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perhaps," he said. "But she is dead. Just as you are dead."
"And ... Mary?"
There was a slight Gallic shrug. "That was bad luck. I went to her to try to
convince her to leave Harry for good. Why should a woman like that have been
loyal to a man like that? I wanted her to run, because without her, Harry
would have to find three hundred thousand somewhere else. I have that much. I
was going to squeeze Harry for half his stock. Waterbury should have let me
buy in. Then nothing would have ever happened."
"Bad luck?"
"She tried to run. The house was dark. I caught her, and we fell badly. Very
badly. It was an ugly situation. She knew who I was. I couldn't call an
ambulance, could I? She knew how bad it was. I had to find out a lot from her
while she could still talk. She was stubborn. I had to ... amplify the pain to
make her speak." He frowned. "I thought it would sicken me to do that. But it
was a strange pleasure in a little while. As if we were lovers. So that is bad
luck too, I suppose, to learn that about oneself. Gratification is expensive
and very dangerous, eh?"
He stood up, clapped his hands to remove the loose sand. "And it was the same
pleasure with Lisa, and we will discover if it is the same with a man, too. I
should not care to dig a hole big enough for you, Mr. McGee."
"McGee?"
"I am very good about details. Harry described you well enough. Mary is dead.
Lisa is dead. McGee is dead. But we must find out who you sent the letter to
and what it said. We shall improvise, eh? There is a tire pump and a jack in
the tool compartment of that ugly little vehicle. Something will come to mind.
There will be enough time to proceed slowly and carefully."
He walked up toward the car, a hundred feet away. The equation was very
simple. No unknowns. I could spend the afternoon on this hideaway beach as
Paul Dissat whiled away the lazy hours with a question-and-answer game with
the penalty for wrong answers and right answers precisely the same. Improvised
agony.
Or I could try to stand up. That was the first step. If I couldn't, there
wasn't any point in wondering about step two. If I could stand up, then I had
to see if I could walk down the beach and into the sea. I had to hurry, but
with short steps well within the range of my constraining nylon cord, and I
had to keep my balance. The third part of it was getting into the water at
just the right place. I had seen the place when I had been out there near
Lisa's head in the hot sun.
There is no such thing as an undertow: Not anywhere in the world. All you ever
find is a rip. Tb have a rip, you have to have a partial barrier parallel to
the beach. It can be a sandbar or a reef. The barrier has to be underwater.
There has to be a hole or channel through it. A great volume of water comes in
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
on wind and waves and tide over the barrier, rushing toward the beach with
waves marching right along behind each other, hurrying in. Then that big
volume of water has to get out to make room for the water coming in. So it
goes flowing out through the hole or channel. A big volume and a narrow deep
hole makes one hell of an outgoing current It is sort of fan-shaped, wide at
the beach end, narrowing toward the gap in the barrier, and going faster and
stronger as it gets narrower. .
You can read a rip on a sandy beach from the way it boils up the sand in a
limited area and makes a foam line out toward the gap. If you get caught in
one, you swim parallel to the beach until you are out of it, then turn toward
the beach. Fight it and you can panic and drown, because they usually go
faster than any man can swim.
I got up, scraping some hide off my back on the palm trunk. I went down the
beach slope, stamping my feet wide for balance. The beach and the sea kept
tilting, misting, merging, flowing. In nightmare slowness I passed the round,
black, hairy thing, saw it vividly for just a moment. A wave had come in and
covered it entirely. The top of it was a few inches under momentarily
motionless water, at rest when a wave had come all the way in and gathered
itself to run back out. Her black hair was fanned out, and in that instant of
sharpened, memorable vision I saw the spume of sand drifting out of her open
mouth, like a strange cartoon balloon, a message without sound. A sandy, tan
farewell.
Paul was shouting above the wave noises. I was off balance, leaning forward. A
wave slapped my chest and straightened me up. I took a deep breath and lunged
forward. I counted on the exceptional buoyancy of the water, the high salinity
of the dry season. I had to know if I was in the rip. I managed to roll and
float and look back at the beach and saw him and the trees and the raft and
the Moke moving into the distance at six or eight miles an hour. It was a good
rip, and I hoped it was a long gap in a barrier reef, that the reef was well
offshore, and that it would move me out into a current that would take me away
from there. Any direction at all. Out to sea and drown while laughing at how
Lennie Sibelius was going to nail Paul Dissat, nail him and sweat him and find
out how it happened. All of it.
The swell had built nicely, and it was going to play hell on him, trying to
find me bobbing around in all that blue and white sparkle. If the hands are
dead, it is less burdensome to drown, but you try not to drown if you can help
it. I could arch my back and float high, my ears full of the drum sounds of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]