Beyond the golden stair Read online

  Hibbert felt, rather than actually caught, the swift and speculative flash of Burks' eyes.

  There was scant traflic just then on this particular highway. The car was doing close to ninety. Hibbert glanced calculatingly at the coxmtryside tearing past but Scarlatti read his mind.

  Quickly, he flung an arm around Hibbert's neck and squeezed hard. Hibbert clawed frantically, strangling, but without effect. The giant's black eyes bored into his gray ones. Deliberately, he wiped a huge paw over Hibbert's hair and crooned silkenvoiced, "Nice little baby—going to be real quiet for papa, ain't you? Or papa spankl"

  Hibbert tried to spit at him. Scarlatti's arm tight-

  ened and Hibbert's eyes popped; his neck threatened to snap. Faintly he heard Burks say, bored "Have your fun later, Frank."

  Scarlatti's voice was cloying with coy concern. **You don't want to get hurt, do you, baby? Well, you won't —as long as you behave. You're not going anywhere except where I go. So don't try nothing, like jumping out of this car. It won't do you no good. And keep your trap shut"—his voice grated—^''or 111 shut it for you, for keepsi"

  Burks added curtly: "He means it. Just keep quiet and everything will work out fine." Was it some sort of secret promise? Burks continued, **That includes you too, Frank." And now it was no hint of promise, but a threat.

  The giant took his arm from Hibbert*s neck. Hibbert sat panting, rubbing his aching throat. In spite of Burks' warning, he muttered: *'You may as weU let me go. I can't be of any use to you. Sooner or later ril get away, if I have to kill you to do iti"

  In the rearview mirror, he saw Burks lift an eyebrow. Scarlatti sniggered.

  "I hke you, shrimpi You'd sass back at God! Well, just remember, I'm the next best thing to Him. You'll do what I like, and like itI There's just one way you get away from me, savvy? And you know what that is, or do I need to tell you?"

  Now he too observed Burks' lifted brow. He explained: T got me a httle plaything now, something I never had before." And added querulously: **But we got to take him along. He knows too damn muchi We can dump him after we get in the clear, on the other side of The Swamp."

  He crushed his arm around Hibbert in vicious friendliness. "If he's still alive by theni"

  Burks sighed. ^Tfou don t get to be Gfod so easily, Frank. But have your fun.*'

  The car hummed along, and though Hibbert couldn't possibly know it—or beUeve it, even if he were to guess—every inch that it covered was another inch nearer the realization of his life-long reciurent dream.

  Chapter Two

  Into the Unreal

  Back in jail, the giant had said: ''When Burks springs me like he's going to, we scoot off into the Everglades. We figured it out, way to hell and gone back, just in case. The swamps are only thirty miles from here. I got me a smart httle gal, Carlotta, Kves on the other side of the Tamiami Trail—she used to help me and Burks nm moonshine, and she knows those swamps like I know my own hand. Shell lead us through, and once we get started, nobody can trace us. We'll cut across to die Gulf Coast and the Thousand Islands where the conks are—''

  Hibbert had asked: "Conks?^

  '^That's what they call the fisher guys. Sort of like squatters. They're so poor and ignorant they don't give a damn who comes to them, as long as they don't make no trouble. Safe? Why, pirates used to duck out on them islands I"

  Now Hibbert was thinking that if nobody could track fugitives once they were deep in the Everglades, perhaps Scarlatti could not track him there eitier, if only he could manage to slip away. As the giant had said, Hibbert was as much wanted by the law as any of them. He'd need a hideaway to plan his next move. Why not the Everglades?

  Therefore he said tentatively: "Have it your way. I'll behave."

  Scarlatti beamed wolfishly. Burks' brow seemed permanently elevated. Hibbert took a good look at him.

  Burks was as precise and eflBcient as the vehicle he drove, not one of his movements wasted. Physically, he was a masterpiece of economy, as streamlined as a whippet. But his sharp-featured face, for all its symmetry, was as repellent as Scarlatti's, for his every expression was without emotion. If ever an electronic computer were gifted with a countenance, it must have resembled Burks

  Hibbert pondered on the relationship between Burks and the giant, then recalled that Burks had mentioned Scarlatti's usefulness—it was probably his tremendous strength, Hibbert decided. Doubtless it had been handy on occasion. But he had no cause to ponder when he was introduced to Carlotta—she was so obviously made for the giant.

  She was taU, her lean frame as heavily muscled as a channel swimmers. Like Scarlatti, she was swarthy. Perhaps, Hibbert hazarded, part Indian. Her black hair hung in a ratty knot at her nape; the lines xmder her eyes and those from mouth to nostrils were deeply etched and yellowed. She seemed older than Scarlatti, who was probably in his mid-thirties. In his perfection, Burks was ageless.

  She was barelegged, her large feet in grimy white sneakers. Her dress hung shapeless as if it had been worn day and night for weeks on end, its slopped stains a travestied leopard-pattern. Hibbert's impression was that Carlotta's way with whatever especially pleased her was to use it to death.

