I knew that the Betty Bee would take four hours to get across, so that would put her in Bimini at five o’clock or later. There was a feeder flight from there to Nassau leav-ing at seven fifteen. A boat is a very inconspicuous way to leave the country. Both Florida and the Bahamas have such a case of hots for the tourist dollar that petty officialdom must cry themselves to sleep thinking about all the missing red tape.
It was two thirty before, in consultation with Meyer, I figured out how to handle it. If I chartered a flight over, it was going to be a sticky problem coping with the pair on Bahama soil. Meyer remembered that Hollis Candy’s muscular Bertram, the Baby Beef, was in racing trim, and that Hollis, as usual, had a bad case of the shorts, brought on by having too many ex-wives with good law-yers.
So it was three when we banged past the sea buoy out-side Lauderdale, Bimini-bound. Meyer could not hold the glasses on anything of promising size we spotted, any more than a rodeo contestant could thread a needle while riding a steer. And if I altered course to take closer looks, I stood the risk of wasting too much time or alerting a couple of nervous people.
We got to the marker west of the Bimini bar at four thirty, and after a quick check inside to make certain the Betty Bee hadn’t made better than estimated time, we went out and lay in wait five miles offshore. I faked dead engines, got aboard, alerted Roxy Howard, and we took them very quickly. Roxy was easily alerted as he had be-come increasingly suspicious of the pair. An Englishman and a Greek. It was useful to do it quickly, as the Greek was snake-fast and armed. We trussed them up and I told Roxy what they’d been up to as I went through their lug-gage and searched their persons. The envelope with the bearer bank draft was in the Greek’s suitcase and with it was the signed letter to the bank identifying me, authoriz-ing me to act for Mick Pearson, with a space for my sig-nature, and another space for me to sign again, probably in the presence of a bank officer. The Greek had two thousand dollars in his wallet, and the Englishman about five hundred. The Englishman had an additional eleven thousand plus in a sweaty money belt. It seemed reason-able to assume that that money had come out of Mick’s stateroom safe. As far as I knew, Mick had taken a good thump on his hard skull and certainly had no interest in bringing in any kind of law. Roxy was not interested in tangling with the Bahamian police authorities. And I did not think the Englishman or the Greek would lodge any complaints. And it was obvious that trying to get word out of either of them would call for some very messy en-couragement, something I have no stomach for. Theirs was a hard, competent, professional silence.
So I gave five hundred to Roxy. He said it was too much, but he didn’t argue the point. We off-loaded them into the Baby Beef, and Roxy turned the Betty Bee and headed for home port. I ran on down to Barnett Har-bour, about halfway between South Bimini and Cat Cay, and put them aboard the old concrete ship that has been sitting awash there since 1926, the old Sapona that used to be a floating liquor warehouse during prohibition. I knew they’d have a rough night of it, but they would be picked off the next day by the inevitable fishermen or skin divers. They had their gear, their identification pa-pers, and over twenty-five hundred dollars. And they would think of some explanation that wouldn’t draw at-tention to themselves. They had that look.
I ran back outside and into Bimini Harbor and found a place to tie up, where the boat would be safe. We caught the feeder flight to Nassau, and I called old friends at Ly-ford Cay. They refused to let us go into the city, and as they had what they called a “medium bash” going, they sent one of their cars to bring us over from the airport. We spent most of Sunday sprawling around the pool and telling lies.