on top of me. He was trying to get his hands on my throat. I pushed up with my arms and legs and we fell backward off the ladder and rolled. We crashed into the stanchion of one tier of bunks and it gave way and mattresses spilled down on top of us. I twisted from under him and then I was across his back with both arms locked around his neck. I pulled back. He came up to his knees, carrying me with him, and then to his feet. I tightened my grip and he lurched sidewise and fell, and we plowed headlong into the row of sheet metal lockers. They came adrift and fell over on us.
He broke my grip around his neck and threw me off him. The lockers rattled and crashed as we fought our way out from under them. A fist caught me on the jaw and slammed me back against the bulkhead. It dazed me. I tried to get up and fell over one of the lockers. He caught me and slammed my head back against the bulkhead. One of the big hands tightened around my throat. I was strangling and beginning to lose consciousness. I thought I heard somebody running along the deck above us.
The beams of flashlights stabbed downward from the deck, and men were coming down the ladder. Boyle released me and sprang up. I pushed myself up to my knees, and swayed, just in time to see him lunge for something shining in the lights that splashed on the deck near us. It was the marlinespike.
“Police!” a voice barked. “Stay right where you are!”
Boyle grabbed up the piece of steel and lunged toward the lights. “Drop it!” a voice warned. He took one more step and the gun crashed. He fell forward against the bulkhead near the ladder and slid to the deck.
I tried to stand up. Everything drained out of me at last and I started to fall. And my last thought as I slid into blackness was that now I had lost them all. Frances Celaya was dead, and now they’d shot Boyle, and there was nobody else who knew how it had really happened.
Fourteen
I opened my eyes. I was lying on a hospital bed in a small white-painted room. It was daylight. Across from me a uniformed policeman was seated in a chair tilted back against the wall, reading a paper. He glanced up and saw I was awake.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. He went to the door and spoke to someone just outside it. I couldn’t hear what he said. He came back and sat down again. I moved my arms and legs, and everything seemed to work except that I was sore and stiff and my side hurt. I felt the right side of my face. It was painful.
I thought of Suzy. They might know what had happened to her, but I couldn’t even ask. There was a chance she was still all right, and if I even mentioned her name it would implicate her. They knew somebody had been helping me.
“Can I make a telephone call?” I asked the uniformed man.
“No,” he said.
“Is Boyle dead?”
He put down the paper. “Don’t ask me any questions. There’ll be a man here in a minute that’s been wanting to ask you some for a week. All I’m here for is to see that you don’t run down the drain in the wash basin or through the keyhole or something and disappear again.”
I lay back on the pillow. In about twenty minutes the door opened and a big man in a rumpled suit came in. He had a tough, competent look about him. There was a stubble of beard on his face, and the rather hard eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn’t slept for some time. He nodded to the uniformed man, who got up and went out.
He lighted a cigarette, stared at me for a moment, and sighed. “I suppose if I killed you, I’d find out there was some stupid city ordinance against it. But it’s a beautiful thought. Who was hiding you?”
”What do you care now?” I asked.
He rubbed a hand across his face. “I guess I don’t, really. I just get scared when I think there might be two of you loose on the same continent. What was her name?”
“What makes you think it was a girl?”
“Because you said ‘he’ when you talked to me on the phone. You could