John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

The dockmaster assigned me a slip for the Flush and space in the small boat area for the Mu¤equita. By the tune we were properly moored, hooked into shoreside power, and had showered and shaved and changed, heavy rain was drumming down, and it was very snug in the lounge aboard The Busted Flush, lights on, music on, ice in the glasses, Meyer threatening to make his famous beef stew with chili, beans, and eggs, never the same way twice running. Guthrie had phoned his wife and she was going to drive down from Lauderdale to pick him up Sunday morning. They were tapping the Wild Turkey bourbon we’d found aboard the Gal, and I was sticking to Plymouth on ice. Meyer kept everybody from going too far overboard in estimating profit. He kept demanding we come up with “the minimum expectation, gentlemen.”

So we kept going over what would probably have to be done and came up with a maximum fifteen thousand to put her in shape, and a minimum forty-five thousand re-turn after brokerage commission.

That is the best kind of argument, trying to figure out how much you’ve made. It is good to hear the thunder of tropic rain, to feel the muscle soreness of hard manual labor when you move, to have a chill glass in your hand, know the beginnings of ravenous hunger, realize that in a few hours even a bunk made of cobblestones would feel deep and soft and inviting.

They wanted me to come into the fledgling partnership, with twenty-five percent of the action. But struggling ven-tures should not be cut too many ways. Nor did I want the responsibility, that ever-present awareness of people depending on me permanently to make something work. They were too proud-Guthrie and Palacio-to accept my efforts as a straight donation, so after some inverted haggling we agreed that I would take two thousand in the form of a note at six percent, payable in six months. They wanted to put their take back into unproved equipment and go after a steel barge sunk in about fifty feet of water just outside Boca Grande Pass.

I was sprawled and daydreaming, no longer hearing their words as they talked excitedly of plans and projects, hearing only the blur of their voices through the music.

“Didn’t we make it that tune in an hour and a half? Hey! Trav!”

Meyer was snapping his fingers at me. “Make what?” I asked.

“That run from Lauderdale to Bimini.”

They had stopped talking business. I could remember that ride all too well. “Just under an hour and a half from the sea buoy at Lauderdale to the first channel marker at Bimini.”

“In what?” Guthrie asked.

I told him what it had been, a Bertram 25 rigged for ocean racing with a pair of big hairy three hundreds in it, and enough chop in the Stream so that I had to work the throttles and the wheel every moment, so that when she went off a crest and was airborne, she would come down flat. Time it wrong and hit wrong, and you can trip them over.

“What was the rush?” Bobby asked.

“We were meeting a plane,” Meyer said.

And I knew at that moment he too was thinking of Helena Pearson and a very quick and duty salvage job of several years aback. We were both thinking of her, with no way of knowing she had been dead two days, no way of knowing her letter was at Bahia Mar waiting for me.

Even without the knowledge of her death, Helena was a disturbing memory…

2

FIVE YEARS ago? Yes. In a winter month, in a cold winter for Florida, Mick Pearson, with his wife Helena and his two daughters, aged twenty and seventeen, crewing for him, had brought his handsome Dutch motor sailer into Bahia Mar, all the way from Bordeaux. The Likely Lady. A wiry, seamed, sun-freckled talkative man in his fifties, visibly older than his slender gray-blond wife.

He gave the impression of somebody who had made it early, had retired, and was having the sweet life. He cir-culated quickly and readily and got to know all the regu-lars. He gave the impression of talking a lot about himself, not in any bragging or self-important way, but by amusing incident. People found it easy to talk to him.