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  “Are you attempting to tell me how to command? Why, you stupid boot, I spent four years in college learning my job.” He glowered at me. “I know all about you, MacMorgan. Circus orphan. The tough guy everybody likes. Well, let me tell you something, swabbie—I don’t like you. Not even a little bit. In fact, I think you’re one of the most stupid human beings I’ve ever met!” He shuffled through some papers on his desk as if looking for my file. “My God, you didn’t even graduate from high school—and you’re trying to tell me? If that wasn’t so absurd it would be funny!”

  “May I still speak plainly, sir?”

  “Yes!”

  “The men think you’re a coward, sir. And I agree. I think you’re yellow.”

  He started to get up out of his chair, then thought better of it. He jammed a cartridge into his ivory-handled automatic.

  “Get out of here, MacMorgan! I don’t ever want to see that baby face of yours in my quarters again!”

  “If Lieutenant Ellsworth would be willing to take his blouse off and step outside, perhaps we could settle this like men.”

  He had pointed the .45 at me then. “Get out of here, MacMorgan. I don’t have anything to prove to trash like you. I’ll be running this man’s Navy when you’re sweeping up bars for a living.”

  So this was the guy who stood above me now, probably that same .45 automatic pointed at my head. He hadn’t lasted long in the Navy. Ass-kissing and brown-nosing will only take you so high. Not long after we finally got rid of him, we heard he had gotten mixed up in the black market somehow. They said he was getting rich. They said Lieutenant Ellsworth could get you anything, absolutely anything, you wanted. And even later, I heard that he had resigned his commission under hazy circumstances.

  “Hah! I see you finally recognize me, MacMorgan!”

  I looked up at him. The angular, ferret face had aged considerably. But the build was the same: just under six feet tall, lean and wiry, the way an English professor might look if he did a little weight lifting. Jet-black hair, thin girlish lips, hands that looked as if they were made to shuffle papers.

  “Yeah, I recognize you, Ellsworth.”

  He sneered at me. “You know, it amuses me to think that I will be the one to kill you. I could have shot you when you suckered poor Charlie into your cabin. Or when, in typically and absurdly heroic style, you gave Big Bart a chance. I could have shot you so easily. I was right behind you, you know.” He gave a weird little laugh. “But frankly, I wanted to see who was going to win. I was very impressed, the way you handled Bart. Almost proud, in a strange sort of way. Bart was a good man—not like Charlie. Charlie was pathetic. But, the same as in the Navy, you have to work with so many pathetic people in this business. So I was glad I didn’t shoot you—then. I wanted to have a chance to have a little chat.” He chuckled again. “You see, Seaman Mack—what was his first name again? Billy, yes. Well, Mr. Billy Mack didn’t have much time for conversation. You always liked killing, didn’t you, MacMorgan? Always gung-ho, ready for a fight? Well, you would have enjoyed seeing the way Big Bart killed your little friend. He flopped around on the deck like a fish. Blood just everywhere—that’s right, MacMorgan, try to get up. Try to jump me. You’re just stupid enough to try it.”

  “You’re crazy, Ellsworth. You’re crazy and you’re a coward.”

  “Yeah, I’m crazy. Crazy like a fox. Crazy and rich. I want you to tell me one last thing before I put a bullet through your brain. Did poor little Charlie tell you anything about our . . . our little operation when you had him down below?”

  “He told me everything.”

  He had lifted his gun, ready to fire. He looked at me in shrewd appraisal. “I’ve always been much too smart for you, MacMorgan. Had poor Charlie told you anything at all, you would have lied. You would have said he told you nothing. But it doesn’t matter, MacMorgan. You’re about to pay for calling me yellow back in Vietnam—”

  “Hold it!”

  It was the woman. Mrs. Johnson. She stood on the port walkway of Billy Mack’s boat, my Russian AK-47 in her hands, pointing it awkwardly at Lieutenant Benjamin Ellsworth. She did look fine: denim shirt flapping slightly in the light August breeze, breasts full and firm beneath, blond hair looking gold in the sunlight. Ah, she was a brave one. A good one. I could imagine her teddy-bear husband whimpering down below. And I thought: If I’m going to die, it’s at least nice to go with someone as brave as her in my mind; someone to replace the awful, bottomless insanity of Ellsworth.

