“As if somebody had tried to break my back.”
As he placed the coffee in front of her, Meyer said, “Thank me for that too. I stretched you out across a boat seat and I could feel your ribs give every time I pushed the air out of your lungs. But I was reasonably careful not to break any.”
The morning light was brilliant against her face as she sat opposite me. Her dark hair was brushed to a gloss, hung free, two dark curved parentheses which framed the lovely oval of her face, swung forward as she dipped her head and lifted the cup to her lips. She had made up her mouth carefully with the lipstick from the convenience kit. The pale down on her face, just below the darker hair of the temples, grew quite long. There was one faint horizontal wrinkle across the middle of her forehead, twice arched to match the curve of her brows. And a slightly deeper horizontal line across her slender throat. A few pores were visible in the ivoried dusk of her skin where it was taut across the high solidity of oriental cheekbones, but there was no other mark or flaw upon her, except the cheekbone scar shaped like a star.
In that light the color of her eyes surprised me. Light shrunk the pupils small. The irises were not as dark as I had imagined. They were a strange yellow-brown, a curious shade, just a little darker than amber, and there were small green flecks near the pupils. Her upper lids had that fullness of the Asiatic strain, and near-death had smudged the flesh under her eyes. She looked across at me and accepted the appraisal with the same professional disinterest with which the model looks into the camera lens while they are taking light readings.
“And otherwise?” I asked.
She lifted her shoulders slightly, let them fall. “I slept fine. You men will have to fill in some blanks. Where are we?”
“Tied up at Thompson’s Marina at Marathon.”
“And last night, after I corked off, did you dear boys go honking and blustering over to the beer joints to make the big brag about what you rescued from the briny?”
Her voice was mild, but there was a curl to her lips.
Meyer smiled down at her. “I don’t know how McGee reacts to that, my dear, but personally I find the inference offensive. How would you like how many eggs?”
“Uh… two. Easy over.”
“With a little slab of sauteed fish? And a quarter of one of Homestead’s better cantaloupes?”
“Yes…. Yes, please. Mr. Meyer?”
“Just Meyer.”
“Okay. Meyer, I’m sorry I said that. It’s just that I’m a little spooked.”
“Forgiven,” Meyer said. “We bluster, dear. We bluster all to hell and gone. But honk? Never!” Meyer served her, poured us both more coffee, then came and wedged in beside me with his own cup.
“I don’t know how you saved me,” she said. Meyer explained it all, how we happened to be there, what we saw and heard, and who had done what. As he explained, she ate with a delicately avid voracity, a mannerly greed, glancing up at Meyer and at me from time to time.
“McGee stayed down just long enough to make my blood run cold,” Meyer said. “I know it was better than two minutes.”
She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly in a speculation I could not read. I said, “I knew you were alive when I got to you. So that was the only good chance I had to bring you up alive, to get you loose that first time.”
“And you heard the car leave?”
“Before you touched bottom,” I said.
Her plate was empty. She put her fork down with a little clink sound. “Then we three, right here, are the only people who know I’m alive. Right?”
“Right,” said Meyer. “Our plans before you… uh, excuse me, dropped in… were to leave sometime this morning and head for Miami. Want to come along?”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“My dear,” Meyer said, “it would seem as if someone took a violent dislike to you last night.”
“Is that a question?”