"Seriously, I have to see him. I want him to get on out here as soon as he can. Would you call in, please?"

"Sure thing." He got into the car again. He fiddled with the transmitter, spoke into the hand mike. "Nine to CCSD, come in. Nine calling CCSD, come in." Nothing. He tried a couple more times, then got out, saying, "I told Red this d.a.m.ned set has got something loose on it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it"s like dead."

"There"s a window I can slip, and I think the phone in there is working. I"m not supposed to call in. Why don"t you use it and just say to him that... you want to show him something at the Baither place."

"You got something to show him? You find something, McGee?"

"Yes and no. Look King. I"m reporting direct. You know how it is."

"h.e.l.l, I know you"re reporting direct. He just said I could stop by and see how you"re making out. So whyn"t you tell me and I can run back in and give him a direct report, and keep it off the air and off the phone?"

I wanted to think it over, and I eased over to lean against the side of the car. But he got in the way, a little clumsy on his feet. But he had moved very well in his little shower room demonstration.

So I said, "Okay, King. That"s probably the best way. I"ll tell you the whole thing. But let"s sit in the car. Okay?"

"It"s too hard for me to get in and out of that little tin bucket. They make cars too small for guys my size."

"Okay. You stand outside and I"ll get in the car." And when he was still in the way, I knew. And I jumped back a good ten feet from him and put the muzzle of the carbine in direct line with his belly.

"What"s with you, buddy boy? You some kind of flip?"

"Put the right hand on top of the head, slowly. Now!"

"Dammit, you"re acting like..."

The holstered weapon was on the belt threaded through his pant loops. "Now undo the belt buckle with the left hand. Now the top b.u.t.ton. Unzip and let them fall."

"But... "

"King, you better believe me, I will blow a hole right through the middle of you."

He let the pants drop, and I had him pull them off and move away from them, away from the car, so I could circle and, holding the gun on him, look into the car. I didn"t see it at first, and if he had been more casual, maybe I never would have noticed it. He had pulled the mike jack out of the radio panel. The mike was on the dash hook, the connector cord hanging straight down.

"I nearly handed it to you," I said.

"You better start making sense soon. This is King. This is the guy on your side, pally." He really looked upset and distressed. He wore blue boxer shorts. His legs were ma.s.sive and white and hairless. It made me think of something else. I had him unlace a shoe, take it off, and back away from it. I advanced as he backed up. I picked it up and held it toward the light and saw the serrations across the bottom, the place at the ball of the foot worn smooth.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and took the slight tension off the trigger. "You nearly had it right then, King. It was close."

"Somebody better lock you up before you hurt somebody, boy."

"How are you at grave-digging?"

"Now you wouldn"t ask a fella big as me to dig his own hole."

"You don"t work very hard, King. Got any fresh blisters?"

He looked involuntarily at his right hand, and, like a little kid, put it behind him. "Worked in my garden lately."

"What did you plant in your garden? A dead lady?"

"For G.o.d"s sake, McGee!"

"And spread the pine needles back neat. But we brushed them away very carefully, and this shoe is going to match the mold Hyzer took. You didn"t have any trouble following Henry"s car. You hung back and saw me leave and went right in. Held her head in the bucket. You"re big enough and strong enough."

"You shove it under the skin, or take it right in a vein?"

"King, I am not going to risk messing around with you. You are too good. Now turn around very slowly. I am going to wrap you up, and when your place is searched, they are going to come up with some chunks of broken cement and some wax and some plastic and some cash money."

It was my intent to get close enough to chunk him in the back of the skull with the b.u.t.t of the carbine, then cuff him to his own steering post, once I drove the car close enough.

He didn"t turn around. "You want to be a boy scout, McGee, go ahead and put one right through the middle. You were close before, you said. Go ahead."

"Why Betsy?"

"Good question. Why not?"

Again I had to consciously ease back on the trigger finger so that it rested lightly.

