Keller 05 - Hit Me

  And came to abruptly. There was no sudden noise, and no one jostled his lounge chair or walked past it to block the sun. He wondered later if it might simply have been an unconscious awareness of her presence that did it, because when he opened his eyes there she was, not ten yards away from him, Ms. Va-va-voom herself, sitting sidesaddle on a lounge chair of her own, and applying coconut-scented suntan oil to those portions of her anatomy not covered by the scarlet bikini.

  Which was to say almost all of her.

  She took her time oiling her golden-brown skin, and it seemed to Keller that she was caressing herself as much as she was protecting it from the sun. He didn’t want to stare at her, but seemed incapable of averting his eyes, and the next thing he knew she was looking right back at him.

  He looked away, but it was as if he could see her no matter where his eyes were turned. He looked her way again, and she was still gazing at him, with an expression on her face that was not quite a smile, although it was definitely headed in that direction.

  Then she turned her eyes from him, and swung her legs up onto the lounge chair, and worked the controls to lower the back into a horizontal position. She was still sitting up, and Keller watched as she put her hands behind her back, uncoupled the bikini top, and removed it altogether.

  She couldn’t have exposed her breasts to him for more than a couple of seconds, but they were longer seconds than most. Then she was lying facedown on the lounge chair.

  Had anyone else seen what Keller had seen? He looked around and saw no one who gave any evidence of having witnessed the performance. Had it been for his benefit? Or had he merely chanced to be present when a free-spirited creature displayed her charms without thinking twice about it?

  Her head was turned to one side, resting on her arm, and facing toward Keller. Her eyes were closed. And she was smiling.

  Go back to his cabin? Go to the bar for a drink, or the lounge for a cup of coffee? Find his way to the library and pick out something to read?

  Or wait for her to give up on the sun and return to her cabin, so that he could see which one it was?

  Keller closed his eyes to give the matter some thought, and once again the combination of sun and waves carried him off. He didn’t doze for long, but when he opened his eyes he saw that the girl had changed position. She was lying on her back now, and was once again wearing the bikini top.

  And she was no longer alone. On the lounge chair just beyond hers, wearing knee-length Bermuda shorts and a loose-fitting shirt with a palm tree on it, sat Carmody himself. His feet were bare—a pair of pink flip-flops rested at the foot of his chair—and from the knees down the man was fish-belly white, while from the knees up he was pretty much invisible, with the shirt and the shorts and his sunglasses and his pink cotton sun hat covering up most of him.

  The contrast between the two of them, dramatic enough in the dining room, was far greater beneath the sun. Earlier he’d looked old enough to be her father, or perhaps her father’s older brother; now you’d be more apt to cast him as her dead grandfather.

  She was lying down. Carmody’s chair was in what the airlines call the full upright position, and he sat there looking like a man waiting for his number to be called. Then, after a few moments, he reached out and rested a hand on his companion’s shoulder. Keller thought that was a tender gesture until the hand moved lower and slipped inside a cup of the bikini halter.

  Keller looked away, willing the old goat to keep his hands to himself, and when he looked their way again it was as if his wish had been Carmody’s command. Both the man’s hands were now resting on the arms of his own lounge chair.

  Well, that was better. On the other hand, a little more touchy-feely and they might get up and return to their cabin, and Keller could note its number. And he wished that would happen sooner rather than later, as there was a limit to how much sun he could handle.

  But how much sun could Carmody take? Not too much on those pale white legs, so…

  Hell. Keller watched as Carmody picked up his towel and draped it carefully over his feet and lower legs. Taking the sun without taking the sun, he thought. Wonderful.

  Time to give up and get out of the sun himself? Wait, Carmody was saying something.

  “Carina? You don’t want to get too much sun, honey.”

  “Feels so good,” she replied, so softly that Keller could barely make out the words.

  “I can think of something else that’ll feel good. Time to go inside, Carina.”

  “Give me a few more minutes, Mickey. You go. I’ll be there by the time you’re out of the shower.”

  “You and the sun,” Carmody said.

  “Makes me warm. You like me warm, don’t you, Mickey?”

  The man answered by leaning over to cop another feel, and Carina contrived to show her appreciation by squirming a little on the lounge chair. Then Carmody slipped his feet into his flip-flops, told her not to be too long, and stood up.

  Keller gave him a head start. He got to his feet, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Carina glancing at him. He didn’t turn to check, but took off in Carmody’s wake.

  He followed the man around the pool and over to the four cabins. Carmody led him to one of two on the far side, so if he’d stayed where he was he’d only have been able to halve the possibilities from four to two, but now he was half a dozen steps behind the man by the time he’d used his key card to let himself into number 501.

  The door closed, and Keller moved in front of it. His immediate mission had been one of reconnaissance, and it had paid off, but did he have to stop there? If he knocked, Carmody would open the door. And once he did, he was there to be taken.

  Keller’s swimsuit had a pocket, but all it held was his own key card. No garrote, no HandyMan, no pills or powders. All he had were his two hands, but if he needed more than that to cope with Michael Carmody he was in the wrong business.

