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Show $FAU Over But the M & Richard Powell SfoOOttfig 1 1 fitn AN IMNJER SANCTUM MYSTERY Vf'! ' STARRING ARAB AMDY BLAKE WN-U FEATURES lililfll 3 JORY THUS FAR: Lt. Andy 'i his wife, Arab, discovered f a spy ring beaded by a Mr. Jrney went to Andy's home, know-Jones know-Jones would follow. Renee, :nt, came through the window -captured by Andy and Arab. rylng to escape, was captured When Jones broke Into the took Renee, but left Andy, be-n be-n dead. Andy went to his sn- S; 3 reported all the facts. He ,;d to a service station, friendly V.ied up the operator. Before he away a car with friends of re up. They made Andy get In He had got word through to .ie, but not In time. 1 CHAPTER XIV the change," I said, hand-loins hand-loins back to her and griper grip-er hand hard. Her mouth Klmply. She looked at me jer but didn't speak. I had l:ieen spraining my eyes try-Cive try-Cive her a warning, mt back to the car, and the 'C:aid, "Got dough, have you? '.;se you got In your pockets?" "gave me a fast cleaning, D; ten-dollar bill, a quarter, 5:11, a watch and a handker-, handker-, rhey let me keep the hand-t. hand-t. There was nothing sus-'jfor sus-'jfor them to find. My dog fe in a corner of the garage gear Washington, and my rcard was in my blouse also lalthe garage. aded north, circled Camden, jng east. Route signs an-: an-: Lakehurst, Toms River, 'jd, Barnegat, Manahawkin, aven. It didn't pay for me Q quick moves now. When I v, suddenly for my handker- catch a sneeze, a big hand ny wrist. The guy was fast. nd and told him what I want-Sie want-Sie released his grip. A hatf-iler hatf-iler the same move brought ip on the jaw and a growled , sit still. They were getting s they neared the hangout. m dove into a foxhole on the d. For a few minutes the sk,y dripped splotches of red k bay, then it was dark. No Tghts came on. The island timed out. The car crept h cowl lights. Beach Haven Jpast like a ghost town. I vh there once for a week end. jit gone fishing for kings and $.1 in Beach Haven Inlet, and "ght dog sharks and skates. t wasn't far south of Beach tojThe hangout must be near, t-niles farther on we swung fc::he bay, and stopped. There Jtiing interesting to be seen iC:h small shack and a dock wjved tipsily out into the bay. if'er patted a tune on the 'llman came out of the shack, "oubtfully at us. a good look, Pop," the larled. "You better make the same number of whis- ..jd last time or I might be a 0 guy." EN you," the man said, "and 'our friend back there, but now that feller in the cor-le cor-le back seat." ")ur business, Pop." pfily was lookin' for you to Vhat's up?" ffpot a reason. Where's the "- Vjj't here. Nobody was look-3sou look-3sou to come." jfiain't here. So nobody was Ngjjr us to come. Get it back wait a minute," the man jjl'his ain't rum-runnin' in ne. They's patrols on the i maybe a cutter lyin' oft S, W You diddle around with "t and you'll be combin' ber slugs outta your hair, ealthy to signal at night." are we supposed to do, couldn't make it across a ijjja rowboat. But it's two ffipn if you could row straight, v! a can't. The way the tide's ilpi vou'd have to detour the mRi better lay over to morn- M business that won't wait" . ju handle a sailboat?" r,Yean one of them laundry-.ffUhings?" laundry-.ffUhings?" j guess you can." !l my throat, and said, "I "vjetaker and driver looked Vispered together for a mo-When mo-When the caretaker said, &.' centerboard?" r'board?" I repeated. ikeel you can drop to keep rT'-draft boat from being ''leways by the wind. You 1when you're going over f he can sail a boat," the V. said. the car and walked out rickety wharf. An eight-oversize eight-oversize sneakbox was ; the end. They ordered j fill it ready, and sat on the S' hing suspiciously while I ' and fitted rudder and UU--Gay'ce. Then the two big men lyC01 and huddled down inside iflg'-ockpit, leaving the care-ery"'e care-ery"'e pier. Starlight gleamed ;ist"c'2el in their hands. They lifljave looked much more 1 had been playing with a TK&taker dropped the hawser Jliripped the mast, and pre-jyOitast pre-jyOitast us off. "Wait a min ute," I said. "What happens if the Coast Guard spots us?" "Nobody'll bother you in the bay," he said. "Just don't go outside." "He won't," one of my pals said. The caretaker shoved us oft. I brought in the sheet rope until the sail filled and tugged at my arm. Water chuckled under the hull. We slid out of the tiny cove. The figure of the caretaker, back on the dock, got fuzzy at the edges and faded. I took a deep breath. I felt good for the first time in twenty-four hours. Things were looking up. In a short time I would know the location loca-tion of the hangout and maybe where to find Arab, and now I wasn't jammed helplessly in a corner of a car. This time it was my party. Lots of interesting things can happen in sailboats. The man yelled, "Get this thing back on the road!" I let the sheet rope run free. The boat came back to an even keel, lost headway. The hands loosened i A She looked at me in wonder but didn't speak. on my throat. I gave him a lecture on sailing, explaining that all sailboats sail-boats tilt in a breeze. The wind was south-southwest and the big sneakbox wouldn't point close into the wind and I had to tack. The boom swung over and my passengers passen-gers almost shot me. I explained that it was called going about and that often in a sailboat you couldn't head right where you wanted to go. You had to zigzag to it, first on one tack and then on another. I demonstrated how the sail fluttered flut-tered and spilled wind when you tried to point too close into the direction di-rection from which the wind was coming. They grumbled about that. They said it was the screwiest setup they ever heard of. They wanted to know why anybody had been crazy enough to invent sailboats when motor boats were so much better. They complained for several sev-eral minutes but finally had to let me have my way. We racked along smartly. In half an hour a nun buoy slipped by and the inlet opened up off to port. The boat heaved in channel swells. The stars were making a night of it. You could see surprisingly far, but I couldn't spot the loom of a cutter across the sequin shimmer of waves. A can buoy bobbed past, heeling far