He said, "She came to check Lew"s place about the time I was getting the lid off that cheap safe. She decided I"d killed Lew. She didn"t say it. But she showed it. I thought I"d set the two of you up nice. I wanted to know what happened to Lew"s body, and after I started digging the hole, she told me. So I twisted the wire tight and I had to leave then to go on duty."

"Why Lew?"

"I thought maybe he found out from Lilo where Frank hid the money. I knew he had some money stashed. I had a good idea where. It was peanuts. Eleven thousand. And a bunch of rotten things. Rotten letters and rotten dirty pictures. I had to burn those. They weren"t decent. Linda Featherman treated me right. She spoke to me like a human being, not a fat old boxfighter turned cop. Lew gave me the wink after she was dead, and I knew he meant she was one of his women, and I decided to kill him. I investigated an accident she was in. She treated me fine. Just fine."

"You"ve been lucky, King. Because basically you are one very dumb guy."

"Do you know how much money I shoulda had? Do you know the kind of payoff I would have had if I hadn"t had bad hands and bad managers, and didn"t cut easy. I had everything else going for me. I would have had one million bucks anyway, pally. Right now. I had everything else. Speed, punch, instinct."

"So the money is yours by rights."

"I would have had more even."

I realized he had somehow managed to get too close. As I started to move back, he bounded in low, banging the barrel aside with a forearm, and swinging a big left into my ribs, low on the right side. I felt them go, felt myself float back and down and heels over head, light as thistledown. Felt myself plucked up and saw him in the red glow, bounding and shuffling, moving in. Saw a fist come afloating, and felt my stomach being smashed loose, saw the sky spin, fell again, and felt cold metal under my lips.

"Come on, pally," he said in a wheedling tone, far away. "Upsy-daisy. Dance with the old King a little." Hand found the metal. It was too much fun for him his way than any other way. Finger found the trigger guard. I had been broken in half in the middle and the two halves were at least a yard apart. I rocked the right half onto its back, bringing the carbine up, and pulled the trigger as fast as I could, but the little joltings of the weapon came at least five minutes apart. A shark sank in a red-sun-sea, and the red rolled over me, and the further I sank, the darker it got.

Twenty-One.

ON A very fine day in May, Meyer brought Miss Agnes around to the door of the Lauderdale hospital, and the cheery Gray Lady wheelchaired me down the short ramp and out to the curb. Meyer came around and I pulled myself up, stepped on that obsolete convenience known as a running board, and sat on the seat and swung my legs in.

I thanked the lady and she told me not to hurry back. Miss Agnes looked better than I had ever seen her. Ron had hand-rubbed so many coats of blue that you could see down into the surface.

"She running good?" I asked Meyer.

"Aside from driving like an armored lorry, fine." The whole world looked bright and new and far too brilliant in every color and outline. A couple of weeks inside can do it. My clothes felt strange. And they were a little large for me.

"Nice to be out," I said.

"For a while there, n.o.body thought you would be."

I knew that. I had lost quite a few days in there somewhere. The doctor absolutely refused to believe that that damage had been done by two blows from the human fist. He said the muscle cover was tough and hard enough to withstand a blow like that. He said I shouldn"t have had three crushed ribs, a rupture of the external oblique muscle, liver hemorrhages, and a perforation from a piece of rib bone in the bottom of the left lung. That"s what brought on the pneumonia that they couldn"t seem to find the right antibiotic for. I had been in shape, but not in shape for the ring.

"Forget about the trial," Meyer said.

"What do you mean? What happened?"

"Sturnevan died this morning. He was coming along fine. The smashed hip was all wired together and seemed to be healing in good shape. Hyzer phoned me. Said to tell you. He said they told him it was a ma.s.sive coronary occlusion."

"We should both have died, lain there on the ground eight feet apart and quietly bled to death. But those kids came back to break into the house. Meyer, my friend, our luck doesn"t run so good in Cypress County."

"I have no pressing need to return. Oh, and Hyzer said your check will be coming through in another few days. Two and a half percent of the total amount recovered. Something under twenty-two thousand."

"n.o.body"s luck ran very good in Cypress County."

