“And you,” Dorothy said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going back to him,” I said evenly. “That’s why you better go back to your friends and get me out of your mind. There’s no place in my short life for pretty little schoolteachers. No place — and no time.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DOROTHY was shocked. She sat there in her deck chair while I picked Patsy up from the play pen and started down the ladder. I was already on the lower deck when Dorothy touched my arm.
“Dan, if this Mr. Nelson tried to kill you in Honolulu, and tried to have you accused of the murder of his wife — he must have sent along someone to watch you — someone to do those things for him.”
I nodded. “He must have,” I said.
Her voice was hollow. “But who?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Could it be that big man who watches you? The one who was in your stateroom last night?”
“Rafferty?” I shook my head. “No. Rafferty and Nelson may both be snakes, but they’re different breeds of snakes. Rafferty wouldn’t be doing anything to help Nelson. Unless the whole world has gone crazy.”
“I’m frightened,” she said. “I’m frightened for you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “What’s the difference if I get it here, or when I get back to Tampa. It doesn’t matter much, does it?”
“It does matter,” she said. “You can’t throw your life away like this — on hatred and vengeance.”
I started away from her.
She walked beside me along the deck and caught my arm. There was a rising wind now, and the gray was spreading upward across the sky. The ocean was turning a murky brown, and the white trail behind us was widening and looked whiter against the brown water.
“What are you going to do now?” she said.
“I’m going to take Patsy down to her nap,” I said. “And while she’s sleeping, I’m going to try to find my friend, Mr. Rafferty.”
“More hatred,” she said. “More violence. It isn’t fair.” What will happen to the baby if you — are hurt?”
“I won’t be hurt,” I told her, “if I find him — first.”
“All right,” she said quietly, “go ahead. I don’t know what it is to me, I’m sure. It doesn’t matter to me what you do to yourself.”
“You’re pretty,” I said. “A very pretty and very nice little school teacher. Maybe if I’d met you some other time I would appreciate you more.”
“You’re only going to get yourself killed.”
I nodded. “I only hope to take along my weight in these bad boys when I go,” I said. “That and the memory of the way your Quaker blue eyes flash when you tell me I shouldn’t get mad at people — ”
“Mad with people — ” she corrected me angrily.
I laughed. She shook her head, and her cheeks were still bright.
“How can you laugh? What sort of inhuman monster are you? Is it no more to you than going down to the corner for a drink?”
“Would you prefer I weep?” I said. “We could weep together about the sadness of the world, in which there are men like Henry Nelson who can kill my brother and his own wife, and go on living, go on getting fatter like the hog he is. What do you want me to do? Hide? Run from him? That’s the choice. I can hide, or I can go to see him.”
We were at the ladder. She stopped and faced me.
“Hide,” she said. “You’ve a good mind, you’re young and got everything to live for. You could make a new life.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But I couldn’t live with myself in it.”
She put out her arms. Her face was very white.
“Give me the baby, Mr. Henderson,” she said. “At least you don’t have to expose a child to the terror. I’ll take her to my stateroom. Come for her after you’ve found your Mr. Rafferty.”
I stood there a moment after they were gone. Now that I was alone, I had no idea just where to begin. I couldn’t go around barging into every stateroom aboard the Hilotania.
Still Rafferty had been up on the sun deck. And I was pretty sure he had been looking for me. If that were true, I might find him almost any place. I retraced my steps up to the sun deck near the bow of the ship. From up there, I looked down on the open decks to the fan tail bobbing like a cork now in the churned up waters.
There was a little sun now, and most of the sun bathers were gone. The wind was loaded with spray, and cold. Standing up there, I began to be chilled, and alone.
I shivered. Standing there, scanning the lower decks with couples leaning at the rails, seamen working in pairs with paint brushes and scouring rags, people talking together in deck chairs, the laughing foursome fighting the increasing roll of the ship to complete a shuffleboard game, I knew how alone I was.
“It’s the schoolteacher,” I told myself angrily. “You let her get to you with all that talk. Her. And you know what she needs, even if she doesn’t.”
I came down from the sun deck fast. I went over the ship then. In the bar, I stopped for a bourbon and water.
“Has a big red haired fellow been in? He weighs over two hundred, you couldn’t miss him.”
The bartender shook his head. “No, I haven’t seen anyone like that this trip, Mac.”
I finished off my drink. Something was wrong. Big Mike Rafferty loved whisky. I’d never known him to stay away from any bar for two days!
I had lunch. They served meals in the salon where there was dancing at night, with the tables pushed back to clear a space. There was a dais, or bandstand at the end of this room.
In the afternoon, I went over the rest of the ship. I even went down in the engine rooms, and watched the oilers and firemen at work. The smell of diesel fuel was strong down there. One of the oilers carried a bucket with him. It was his first trip they said, and the smell of the fuel made him sick.
I met Viola Keeley walking with five or six of her other teachers. She didn’t even bother to speak.
I went along every corridor. I went slowly, listening, and waiting and watching. There was no sign of Rafferty.
At last I returned to my own stateroom. The maids had been in to make up the beds and clean up the place. Everything was in order. Patsy’s diapers had been removed from where they hung in the bedroom and were folded in neat square piles on the bed.
