A Pure Double Cross (24 page)

I watched the Grumman bearing down and thought of another airplane, a lone B-24, and a farmhouse outside Heilbronn, swallowed up in flames. My death would not be so heroic as Alfred and Frieda's but damned if I was going to die in the toilet.

I stood up and walked to the stern and held on to a grab rail. I looked up at the starry sky.

“Beautiful night, isn't it?”

Jimmy turned to face me. “What're you, nuts?”

“That's entirely possible.”

Ah, but it was a beautiful night. Made even more so by a sudden warming wind from the north.

I had become a halfway decent meteorologist in my two-year overseas employment, accurate weather reports being critical for bombing runs. Spikes in temperature were usually accompanied by incoming weather systems. Clouds, big fat beautiful low-scudding clouds. When the mercury was really surging ground fog would rise up to greet them. If we could buy ourselves another fifteen minutes we might be able to escape under cloud cover. But one man's fifteen minutes is another man's eternity. Ask Einstein you don't believe me.

The Grumman Goose reached the frozen wave a mere two hundred yards to stern, but they no longer had a clearly carved ice channel to follow. Continuing due north would put us square in the crosshairs.

“Change course, ninety degrees!”

The Schooler didn't argue. He pinned the wheel to the left and leaned into the turn.

I clutched the grab rail on the stern of the
Tin Lizzie
with both hands and watched the furiously boiling wake.

Our course correction worked. The Grumman Goose continued north. And then the clouds rolled and the mist rose and the
Tin Lizzie
was swallowed up in heavenly vapor. The Grumman Goose kept its noisy vigil but they were flying blind. So long as the weather front kept us company we were snug as a bug.

“Free and clear on the high seas mates!” said The Schooler in his hearty sailor voice.

I echoed the sentiment with the only maritime expression I knew. “Anchors aweigh!”

Jimmy laughed at me, like he was an old salt from way back.

Truth was I had never understood why anyone would voluntarily abandon the feet-on-the-ground security of terra firma in order to be cooped up on a sea-tossed tub. My only nautical experience came from troop shipping over to Liverpool with a boatload of GIs. I wasn't in uniform and I wasn't permitted to say why. The OSS had warned me against fraternizing, which was a strange word to use for a young mope stuck on a passenger ship with a couple thousand other young mopes just like himself, scared, lonely, seasick.
Fraternize
is what you're not supposed to do with the enemy.

The clouds rolled and the fog swirled. The thrum of the twin engine Grumman grew faint. I drew a full unhurried breath for the first time in six hours.

The Schooler continued west at full throttle, which meant we weren't bound for Canada. Good, too obvious. And too far to go before dawn. Where else? Port Clinton? Sandusky? They'd have their PDs and Coast Guards on hot standby as the
teletype Paul Revere'd its alarum from post to post. Where else could we reach before dawn?

“Gimme back my shoes,” said Jimmy all of a sudden. He was squared up on the rear deck, raring to go.

“Why should I be the only one who looks ridiculous?” I said, lightheartedly.

“Gimme the fuckin' shoes!”

So much for the lighthearted approach. “Come get ‘em tough guy.”

Jimmy doffed his topcoat. I removed my windbreaker and assumed the position. Jimmy was a handful, no question. But if I couldn't handle a guy wearing bedroom slippers on a slippery deck it was time to hang up my cub scout beanie.

“Stow it, you nitwits,” shouted Henry.

“He won't give my shoes!” said Jimmy.

“What's wrong with your shoes Schroeder?”

“They're frozen!”

“Then set them on the engine block and give Jimmy back his pair,” said the long-suffering headmaster.

“Okay, on one condition,” I said to Jimmy. “You tell me how you got to the boathouse.” This wasn't much of a condition. Jimmy was dying to tell me about his clever subterfuge.

“You made a phone call.”

“Yeah I did. How'd you know that for sure?”

“I din't,” said Jimmy, “you told me.”

Sumbitch was right about that. All Jimmy knew for certain was that I was AWOL for a short bit of time at the brown brick monastery. He'd called my bluff and I bit, saying I had phoned Jeannie.

“You din't go through all that bullcrap just to call your lady friend,” said Jimmy. “You called for reinforcements, feds or crooks. Neither case was I getting behind the wheel of that panel truck.”