  Because I was going to die. And so was she. And so was her husband.

  At a glance, Ellsworth saw what I saw. He laughed loudly. “Mrs. MacMorgan, it’s nice of you to try to save your husband—but you’ve forgotten one thing. You’ve forgotten to arm your weapon.”

  It was true. That ugly crescent cartridge clip was missing.

  The lovely face fell, horrified. She looked to me for confirmation. I nodded. And mustered up a brave wink; a wink because I wanted her to go out with at least a little hope, and because I was so, so sorry that blind bad luck had caused them to charter the boat of Billy Mack’s best friend, this one awful August day.

  “Come on down and join us, Mrs. MacMorgan. I’d like to get a closer look at the woman stupid enough to marry this droll human being who lies before me.”

  “She’s not my wife, Ellsworth! Let her go. She doesn’t know a damn thing.”

  “Sure, sure, MacMorgan. I’m surprised you found such a pretty lady, frankly.”

  The woman stood beside him now, shrunken, slack, as if she were in shock.

  “But you know, it’s hard to see how pretty you are with all those clothes on.”

  “Don’t!”

  He leveled the gun at me again. “Don’t move again, MacMorgan. Don’t lift a finger, or you’ll watch her die.”

  Her lips were trembling, her entire body shaking. Ellsworth reached up with his left hand, still watching me, and ripped her shirt open. Buttons skittered over the teak deck. She was braless beneath the shirt; brown cones of breast pointed skyward.

  “Lisa-lee! Lisa-lee, what’s going on out there?”

  Lisa-lee—so that was her first name.

  Ellsworth raised his eyebrows. “Ah, so we’re about to have another guest, huh?”

  Her husband peeked around the cabin wall, then ducked back in, like a turtle.

  Ellsworth smiled. “Well, maybe this will bring our frightened friend out. Get down on your knees, woman!”

  As she dropped to her knees, facing Ellsworth, he pulled the shirt off her. Her skin glistened in the sun. I knew what he wanted her to do. And I hated the thought of it. Slowly, his eyes darting from me to her, from her back to me, he unzipped his pants. And that’s when I decided. I decided I would force him to shoot. It didn’t matter. He would kill me anyway. And just as I was about to leap at him, hoping I would at least get my hands on his throat before he shot me down, Lisa-lee Johnson, that pallid, terrified woman, reached back and gave him such a fist to the groin that had it been his heart it would have killed him.

  It didn’t kill him, of course. But he howled. And, with me already in motion, I was on him before he even had time to shoot. Like a linebacker nailing a little tailback, I hit him with such force that his neck jerked back with a loud pop and the gun flew out of his hand into the water. I hoped I hadn’t killed him. I wanted to hurt him, to punish him. I wanted him to live—for a while.

  He wasn’t dead. He started up at me, and when he did I kicked him full in the face. He lay there choking on his own teeth, and then he turned an awful face toward us. “They’ll get you for this, MacMorgan. You’ll pay for this, you silly naive bastard!”

  Lisa-lee Johnson held close to me, trembling, feeling very small.

  “Lisa-lee, go back to my boat. Back to the cabin. Get some clothes on.”

  “You’re not going to kill him!”

  “What?”

  She sagged against me, her arms holding me. She was crying, tears dripping down onto her bare breasts. �
�I can’t take any more, Dusky. I can’t listen to another scream. Please, oh please, Dusky, let the police have him. He’ll be imprisoned. Or go to the electric chair. Please!”

  Gently, I pushed her away from me. I was the madman, now. Oh, I was going to kill him, all right. Lieutenant Benjamin Ellsworth was about to die with the hands of a trashy high-school-dropout circus orphan at his throat. Oh yes, I would kill him. And make it last as long as I could.

  I jerked him to his feet, slapping him to make sure he was conscious. And just when I got my hands around his throat, just as his eyes started to bug, that’s when the Coast Guard jet helicopter came roaring over. They were screaming at me over the PA system. And Lisa-lee, with her tiny hands, was trying to pry my huge ones away from the throat of Ellsworth.

