The Hard-Boiled Detective Stories From Black Mask Magazine 1920-1951 by Howard Ruhm

Author:Howard Ruhm [Ruhm, Howard]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The cabin cruiser was a forty-two footer, all white and mahogany, and a sweet thing to tie up to a swanky yacht club dock. There was a lot of glass windows around her cabin, and two neat little varnished lapstrake dinghies were davited, one on each side.

The glass had all been blown out of her cabin. One dink was gone. The other had come loose from the stern davit, had swung over, and was slamming up and down, patting a hole in the cabin top.

There seemed to be about two feet of water inside her.

She had anchored in a mangrove creek, but the wind had pushed her out and she was drifting down on the mangroves on the other side. The Sail came in ahead of her. She would never come up into the wind under stays’l alone.

There was no sign of life aboard her.

Sail left the wheel, raced forward, used his sheath knife on the lashings of the heavy anchor. Three hundred pounds of iron, it was. Ridiculously large for such a small boat. And the chain was heavy in proportion.

Sail let it go. The chain ran over the winch wildcat and was arranged so it couldn’t jump out. The winch had a brake. Sail came down on it.

The anchor took hold; its yank ducked the whole front of the boat. Sail reached out with the knife and stuck the stays’l. The sail went to pieces with a noise like cats fighting.

The hooker was the Oilman. And the Sail was hanging directly ahead of her by no more than a hundred feet.

Sail got down on all fours and hung onto things and got back to the wheel. He set it to port, locked it. The bugeye swung over, for water was rushing past underneath just as air was rushing on top.

He went forward and let out chain until he had the bug-eye back even with the cruiser. Then he half-hitched the chain over the winch niggerheads.

A boil of water came over the bugeye four or five feet deep and left John Silver hanging at the end of his lashing line. Sail hauled him back, put his mouth against the peg-leg’s ear.

“I’ll swing her in and board,” he shouted. “You swing her off, then bring her back again when and if I clean house.”

Sail jockeyed the wheel, and the stream of water moving past and pressing against the rudder caused the bugeye to swing on her chain in towards the power boat. He was facing the wind now. His polo shirt and trouser hugged one side of his body and ballooned out on the other. And he could see at all only when he held his open hand over his eyes and squinted between the fingers.

Sail gave John Silver the wheel. He pulled himself amidships. The bugeye shouldered against the cruiser. Sail was pitched aboard. He got in the deckhouse.

John Silver sheered the bugeye off.

The osteopath came clawing up out of the cruiser’s forward cabin and Sail kicked him in the face.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.