  Her shanty huddled gray and forlorn on a flat landscape, the Okaloosa Swamp at the edge of the Ever-

  glades. The vista was mostly one of lush deep grass rutted with meandering trails like dried creek-beds. Afar were clumps of tall palmetto and the shine of narrow waters.

  *'Give us some coffee before we start out," Scarlatti ordered. Carlotta made no move. Her black eyes held to Hibbert, questioning. Scarlatti said: "This kid's coming along with us. What's the matter? You don't like it?"

  Evidently she didn't. She glanced at Biu-ks for confirmation.

  Burks said: 'We'll leave him here, Frank. Carlotta's canoe won t hold four of us." He spoke so casually that at first none of the others caught his implication. Then Carlotta smiled—strangely, a mingling of triumph and misgiving. It flashed on Hibbert what Burks had hinted, and his spine froze. Burks' hand was on the gun in his belt. He was looking suggestively over at the water.

  Quickly Hibbert began: 'Tfou don't mean to—'*

  Scarlatti stepped between him and Burks. "He comes along with us, get me?"

  Burks gazed at him dispassionately, hand still on gun. Scarlatti fumed: "He's mine, see, and nothing's going to happen to him unless I do it myself 1"

  Carlotta's eyes narrowed. She sneered: "What did you do in the clink, pick up a new habit?"

  Scarlatti swung furiously around, and as though from long conditioning, she cringed. Her study of Hibbert took on fresh resentment. Scarlatti snapped: *This here's a smart boyi I'm taking him with us—to teach him not to be so damn smarti"

  He whirled back to face Burks. ''He's coming along —^you heard mel"

  Burks hesitated, then shrugged. His hand moved

  from his gun. He said, amused: "How you must have hated your father, Frankl" Scarlatti frowned. '^What's my father got to do with

  itr

  Carlotta remarked darkly: '*The punk limps."

  "So he was in the army and got shot upl" Scarlatti snarled. "Cut the gab and get that coflEeer

  She temporized. ''He sure isn't going to be any help when we leave the canoe and start walking.'' Burks exchanged a glance with her. It must have made some bargain. She smiled wryly and went into her hut.

  Yet while she poured the coflFee, her eyes caressed the giant. They were strangely soft in her rugged face, like flowers springing from granite. Hibbert wondered what she saw in the man. The attraction of physical likeness, probably. They could easily have been brother and sister.

  Coffee finished, they loaded the car with supplies and clamped Carlotta's frail canoe to its roof. Burks drove, Hibbert beside him, the giant and the woman in back. The ride over the fenceless Okaloosa country was rougher than a trip on camel-back. They bounced on their seats and though they gripped the car's sides, were thrown against each other. Whenever Hibbert was jounced against Biu-ks,
he remembered what Burks had intended. His hands ached from clutching the car's frame to steady himself.

  The pools and lanes of water spread out as if seeking company. The car bumbled past acres of blue flags where redwinged blackbirds dipped and flew. The puddled road twisted up a slow rise. The vehicle went more smoothly through a cut-over area of Caribbean piae.

  Carlotta warned: "This road follows the high groimd. Seminole Indians live along the ridges. If we

  don't want anybody giving us the dog-eye, we'd better stash this jalopy in the brush and take to the canoe."

  Burks abandoned the car at a mangrove thicket '"Moonshiners live handy,** Carlotta said. 'They can use a car, and they aren't about to tell anybody how they came by it."

  They imshipped the canoe. It was very light; Scarlatti carried it on his back. Carlotta handed a couple of heavy shopping-bags to Hibbert and herself carried a wrecked cardboard suitcase and a blanket-rolL She led them over the oozy, uneven ground. Its fragrance, rank and damp, was like the smell of a conservatory. The mud was seldom deep.

  'That's because the Everglades is all solid rock imdemeath," she explained. "It's gray coral rock, all twisty like snakes and full of holes letting the water seep through. The dirt is just rotted plants. The reason the water's like coffee is because it's stained with acid from the palmettos and cypresses and water hyacinths."

  Somewhere this woman had picked up an education of sorts. Hibbert had become aware that although she avoided contact with him as much as possible, she was aiming her comments at him. Why? She had looked at him so Uttle that he was willing to wager she could not describe him, were he suddenly to vanish. He was fairly certain that Burks and Scarlatti knew almost as much about the swamps as she, and that in any case her remarks did not much interest them.

  Carlotta was jealousl And she was airing her knowledge of the Everglades in an attempt to establish superiority over Hibbert, to enhance her worth in the giant's eyes. He wondered whether by playing upon

  her jealousy he could persuade her to help him escape.

  A rush-bordered waterway ribboned from one of the large pools. "Bayou,** said Carlotta. "A water bridge, sort of, between lakes. Some folks think bayous are the same thing as rivers, but they aren t. They finish where they start, and begin where they stop.**

  Pleased by the paradox, she smirked self-consciously. *Tut the canoe down there," she told Scarlatti **Get inl** she said to them.

