Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 07

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 7

It was like they had gone crazy. Miss Wong said harry was a kind of catalytic agent that drove people right out of their mother-loving skulls. She said she had seen it happen before. But take this time with the Burgers. They were zombies, walking dead, until they met Harry. He zinged them like stepping on a high-tension wire. They didn't even know how dead they had been until they got a jolt from Harry. But it was kind of addictive medicine. They couldn't let go of him after that.

Anyway, Charisma charged up astern like she meant to go right through us. And there were Mr. and Mrs. Burger jumping up and down and waving their arms. We rocked wildly in their wake as they circled around us. They were hollering at us but the wind blew their voices away. All the same the message was clear; they were going with us. Harry, ignoring the whole thing, stood at the wheel gazing sternly out to sea like Christopher Columbus. They hullabalooed around us a few more times, and then dropped back and took up a position astern like a mother duck watching a baby learn to swim.

This time we got the sail up and the halliard held. It was the first time I had ever been under sail anywhere, and it was kind of exciting. Jezebel laid over as she caught the wind. The big, ragged, floppy tent of a sail billowed out. And the old tub seemed to come alive, like some old horse suddenly beginning to prance around the barnyard on a brisk fall morning. And without the engine it was marvelously quiet. Like gliding. We charged out toward the horizon at a snappy three miles an hour.

Somebody had eaten breakfast off the chart; it was spotted with coffee stains and marmalade. But you could still see a little speck called Bimini and that was where we were heading. It was only fifty miles away, but the trouble was we had to go right across the Gulf Stream, which was going faster than we were. So, all the time we were sailing east we were really going north. And in addition there is such a thing as leeway in a sailboat. I mean, you don't just point the boat in the direction you want to go. You point it in a totally different direction and just hope that one thing will sort of balance out another. And hope that the boat will hold together. And that you don't get clobbered by a hurricane. Altogether I figured our chance of hitting Bimini was about one in four hundred.

It took us four days to go the fifty miles. Murphy's Law was working overtime. For one thing the compass was a joke. It was one of those mickey-mouse gadgets. designed to be stuck on the dashboard of a car, and it kept falling off wherever we stuck it and finally broke altogether. After that we steered by the auxiliary compass which was mounted on the head of a plastic ballpoint pen stamped COMPLIMENTS OF METROPOLITAN MORTGAGE COMPANY. And, of course, the sails blew out. They were so old and rotten they just seemed to dissolve every time the wind got over ten miles an hour. So I sewed. And when I wasn't sewing I was trying to fix the engine, which had quit again. I opened up the strainer and found it looking like the bottom of a spittoon. There was everything in there but cigar butts, and there might even have been a couple of those. In addition, we sprang a leak. Or leaks. Suddenly we had water over the floorboards and I let out a holler.

"You don't want to get into a sweat, Number Three,"

Harry said. "A little water is good for the boat. Keeps the bilges sweet. Prevents dry rot. Start pumping."

"Where's the pump?"

"Up forward. Use your eyes, son."

I rummaged around in the fore-peak Empty paint cans, useless brushes, a broken stove, lifeless rope, anchor with one fluke busted off, hammer head with no handle, a mile and a half of rusty wire. Finally the pump-one of those old tin things with a dried-out washer. You couldn't have emptied a teacup with it. I brought it up and showed it to Harry.

"You're the engineer," he said. "Pumping is in the engineering department."

When things were going good it was his department. When the ship was sinking it was my department.

The water was lapping the bunks now and there obviously was no time to lose. I needed rubber or leather to fix that pump. The only leather I had seen was Harry's briefcase tucked under his bunk. He might take a dim view of my chopping it up, but if I didn't do something soon it would only go down with the ship anyway.

It was full of some kind of diagrams. I removed them and cut a nice round patch out of the side. I stuffed them back, shoved the whole thing under the bunk, and started pumping. I pumped for like a day and a half and then started over again.

Fortunately we had no storms.

Charisma finally got tired of our nonsense and charged alongside.

