Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 26

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 26

It was hard to stay mad at Harry. A sense of outrage is hard to keep up for any length of time anyway, and how could you stay mad at a man who made no effort to apologize or explain or defend himself! To him it was all a game and none of it seemed to matter. I mean I am sure he was sorry about Charity, but he did not brood about it. He said that she was doomed anyway. He was sensitive to vibrations and he had never met anybody with so many vibrations of doom. He was a fatalist about things like that, and poor Charity had obviously been heading for a sticky end anyway. It was true that in a way he had been the agent for her death, but even that had been inevitable—all planned beforehand by the fates or sea gods or whatever.

I told him that in my opinion what he was saying was just a big cop-out—a nice way of shifting responsibility. He said that nobody was really responsible for anybody else, and that a man was responsible only to his own sense of morality, whatever that might be.

"What about Grogan then?" I said.

"Grogan was a fool and a born loser. What good did it do to turn back for the girl? Did it save her life?"

"No, but he couldn't have known that at the time."

"If he had stopped to think, he would have realized that nothing he could have done for her would have affected her in the end anyway. He was only putting his own neck under the chopper for no reason."

"He was in love."

"I agree. Poor, silly, little bastard. But what is love? Love is a selfish emotion. Possessive. Greedy. A greedy man will eat more than is good for him. A loving man will love more than is good for him. Grogan is in jail now because he was greedy and loving."

"Haven't you ever been in love?"

He shook his head. "Not that way. There have been women I was fond of and that I enjoyed being with, but if I never saw them again that was all right, too. When the time came to split I always did it without a quiver."

"Like with Miss Wong?"

"Exactly," he said.

"Anyway, you're putting the cart before the horse. You said Grogan is in jail now because he loved Charity. In a way you're right, but the real reason he's in jail has nothing to do with that."

"Meaning?"

"That you talked him into a crazy scheme to rob the casino. That's why he's in jail."

He looked around and put a finger to his lips and said, "For God's sake, tone it down to a dull roar, will you."

"What does it matter now who hears? What does any of it matter now?"

"Shut your bloody mouth, you idiot."

For the first time since I had come to Rumbullion Cay he was losing his temper. In a sense I liked him better that way. I mean at least he was human, not a block of ice peddling generalities about doom and fate.

"All right," I said.

"You want to start diving on Jezebel now?"

"Sure," I said. "Why not?"

Neither one of us had mentioned the money. I was willing to leave it that way. For the time being I didn't want to think about it.

I said goodbye to Mr. Albury and thanked him for bringing me over. He said it was nothing and that he hoped we would be able to salvage the wreck. Miss Soames was there to watch him go. She gave him a hug. I liked her for that. We watched him take off, going wing and wing down channel. He sure could sail, that old man.

I said, "I like him."

"So do I," she said.

"Have you known him long?"

"Years."

"He seems very well educated."

"For what?" she said with a smile. "For a black?"

She was testing me, I realized.

"I mean for someone who lives alone on an island," I answered, knowing as I said it that it wasn't what I meant to say. Yes, all right, for a black then.

"I live alone on an island," she said. "But you haven't lived here always."

"Neither has Albury. He was a doctor at one time. Took his degree in London."

"Then what's he doing here?"

"I've never asked him. Island people don't ask questions." Meaning, of course, that I shouldn't ask her any questions either. But it was clear that something had happened with both of them, with her and Albury, that had driven them to this kind of life. She was a strange woman. I mean she was pleasant enough but very cool. Detached. She had taken my appearance on the island for granted and she would take my disappearance just as easily. No questions. Something like Harry that way. A kind of inner strength. They had themselves. Other people were not all that important to them.

Harry came out of the shed carrying a face mask and a pair of flippers. He said, "You'll need these. There's a hell of a tide rip sets on and off that reef."

Miss Soames said, "Aren't you going with him?" Harry shrugged. "He's better at it than I am."

She regarded him with those cool gray eyes and said nothing. But she got to him. I saw a little flush along his cheekbones. It was the first time I had ever seen him put out by what anybody thought of him. Then he grinned and put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze in a familiar kind of way. She didn't pull away but she didn't respond the way a Carole Burger would have done. She just stood there until he dropped his arm. I saw him flush again. I thought it was just possible that maybe at long last he had met his match. I grinned at her, and although she didn't smile back, there was something in her eyes that made me feel good.

"I'll be seeing you," I said and picked up the mask and fins and walked down to the water. Although my back was turned I had the feeling that she was still watching me.

I put on the fins and wet the mask and waded out.

He was right about the tide. It must have been running at a good three or four knots. Without the flippers I don't think I could have made it. As it was, I was pretty well beat by the time I hit the deck.

At least it was easy getting aboard with the poor old girl laid over on her beam ends that way. She was on about a forty-five-degree angle, and you had to hang on to something just to get around. The hatch was open and even from the deck I could see water sloshing over the floorboards, but it was hard to tell if that had come through a hole in the bottom or had been washed in from above.

