Free Gulf Coast Girl by Charles Williams Page B

of the blond head. “I like the whole plan, and I like the way your mind works.” She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, “You’ll never know how glad I am I ran into you. I don’t feel so helpless now. Or alone.”
    I was conscious of the same thing, but probably in a different way than she’d meant it. There was something wonderful about being with her. For a moment the whole mess was gone from my mind. The sea wind blew past the car, and behind us in the night I could hear the surf.
    “You were good on the phone, too,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”
    In other words, keep your distance, Buster . It was stage money, so don’t try to buy anything with it. I wondered why she thought she had to warn me. We both knew it was only an act, didn’t we?
    Maybe I was always too aware of her, and she could sense it. I lashed out deliberately at the spell, shattering it. “All right. Now,” I said curtly. “That still leaves the problem of getting him aboard. I’ll have to work on that. He’s there in the house, isn’t he?”
    “Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know?”
    “Guessing, mostly. You said they’d searched it while you were gone. They wouldn’t have had to tear it up much, looking for a grown man. So maybe he told you they had.”
    “You’re very alert. He heard them and told me.”
    “Why is he hiding there? And how?”
    She leaned forward a little with her elbow on the back of the seat, and took another puff on the cigarette. “I’ve been wanting to get to this. Here’s the whole story, briefly.
    “About three weeks ago my husband saw one of them on the street and knew they’d caught up with us again. But for some time he’d been working on this plan for getting to Central America and losing them completely, for the last time. It was about completed. I won’t go into it in much detail except to say it involved a man who’d been a close friend of my husband’s in college. He lives in Central America, in Honduras to be exact, and is very wealthy. He owns a number of large plantations, and has considerable political influence. He’s also a rather passionate flying fan. He’s always buying planes in the States and having them flown down to him, and my husband was to take this one to him. It would get him out of the country without any trail they could follow, you see? He’d merely take off without filing a flight plan, and disappear. Of course, landing down there would be illegal, but as I say, this friend of his had quite a bit of political power.
    “The only trouble, however, was that he had to go alone. It was a light plane and its cruising radius with the maximum amount of fuel was still a little short, so he’d added an extra tank. That meant I had to come later, making sure I wasn’t followed. We had that arranged, however. I was to do it over the Memorial Day week-end, and it involved about five different zigzagging commercial flights with the reservations made considerably ahead of time. On a long holiday like that they’d be sold out, you see? If they were trying to follow me they might catch a no-show at one or even two of the airports, but not all of them. There was more to it than that, too, but I won’t bother you with it.
    “But he had engine trouble, and the plane crashed off the coast of Yucatan. My husband got off in a rubber boat, and was picked up by some snapper fishermen. And they brought him, of all places, right back into Sanport. Fortunately the boat docked at night and he managed to slip off and get out to the house without being seen. It was just two days before I was supposed to leave.
    “But now they’ve found out where we live, and they have the place surrounded. Barclay rented the house right across the street, and they watch me all the time. They’re waiting for me to lead them to him—”
    “And they don’t know he’s inside?”
    “I don’t think so. You see, they searched it the first time while he was actually