  “They’ll try you for murder, Dusky. Think of your wife, for God’s sake. They’ll arrest you!”

  So the Coast Guard carted Lieutenant Benjamin Ellsworth away, his bloody face smirking, his promise still ringing in my ears: “They’ll get you for this. You’ll pay. . . . ”

  But they would arrest him for murder. And try him. And send him to prison. Or the electric chair. Because this is the United States of America. Home of the brave, land of the free. Where judges are fearless in their application of the law. Where lawyers are servants of the public, battling for what is right. Where justice is blind, blind, blind.

  Sure it is.

  Absolutely.

  No doubt about it.

  Right. . . .

  V

  It took exactly five days for Ellsworth’s threats to become a reality. Five days, seven hours, and thirtysome minutes. I know because I looked at my Rolex when I heard the explosion. And when I realized that the sound of the explosion came from the direction of our home on Elizabeth Street, the time was seared into my memory for the hellish eternity I knew my life would be from that moment on.

  Ellsworth was right. Correct on every point. I was naive. And stupid. And “they” would get even.

  They didn’t kill me. But they tried. And, in trying, they did what I had done to Charlie, the pill-eyed blond pirate. They tore my life away at the throat. I wasn’t dead, but I was a corpse. A living, walking corpse.

  When I finally got back to the docks with the Johnsons, I had resigned myself to the fact that it all wasn’t just a bad dream, a blue-water vision that occasionally befalls the solitary open-ocean sailor: dreams that can either horrify or delight, but always seem very, very real indeed right down to the last detail. No, the look on Lisa-lee Johnson’s face alone was testament enough to the reality of it all. She had retreated to a far corner of the Sniper, alone, shrunken, looking very pale, while her beefy husband pouted below. He was outraged that she could have allowed that vile man with the pistol to rip her shirt off. The nerve of that woman! Traipsing around bare-chested in front of total strangers!

  He was shocked and outraged by the whole episode. No burst of realization in that chubby husband: That is one magnificent human being I have as a wife. Her bravery was wasted on him.

  As they filed off my boat, staggered by the violence which occurs daily in this world, but had only been bad half-hour TV dramas in their world, I tried to apologize to Lisa-lee.

  “Mrs. Johnson, had I known . . . had I had any idea . . . ”

  She looked up at me, her blue eyes troubled, her brain scanning to make some sense of it all.

  I said, “Don’t try to reason it out. There are some very bad things in this world. Very bad. Today, you got a little glimpse of them. But don’t try to make them fit into some orderly scheme, some great and glowing plan, because they won’t. I know. I’ve tried.”

  She smiled, then, a narrow, sharp smile—the kind you might have expected to see on the face of Mark Twain. “Crazy world, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My husband didn’t catch his world-record fish.”

  “His wrist . . . I really am sorry about that. I expect to pay all the doctor—”

  She held her hand up. “We’re insured for everything. We should be. He sells it. Insured clear up until the time he takes his last passive breath.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him.”

  She reached up and touched my face; touched it as she had on the boat before it had all happened. “I’m the better for you, Captain Dusky MacMorgan. And I won’t be too hard on him—in fact, I’ll be quite the opposite. And I’ll mail your shirt back to you the first chance I get.”

  She turned to walk away, then stopped, hesitated, looked back at me. “He really would have killed us, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, he would have killed us all.”

  She nodded, thinking, then turned and followed her outraged husband back into her own life.

  Timing is an odd thing. Take a side street instead of the main street and you miss the drunken driver who, on a different day, would run the stop sign and bring your innocent existence to a fiery end. You leave the house thirty seconds too early on a nondescript day for a pack of gum at the corner store, and you miss the telephone call which would have altered the course of your whole life. As I tied up my Sniper I wondered what might have happened had Billy Mack decided not to go after dolphin that day; wondered what if he had made it back to the docks. Wondered what if Mr. Johnson had taken his world-record Atlantic; what if, to celebrate, he had taken me and Billy and Lisa-lee down to Sloppy Joe’s; what if Billy and Lisa-lee had hit it off, as I knew they would have. What if, indeed. . . .