  He looked in both directions, and there was nobody around. How soon would the girl come back? Could he dispatch Carmody in time to be out of the room before she made her appearance?

  If not, well, that would be bad luck all around, especially for her. Keller preferred to avoid that sort of situation, but sometimes you couldn’t, and he had learned to do what had to be done.

  He knocked on the door, listened for footsteps.

  And didn’t hear any. No, of course not, the son of a bitch was taking his shower. He wouldn’t be able to hear Keller knocking, or if he did he wouldn’t feel the need to cut short his shower to go see who it was.

  Knock again? He was about to, but now there was someone in view, a maid pushing a service cart. And when she passed there would be somebody else, and sooner or later the girl would show up, and Keller would have to wait for a better time.

  Maybe it was time to check out the library, see if he could find something to read. First, though, he’d get his own shower.

  Mickey, he thought. Mickey and Carina. Well, the afternoon hadn’t been a total loss. He now knew which cabin they occupied. And, though he couldn’t see what good it did him, he knew what they called each other.

  Twenty-Seven

  Julia had made a new friend during the afternoon, and worked things out so that the two couples could share a table for four at dinner. They were Atlantans, though both had grown up in the Midwest. The husband, Roy, said he had the perfect job. He worked for an insurance company, but he didn’t sell anything, or weasel out of paying claims, or sit at a desk and crunch numbers. Instead he flew around the country and met with groups of insurance agents, explaining why they should push his company’s policies instead of the competition’s.

  “I buy the pizza, I buy the doughnuts, I’ve always got the latest jokes, and whenever I show up everybody’s glad to see me. I swear it never feels like I’m working.”

  “He works very hard,” said his wife, who was called Myrt, which Keller figured had to be short for Myrtle. “On and off planes all the time.”

  “The planes are fin
e,” Roy said. “It’s the blankety-blank airports. But don’t get me started.”

  Nobody did, and the subject shifted to the two men who’d left the ship, and whom everybody had taken to calling Smith and Wesson, and who were assumed to be very dangerous men. Mafia torpedoes, the consensus seemed to be, no doubt dispatched to kill one of the passengers, or even a crew member.

  “It could be anyone,” Myrt said darkly. “The captain looks perfectly decent, but he could have gambling debts.”

  “Are we playing Pick the Victim?” her husband wondered. “My candidate’s Foxy Grandpa. Oh, you know who I mean. The dirty old man with the hot redhead.”

  “Gambling debts, Roy?”

  “Hell, who needs a motive? I’d kill him myself if I thought it’d get me a shot at her.”

  “Oh, Roy,” Myrt said, and swatted him with her napkin. “Am I gonna have to keep you on a leash?”

  “Arf arf,” Roy said.

  “I swear, men are terrible creatures. Still, I have to say this is more interesting than our last cruise.”

  “You had a good time.”

  “Well, I did, but the conversation! Perforations, inverted underprints—”

  “Overprints,” Roy said.

  “Like it matters? Roy,” she announced, “took me on a cruise for stamp collectors. Can you imagine? Every time we landed and the wives went shopping, all of the men rushed to the nearest post office.”

  Roy said it wasn’t quite like that, and Myrt said it was close enough, and Roy said only thirty-some passengers were stamp collectors, it was just a small portion of the whole, and Myrt said yes, but those were the people they had to sit with every night at dinner, and finally Keller was able to get a word in edgewise.

  “You’re a collector,” he said.

  “Guilty as charged, but I never would have brought it up, because there’s nothing less interesting than someone else’s hobby.”

  Was that true? Keller didn’t think so, and had found most people to be at their best when talking about their hobby or pastime. But what he said was, “Well, I wouldn’t be bored. I’m a philatelist myself.”

  “I guess you just might be, if you can pronounce it correctly. Myrt still has trouble after all these years. What do you collect, Nick?”

  Keller told him, and Roy nodded respectfully. “Classic general worldwide,” he said. “Got to admire that. Myself, well, nothing quite that ambitious, but I’ve got a batch of collections going. My main interest is stamps of Turkey, and don’t ask me why. No Turkish ancestors, no connection of any sort, and I’ve never been to the country and don’t expect I’ll ever get there. I just like the stamps, for some reason.”

  It made perfect sense to Keller.

  “And of course along with Turkey I collect a batch of dead countries connected to Turkey, like Hatay and Latakia.”

  “And Eastern Rumelia,” Keller offered.

  “You bet. And, let’s see, besides Turkey I have one topical collection. I collect fish.”

  “That’s fish on stamps,” Myrt said, as if otherwise Julia might think Roy had a collection of actual fishes.

  “Now, I like fish,” Roy said, “though I wouldn’t want it served to me every night. And when I was a kid I had an aquarium and I used to like watching the fish, until they all died and I emptied the fish tank and gave it to my mother to grow ferns in. And I’ve been fishing, but only a couple of times in my life, and I don’t care if I never waste time again in that particular fashion. But I do like stamps with fish on them. I just like the way they look, all the different species.”

  That made sense to Keller, too.

  Keller, stretched out on his bunk, turned at the sound of Julia’s key card in the lock. She entered, holding the plastic rectangle aloft like a Plains Indian brandishing a scalp.

