Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 23

1971 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Casino Heist

A wildly erotic novel of intrigue, suspense, and adventure...

There's a lot to be said for my Uncle Harry. Mostly unprintable. All my life I'd heard about him, and from a distance he was a kind of legend. But the moment I signed on as one-man crew to his beat-up old bucket, Jezebel, I found my hero of the sea was really a pirate. Broads and booze kept him afloat between capers—and so far, his luck was holding...

But this new harebrained scheme—to heist the loot from an island gambling casino—was the daffiest—and most dangerous yet.

And there I was. Right in the middle. Up to my virginal ears in naked nymphs and Nitrous oxide—with nothing between me and the future but a leaky getaway and a pot of gold that was fast disappearing behind Harry's private rainbow.

CHAPTER 23

I got to see Grogan too. Sort of by accident. Because of the bananas. I was eating nothing but bananas then, because they were the cheapest thing I could find. There was a little fruit stand down near the post office where I went to buy them. There was a very pretty white building across the street, and I did not even know it was the courthouse and jail until I cut across the grass and sat down under a tree to eat and saw Grogan. He was behind a barred window on the upper floor and his head was bent over and he looked like he might be praying. Maybe he was praying for Charity.

I wanted in the worst way to signal to him but I did not dare. Nor did I dare hang around there much longer. Cops kept zinging back and forth through the doorway, and I figured it was only a question of time until someone began to wonder what I was doing there. So I took my bananas and strolled past the building as if it could not have interested me less, trying hard all the while not to look up at Grogan's window.

But just before I went around the corner of the building I saw a flicker of movement from his window and something like a small white moth fluttered down into the bushes. I realized then that he had been watching me all the time and had tossed down a bit of paper. My impulse was to make a grab at it right then, but I controlled my impatience and went around the building and strolled back the other way. I dropped a banana, bent down to pick it up, and retrieved the tiny slip of paper at the same time. I risked a quick glance up at the window and saw him with his head just above the sill. He gave me a kind of grim little smile and then was gone.

I kept the paper crumpled in my hand until I was well away from the building and then risked a look. He had torn it out of a book. The printed words were all about primitive religions but scrawled over them was a kind of crude little map drawn very roughly in pencil. There were half a dozen circular spots that I finally concluded were islands. One of them was marked Wardrick Wells and another Galliot Cut. The others were unmarked. An arrow pointed toward the middle one. There was nothing more.

It was enough. I knew right off what he was trying to tell me. That dot marked by the arrow was where Harry had gone. Or at least it was where he was supposed to have gone the place he and Grogan had picked out ahead of time. But where was it? The names meant nothing to me. They sounded Bahamian all right, but then again they might have been West Indian. Chances were they were Bahamian. Jezebel was a handful in sloppy weather and a man alone on her would probably not elect to go too far. And if he was not being chased, there was no need for it. All he required was some isolated spot where he could hole up with his hundred and fifty thousand until the excitement died down.

For the first time in two days my life seemed to have some direction. I would go over the charts until I found the names Grogan had scrawled on the slip of paper, and then I would find Harry.

Why? I mean why find him?

I no longer knew.

At first I had felt that he had betrayed us all and had in some way been responsible for Charity's death and Grogan's capture. But I could see now that I had been unfair. He could not have known that Charity would be attacked on the boat and come running to the casino. Nor could he have known that Grogan would turn back for her. On the other hand, I was still convinced that he had seen me in the water and had deliberately refused to pick me up. What's more I had a hunch that he had planned all along to ditch both Miss Wong and myself as soon as we had played our parts in the casino holdup. By doing that he would have just about doubled his own take. Was it possible that my father had been right about him all along? If so, I would get my share of that money if I had to chase him all over the ocean.

Still thinking I might have been seen picking up Grogan's note, I doubled through Dogflea Lane to Angelfish Road to Conchshell Avenue and finally back to the Yacht Haven. I remembered having seen a copy of the Yachtsman's Guide to the Bahamas in the skin diving shop where Grogan had stored the tanks and I thought it would be as good a place as any from which to start my search.

It worked so simply I could hardly believe it. I did not even have to search through the charts. The place names were indexed at the back of the book and it took me only about half a minute to find Wardrick Wells and Galliot Cut. They were about halfway down the chain of islands which led to George Town in the Exumas. There were a lot of other little cays indicated on the chart, and Jezebel might be anywhere in among them. The best way to locate her would be from the air, but there was no way in the world I could afford to hire a plane. I would have to do it from the water and it might be a long search with nothing but disappointment at the end, but I was determined to go ahead with it anyway.

