Operation Whiplash Page 17

  “We’ll dump the garbage and take off. Keep your nose clean and the home fires burning.”

  Hazel kissed him on the cheek, and his lips moved soundlessly.

  “Take the Ford,” I told Hazel. “Drive east on Main about two miles until you see two signs that say BAIT AND TACKLE FOR HIRE and AIRBOAT FOR HIRE. Stop at the first one. I’ll bring him along.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at Colisimo. “With Kaiser on the seat between us so I can concentrate on the driving. Hit it, baby. Daylight’s gaining on us.”

  She went to the door. On the landing I could see her stiffen. “Earl!” she said tensely from the corner of her mouth. “There’s a police cruiser with its light off parked across the street.”

  “Wave to us,” I directed her. “Smile. Then do what I told you.”

  She waved.

  She smiled.

  I could hear her descending the stairs.

  I breathed more easily when I heard the Ford start up and drive away. I looked at Colisimo. “Parole violation’s the least of what you’ll go up for if you call attention to us,” I said. “If you live long enough to go up for anything.”

  “I don’t wanna talk to no cops,” he protested.

  We were in complete agreement on that score.

  “Car keys,” I said. He tossed them to me. I started him down the stairway ahead of me with Kaiser on his heels. I followed, but I stopped halfway down. “Hell of a party, man!” I shouted to Jed. “Let’s do it again real soon over at my place!”

  I could see no movement in the police cruiser when I reached the sidewalk. The gangster car was a long and expensive Lincoln limousine. In the corners of the back seat Carlie and Ricardo seemingly embraced drunken slumber. I opened the front door and Kaiser flowed effortlessly onto the seat. The shepherd seemed to have fully recovered from his double head-knock. I motioned to Colisimo, and he got in gingerly, his eyes on the dog. I walked around the car, got in, and started the engine. It purred with quiet power.

  Hazel and the Ford were nowhere in sight. I started off slowly toward the traffic light, then watched in the rear-view mirror as the cruiser’s lights came on and swung in a big arc as it turned to follow us.

  Jed Raymond was a local businessman and entitled to some latitude, but in the view of the cops in the cruiser, they’d be negligent if they didn’t ask politely for a look at my license. Probably only the presence of Hazel and Kaiser, unlikely adjuncts to criminal enterprise, had kept us from an outright stand-and-frisk.

  The condition of my back-seat passengers ruled against any cooperation with the law. I mashed down on the accelerator. The Lincoln almost jumped out from under us. I was under the traffic light before the cruiser had completed its turn-around. I drove straight ahead. Twenty yards beyond the light I punched the switch that turned off the limousine’s lights, then turned and bumped across the sidewalk into the first opening I saw between two buildings.

  We sat in silence while the police cruiser roared by on the highway. Away from Hudson. Away from Hazel.

  Colisimo sighed heavily. “How’d a citizen like you ever get to be such an operator?” he asked.

  I didn’t try to answer him.

  It had been a long time and many ventures ago that I had been a citizen in the nonparticipatory straight world that Bolts Colisimo meant.

  I backed out of the space between the buildings, turned left at the light, and drove two miles. The Ford was parked at the bait and tackle for rent sign, fifty yards from Casey Deakin’s old shack with its crumbling dock. Hazel got out and approached me. The dawn light was dirty gray. “Hide the Ford the best place you can find on the other side of the road,” I told her. Sooner or later the cops in the cruiser were going to backtrack and cast a wider net.

  I drove the Lincoln off the road, down a gentle incline, out of sight of the highway. Water lapped quietly at the edge of the swamp. Fifty yards away three airboats danced gently, moored to stakes sunk in muddy-looking water.

  “Watch him!” I said to Kaiser re Colisimo before I left the car. And to Colisimo, I added: “He knows who hit him on the head.”

  I walked to the airboats, waded out, pulled up the stake of the nearest one, and began to tow it silently along the curving, swampy water’s edge. I kept at it until I had it in front of the old dock near Deakins’ place.

  I went back to the Lincoln and backed it around the curve until its rear wheels were in the water at the dock. I didn’t have to tell Colisimo what came next. No one knew better than he did that the first order of business was getting rid of the bodies in the back seat. We worked at it together, hampered by the fact we each had only one good arm. Fortunately it was my right and his left which made the heavy-duty work possible. Colisimo worked as hard as I did, because he still thought he was going to make a deal.

  We dragged the bodies from the car to the airboat and then thumped them down into the scooped-out space in front of the huge propeller in its wire cage. Colisimo kept looking down at his suit to see if he had any blood on it. Kaiser paced beside us every step of both trips.

