Color Him Dead by Charles Runyon Read Free Book Online

But that was before the
madame
came.”
    Drew remembered watching the man walk back to his car. His left shoulder had been raised as though to compensate for an extra weight on his right side; now Drew was certain the man had been heeled.
    “What does he do now? Is it anything to do with the
madame
?”
    Leta nodded. “He watches her.”
    Drew raised his brows. “Watches her? Why?”
    “Because the white mister is jealous. And the
madame
makes herself very … interesting to men.”
    And that, thought Drew, was probably the most charitable description of Edith ever to come from another female. He released Leta’s arm, then followed her inside. The big room had once housed the radar control equipment; now a tangled viscera of wiring hung from the peeling plywood wall, and rot had eaten into the panels where they joined the concrete platform. Leta had nailed flattened biscuit tins over the holes to keep out the rats.
    Leta was in the larder, repacking the food she’d brought out that morning. Drew reached above her head and took down a bottle of the dark Martinique rum which Leta had gotten from a smuggler. He carried it to a table he’d looted from the servants’ quarters behind the big house. Bracing himself against the wall, he leaned his crutch against the table, then used one hand to hold the glass and the other to tip the bottle.
Damn the leg, every move is a problem in logistics.
He tipped the glass and felt the rum slide down his throat like oil. It rested for a moment at the bottom of his stomach, then exploded. A tongue of flame burned a path to his nostrils and brought tears to his eyes. He corked the bottle, hobbled to the wall, pulled the binoculars off a nail, and slung them around his neck. “Go on with the packing, Leta. I’m going up to the tower.”
    He swung along the path Leta had hacked through the tall grass. A half-dozen wild goats clattered away and left behind the crushed-orange smell of broken stems. Drew streamed sweat by the time he reached the bottom of the tower. The stone steps had long since crumbled, but he managed to climb the wooden ladder and reach the round flatness at the top. It held a stone pigeon cote, bespattered by the descendants of those who had once carried messages to the fort. His shoes crunched on an inch of droppings and dirt, and he kicked up a green-molded brass button which read
39th Fusiliers.
The first time he came up here he’d found two bullet casings, .270 caliber rimfire. When he asked Leta about them, she explained: “Barrington, when he lived here, had a man stand in the tower all day, all night. When fishing boats come near, bang, they shoot in front of him. If he come still, they shoot him dead. Truly. I myself know two he shoot.” When Drew asked how he got away with it, she waved her arm in a wide gesture: “The sea swallowed them. There was no proof.”
    Now he sat down, rested his elbows on the parapet, and surveyed the channel between Petty-lay and Barrington’s Isle. It resembled a funnel, with water pouring over the shallows at the eastern end. Long rollers stretched from shore to shore and marched down the channel like ranks of white-plumed soldiers. Near the western end, a jagged peninsula jutted out from the main island, forcing the water into a narrow, frothy torrent which tore at the rocks below the fort. He looked up, saw the pale coin of the moon chasing the sun across the sky, about fifteen degrees behind it. Tonight would be a flood tide, and whirlpools would hiss in the narrows below the fort. The current would roar like an avalanche; it would swallow any rowboats which came near, chew them to pieces, and spit out nothing but sticks and bones and whitened flesh. No doubt that’s what had happened to the men Barrington had shot; perhaps Doxie had pulled the trigger. He sounded formidable….
    He looked down at the beach in front of the big house. The nets were in, and the women were frantically trapping the tiny fish which flopped like