Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,62

you feel better?”

“Rested,” I said. “You want me to relieve you now?”

He shook his head. The only concession he had made to the informality of an ocean cruise was to take off his tie. He still had on the tweed jacket, and I could see the bulge of an automatic in each of the patch pockets. His face was pink from the sun, and his jaw was covered with a stubble of brown whiskers.

“No,” he said. “Barfield relieved me for a while this morning. You can take over at six. What I called you about was the matter of food. You can cook, I presume?”

“A little,” I said.

“Well, suppose you prepare something, sandwiches at least, and make some coffee. And call Mrs. Macaulay. Tell her we shall have a meal of sorts and a briefing session here at around five o’clock.”

“Briefing?”

His eyebrows raised sardonically. “Yes. We intend to take up, at long last, the trifling matter that brought us out here. I refer to the location of that plane. Provided, of course, that we don’t have any more distracting swimming parties. We should be some fifty miles offshore now, so perhaps she’ll leave her life belt below when she comes up.”

I took a last puff on the cigarette and tossed it overboard. “I have some news for you,” I said. “She lost the life belt when she went overboard and didn’t expect to reach shore. She was merely committing suicide rather than come back.”

“Very touching,” he said. “But you’ve come to the wrong department. I’m not the custodian of Mrs. Macaulay’s happiness.”

Barfield spread his hands and shrugged with burlesque sympathy. “You see, Mortimer? It’s a cruel world.”

“And I have more news for you,” I went on, ignoring Barfield. They’d know, sooner or later, so why not start preparing them? “You’re never going to find that plane. She told me what Macaulay told her, and you couldn’t find the Pacific fleet with the information.”

He shrugged. “Really, we don’t expect to find it that easily. It may be the second or third location before she begins to get near the truth.”

I kept my face expressionless, but it scared me. It was what I had been afraid of all the time. They had no conception at all of the immense waste of water out here and of the firsthand, pinpointed accuracy of information you had to have in order to locate something lost in it. The only thing they’d ever be able to see was that she wanted the stupid diamonds herself and was holding out on them.

“If you had lost your watch overboard between here and the sea buoy,” I said, “could you go back and find it?”

“An airplane is considerably larger, old boy. And Macaulay knew exactly where it went in, or he wouldn’t have tried to hire a diver. But enough for now. We shall take that up when Mrs. Macaulay is present. Right?”

I said nothing as I turned and went below. Arguing with him was futile.

I pulled the curtain aside and stood by her bunk. She slept peacefully, a little flushed with the heat. “Shannon,” I said softly. She didn’t stir. I touched her arm.

Her eyes opened and looked at me without comprehension at first. Then she stared around the cabin and just for a second her defenses were down as the whole ugly mess came back the way it does in that instant of waking. She absorbed it and took command without a sound.

“Hello, Bill,” she said. “I’m glad it was you.”

“How do you feel?”

She stirred a little, experimentally. “I’m not sure yet. Wobbly, I think.”

“You look wonderful.”

She made a wry face. “I’ll bet I do.”

“Really, you do. You’re beautiful.”

Self-consciousness seized us both. Too much had been compressed into too short a time. By any normal standards what we had done could have been called ugly and callous and an absolute travesty on any kind of good taste, but normal standards didn’t exist any more. Time was telescoped and flattened like the front end of a car in a head-on crash. We had been through a lifetime in less than a week, and we probably had less than another week to live.

Sure, he was dead, and he’d died violently less than 24 hours ago, but it meant nothing any more. He had deliberately erased himself long before that. He had run out on her to save himself. She had left him when she knew it—not physically, because out of some sense of obligation she had to stick with