  But Billy wasn’t coming back to the docks that day or any day. His Ernie’s Honor would be towed back in later, quiet as a coffin, and we would never crack a beer after a day’s fishing and shoot the breeze again.

  No, the only person to meet me on the docks that day, as I drained down a cold Hatuey, trying to figure out how I was going to break the news about Billy to Janet and the boys, was a tiny, officiallooking man in a gray suit. He strode up as if he were seven feet tall, filled with his own importance. He stopped at my slip, flashed a badge in my face, then started to step aboard.

  “Hold it, partner.” He stopped. “How ’bout asking permission before you step onto my vessel?”

  He looked slightly flustered. “Mr. MacMorgan, my name is Lenze. Arnold Lenze, and I’m with the federal government. I head up a special task force mandated to investigate drug smuggling and drug-smugglin-grelated crimes, and then to prosecute. We work with the blessing of local law-enforcement agencies, but independently of them and beyond their authority. I want a statement from you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Ask to come aboard, and I’ll talk your ear off.”

  He flushed, more than just a tad pissed off. Federal government. One of the superior few. Well, I knew his type. One of the thousands of people who couldn’t make it in the free-enterprise system, so made a blind reach for solvency and came up with the government teat. Leach of the bureaucracy; leach of the people. They suck us dry with their self-importance and their federal programs.

  “Mr. Lenze,” I said, “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m really not. But this has been one of the nastier days, and I don’t think a little common courtesy is too much to ask.”

  “MacMorgan, you’re very damn lucky I don’t arrest you and charge you with attempted murder!”

  “What?”

  “That’s right! Mr. Ellsworth gave me a very interesting statement.”

  “Ellsworth was with the two druggies. He’s part of the operation—”

  “He told his story, and he also told us what you would say. MacMorgan, Mr. Ellsworth is a highly respected civil servant in Miami—”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told us the truth, I assume. That he was kidnapped to be used as a hostage by those two men that he killed.”

  “That he killed!”

  “That’s right. That he struggled free of the ropes with which he was tied after being loaded into the stolen boat, that he overpowered his two captors, and then you came along. He said that you had recognized your
friend’s boat, and that you were ready to kill somebody, anybody, and that you especially wanted to kill him because he was your superior in the Navy. Frankly, I can relate to that because I myself was a lieutenant in the Army, and my men often threatened to kill me.”

  “Lenze, he fed you bullshit. Raw bullshit! My God, there are witnesses. Two of them just left!”

  He pushed his glasses up off the bridge of his nose and opened a manila folder. “Good. Give me their names and their addresses, and we’ll get in touch with them.”

  “Johnson,” I said. “But I don’t know their address. From someplace in New York, I think.”

  He looked up at me. “You have no address? Mr. MacMorgan, there are probably a hundred thousand Johnsons in New York. I need something a little more specific. What motel are they staying in?”

  “They left for home today—wait a minute, you can catch them at the hospital if you hurry. Mr. Johnson had a broken wrist.”

  “Did one of the two boat thieves do it?”

  “No, I did—and there were three, not two. Ellsworth was—”

  “MacMorgan, I’ve already taken a statement from one Nels Chester. He told me four men—two black, two white—were involved in the theft. He said that a black man and a white man killed Mr. William Mack, and then made off with his boat. Mr. Ellsworth says he killed the two men—”

  “I did!”

  “—one black, one white. It gives countenance to his story. Tell me, MacMorgan, why did you break Mr. Johnson’s wrist?”

  I closed my eyes, shaking my head. I couldn’t believe it.

  “MacMorgan, before I came here I had a phone call from a United States Senator. A very important Northern Senator who vacations in Florida and knows Mr. Ellsworth very well. He told me Mr. Ellsworth was one of the finest, most honest men he knew. And I believe that, MacMorgan. So why don’t you just tell me the truth? Mr. Ellsworth isn’t going to press charges—that’s the kind of man he is, apparently. He says he understands your grief at the loss of your friend. Frankly, if you had tried it on me, buster, I’d have seen your tail in prison.”