“If you knew that going in why didn't you rat me out to the old man?”

“If you called the feds the deal was dead, nuttin' I could do about it. But if you called in a new crew, well, I do what I did.”

Let the new hires risk their necks. Hide yourself under a rowboat in hopes the new hires got lucky. Then ambush them with your sawed-off.

The
Tin Lizzie
buzzed through the scattered ice, the clouds rolled and the fog swirled. I asked the question again.

“How did you get to the boathouse?”

“In an Alfa Romeo roadster. Lizabeth's car.”

“You swiped her keys.”

“She drove me herself,” said Jimmy with a lurid grin.

The Schooler was standing at the helm, the seat of the captain's chair bracing his lower back, grinning, talking to himself, in his glory. I nodded my head in his direction.

“You want to say that a little louder Jimmy?”

“Gimme back my shoes!”

I did so, taking my sweet time, then shuffled my slippers down to the cabin to retrieve my soggy brogans. I opened the bulkhead door.

My knees buckled and my head swam. Heat. The cabin was
heated.
I had stripped off my clothing in this very room, I would have noticed. Unless I was too frozen. Or the heat hadn't kicked in yet. And how does a cabin cruiser heat itself anyway?

I flopped down on the narrow bunk and fell dead asleep.

I woke up on the floor of the cabin about four hours later. 3:40 a.m. The
Tin Lizzie
was no longer slicing through icebound Lake Erie like a hot knife. In fact we seemed to be moving backwards at the moment.

Then we reversed gear, shot forward and smacked into something, hard. The hull of the ship shuddered and groaned. We backed up and did it again. No wonder I woke up on the floor.

Jimmy banged in. “Wake up Sleeping Beauty.”

“And you must be the handsome prince.”

“It's boathook time, funny boy.”

I climbed to my feet and followed Jimmy up to the rear deck. We sat on the gunwale and held fast as The Schooler put the iceboat through its paces, backing and ramming, backing and ramming. We had outrun our warm front. The night was clear and bright with stars, and cold as a banker's smile. I looked to see what The Schooler was trying to bust his way through.

Plates of ice had fissured and overlapped. The obstruction wasn't nearly as tall as the sculpted wave but it was a damn sight wider. The
Tin Lizzie
backed and rammed once again, then sat back on its scuppers, exhausted. I looked again. The boat had only carved a small vent in the windrow or pressure ridge or whatever it was.

The Schooler looked down at us from the wheelhouse. Jimmy handed me a boathook pole with the big-toothed saw attachment. I stood up and sat down.

I'm a trooper, I'm a super-duper double trooper. But Jimmy and I weren't equipped to do the work of a 10,000 hp diesel
iceboat with bilge pumps that move the ballast fore to aft. I said as much.

“You're the genius Henry. Dazzle us.”

The Captain of the
Tin Lizzie
took this challenge with a snide smile. He bent to his stow box and removed what looked like two leather bridles.

“And I suppose we're the horsies.”

The Schooler did a hearty pirate version of his flat clipped laugh.
Herr herr herr. Herr herr herr.

Turned out the bridles were safety harnesses - you clip ‘em onto the hand railing so's you don't fall off the boat when you snag a big one. Jimmy and I shrugged into them. The Schooler positioned us amidships with our boathooks, saw attachments removed. Jimmy was starboard, I was port. Then he backed the Chris Craft up the channel a good thirty yards.

“Poles at the ready gentlemen,” called The Schooler as he gunned the engines.

I raised my ten foot pole up high like I knew what I was doing. We motored forward at a stately pace. If Captain Bligh intended to blast his way through the jumbled ice plates he had better pick up the pace.

He did. Ten yards shy of impact The Schooler redlined the inboards, raising the serrated bow of the
Tin Lizzie
just enough to ride the carved vent up and onto the thick mass of ice.

“Pole, you worthless buggers, pole!” shouted Henry in his hearty sailor's voice.

We poled. We dug the boathooks into the starchy ice and oared the boat forward with all we had. I counted six full strokes before the cabin cruiser ground to a halt.

“To the cutwater!” crowed The Schooler.