I told myself it was crazy. Harry was probably five hundred miles away in a different direction by this time. Even if that had been the original plan, why would he stick to it in view of the way everything had changed?

On the other hand, what choice did I have? Any American coming into the Bahamas was supposed to have a round-trip ticket. Even if I could somehow raise the money for a plane ticket home they would never let me out without wanting to know how I had arrived in the first place. I could of course simply tell them the truth, which was that I had come in on Jezebel, and they probably would not have given it a second thought until they began to compare the dates and find that she had been at Nassau on the same day the casino was robbed.

But if I went the other way-south-further into the islands, no one would be asking me anything.

I remembered, in leafing through the guide, that there had been some mention of a mail boat leaving once or twice a week for a round of the out-islands. I did not want to attract attention at the shop by going back again—they might have remembered seeing me there with Grogan—so I cut back along Bay Street to the Prince George Dock. There were several big cruise ships tied up there with a steady flow of sunburned tourists coming and going, and a lot of little native sloops anchored offshore, their decks knee-deep in pigs, kids, Coca Cola bottles, and crates of tomatoes. At the far end of the pier, pretty well hidden by the seagoing monsters around it, was a kind of scruffy-looking motor vessel about fifty feet long. Its dark green paint was peeling off and even from a distance the smell was enough to curl your hair. I figured it was probably the mail boat. It was. They agreed to take me to Highbourne Cay, about halfway down the Exuma chain, for ten dollars. I emptied my pockets and showed the skipper that I had exactly eight fifty. He agreed to take me for eight, leaving me with fifty cents. He asked if I had any luggage and I told him I was standing in it.

The mailboat was named Cockburn Queen. This was a name that afforded the passengers a lot of amusement and, since she was a very old boat, had apparently done so for a good many years. There were about fifteen passengers besides myself, all of them black, bound home to the islands after a buying spree on New Providence. Most had come provided with food and drink. When they saw that I had nothing, they were very generous about sharing. Since I had eaten nothing but bananas for the past two days, I must have wolfed down the equivalent of three loaves of bread in the hour or so before our departure.

We sailed at last, on the tide. The big old diesel had plenty of thrust, but it shook that boat like a dog with a rat. All conversation came to a standstill since the only way anyone could have been heard above the roar of the diesel would have been with a bullhorn.

I was very glad to be moving. For one thing I could hardly believe my good luck at getting away from Nassau without so much as a hard look from a policeman, and for another the stench that inhabited the old tub was soon carried aft by the sea breezes. We thundered along at about seven knots past Salt Cay and Sapphire Cay and Porgee Rock and a lot of other equally pretty places, but I saw nothing of them because I was asleep. The weariness and excitement of the past couple of days hit me like a club. I lay down on the deck and closed my eyes and when I opened them again there was nothing to be seen but a cloudy night sky and the running lights of an occasional vessel.

At dawn we were passing over the Yellow Bank and it was a little scary because of the way the coral heads grew up from the bottom like giant mushrooms. The Cockburn Queen's skipper plunged straight ahead and I could swear that at times we had no more than six inches of water under our keel. I wondered if Jezebel had come this way and if so how Harry had managed, without a lookout, to thread his way between the heads.

Since there was nothing I could do about it in any case, and since I had eaten the last of my bananas, I went back to sleep.

By noon we were approaching the first islands of the Exuma chain, and I sat up on the bow hoping to catch a glimpse of Jezebel's masts. As we went down the chain of islands I did see a couple of sailboats here and there, but none had her peculiarly raked spars.

Shortly before dark we came to Highbourne Cay and that was where the skipper put me off. He said that was as close as he came to the area I was interested in, and in any case that was as far as my fare would take me.

I stepped out onto the rickety dock and watched the Cockburn Queen depart. Miserable old tub that she was, I hated to see her go. I was lonely and hungry and as the night wind came up I began to feel cold. The only sign of habitation was a house far up on the hill about a mile off, and there was no light showing from it. There was the beginning of a road and a mass of rusty junk that might once have been a tractor. A bunch of old oil drums lay scattered at the base of the pier. I went over and thumped them, thinking that if they still contained fuel it might indicate that boats stopped there, but they were empty. The only good thing was that I found two coconuts washed up on the beach near the drums. They seemed pretty old, but I broke them open and got a little meat out of them and a few swallows of coconut milk. After that I sat down and waited to see what would happen.