"Nine hundred and twenty thousand is maybe an unlucky number. Your hands get sweaty and you become accident p.r.o.ne."

"Meyer, did they locate any bodies near that trailer?"

"I told you they did. Ten days ago I told you. You looked like you were listening."

"Who?"

"They don"t know. They"d been there too long. A tall body and a shorter body, both male, both with a round puncture hole in the base of the skull. I told you that, too."

"Don"t get surly about it. Does it hurt to tell me twice?"

"I"m thinking of the other things I told you I"ll have to tell you twice."

"There"ll be time enough. We aren"t going anywhere. Did I happen to do any talking when I wasn"t tracking very well?"

"A certain amount."

"Anything interesting?"

"It was all very dull stuff. You know, the usual run of delirium. s.e.x and violence. Nothing original."

"Thanks. That light is red."

"Even if I hadn"t seen it, I would have seen it when you sucked air through your teeth, McGee. Telling me out loud also is superfluous. I might get angry and run into somebody."

"You"re driving. So drive. I"ll leave you alone."

"A blessing!"

"Did you get anybody for the job, Meyer?"

"If I didn"t, wouldn"t I get stuck with it myself? Yes, I found a woman to cook and clean. An ugly one. A little bit hard of hearing. In your condition I did you a favor and found an ugly one that reads little books of inspirational poems in her spare time."

"You"re too good to me, Meyer."

""Wrong preposition. For."

"The light is green, Meyer."

"Do I do this to you when you"re driving? Do I complain when you go running into ca.n.a.ls?"

"No. But you keep bringing it up."

So soon we went under the pedestrian bridge and turned left and Meyer eased Miss Agnes into a slot reasonably near the entrance to F dock.

"You want to ride on one of the delivery carts?"

"Let"s walk. Slow."

So we walked along to F-18, and there were yelps from far boats; and sounds of welcome from nearby ones. And unkind comment. Are you McGee"s father, mister? Meyer, who"s the clean skinny old man? McGee, where"s your tan? Fall into the oatmeal? Let me give you the address of my ex-husband"s tailor, darling.

Have fun, people. All I want to do is get aboard and lie down.

So as I tottered across my little boarding ramp, holding carefully onto the safety cable, I noticed that my houseboat looked almost as good as my ancient Rolls pickup. It gleamed and glistened. It looked so good, it embarra.s.sed me. Why couldn"t I maintain it like that?

"Meyer, who is the compulsive polisher?"

"That deaf woman has a lot of extra energy. She asks me what next, and one day I said she could clean the outside of the boat, too."

Meyer helped me into the lounge and down the corridor past the galley into the master stateroom. The bed was crisply made up and turned down. I undressed and got in, and Meyer said I would probably feel better if I had my usual, a nice knock of the Plymouth over ice, and I told him he was a nice man. I heard him tinkling around out there. The tinkling approached and I put my hand out and opened my eyes, saying, "Meyer, where is..." And Heidi Geis Trumbill put the drink in my hand and laughed aloud in her pleasure at my surprise. She was still the most elegantly textured p.u.s.s.ycat of them all, a little older now, not a pound heavier, with more of the awareness of living in her eyes, more of the taste of times and places in the look of her mouth. Elegance, freshly tanned, leaning her perfume close to kiss me quickly and softly on the lips, and then sitting down on the side of the bed, looking at me misty-eyed.

"McGee, you idiot, are you crying?"

"It"s weakness, love. This water runs from the eye. Means little. Or a lot. Take your pick. But how! The last time I saw you was..."

"When I got in the car with the luggage and left you standing there, dear. St. Croix. I looked back. You looked so dejected. And my heart was breaking and breaking."

"You went to find your own life, find that right guy, have fat babies I think you said. Well?"

"I found him, but somebody else had found him first. It was a long bad scene, dear, and I cut away from it six months ago. I"ve been painting like a madwoman. My show sold out."

"What are you doing here?"

"Don"t you know? I"m ugly and hard of hearing and I will read inspirational poems aloud to you."

"Did you clean up this crock boat?"