knowledge of her death, Helena was a disturbing memory...
2
FIVE YEARS ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife Helena and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady. A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.
He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He cir-culated quickly and readily and got to know all the regu-lars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.
Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, show-down was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.
He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some sur-plus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn't wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.
Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. "So they know I've got this bank draft pay-able to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand Eng-lish pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I've got a protected account there. I didn't want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It's enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I've got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn't make it. So I have to have somebody they don't know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they'll give up."
I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn't just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.
His was a very tough grin. "Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn't do that to any-body. Neither could you. That's what makes us incurably small-time."
"That kind of money isn't exactly small-tune."
"Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me." So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn't seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.
That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the state-room safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open
2
FIVE YEARS ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife Helena and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady. A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.
He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He cir-culated quickly and readily and got to know all the regu-lars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.
Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, show-down was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.
He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some sur-plus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn't wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.
Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. "So they know I've got this bank draft pay-able to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand Eng-lish pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I've got a protected account there. I didn't want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It's enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I've got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn't make it. So I have to have somebody they don't know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they'll give up."
I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn't just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.
His was a very tough grin. "Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn't do that to any-body. Neither could you. That's what makes us incurably small-time."
"That kind of money isn't exactly small-tune."
"Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me." So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn't seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.
That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the state-room safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open
Similar Books
Finding Forever (Smoky Mountain Lawmen Book 1)
Ashley Quinn
Poems 1962-2012
Louise Glück
Private Politics (The Easy Part)
Emma Barry
Unquiet Slumber
Paulette Miller
Exit Lady Masham
Louis Auchincloss
Sunset & Vine: Loose Lips
Per Hampton
Trade Me
Courtney Milan
The Day Before
Liana Brooks