I guess a shipwreck must be one of the saddest sights in the world. A car wreck is bad enough, but when a car is really smashed it seems to be turned instantly into broken glass and junk metal. But a boat on a reef still has her personality. The water joggles her and she still seems half alive and struggling to get off. She is like a wounded bird caught on barbed wire. Every motion digs the barb a little deeper, but she will still beat herself to death in the effort to escape.

And everything was a mess. That's another thing about a boat; in ten minutes it can be turned from a cozy little home to a shambles. Whatever wasn't nailed down had come adrift. Pepper, salt, bacon, frying pans, flour, dishes, eggs, and a couple of broken bottles of rum had manicured the sides of the cabin and then combined together on the floor.

I made my way through the mess and then crawled back aft to what Harry had called the Black Hole. My mattress was still there, although being lapped now by several inches of water. I reached under the mattress and found my wallet. My thirty dollars was wet but otherwise intact. Why was I worried about thirty dollars when I was about to share in more than a hundred and fifty thousand? Because this thirty dollars was mine. I had earned it in the course of a lousy summer working for nickel and dime tips as a bagman in the supermarket. I knew how many hours of hauling and lugging had gone into that thirty bucks. The other? Well, the other was a dream. A bad dream now considering what had happened to poor old Jezebel and to Charity and Grogan.

All the same if it was still on the boat I meant to find it. So I made a thorough search in all the likeliest places but turned up nothing. Well, I had hardly expected to. He would not have been fool enough to leave it on the boat. Or if he had left it there he would not have let me come out alone looking for it. I gave it up finally and tossed my knapsack up on deck and then dropped over the side to inspect the hull damage.

Everything below was visible in the clear water. I could see the scars along the bottom left by her keel as she had struck first on the outer reef and then bounced across to become securely wedged on a spiny outcropping. And I could see, too, where one sharp tooth of coral had gone through her planking on the port side amidships. That was what was holding her fast. If that coral could be broken loose she could be gotten off the reef and, if she did not sink first, beached. It would have to be done at dead low water so that the rising tide would float her, and then she would somehow have to be gotten across the swiftly moving current that raced through the channel and on into the lagoon. I remembered the powerful outboard motor I had seen stripped down in the shed. Where there was a motor there ought to be a boat. If I could get the outboard going, and if we timed it right, we could probably pull her off with that. With a little luck the old girl might yet sail again. The thought cheered me up and I went over the side again with a hammer and whacked away a little chunk of the coral just to see how tough the job might be. The coral was iron hard, and I could not seem to get any leverage under water. It would be tougher than I had thought. But it could be done.

When I surfaced this time Miss Soames was there. She had come out in a skiff powered by a noisy, little, one-cylinder English outboard.

"How's it going?" she called out.

"Okay. I think she can probably be saved. She's just caught on a spur of the coral."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"Where's Harry?" I said, wondering why he had not come with her.

"Sulking."

"Harry?"

"Mmm." She had tied up alongside and stepped out onto Jezebel's canted deck.

"That doesn't sound like Harry," I said, climbing up beside her.

"Well, he is. Achilles in his tent."

I tried to think of a reason for his behavior and the only answer I could come up with was that he had made a pass at her and she had rejected him. It seemed to fit in with his need to get me off the island and out to the boat.

I was gasping for breath after being under water so long and fighting the tide. I stretched out on my back on the deck and sucked in air. The sun was warm on my face. What had really happened between them? When I had first landed on the island they had seemed very friendly. I'd had the feeling then that Harry was in control of the situation. Also, perhaps because of something Albury had said, I had thought of her as much older. A New England spinster lady living alone on this isolated cay. But I could see now she wasn't old. In her late twenties maybe. And very good-looking in her clean, bronzed, outdoor way. She had a beautiful figure—neat, compact, sturdy. But she didn't hit you in the face with it. I mean not the way Miss McGee did or Miss Wong or Mrs. Burger. There was nothing flirtatious about her. Yet behind those cool gray eyes there was a spark of something . . .

I had never met anybody quite like her. I mean I could not pin her down or classify her. In a way she was like the sea, always changing. Sometimes bright and sunny and other times cool and gray. And I had the feeling even then that no one would ever really get inside her. She made it clear from the start that the inner core of Hester Soames was her business and no one's else. I think that was what got Harry more than anything else. I don't suppose he had ever before met a woman he could not crack in one way or another. I don't mean just going to bed, although there was that too. What I am trying to say is he could not sort of compartmentalize her. She changed too fast for that. Even her appearance kept changing. There were times when she was kind of hunched in upon herself with tired eyes and looking like nothing so much as a little old man. Other times when she was erect and straight with smooth skin and flashing eyes and breasts thrust out like a sixteen-year-old girl.

While we lay there on deck in the sun she asked me about myself and I told her the whole story. That is up to the part about the casino. And of course I left out Charity and Grogan. But there was a big hole in the story when I came to that part and I had the uneasy feeling that I wasn't really fooling her. I don't mean that she knew the whole truth but just that I was leaving something out. I used to think I was a pretty good liar until I tried it out on Hester Soames. Right off she made me feel like I had been into the cookie jar. The way she put it to me later on, when we knew each other much better, was, "You sometimes have a little trouble with the truth, Clayton."

She was right. No matter how I tried I couldn't fool those cool gray eyes.