"Which the hell way are you supposed to be going?" her captain bellowed through his bullhorn.

"North by east."

"Well, you're heading south by west. Where's your compass?"

Harry held up the ballpoint pen. I thought the captain would have a stroke. When he had pulled himself together they lowered a basket containing a compass in a beautiful mahogany case. With it was a bottle of champagne tied up with one of Mrs. Burger's pink ribbons. She blew us a kiss.

"Why don't you stop all this nonsense and let us give you a tow?" the captain said.

"Tow be blowed. I've wrung more salt water out of my socks than you've ever sailed on," Harry answered.

On our third night out we saw something that might have been the loom of a distant lighthouse. Harry consulted the chart. He looked smug. "That will be Great Isaac Light. Just where it should be. We're only forty miles off course."

So we headed south. Two days later we saw a fringe of trees on the horizon. Then a radio tower and rooftops and finally the land itself looking low and very brown. I wondered if it was Bimini or China. I did not feel much excitement because I was too tired. I had been up and down that bloody mast half a dozen times. And I had broken my back pumping. And I had lain head down in the bilge cleaning the crap out of the strainer. And I had slept in a hole so small I could not raise my head six inches from the horizontal. Altogether I figured I had lost about fifteen pounds.

Not so Harry. He looked rested and refreshed. At ease with the world. Proud of his navigation.

Miss Wong was her usual self, cool and unfathomable and beautiful as ever. Charisma followed doggedly in our ragged wake.

A reef circled the island. We sailed all around it looking for an entrance. At last we found a narrow cut marked by a range. Harry claimed it was the range marker although to me it looked more like a ruined chicken house. But as it turned out there were no chickens on Bimini.

Unhappily, wind and tide were against us, and try as we might we could not get the old girl to beat through the cut. We strapped her down as hard as we could, but when we did she would not sail at all. Or if she did sail, it was sideways. There seemed nothing for it but to get the old Palmer going again. But I was not very happy about that because of the smell of gasoline all over the place. I was pretty well convinced that next time we pressed the starter, the whole thing would go up in smoke and we would go with it. But the ship was still leaking, and it seemed better to die a quick death in an explosion than a slow one manning the pump.

So I told myself here goes nothing and pressed the button. The usual cloud of oil and smoke spewed back onto my mattress, but otherwise it was okay. The pile of junk actually ran.

"Stand by to lower all plain sail," said Harry. "Avast and on the double. Which means I await your pleasure, Master Bullmore."

I pointed out that it might be better to keep the sail on her since only a complete moron would put his trust in that engine.

"Oh ye of little faith," cried Harry. "Lower sail, sir, and be damned to you."

So I did. And we started through. At full throttle she turned up a big fat thousand RPM. It was barely enough to hold us against the tide. When we did progress, it was a foot at a time. The Palmer wheezed and groaned. Suddenly she gave one of her typical farts and out came a cloud of smoke. The cabin was thick with it. The monkey shot into the rigging, and the cat ran for cover in the bilge.

I hung, head down, trying to figure out what had happened. Smoke and rusty water everywhere. And more water pouring in. A real geyser. Then I saw that the exhaust line was nothing but a hunk of rusty galvanized pipe about a hundred years old, and the pressure had been too much for it. It had busted in about six places below the water line and the ocean was coming in.

"What the hell is going on down there?" bellowed Harry.

Too busy stuffing rags into holes to answer. Mattress already under six inches of greasy water. And I knew the reef was not more than six feet away. A situation.

"Keep her going!" I yelled back.

He did. But Jezebel was sinking. I raised my head long enough to glance through the port and see that he was heading for a pier.

"Don't tie her up there," I yelled. "Beach her!"

He grinned at me. It was one of the times I liked him best. Piled on more steam and ran her straight onto the flats. I always said he had pizzazz. A smack as she hit and everything loose came crashing down. Monkey tossed out of the rigging with a despairing shriek. Luckily into three inches of water. Engine dead. No sound but the trickle of water and Harry's laughter. My aching back.