Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,16

her husband; presumably she was in love with him. And from the little I’d seen of her I knew she wasn’t given to stating the obvious. There wouldn’t be any question of letting him down, nor any necessity for mentioning it. When you put it into words, even without thinking, it wasn’t love, or devotion. It sounded like obligation.

I came out the doors at the end of the shed. Off to my left, just at the edge of the illumination from the small bulb over the doors, I could see the ladder leading down onto the barge. Only a little of it stuck above the level of the pier now, and I remembered absently that the tide had been ebbing about three hours.

I started over toward it, and then suddenly remembered old Chris had said somebody was waiting out here to see me. I looked around, puzzled. My own car was sitting there beside the doors, but there was no other. Well, maybe he’d gone. But that was odd. Chris would have seen him. There was no way out except through the gate.

I saw it then—the glowing end of a cigarette in the shadows inside my car.

The door swung open and he got out. It was the pug. There was just enough light to see the hard, beat-up face, and the yearning in it, and the bright malice in the eyes. He lazily crushed out his cigarette against the paint on the side of the car.

“Been waiting for you, Big Boy,” he said.

“All right, friend,” I said. “I’ve heard the one about the good little man. And it’s put a lot of good little men in the hospital. Hadn’t you better run along?”

Then, suddenly, I saw the whole thing over again, saw him holding and hitting her like some vicious little wasp systematically destroying a butterfly, and I was glad he’d come. A cold ball of rage pushed up in my chest. I went for him.

He was a pro, all right, and he was fast. He hit me three times before I touched him. It was like one of those sequences in an animated cartoon—boing-boing-boing! None of the punches hurt very much, but they sobered me a little. He’d cut me to pieces this way. He’d close my eyes and then take his own sweet time chopping me down to a bloody pulp. These raging swings of mine were just his meat; I didn’t have a chance in God’s world of hitting him where it would hurt, and they only pulled me off balance so he could jab me.

His left probed for my face again. I raised my hands, and the right slammed into my body. He danced back. “Duck soup,” he said contemptuously.

He put the left out again. I caught the wrist in my hand, locked it, and yanked him toward me. This was unorthodox, and new, and when my right came slamming into his belly it hurt. I heard him suck air. I set a hundred and ninety-five pounds on the arch of his foot, and ground my heel.

He tried to get a knee into me. I pushed him back with another right in his stomach. He dropped automatically into his crouch, weaving and trying to suck me out of position. He’d been hurt, but the hard grin was still there and his eyes were wicked. All he had to do was get me to play his way.

He was six or eight feet in front of the car, with his back toward it. I went along with him, lunging at him with a looping right. He slipped inside it, pounding that tattoo on my middle. He slid out again, as fast as he’d come in, only now he was three feet nearer the car. I crowded him again. He didn’t know it was there until he felt the bumper against the backs of his legs.

I moved in on him fast. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and he was already too far back and off balance to swing. I caught his wrist and the front of his shirt and leaned on him. The right crashing against his face had an ugly, meaty sound in the night. This was exactly the way he had held and beaten the girl. I slammed him again, savagely, punishing him.

“Different when you’re catching, huh?” I said. I rocked him again.

He twisted away at last, but he was a little groggy now and his timing was off. A trickle of blood ran out of