chin touched the sand. I was absolutely certain that somebody was waiting, alert, ready for the target to appear above the ridge, silhouetted against the slow-motion bonfire of the sky.

  So I worked my legs up under me, adjusted my grip on the piece of paddle, and began to take slow, deep breaths. In the total silence of the world, mW best way to get over was to bound over, letting out a yell which would shock the rifleman into a momentary rigidity, or into panicky unaimed shots. There was the hesitation much like that remembered from childhood, standing on the edge of a roof, a reluctance to make the first commitment.

  In that great stillness a monstrous breathing sound began. A great snuffling intake, and then a long breathing sign. Snuff sigh. Snuff-sigh. Snuff sigh. As though a winded dragon lay beyond the ridge, slightly to my right and far down the landward side of the dune. It was very steady and regular. I tried to identify that sound. It seemed, somehow, very homely and familiar. Suddenly there was a metallic clank at the end of the snuffing sound, a hesitation before the sigh.

  I knew then what the sound was. It had been unfamiliar only because it was so incongruous when compared with my state of tension. There could be two of them, of course. It was still a time for caution, but a time to discard the large bad idea of bounding over the rim and down the slope, yelling and waving my paddle.

  I dropped back a little and then moved laterally until I was directly above that breathing sound. And then, instinctively holding my breath, I looked over the edge.

  It was darker on the landward side of the dune. The red light that bathed the world was all shadows and wine.

  There, below me, John Tuckerman shoveled the dry, loose sand. Chuff of the shovel blade into the sand, then the soft sound, like an exhalation, as he swung the sand out in an arc behind him. As he dug, the sand slid down the slope, rivulets filling some of the space he had shoveled. The muscles of his back and shoulders and upper arms slid and bulged under the sun-scorched flab. He worked with the metronomic energy of the demented. He was naked. It was a labor assigned in hell. From the blazing sunburn on his body, and from the look of the piles of sand he had shoveled, he had been at it all day.

  He was excavating the yellow jeep. It was aimed south, parallel to the ridge. The wheels and fenders on the right side of the vehicle, in fact the whole right side of it, was still covered by the slide of brown coarse sand. There was a figure behind the steering wheel. It sat, arms in its lap, chin on its chest, looking like a crude sand sculpture made of a slightly darker shade of sand. An imperceptible movement of the air brought the faint, sweet, gassy stink of decay, and I nearly gagged as I realized that the sand was darker because it was clotted by the fluids released by the tissues. In the passenger seat a slight knob had begun to appear, in just the right place and the right size to be the back of a head.

  I looked for the rifle, finally saw it about thirty feet beyond the front of the jeep, leaning against a leafless stunted bush.

  He stopped shoveling. He spoke at conversational pitch, but in a strange tone of voice, a sweet wheedling tone pitched so much higher than his normal tone that he sounded almost like a woman.

  "Now you shouldn't talk to me like that, Hub! I'll get you out of here and you can be on your way. Don't I always do what you want me to? Don't l?" He waited, leaning forward, seeming to listen.

  "No, it wasn't like that," he said. "What she was going to do was take all the money and leave all by herself. But I made her wait, Hub. I made Krissy-bitch wait, and she's right there beside you, isn't she? And that's proof. You and she can go on off together soon as I get you dug out and get the engine started."

  Again he listened.

  Again he answered. "Well, goddarn it, Hub, I forgot. That's all. I knew I had something to remember and I forgot. When I covered you up so you'd be safe, I just jammed it against the dune, put you in the driver's seat, climbed on up with the shovel, and spilled enough down to do it in ten minutes, no more. That's how I didn't know it would take me this long to get you out. You two will be fine in Mexico. They've about stopped hunting you. Now you stop complaining and let me work, will you?"

  That high sweet tone of voice made the skin crawl on the back of my neck and the backs of my hands. And it was no longer a person-against-person conflict. He was a mechanical toy, and I had to get to him and turn him off. A mechanical man will walk into a wall and try to keep walking. He will fall down and his legs will still make walking motions, little gears and springs ticking as he winds down.

  Nineteen

  HE was working at the rear of the jeep, and as I tried to decide on my best and safest move, more sand spilled toward him, revealing the head and shoulders of the figure sitting next to the body of Hubbard Lawless. It was as dark and silent as he. I moved to my right behind the crest, so no movement would catch his eye, and stopped when I was directly opposite the small-caliber rifle.

  I timed my lunge so that it came just as he was lifting a full shovel of sand and beginning to pivot to throw it behind him. I came down the slope in giant plunging strides. The whirling shovel caught me just below the knees, whacking a leg out from under me in such a way that I landed face down on the hardpan at the bottom of the dune, losing my good canoe-paddle club in my effort to break my fall: I got up on what felt like two broken legs just as he whirled with the rifle in hand. I dived for my club, grasping it, rolling over and over toward him, heard the broken-stick sound of the shot, and felt both fire and numbness in the left cheek of my behind just before I rolled against his legs and knocked him down. He sprang up again with a rubbery monstrous agility, with a frightening strength. I'd grasped the gun barrel in my left hand, and I took a swing at him with the club as he was bounding at me, wresting the gun away from me. There was such a slight feeling of impact that I knew I had only grazed him with the club.

  He backed away from me and aimed at the middle of my forehead. I could practically see the little round hole it would make where it went in, and the shattered suety ruin it would make where it came out.

  "Johnny!" she cried, a long desperate wailing sound, full of an absolutely final despair. I was kneeling, as though in homage to my executioner. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her standing tall, teetering, on the crest of the dune, outlined against the burgundy light. He moved the sight from me to her, aiming up at her, as I threw the club at his face as hard as I could. He fired, and I turned again and saw her tumble toward us. She slid down the slope, creating a small avalanche of sand which almost covered her head when the sliding stopped.

  With no thought of the gun, I went stumbling, crawling, floundering to her, and grasped her shoulders and pulled her head out of the brown sand. She made a dry spitting noise, trying to expel the sand caked in her mouth.

  John Tuckerman was acting strangely. He seemed to be trying to aim the gun at us, holding it in one hand. With his other hand he was clutching at his own throat. As I leaped toward him to try to take away the rifle, he dropped
it and put both hands to his throat. He was making a wet hissing sound. In what light was left I could see the sheen of the bright arterial blood which came out between his fingers and ran in a broad band down through the chest hair, down the belly, into the groin, and down both thighs.

  He looked puzzled. Then he seemed to smile at me, one of those small shy smiles people use when they have committed some vulgar social blunder. A girl who had just lost her contact lens in her chicken chow mein once gave me a smile very like that.

  He took two slow steps toward the jeep, then lowered himself gently to his hands and knees. He crawled a little farther, blood pumping out of the throat wound. He seemed to dwindle in size as I watched. He collapsed onto his face a yard from the jeep, with a final exhalation that made him smaller yet. There was a strange overlay of sentimentality about it. Faithful hound returns to master. I turned and hobbled back to Gretel. I had rolled her onto her back when I had pulled her face out of the sand. As I looked at her, the last of the red light went, leaving us in a darkening, gray-blue edge of night. Her face was so slack I could see what she had looked like asleep in her crib long ago. She was breathing, her respirations slow and shallow. Her pulse was heavy, steady, reassuring.