Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [31]
I decided to keep going and hope that neither the speedboat nor the plane made a curtain call. Enter and exit in the first act, and stay that way. I could see the yacht now, a massive silhouette about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me and off to the right. I began paddling toward it, stopping every so often to listen, but there was nothing to hear, and so I listened to that.
The closer I got to the yacht, the more nervous I became, all my senses on high alert, my heartbeat pacing my every stroke. And then, all at once, I was right beside it, like a solitary bird flanking a behemoth. I moved around to the stern. I intended to keep the boat between me and the mansion, because I suspected that either Williams or the Colonel might be watching out for me with night-vision glasses, and I didn’t want them to know I was aboard until the time came to take her out to sea.
I grabbed my flashlight and played the beam along the hull. The Carrousel was written there in gold italics, each letter outlined in black. I touched the white hull the way you might touch a sleeping stranger.
I paddled back to the dive deck and used two tethers to lash the kayak to the aluminum ladder, and when I was sure I was in tight, I put the flashlight in a pocket of my life jacket and got ready to haul myself up and out. I grabbed for the middle rung of the ladder and twisted my legs and pelvis until my feet swung free. During the ride my legs had stiffened up considerably. The moment I lifted my right knee, the hamstring cramped up so badly that I had to spend a few moments pumping my leg until the blood broke through and I could begin climbing again.
I went into a crouch the second I was on deck and looked back at the Colonel’s place from behind the door leading up to the cabin. The back of the place was well lit, as usual. The two tall towering spotlights that flanked the property glowed like miniature moons, but the house itself was dark.
I listened to the darkness for a moment, then opened the cabin door. It was too dark not to use the flashlight, but I kept the beam away from the windows. The light revealed a large stateroom furnished with black leather couches hugging the walls and a comfortable-looking red leather recliner that had toppled over onto its side across the rose-colored carpet. Next to the central couch sat a long, low, irregularly shaped coffee table made of burnished driftwood that looked like it might still be capable of giving someone a bad case of splinters. On it were three glasses. One of them, set off from the other two, had a red flange of lipstick along the rim.
Across from the couch on the far wall against a window that looked out into the dark sky was a well-stocked, copper-covered bar that looked like it was forged from a zillion hammered-down pennies, then polished to a high gloss. There were glasses on the bar and ashtrays full of butts and half a bottle of scotch somebody had forgotten to stopper. Behind the bar the usual panoply of bottles and above them, on the next shelf up, an old-fashioned astrolabe and sextant that looked as authentic as the kind you find in maritime museums.
I went around behind the bar and saw the body of a man sprawled on the floor. It was Matson. I killed the light and stood there, quiet and alone in the darkness, listening to myself breathe. It was real now; there is nothing more real than a dead body, especially when it’s the body of someone you know. I inhaled deeply and switched the flashlight on him again, trying to be a cop once more before I went back to being a criminal. Nothing new here, I told myself, just another homicide. It was time to be objective, but my trembling hands didn’t help.
I ran the beam of light up his legs, over his torso. He was lying facedown, and there was much blood under his head but no sign of a wound, which meant he’d been shot from the front. His left arm was extended over his head as though he’d been reaching for something. I moved the light forward and saw a silver-plated .38 on the floor and the cigar box where he’d obviously