  I left him with Colisimo while I went back to the Lincoln. I opened the trunk and found half a dozen lengths of heavy chain. I carried three of them, one-handed, to the airboat and dumped them on top of the bodies.

  Hazel came down the bank and watched silently while I drove the Lincoln up out of the water to make sure it hadn’t become mired. I gave her the keys. “Drive this thing down the road half a mile and leave it with the key in it,” I told her. “Then let’s hope someone comes along with larceny in his heart. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  I waited while she drove the Lincoln up the incline onto the highway. Then I loaded Colisimo and Kaiser onto the square bow of the airboat’s platform, scant inches above the water. Kaiser would be between me and Colisimo while I was operating the craft. I still had the derringer in its spectacles-case holster on my shin. It gave me the complacent feeling of a poker player who draws the fourth ace.

  The last bit of luck I felt I needed was for the airboat engine to start. It started with an ear-shattering roar sure to draw the attention of the owner from whom I’d liberated it. But nothing could stop me now. I eased in the throttle and experimented with the tiller as we moved slowly away from the dock into the winding waterway that led into the depths of the thirty-acre swamp. The boat handled nicely.

  I knew where I was going.

  I’d been there before, via the same method, and for the same purpose.

  The airboat glided over an occasional tussock of swamp grass as I navigated the channel. The air was dank and heavy amidst the gnarled mangroves and cypresses. The boat had a headlight, but natural light had increased to the point I didn’t need it.

  I made a right turn into a branch channel, a left, and another right. I cut the engine then, and the boat drifted up to a greasy-looking patch of antediluvian swamp mud in which oily bubbles constantly appeared and disappeared.

  Colisimo turned to look at me in the sudden silence. I stepped up on the rear platform, keeping the engine between us. “Wrap them and dump them,” I told him. I whistled to Kaiser, who otherwise wouldn’t have let the squat man past him.

  Colisimo shrugged and came to the stern. He wrapped the first body in a length of chain and heaved it over the side with a grunt. It hit in the ooze and began to sink at once. It was already out of sight when Colisimo repeated the performance with his second henchman.

  “Now let’s talk a little business,” he said then in the manner of a man who has just taken care of all the unimportant details before arriving at the main transaction.

  When he turned around, I didn’t have to say anything.

  He saw it in my face before he saw the automatic in my hand.

  Blind rage suffused his dark features a choleric gentian hue. Gun or no gun, he started around the engine casing after me. There was nothing else he could do, of course. I had him in the front sight when he stumbled unseeingly over Kaiser. Arms flailing, Colisimo’s squat body failed in its a
ttempt to right itself. He pitched heavily from the airboat platform into the mud.

  The sounds from the mucky ooze didn’t last long.

  When they stopped, there was only a white carnation floating on the deceptively watery-looking surface.

  I threw the remaining chain on top of the carnation.

  Kaiser and I rode the airboat back through the swamp to a spot a little distance away from where its irate owner might be awaiting its return. We walked along the bank below the surface of the road until we came to Casey Deakin’s shack.

  We climbed up on the highway then.

  It was almost full sunrise when Hazel drove up in the Ford.

  We made one more stop in Hudson, Florida, and that was at Jed Raymond’s back door where I left Kaiser. I told the dog to stay. He whined, but he made no move to follow when I got back in the car.

  I leaned back and tried to relax while Hazel wheeled us out of there.

  twelve

  We drove to Miami where we sold the Ford. We caught a plane to Detroit where I went to a disbarred surgeon in Hamtramck who took care of my arm. After that, I packaged up $1000 in hundreds and mailed it to The Schemer, General Delivery, Washington, D.C. Four hours later we were aboard American Airlines Flight No. 195 from Detroit to Mexico City. We arrived at 4:40 p.m.

  We spent the night at the Hotel Ritz on Avenue Madero, and nobody had to sing us lullabies to get us to sleep. We slept right through breakfast, and then had lunch in the Muralto Restaurant in the Latin-American Tower. In the afternoon we caught the daily flight from Mexico City to Zihautanejo via a 14-passenger Viscount which deposited us on the edge of the Pacific.

  And here we are.

  Hazel spends the days swimming, sunbathing, and snor-keling.

  I sit on our terrace overlooking the blue-green Pacific while my arm heals.

  We don’t talk yet about Hudson, Florida.

  The subject will come up eventually, of course.

  But for now, we walk the beach evenings in the sunsets and savor filete of huachinango in the hotel dining room.

  For the moment it’s more than enough to know there will be tomorrows promising the same.

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  Copyright © 1973 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  Copyright Registration Renewed © 2003 by Robert Ragan

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  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

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