I unclipped my harness and followed him to the prow of the boat. Jimmy was already there. The Chris Craft was teetering on a precipice of ice plates. All we needed was a shift in the cargo load to get us over the hump and into the thinner ice below.

Jimmy, the big hambone, climbed over the bow and hung from the handrail like a grotesque figurehead. Henry and I did our bit by jumping up and down, but it was Jimmy's triumph when the
Tin Lizzie
slowly, finally, slid down to the other side.

Just as the prow dove into the thin ice the hull shuddered and made a long loud wrenching sound. It came from the stern, starboard side. The Schooler clambered back to inspect the damage. I held fast to the handrail and understood about boats.

I've always been a car guy. My best ever was a deuce coupe Ford. I tinkered with it, spent money on it, took it out on the weekends. But I didn't sit up nights worrying about it, it didn't have a
name.
Then again I didn't have to worry about an untimely burial at sea if the oil pan sprang a leak.

El Capitan surveyed the hull and gave us a thumbs up. Untimely burial at sea postponed. He climbed back onto the bridge, throttled forward and ground his way through the brittle harbor ice.

And harbor ice it was. Smudgepots of light glimmered in the distance, dead ahead. We were approaching our destination. An island.

An island. A place for this weary landlubber to rest his bones. A place for this sorry backstabber to sort things out.

I had double crossed both The Schooler and Jimmy Streets and lived to tell about it. I assumed The Schooler would forgive and forget, given how things had rounded out. Then again I had messed with his masterpiece.

And I had committed the cardinal sin with Jimmy Streets. I had tried to chump him, which meant I thought he was stupid. The wheel had turned in his favor but Jimmy wouldn't forget. The moment he glommed his share of the laundered money our ironclad triangle would pull apart.

Or sooner. If I'm Jimmy why wait for the mob juice dealer to show? Why not clean house with my sawed-off and get in the wind, find a way to launder the newly-minted money my own damn self?

Come to that if
I
were me why wait for the money broker? I was the one who said
and the juice dealer will bring friends.

It grew colder on the rear deck as the cabin cruiser ground its way toward the island. The racket was ear-busting in the dense air. Jimmy Streets sat across from me on the portside gunwale and pretended he wasn't freezing his miserable ass off. His performance was unconvincing, something to do with the tiny icicles hanging from his eyebrows. We passed an icebound bell buoy and set it rocking side to side. Its clapper made a sound no louder than a hiccup.

The Schooler piloted the boat north, abreast of the island, away from the smudgepots of light. The ice thickened. We were barely making three knots, and were about to lose the cover of night.

I looked to the east. Jet black. I blinked ice from my lashes and looked again. Jet black with deep purple underneath. I dug ice crystals from my ears and listened for twin-engine aircraft. All clear.

The cabin cruiser plowed on, the Ancient Mariner at the helm. How he kept himself unfrozen and alert after all these hours I couldn't tell you. A point of negative light came into view. A tip of landlocked darkness circled by icy starshine. It looked like the tip of a peninsula. Where the hell were we?

The
Tin Lizzie
was laboring mightily now, making little headway. The Schooler consulted a navigation chart, throttled back to neutral and joined Jimmy and me on the rear deck.

“The channel gets shallow here. It's solid ice to the shoreline.”

I let Jimmy ask the dumbass question for once.

“So whatta we do?”

The Schooler looked amused. Amused, ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed and very pleased with himself.

“We gather up our ill-gotten gains and walk across the frozen lake to shore.”

Jimmy and I executed a perfect vaudeville turn - to Henry, to the shoreline, back to Henry. The shore was a quarter-mile distant and the twelve blocks of cash were a bulky load.

The Schooler ticked his head. We followed him down to the cabin.

He threw open a closet, we grabbed the loot. The stack reached our foreheads. The Schooler pulled the bunk mattress off its box and removed the contents underneath. A kid's sled with a pull rope.

Jimmy and I tottered up to the rear deck and dumped the cash. The Schooler dropped the sled on the ice. Jimmy grabbed his sawed-off from a stow box.

“Over you go,” he said.

Over we went. The Schooler handed down the twelve blocks of cash three at a time. We piled them on the sled. He
handed me a roll of tape, I secured the money blocks to the Flexible Flyer.