I moved them over to the dresser and lay down across the bed. I propped up the pillows and lay there tensely, with my eyes fixed on the closed door.
I don’t know how long I forced myself to stay there. The ship was rolling now, and the sound of the waves against the sides was like faraway thunder. You couldn’t hear anyone in the corridor unless they were laughing and talking. It grew dark in the room, and I knew I had to get out of it.
It was quiet in the corridor as I went along it. I knocked on the door of Dorothy’s stateroom.
She opened it at once.
I could see Patsy playing on the floor with hair brushes and jars of face lotion.
I looked at Dorothy. Her face was white and tense. Her eyes were dry and she looked me over quickly.
“You didn’t find him?” she said.
“No. I couldn’t find him. We’ll have to play it your way. We’ll have to let him find me. Come on, we’ll take Patsy and go up to eat dinner.”
• • •
DOROTHY TALKED ABOUT everything in the world while we ate. Everything except Rafferty, Nelson and the fact that I was going back to find Nelson — if I lived that long.
“I’m beginning to like you better every time I see you, Teacher,” I told her. “Maybe that was what was wrong with my education. None of my teachers was ever as pretty as you. When they tried to keep me in after school, I didn’t want to stay.”
“What did they keep you in for?” she said, “Fighting?”
I laughed.
“You and I could have fun together,” I told her.
She shook her head. “No, we couldn’t.”
“Sure we could You�
��d forget you ever knew a guy named Fred. You would forget you were ever unhappy.”
Her eyes on mine were direct and honest. “I don’t doubt it,” she said.
“Well then?”
“I’m not going to have anything to do with you at all. I’ve been hurt once, I don’t intend letting myself fall in love with a man who seems intent upon getting himself killed.”
• • •
PATSY AND I SAT alone at the table for a while after Dorothy was gone. I watched the people coming into the dining room until the baby began to fret.
I walked with her then on the open deck. There were only a few lights, and they swung wildly, and seemed very dim against the darkness. There was a movie up on the hurricane deck. I went up there, watching every person we met, and hardly aware that Patsy was against my right shoulder.
The movie was a musical comedy, but the music and the comedy were blown away and diffused in the high wind, and the few people who stayed for the show only saw a group of unrelated pictures on the screen.
I leaned against a life boat and watched the people leave. I don’t suppose I really thought Rafferty was going to be up there at the movie, but he had to be somewhere on that ship. And I had to find him.
Anyway, I knew I wanted to put off returning to that stateroom as long as I could.
When Patsy began to scream, I gave it up. I knew I’d have to go back there. For this was only the second night out, and I had to get through two more of them somehow.
I locked the stateroom door after me, pushed the big chair against the knob, and bathed Patsy to get her ready for bed.
It takes you a long time to get a baby to sleep, and Patsy was in no mood to relax. The rolling motion of the ship frightened her. And in our stateroom, the pounding of the waves sounded like thunder in the next room. It had a loud, bottomless sound.
It must have been after ten when she went to sleep finally, and I turned out the lights. I lay there in the darkness, listening to the thunder, and feeling the ship lift as it thudded into the growing waves, and feeling its nose drop into the trough of the next one.
I thought I had fallen asleep, but my eyes were fixed on the door as it was pushed slowly open. I thought, what a hell of a time he has picked. As a storm begins. But I couldn’t move. It was as though I was paralyzed there in the bed. That was one reason I was sure it was a dream.
There was nothing but a shadow at the door as it slid open. The shadow moved against the wall and the door closed. It wasn’t big enough for Mike Rafferty, and I thought wildly, who ever was in this room and threw everything from my suitcase has come back. I sat up straight on the bed and I saw the gray gleam of a knife raised above the darkness of the shadow.
There was the small straight chair beside the bed. Last night I had propped it against the bathroom door when I’d thought Rafferty was hiding in there. My hand went out, touched it, but I didn’t take my eyes from the gleam of the knife.
I raised the chair out in front of me as stealthily as I could. It must have been dark there around the bed, or else the knifer had just come in from the light of the corridor and was momentarily blinded.
As I thought of that, I was sure that was my only chance against that knife upraised. I leaned forward to pull myself off the bed so that I could throw that chair.
As my feet touched the floor, Patsy screamed out.
I heard the knifer gasp and saw the gleam of the knife as it laced through the darkness toward me. I hurled the chair as the knife sliced into the fleshy part of my left shoulder.
The chair struck the man. I heard his breath go out of him. The door was flung open, and in the sudden light from the corridor, I saw a dark, oily head, a bright sporty suit as the man leaped out through the opening.
• • •
I JERKED THE KNIFE out of my shoulder and threw it backhandedly across the room. I heard it clatter against the bulkhead. The pain in my shoulder was the icy cold kind — if you’ve ever stuck an ice pick in your hand, you know how it was. It was cold and it made me sick all over.
Patsy was screaming as I ran toward the door. Wrenching the door open, I stood there searching the corridor. I saw the dark man sprint into the doctor’s office.
