Finally I began to get the impression that he was focusing on me, as if he had been engaged in some process of selection and I was his best candidate. I realized how very little I knew about him, how little he had actually said. Once we began prying away at each other, show-down was inevitable. I remember how cold his eyes were when he stopped being friendly sociable harmless Mick Pearson.
He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some sur-plus, obsolete Turkish military vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn’t wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.
Some other sharpshooters had been trying to make the same deal, he said. They refused to make it a joint effort, as he had suggested, and tried to swing it alone. But Pearson beat them to it and they were very annoyed at his methods. “So they know I’ve got this bank draft pay-able to the bearer, for two hundred thirty thousand Eng-lish pounds, payable only at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the Bahamas, at Nassau, which is the way I wanted it because I’ve got a protected account there. I didn’t want them to find out how I was going to handle it, but they did. It’s enough money so they can put some very professional people to work to take it away from me. Long, long ago I might have taken a shot at slipping by them. But now I’ve got my three gals to think of, and how thin their future would be if I didn’t make it. So I have to have somebody they don’t know take it to the bank with my letter of instructions. Then they’ll give up.”
I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn’t just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.
His was a very tough grin. “Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn’t do that to any-body. Neither could you. That’s what makes us incurably small-time.”
“That kind of money isn’t exactly small-tune.”
“Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me.” So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn’t seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.
That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the state-room safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open it himself. So too many peo-ple saw the pair leaving the Likely Lady too hastily. It took me almost two hours to get a line on them, to make certain they hadn’t left by air. They had left their rental car over at Pier 66 and had gone off at one o’clock on a charter boat for some Bahamas fishing. I knew the boat, the Betty Bee, a 38-foot Merritt, well-kept, Captain Roxy Howard and usually one or the other of his skinny neph-ews crewing for him.
I phoned Roxy’s wife and she said they were going to Bimini and work out from there, trolling the far side of the Stream, starting Sunday. At that time, as I later learned, the neurosurgeons were plucking bone splinters out of Mick Pearson’s brain.