over. It took plenty of tide to do that. "You better tell me exactly where you want to go," I said. "There seems to be a little island across the Inlet. I'll have to make a long tack west to clear it" "That's the island we want," one of them said. 1 peered south. At first I could only see a narrow strip of beach. Then a shadow formed, bulky and dark, in the middle of the island. A house. A big one. "Where do we land?" I asked. "There's a dock on the bay side." "How do you boys get away with it?" I said. "Don't nobody ask what you're doin' this time of year?" One of them grunted, "We're supposed sup-posed to be fishing. For striped bass. A month ago the chief made me stand on the beach all day with a lousy pole and hunk of string." I said innocently, "If you two guys would sit up here with me we wouldn't tilt so much." "Not me. That boom's too much like a blackjack when it comes over." "Maybe you're right" I said. Under cover of the darkness I looped the sheet rope around a cleat beside me. It was time to give them a final lesson in sailing. A lesson on the danger of jibing a sailboat when the sheet rope can't run free. In a Jibe, you turn the stern into the wind instead of the bow. and the boom thunders across with t full leverage of the wind behlna It. Jibing is a racing trick and nothing to fool with even in a mild breeze. "Going about," I droned. "Hard-a-lee!" The big men ducked their heads. They didn't see that the stern was creeping into the wind instead of the bow . . . and probably it wouldn't have meant anything to them, anyway. any-way. We were running before the wind now. Water hissed past The rudder got sluggish. I jammed it hard over. A little more . . . a . . . little . . . more ... The taut sail crumpled for an Instant. In-stant. Then it bellied the other way, flitted across the boat like the beat of a giant wing. I dodged the bat-tleax bat-tleax sweep of the boom. In the next split second the sheet rope snubbed the boom up short. The sail flapped tight, bellowing like a gun fired in a barrel. The power behind it switched to cleat and mast and hull. Wood shrieked and crackled. crac-kled. I hall started a dive overside when the boat reared and flipped me out sprawling. For a few seconds everything was scrambled. Water slapped half the air out of my lungs. I went down, fighting the drag of sweater and pants and shoes. Sparks were flickering flick-ering in my head before I clawed back to the surface. I gulped air twice, let myself go under and wrestled wres-tled out of the sweater. It wasn't so hard to climb to the surface this time. After a few breaths I curled under to work on my shoes. The laces turned into angry little snakes, but I finally managed to loosen them and to kick off the shoes. Then I relaxed, treading water, and let the tide carry me along. It was difficult to see anything. Salt stung my eyes and the black glitter of waves tired them. There was no sailboat. Once or twice something gleamed faintly out across the waves. It might have been the- curved green bottom of a boat. Once I heard a distant shout. It might have been a man calling, a man who couldn't swim across a bathtub. I thought grimly: if they don't like it here, let 'em swim back where they came from. The water was cold but not numbing. numb-ing. I peeled off my shirt The island where we had been heading seemed to be about a quarter mile away. I angled toward it with a quiet side stroke, going with the tide instead of trying to fight it. I would miss the inlet side of the island, but with luck there would be a return eddy to help me make the ocean side of the beach. It took less time than I had esti-mated. esti-mated. The tide set toward the island is-land after boiling through the inlet narrows. And my angled course helped. In a way, I used some of the force of the tide just as the boat had used the wind. I was still fairly fresh when I got Into the pound and drag of the breakers. Fresh enough to take a few bruising somersaults and struggle out of the undertow onto a hard-packed beach. I didn't take time to rest there. The beach was empty. Too empty. There wasn't even much driftwood. The house was only a hundred yards away, and a big dark blob on the beach might make an observer curious. curi-ous. I stumbled across the beach and up a dune. I flattened to the sand, gasping. The breeze chilled my body and the sharp beach grass stung my face, but gradually a little strength seeped back into my arms and legs. I sat up to study the situation. situ-ation. A hundred years ago, perhaps, a sand bar had started at the bottom and worked its way up in the world. Not very far up, however. From north to south it was only a few hundred yards long. You could cross its widest part with two or three throws of a clam shell even allowing allow-ing for the way clam shells curve. Low dunes, protected by a double row of piling stuffed with brush, formed its backbone. The house sat on a central dune, close enough for me to pick out details. de-tails. It was a gaunt three-story affair af-fair with unpainted shingles weathered weath-ered almost black. In its shadow was a concrete structure the size of a four-car garage. Starlight silvered a small boathouse on the bay side, a dock, and a board gangway leading lead-ing across the bayside marsh to the house. The place might ones have been a sportsmen's club, in the days before be-fore civilization caught up with the ducks and stripers and big tide-running weakflsh. Judging from what I had heard earlier, the house had been a drop for rum-runners in the twenties. Apparently the ambitious sand bar hadn't done so well recently. recent-ly. It might have moved in better company if it had stayed on the bottom. bot-tom. I hadn't the slightest idea what to do. My resources consisted of a pair of pinks, wet; one undershirt, wet; one pair of shorts, wet and one handkerchief, wet I began to realize real-ize what an unusually helpless guy had been carrying the name of Andrew An-drew Blake around for thirty-odd years. I wasn't a good enough swimmer to make the mile-wide crossing back to the main island. Of course I could send signals. All I had to do was to spot a Coast Guard cutter and find a flashlight and locate lo-cate somebody who would give me lessons in international code. (TO BE CONTINUED) |