I had no idea how long he would stay in there. Perhaps as long as he could see my door standing open. I propped the big chair against the door and ran back to Patsy.
Roughly I thrust a cold bottle of milk into her mouth. The weight of my hand pushed her back in the bed, and she lay there still. I didn’t wait to see if she was all right.
I could feel the blood pouring down my arm under my shirt as I ran across the room. Coldly, I picked up the knife and thrust it into my coat pocket. It was agony, pulling that coat on over my arm, but I did it as I ran down the corridor toward Dorothy Gould’s stateroom.
I knocked three times on her door. When it opened, Viola Keeley was standing there in a plain wrap-around, and her straw colored hair up in curlers.
She blinked at me.
“Dorothy,” I said. “Is Dorothy here?”
She shook her head.
“Will you go to my stateroom?” I blurted. “I want you to go there and stay with my baby until I get back.”
“A man’s stateroom,” Viola said. “To stay with a baby, yet. All right, I’ll do it. Just a minute — ”
“Go as you are,” I snapped. “I can’t wait. The door is opened. When you go in, lock it. Don’t open it until you hear my voice outside.”
Her eyes widened as she stared at me. Then her gaze went down to my hand. There was a line of red creeping across the back of it. Blood. She started to speak, but I wheeled and ran.
At the door of the Sick Bay, I hesitated. If the man inside had a gun, his knife that I clutched in my coat pocket was going to be useless.
It was dark inside the dispensary. I reached inside, found the switch and snapped on the lights. I heard the sharp intake of a man’s breath. He was in there.
I leaped into the room. Along the wall were racks of medicines and supplies, moored so that the increasing motion of the ship would not disturb them. There was a desk, a couple of white cabinets with red crosses neatly stenciled on them. And there was a door to another corridor across the room. As I came into the brightly lighted, antiseptically white office, the dark man in the checked suit went out of that door into the far corridor.
Shoving my left arm into my coat pocket so that I wouldn’t leave a trail of blood through the ship I leaped the foot high water guard at the door into the corridor.
It was silent. I stood there in the doorway. Reaching back I pulled the water-tight exit closed behind me. At that moment, I saw movement at the ladder at the end of the corridor.
He had been pressed in behind the ladder, and now he ran up it. I growled and ran after him. When I came up on the darkened deck, there was no sign of him.
I stood there at the head of the ladder. White tips of waves rolled up along side the railing and spray spread like a sheet all the way across the open deck. The ship was rolling now, and I hung on to the rail.
From the salon up forward there came the sound of music. I watched every shadow, and every darkened cranny as I inched along toward the brightly lighted dance floor.
I could see the shapes of the couples in fantastic shadows through the closed doorways.
I opened the door and stood just inside it with my left arm still plunged into my coat pocket. My face was wet with spray, and large drops of it stood along my shoulders. I could feel my hair tumbled over my forehead, and I knew I looked like a wild man to the polite tourists who were trying to ignore the storm as they danced.
It was a strange sort of dancing at that. The men were dancing with their legs a little apart, bracing their sea legs against the roll of the ship.
I saw Dorothy then.
She was dancing near me with a fat, bald man. She had forgotten the grinning partner and was frowning as she stared at me.
At that moment, the music ceased with a little fanfar
e and I saw Dorothy abruptly thank the fat man for the dance.
She beckoned toward me, and smiled encouragingly as though I were one of her first grade pupils. She came across the dance floor, moving between the couples of dancers, but I shook my head at her.
This didn’t discourage her. She only smiled and put out her hand. I saw she wanted me to dance the next one with her. I shook my head again, and stepped out of the doorway to the open deck.
I went aft the way I had come. I know the doorway opened for a moment. The light reached out like a yellow finger after me along the wet deck. If she called after me, I didn’t hear her in the loud wind and the door closed, and the yellow finger curled up and I was in the darkness again.
I moved watchfully along to the bar. My arm was aching and I knew I needed a drink. As I went into the almost deserted bar, I saw the dark man with the checked coat, sitting on a stool near the far exit.
It was Lungs Garcia!
He was hunched over his whisky, his coat as wet as mine, his dark hair, glistening with unmixed pomade and spray. My heart began to pound so hard, I could feel it up in my throat, my right hand was trembling, and the ache in my left shoulder grew worse.
I curled my trembling fingers over the hilt of the knife Lungs had thrown at me in my cabin.
As I moved toward him, moving as though I were walking on wooden stilts, he looked up into the darkened mirror on the bulkhead.
Our eyes met.
There was a lot of difference in his eyes now and that day at the Las Novedades when he’d looked up insolently over his shoulder and said, “Hi, Copper.”
His face was lined with fear, and his eyes were dark with it.
He pushed the drink away from him and slid off the bar stool toward the exit.
I sprang at him, and my fingers just scraped his checked coat as he gave a little yelp and leaped through the doorway to the deck on the lee side of the ship.
I was right behind him this time. On the deck, Lungs was more frightened than ever. The roll of the ship terrorized him.
He pulled in as close as he could to the bulkheads, clutching at them with his fingers as he tried to run away from me.
Slay Ride for a Lady Page 10
