Free Assignment - Budapest by Edward S. Aarons

did not understand what was happening, but he turned toward the beach. His legs were like rubber, and he felt the warmth of his blood running alarmingly down his arm and off his fingertips. The girl came toward him, up the slope of the beach, with a gun in her hand. She wore a red hat. She was the girl who had followed him from New York.
    “Oh, you fool,” she said. “You let him get away!”
    “Ilona?”
    “Who did you think?” she said bitterly. She came close to him, her gun held warily, and he could see the anger in her face. “What is the matter with you? Are you hurt?”
    There was a strange roaring sound in Durell’s ears. He tried to reach for her gun and his hand went wavering off to one side and he looked at it in surprise before he felt his legs slowly buckle and he pitched forward and down.

Chapter Seven
    For some time there was darkness, and a strange mechanical creaking sound, and a feeling that the world had become a queasy, unsettled place, without stability or solidity. He felt hands on him and heard the girl's voice talking, and he listened to learn if someone answered her, but no one did and he guessed she was talking to herself, bitterly and angrily. He felt himself being pushed and hauled and once the pain in his shoulder became so great that the darkness swallowed him again for several long minutes, and when he opened his eyes again he was not sure what time it was or where he could be. He felt a vibration all through his body, as if an engine were running and shaking the bunk on which he lay on his back, and he looked up at the silvery light that seemed to have no earthly point of origin. This last was correct, because he turned his head and looked out of a small porthole and saw that the wind had scoured the sky clean and a half-moon was shining, cold and distant and bleak, upon a waste of water, reaching everywhere in the small arc that he could see beyond the glass. He was on a boat, and he was sure it was the pungy.
    He turned his head and looked at the bunk on the other side of the narrow cabin. An old man sat there looking at him. Durell had never seen the man before. Shaggy gray hair, shaggy beard, a weathered face like ancient leather, bright eyes alert with curiosity under massive eyebrows. The old man had no teeth, and he mouthed his gums a moment before he spoke.
    “Feel pretty sick, hey, young feller?”
    “I’ve felt better.”
    “She took pretty good care of you, son. Right smart girl. Kind of frightening, in a way. Ain’t used to women like that no more.”
    “Are you Tom Yordie?” Durell asked. “This is your boat?”
    The old man nodded. “She come out in the skiff and hauled you aboard. Made me help, at the point of a gun. Then she used my medicine kit to take care of that bullet hole in you. You were lucky, young feller. The slug went in and out, clean as a whistle. No trouble at all. She knew what she was doing.” The old man chuckled. “Here, have a nip of this. Made it myself. Always prefer my own mix.”
    Yordie extended a gnarled, rope-hardened hand with an old brown bottle. Durell took it, nodded thanks, and swallowed deeply. The liquor was not unlike the mule he had known long ago, back in the bayous. It exploded warmly in the pit of his stomach and spread its heat through his body. He looked at his shoulder and saw that a neat bandage covered the wound. He looked for his gun. It was gone. Tom Yordie grinned.
    “She thinks of everything. We’re halfway across the bay by now, and them roosters on the shore ain’t got the foggiest idea you’re here. You gonna tell me what this is all about, young feller?”
    “I thought you might know,” Durell said flatly.
    “Don’t know nothing. Go on, drink up. I can always make more.” Tom Yordie watched Durell take another long swallow of the white liquor. “You drink like you’re used to the stuff. I like that. Some of them namby-pamby Washington folk come out here to hunt an’ fish, they fancy their own