AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED the shooting made it a whole new ball game. Four feet from the head at 20 yards was pretty close for scare shooting. It implied something more was involved than I had yet figured out.
Would Chuck have gone off and got a gun and come back to take a crack at me? It was entirely possible.
At the house the first thing I saw as I came in the upper garden door was the yacht Agoraphobe, all lit up again out in the little harbor as if she might be getting ready to go to sea again.
I went on in and wearily climbed the stairs with the ice bucket to see what I had to repair. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror, then started methodically to work. Icepacks for the swelling, a Band-Aid for a cut. I had gotten good at it over the years. My face wasn’t as badly marked as it felt. It would be nearly normal by tomorrow. The worst thing was the pain in my side but I could live with that. Anyway, I couldn’t do anything about it now. Maybe tomorrow I could get Georgina to help me tape it. That ought to titillate her.
It was not yet eleven o’clock. Dmitri’s across the way was fit up and going full blast. With a drink in one hand and the icepack in the other I went to my bedroom and undressed to the skin and then turned off the lights. Then I stood in the window with my icepack to my face and watched the Agoraphobe.
Whatever they were doing, they weren’t getting ready for sea. As I watched, the lights began to go out and the generator motors were turned off. As I stood there, I heard Kirk hail them from the deck and one of the crewmen ran down the ship’s ladder to the launch and went in to get him. I put down my icepack and got Con Taylor’s binoculars.
I gave Jim Kirk a close looking at with them as the launch burbled back to the ship. I wanted to see if he had a gun on him. He didn’t. Not one that I could see. Then I turned them on the crewman, and received a slight shock of recognition.
I was looking at the smartest one of the three men who had jumped me outside Chantal’s house that night. The one who had called off the moronic-looking blond boy when he flashed his knife.
I supposed I owed him a small debt of gratitude. I didn’t feel like it.
It had never occurred to me to look for my would-be muggers in Kirk’s crew. I swung the glasses back to the ship, and right away spotted the moronic blond boy in the crew on deck. The third man, the one whose nose I’d smashed with my forehead, wasn’t among them.
I put down the glasses, and got my icepack and my drink. On board the yacht the rest of the lights went out, and I watched the crew pile into the launch and head for shore. Only Kirk and the blond boy stayed on board. I watched them go down the forward hatch to the crew’s quarters, where two lighted portholes stared back at me like eyes—the only lights left on the ship.
With my icepack and my drink I sat down on the bed and sat there for a while, thinking. Down below the crew tied up the launch and dispersed. It was funny, but I hadn’t spotted a one of the three in town.
I thought some more.
After a while I got up and painfully began to dress. I didn’t want to. I went downstairs and got out one of my snub-nosed .38s from my locked briefcase and put it in my belt under my shirt. Then I took the flexible flathead sap from the briefcase and put it in the hip pocket of my jeans. It was old-fashioned, my flathead. But I preferred it to the round club-shaped ones. It was more precise, and it didn’t fracture as easily. One way or the other I meant to find out why those three had jumped me, and who had given the orders.
If I found out something about the murder too, that was all to the good.