Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 28

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 28

Harry caught me before I was halfway back to the shed. He was raging, giving off sparks. He rose up from behind the dune as I came along and stood squarely in front of me with his arms crossed.

"Just what the bloody hell do you think you're up to?" he grated.

My heart jumped a couple of beats. He could still manage to scare me.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Making an ass of yourself with Hester. Imposing on her hospitality. Goddamn horny kid! Do you want to get us kicked off this island? Christ, she could be your mother!"

He was almost dancing up and down in his fury. But suddenly I felt very cool. My heart steadied and all the anxiety I usually felt with Harry seemed to melt away. If anything I felt a little sorry for him. Our roles seemed to be reversed. Harry was the one who was behaving like a kid, spying on people and having tantrums. There wasn't anything I wanted to say to him just then except to advise him to cool it, but I thought it would be better not to say anything at all. So I just walked away.

It was kind of a hairy feeling to turn my back on Harry when he was that sore. I half expected him to climb right up my spine and club me with that Japanese head punch he had used in the casino. Or if not that, a rock or a coconut. But he did nothing. All the same, I could feel his eyes biting into the back of my head.

He beat me back to the shed. He must have run through the brush and he was covered with sweat. He was standing there waiting for me when I came up the path. This time he didn't yell at me.

"Stay away from her, Clay," he said in a flat voice.

"You can't give me orders anymore, Harry. Not after Nassau."

"I'm telling you, kid. For your own good."

"The same way you told Grogan? Or the way you told me when I was swimming around the harbor that night when you went right by me and waved goodbye?"

"Now listen. Just calm down."

"I'm calm. You're the one that's excited."

"All right," he said. "We've got a job to do here."

"What job?"

"We've got to get Jezebel off the reef."

"No we don't. You've got to get her off. You're the one. that put her on."

I think that came as a blow to him. He stood very still, but his shoulders seemed to slump a little.

"You're quitting?" he said.

"I didn't say that."

"What did you say then?"

"Where's the money, Harry?"

"So it's come to that. In the end it always does. What do you want now? Half?"

I shook my head. "I don't want anybody else's money. Just mine. My original share."

"You'll get it."

"When?"

"When we leave."

"You mean when you leave, don't you Harry? When Jezebel is refloated and you take off some dark night. Will you wave goodbye to me again this time?"

He grinned. It was not much of a grin but at least he made the effort. "Little Clayton Bullmore Third from Peckinpaugh. Doesn't trust his Uncle Harry."

"That's right."

"You want the money now?"

"Yes."

"Right this minute?"

"Anytime will do. But the sooner I get it, the sooner I'll go back to work on the boat."

"You'll get it tonight."

"What's the matter? Afraid I'll follow you to see where you hid it?"

"Frankly, yes," he said.

We left it at that. He went into the shed and I retired to my hammock. In little while Hester came by.

"What happened to you?" she said.

"Nothing."

"You disappeared so suddenly."

"It was nothing. I just thought I'd head back."

She made an inquiring gesture with her head toward the shed as if to ask whether Harry was in there and I nodded. The answer seemed to satisfy her. Either she had seen us together on the beach or had guessed that we'd been through some kind of confrontation. She was very quick that way. She was also quick enough to know that he was probably listening to every word we said.

"Well, I think it's siesta time," she said.

"Yes."

"Happy dreams, Clay. See you later."

"Yes."

I watched her go, her neat trim little figure, the compact way she held herself when she walked. I settled back in the hammock. I had supposed that with everything that had happened I would be too exited to sleep, but I went right off.

When I got up I peeked in at Harry. The shed door was closed so I figured he was still asleep. There was no sign of Hester. I took the fins and mask and swam out to Jezebel.

High tides had come and gone and she had not budged. She would have to be lightened before she could float. It would be an awful job, but there did not seem to be any other way. The first thing to start with would be the inside ballast, about a ton of it. It was in the form of lead pigs weighing about a hundred pounds each. It would have been a lot easier with Harry to give me a hand but the way things were between us I preferred to work alone.

I pried up the floorboard and felt around under the water for the first of the pigs. The metal was slimy from the bilge water and I could not get a solid grip. I was afraid of smashing my fingers or toes if the thing slipped. I went back to the engine room, got the big old screwdriver, and used it to pry up one end of the pig. Then I managed to get a fairly solid grip on it and slid it out of the bilge. In that narrow space and with the boat canted the way it was, it was no cinch to wrestle with a hundred pounds of greasy lead, but I finally got it over to the companionway and out on deck. By the time I did, sweat was pouring down my back. And there were nineteen more of them to go. And if that did not do the trick I would then have to start throwing overboard everything else I could find, including maybe the engine. In any case, I did not want her to come off the reef with water gushing through that hole. She might sink before we could get her over to the beach.

I dug up the rest of the floorboards and found that I still could not get at the turn of the bilge where the coral had come through the planking. I would have to tear out the forward bunk on the port side. So I started with the screwdriver and hammer and just went ahead, splintering and smashing and throwing bits of wood over the side. Harry would probably not be too happy about it but I could not see any other way to handle it.

In between hammer blows I heard the sound of the outboard and stuck my head up through the hatch. It was Hester in her old skiff. She went by without a glance and I thought at first she was heading right out to sea, but then as she reached the end of the channel she swung around as if she had suddenly changed her mind and headed back in my direction. When she was alongside she cut the engine, nosed up into the tide, and let the skiff come to rest against Jezebel.

She smiled up at me and said, "You're a mess, little friend."

"I know. Come aboard."

"Am I disturbing you?"

"Gosh no. I'm glad to see you." And I was. The prospect of the whole lousy hot dirty job that lay ahead had been getting me down, but Hester seemed to bring with her a kind of cheery vitality that swept it all away. I had the feeling that nothing could intimidate her; that if she had lived in the days when people had been burned alive at the stake, she would spit on the fire and grin while the flames mounted around her.

She had with her a little straw picnic basket, and she handed it up to me. It held a bottle of wine and some cheese and crackers.

"I thought you might be getting hungry," she said. "I'm always hungry."

"How marvelous to be seventeen," she said. "With everything before you."

"Well, you have everything before you."

"Yes I do, but there's quite bit behind me too."

I waited for her to go on, but that was as far as she would go. When it came to talking about herself I never got anything more than cryptic little bits and pieces like that.

"You take a swim," she said, "while I open the wine."

I went over the side in a long flat dive and plowed about halfway across the channel holding my body high in the water and digging in hard and feeling full of strength. Hester affected me that way. I felt full of confidence and guts when she was around.

I wondered if Harry was watching us. I scanned the beach but could not see him.

When I pulled myself up, she had spread the contents of the basket out in the cockpit and opened the wine. It was a Spanish wine, very dry and tart, and you could taste it on your tongue long after it had gone down.

I wanted very much to touch her, just to feel her flesh against mine. But I was nervous about it. Had she changed her mind about me? Decided I was nothing but a punk kid? But I knew she hadn't. Why would she have come to the boat if that were the case?

I put down the glass of wine and reached out and took her hand. The skin of her palm was a little rough from gardening. She tightened her grip on mine, but we did not make a move toward each other. My anxiety began to fade. I felt as I had during the confrontation with Harry. On top of the situation. Quite different than I had ever felt with Miss Wong or Elvira McGee. Hester wasn't teasing me. I don't think she would have been capable of it. She honestly liked me. I knew that sooner or later we would go to bed together.