  “That’s the key to 501?”

  She shook her head. “It’s a spare key to our cabin. I just let myself in with it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Silly me, locking myself out. In a minute I’ll take the key back.” She tapped it with her thumbnail. “There’s no way she’ll give me a key to Carmody’s cabin. You need to show ID and sign for it. But I saw where she keeps the keys, and how they’re sorted. Now if somebody could get her to come away from the desk for a minute or two, someone else could slip away with the key to 501.”

  “Last time I passed the desk,” Keller said, “there were two girls behind it. They looked enough alike to be Xerox copies, but there were two of them.”

  “Two to a shift,” Julia agreed. “Two on duty from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, and two others from four to midnight.”

  “And only one after midnight?”

  “Pilar is so glad she does not have the graveyard shift this week. She had it last week, and you get so lonely.”

  “You got friendly with her.”

  “It never hurts to be friendly,” she said. “She’s from the Philippines.”

  “I think they all are.”

  “Uh-huh. All the dining room and housekeeping staff, and the ones on the desk. The cruise director and his staff are American, except for the ones who aren’t. And the crew’s a mini United Nations, with a lot of Eastern Europeans. The chef is Swiss. Pilar doesn’t like the Ukrainians.”

  “Why not?”

  “She says they’re not nice. I was thinking if we waited until one o’clock, and then you found a way to lure the attendant out from behind the desk, all I’d need is a couple of minutes to get the key to their cabin.”

  “Maybe you should do the luring.”

  “No,” she said, “because I saw where the keys are. You can play helpless confused man in need of help. Besides, if anybody happens to see me behind the desk, it’ll be less unsettling than if they were to see you.”

  “Because you look more like a Filipina?”

  “Because I’m a girl, silly. Women are less threatening. How could you not know that?”

  He didn’t say anything, and she asked him if something was bothering him.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said, “if this is really something you want to do.”

  “The key will help, won’t it?”

  “It might. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Well,” she said, “I want to help.”

  He made one change to Julia’s plan, delaying the starting time an hour to give the girl on the desk a little more time to appreciate the loneliness of her situation. At a couple of minutes past two, Keller approached the desk, where the attendant met him with a big smile.

  “I was wondering if you could help me,” he said. “The only thing is, I don’t know if it’s okay for you to leave the desk.”

  “It’s not rush hour here,” she said. “How can I help?”

  There was a notice on the board he couldn’t understand, he said, and he led her down a corridor to where notices were posted, and pointed to one he’d scouted out earlier. Its message, some drivel about evacuation in the event of fire or shipwreck, was pretty clear, but she was evidently willing to believe he was somewhere in the early stages of cognitive decline, and worried about drowning, and so she explained it all very clearly and carefully.

  Keller asked if there were many shipboard fires, and after she’d reassured him on that score he raised the subject of piracy. That was pretty much limited to the Indian Ocean, she said, and the only real pirates in the Caribbean these days were running gift shops. He laughed at that, and found a joke to tell her in return, and she was polite enough to pretend it was funny.

  She went back to her post and Keller returned to his cabin, where Julia showed him a key card. “What did I tell you?” she said. “Nothing to it.”

  In the morning they left the ship with Roy and Myrt, whose last names turned out to be Huysendahl. The wives had shopping to do, and Roy suggested a visit to the post office. “You won’t find anything,” Roy said. “Not if your collection’s got a 1940 cutoff date. And I probably won’t find anything, either.”

  “
Not much from Turkey,” Keller said.

  “Doesn’t seem likely, does it? But they might have some fish stamps. It’s a popular topic, and easier to justify for a Caribbean island than some landlocked African dictatorship that gets three drops of rain every two years.”

  The post office had a special philatelic window, and a display showing just what stamps were still available for purchase. There was a very attractive set of stamps showing brilliantly colored reef fish, along with a six-stamp souvenir sheet; they’d just come out, and Roy picked up four sets, sheets included. “One for me and the others for some guys I know’ll want them. Cheaper at the post office than from a new-issues dealer.”

  Back on the ship, Julia showed off a blouse she’d bought. “I don’t know that I’ll ever wear it,” she said, “but it was cheap, and Myrt bought one, so I picked it up in the interest of female bonding. Did you find any stamps to buy?”

  He showed her the two souvenir sheets he’d bought, one with fish, another showing the various islands that comprised the British Virgins. “They’re souvenir sheets,” he said, “so I bought them for a souvenir.”

  “And in the interest of male bonding?”

  “I suppose. He’s a nice fellow.”

  “Myrt thinks the four of us should make dîner à quatre a regular thing. Could you stand sharing a table with them every night? Just the four of us?”

  “Saves trying to find things to say to new people.”

  “That was my thought. The British Virgins. You know what a British virgin is? A ten-year-old girl who can run faster than her brothers. Actually, that’s an old joke about Cajuns. But I’m not sure it really works to adapt it. The British don’t have that reputation.”

  “Quite the reverse,” he said. “‘Dead? Sacre bleu, Monsieur, I thought she was English!’”

  “Oh, I heard that joke years and years ago,” she said. “And it’s still awful.”