Dead Calm by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

eye fell on the ship’s log, behind a clip on the bulkhead above it. He frowned, puzzled. Warriner had apparently been telling the truth otherwise, so why had he lied about that? He’d said the logbook was pulp, sloshing around in the bilges. And that the radio and chronometer and sextant were all ruined. Nothing up here was wet at all. And as water rose in the cabins below, wouldn’t he have brought his passport and money and other valuables up here where they’d stay dry? It would be the natural thing to do. They might be in one of the other drawers of the chart table. Well, he’d look for them in a minute. He pushed open the door and peered down into the after cabin.
    A dark-haired woman who appeared at first glance to be completely nude was huddled on the far end of the right-hand bunk, her back against the bulkhead at the foot of it and her legs drawn up under her chin as if to get as far as possible from the door. One hand was up to her mouth and her eyes were wide with fear, which changed to amazement and disbelief as she stared into his face. She cried out, “Stop! Stop, it’s not him!” And in the same fraction of a second Ingram saw the other one reflected in the panel mirror mounted on the after bulkhead between the bunks. A man was standing just below him, to the left of the steps leading down, a big man, naked from the waist up, with a broad, beard-stubbled face smeared pink with diluted blood running down from a wound somewhere in the sodden mess of his hair. In his upraised hand was a billet of wood, apparently the end of a drawer he’d pulled from under one of the bunks and smashed. He’d been poised to bring it down on Ingram’s head, and when the girl’s piercing outcry stopped him he tried to recover. At the same moment Orpheus lurched over to starboard, and he fell into the water washing back and forth across the cabin sole. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the water with his back against the other bunk, brushed a hand across his bloody face, and looked up at Ingram with a hard and bitter grip.
    “Welcome to Happy Valley,” he said. “Where’s the All-American psycho?”
    “Get on deck!” Ingram snapped. “Ill be back.” He whirled and plunged up the steps into the open, ducked under the main boom, and dropped into the dinghy. His hands fumbled as he loosed the painter. Two explosive strokes with the oars brought him into the clear past Orpheus’s stern, where he could see across to Saracen . Her position was unchanged except that she had swung around and was lying broadside to.
    Rae was alone in the cockpit.
    He breathed softly and dug in the oars, feeling sweat begin to run down into his eyes. He came up the broad slope of a swell and ran down the other side like some frenzied, two-legged waterbeetle in flight for its life. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all right. There’s no reason the crazy son of a bitch would wake up. Then, across a hundred and fifty yards of open water, he heard the growl of the starter. Rae was coming to pick him up.

4
    He tried to signal to her. At the risk of capsizing, he stood up in the dinghy and frantically sliced the air in horizontal sweeps of his opened hands, but she was bent over the controls now and didn’t see. The starter growled again, and this time the engine started with a coughing backfire that spread gooseflesh between his shoulderblades. One of his oars started to slide overboard. He grabbed it and dropped to the seat again. Muscles writhed across his back as he dug them in and lunged, flinging the dinghy up the side of the swell. He was to blame. She’d been watching with the glasses and had seen the way he’d exploded out of the doghouse and run across the deck, and, knowing only that there was something urgent about his getting back, was trying to help. Saracen was swinging now, under way and foreshortened as she began to bear down upon him. The gap was only a hundred yards, and closing. Some of the fear began to