woman, and in a couple of minutes a boy handpoled an airboat to the dock from behind the shack. Manny raised his arm.
'We won't need any conversation,' Bucktooth informed me, nudging me with his gun. He slipped it into his pocket as we went down the path. Bucktooth looked distrustfully at the airboat's wide-planked, battered hull with its high, platform seats and the big propeller encased in wire mesh. Three of the planks were fresh where someone had ripped out the bottom on a snag.
I stepped up onto the boat and started the engine. It was old, with a hand throttle. A rudimentary tiller guided the lightweight craft. I revved the engine a few times, listening. I tested the plugs and battery, then checked the gas gauge and compass. I had no intention of being stranded in the swamp myself.
The kid who'd brought the airboat saw I knew what I was doing, and he wandered off. The woman had already disappeared with Manny's rental money. 'Can't you run this thing?' Bucktooth demanded of Manny. 'I don't like the idea of him runnin' it.'
'Sure I can run it,' Manny said. I was sure he couldn't. 'But he's the one who's got to do the steerin' to the right spot. Just keep an eye on him.'
He climbed up into one of the front platform seats. Bucktooth settled himself in the dishpan cockpit, facing me, his back braced against a platform strut. He could watch every move I made in the navigator's bucket seat. 'You'll get wet there,' I told him.
'Just sec to it I don't get wet, pal,' he answered me. I would have preferred them in reversed positions. Manny had my .38 and the keys to the station wagon. 'How long's this goin' to take us?'
I shrugged. 'Hour and a half each way.' It wasn't going to take a third of that if I had my way.
I eased the airboat away from the dock. Bucktooth stared nervously at the brackish-looking water lapping at the boat's low sides. I could see Manny flinch the first few times I rammed the airboat over deceptively solid-looking areas of sawgrass.
The sun beat down upon us. Dark patches of perspiration appeared on Manny's back and under his arms. Bucktooth was sweating freely, too. Shade, but no coolness, was under the gnarled cypress trees with their trailing moss. The swamp was a miasma of sticky heat.
I turned right and left through narrow channels, often enough to get them thoroughly confused. I kept one eye on the compass and the other watching for mangrove roots that might tip us over. The engine didn't sound as noisy beneath the thick, green jungle growth overhead. Mosquitoes and gnats hummed around us. Manny and Bucktooth swatted them busily. Once or twice Manny turned to look back at me. I could see he was beginning to have doubts about the expedition.
I gave them enough time to become relaxed, then began watching for a wide enough space between the trees bordering the channel, accompanied by a lowlying branch of the right height. I passed up a couple of places that almost, but not quite, filled the bill.
When I saw what I wanted, I didn't wait.
The opening was on the left, more than wide enough for the boat. 'Alligator!' I yelled and pointed to the right.
'Where?' They bellowed it together. Bucktooth turned in the direction I pointed. Manny stood up to see better. I jammed the throttle wide open and steered hard left. The boat stood up on its port gunwale as it darted between the I roes. The lowlying branch caught Manny squarely in the chest. He shot off the platform like an ice cube from a •.pilled cocktail. He crashed into the right-hand tree, and even above the engine roar I could hear the squishy splash he made when he hit the mud below.
Two-thirds of the way around the tree I shut the engine oil' with the tiller still hard right. Bucktooth had grabbed with both hands to save himself from sliding overboard as the airboat tilted. I reached down and slipped the little .17 caliber from my shin holster. Bucktooth started to turn to check the shut-off engine as we drifted back into the main channel.
'Don't turn a thing but your head, man,' I told him. My voice sounded loud in the sudden quiet.
His eyes bulged when he saw what I had in my hand.
Desperately he looked up at the platform for Manny. His gaze fled to the space between the trees, and he looked stricken anew at the sight of two feebly kicking legs visible above the watery, greenish mud.
'Drop your gun in the water,' I directed. I didn't even blink while he did it. His nerve was gone. He was ashen, and his hands shook.
'Listen—' he began.
'You've got a choice,' I interrupted him. 'You can stay out here with the heat and the mosquitoes and the bugs and the snakes and the alligators.' His whole face was wet as he stared at me. I showed him the handgun. 'Or you can take one from this.'
He couldn't make a sound for a second. 'You'd—you'd shoot me?' he croaked.
I laughed. 'What the hell were you planning to do to me? Come on, make up your mind. Which is it going to be?' His eyes darted wildly in all directions. 'Take the bullet,' I said. 'You'll go out of your mind in twelve hours here.' His chest was heaving as he tried to force air through his constricted throat. 'Take the bullet.'
'No!' It was wrenched from him forcibly.
'Okay.' I ruddered the airboat to a little sawgrass island with ;t single half-grown scotch pine slanting up from it. 'Jump.'
'Oh, Jesus, no! You wouldn't—'
'Jump, you bastard. Or catch the bullet.'
His voice soared to a shriek. 'Just gimme a chance to—'
1 moved my arm.
Me jumped.
Mis scream echoed hollowly through the green tunnel as he went In up to his knees in the gelatinous ooze. He grabbed at the tree, then screamed again as something slithered away from under his hands. He kept trying to pull his legs up out of the muck.
I stalled the engine and turned the boat around. The last I saw of Bucktooth he was halfway up into the tree which was bending double under his weight. If he was
making any noise I couldn't hear it above the engine sound.
I went back to Manny Sebastian. His legs were under water now, too. I had a hell of a time pulling him far enough up from the mud to get my .38. I didn't bother with the car keys. I dropped him back in.
I rode the compass back to the shack. I poled in the final quarter-mile and beached the airboat three hundred yards away from the dock, behind a point. The crackers weren't going to worry too much about their boat while the station wagon remained as security. I'd be long gone from Hudson by the time they started combing the swamp for the supposedly missing threesome.
I walked a mile, then hitched a ride into town. I made and remade plans all the way. I had a date with Lucille Grimes at five o'clock, a date I was going to keep. Five o'clock would be the payoff, but I had a few things to do first..
It must have been ninety in town, but it felt almost chilly compared to the swamp. I had a meal in the truck- stop diner south of the traffic light in the square. I could hardly believe it when I saw from my watch that it was only ten-thirty in the morning.
From the girl cashier I borrowed a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a pencil. Then I practiced composing telegraph messages on napkins. I finally hit on one I thought would do the trick. I printed ARRIVING SOON MEET ME LAZY SUSAN MOTEL URGENT YOU NOT FAIL ME. I addressed it to Dick Pierce, General Delivery, Hudson, Florida, and I signed it Earl.
I copied it out on the sheet of paper and sealed it in the envelope along with two one-dollar bills. I printed 'Western Union' on the outside of the envelope. I watched the drivers from the northbound, diesel-rigged big vans and selected a middle-aged, steady-looking man. I gave him a five-dollar bill and the envelope and asked him to drop it off at the Western Union office wherever he was at noontime. He promised he'd be sure to do it. I sat there till he drove off.
When that telegram hit the deck in the Western Union office in Hudson, it would be sent to the post office and delivered to Lucille Grimes. I should get a little action for my seven dollars right about then. The telegram with that signature should give Lucille Grimes and Blaze Franklin something to think about besides Chet Arnold.
I walked from the diner to the motel room, where I took the phone off the hook. If Jed was trying to call me