  She set her bundles in the shaky craft, took Hib-bert's without looking at him, and stowed them away. They embarked, Scarlatti taking one paddle and nudging Hibbert with the other.

  The mangrove thickets expanded, lifted into forests, and formed solid green walls of which the palmetto crowns were bartizans. Hibbert could not drag his paddle as heavily as Scarlatti. Carlotta snatched it from him with a sniff of triumph and effortlessly matched the big man stroke for stroke.

  Enormous white spider-liUes clawed up from the water like drowning waxen hands. Hibbert thought he saw a snake among them. Carlotta snickered.

  "That's no snake, its just a water tiu-keyl They got long necks and swim with their bodies imderwater.**

  They came to a cypress brake, a pool surrounded by ancient trees rising from water, their roots like bent knees lifting into the air—as if the trees sat spider-legged in what to them was but a puddle. Their tangles of feathery foHage shut out the sky, and from their limbs the aerial moss dropped in confused spiral filaments like ragged ghost-garments hung to dry.

  *Trhe trees breathe through their knees, come high water,** Carlotta said, and pointed out a white flash through the lattices of verdure—a gleam of pearl on weathered copper, snowy egrets feeding.

  I

  From the cypress head, another bayou carried them into a sawgrass swamp where packed spikes ten and twelve feet tall grew as closely together as the bristles of a brush.

  "We got to push through. You two''—^to Burks and Hibbert—*lay lowl The blades are sawtoothed like great big cutgrass. If they touch you, they'll cut you to ribbonsl The water s shallow here. Me and Frank will pole through.*'

  It was like worming through the crackling straws of a gigantic broom. Hibbert peeped over the gunwale at projecting rocks splashed with hchen, at twisted tangles of driftwood—on one of them he saw a diamond-back rattlesnake of prodigious size sunning itself in the company of a dozen sleepy turtles. Just when the canoe's canvas bottom scraped the ragged coral bed of the swamp, a water moccasin shot past and away. Carlotta blanched.

  **A11 we need to do is get stranded herel" she whispered.

  It was too early for mosquitoes, but clouds of sand flies followed and pestered them. A whip of grass slashed Hibbert's cheek, bringing blood. The canoe thumped against a slanting wall of weathered wood, the side of an old wrecked ship, of what kind and size there was no knowing, since the close-packed high grass permitted only immediate view. Hibbert wondered when the water could have been deep enough to float it. Carlotta said: "A hurricane must have dragged it in from the coast. Might even be one of the old-time pirate shipsl"

  And hastily to Scarlatti, as she levered her paddle against the hulk and pushed away: "But even if it's a pirate ship full of gold treasure, we better lay off it Probably find it full of coral snakesi"

  There came a low sustained note like a blast from a cracked horn. "Bull 'gator roaring," Carlotta divined. Burks' hand went to his gun. "There's no danger unless we run into a nest. And hearing him is good, means we're coming out of the sawgrass."

  Soon they emerged into a wide and shallow lake ringed by forest. They skirted its shores imtil Carlotta cocked a navigator's eye at the sun and chose an outlet. Now there was current in the black water. They rested paddles for a while.

  Hibbert watched the aerial ballet of huge tiger swallowtail butterflies against a setting of brown orchids. He noticed that though the shores were slipping steadily past, the bayou's islets were keeping pace with the canoe. He turned to Carlotta.

  She pHed her paddle, still not looking at him. "Ah, they're floating islands. Dead plants get tangled with driftwood, they ferment, and the gases keep them floating while new plants take root. And these're nothing! Some floating islands get so big, they got full-grown trees and animals on them. And some you can build houses on, too."

  Near sundown, she chose for campsite a rocky knoll walled by palmettos. Burks helped her carry what was needed from the canoe, then sat off to one side while she unpacked food and utensils. He took out a pipe and smoked contemplatively, as removed from the others as an Oriental mystic deep in a nirvanic trance.

  "Got to have sticks for a fire," Carlotta said loudly to nobody in particular. Hibbert moved off to gather wood. The giant grunted suspiciously, then joined him, carrying nothing himself, but obviously obtaining plea-sm-e by pointing out dead twigs here and there and commanding Hibbert to pick them up. They returned to where Carlotta was kneeling, engaged in building a

  fire wall with chunks of loose rock, and HUbbert lowered his bundle beside her. She ignored him, her lips pressed in a hard line, the hand with which she reached for kindling shaking. Burks' silence and cliilly stare were hardly less reassuring.

  What conversation there was, Scarlatti made—lirst to Carlotta, who deigned no answer; then to Burks, who quickly dampened him with indiifferent monosyllables; and last to Hibbert, who kept as aloof as he could. Finally the giant stamped a foot and bellowed:

  **What the hell's the matter with everybody?"

  Carlotta took time oflE from her business at the fire to jerk her shoulder toward Hibbert. "If you have to know, it's himi Why'd you have to bring him along? All he's doing is lousing everything upl He can't use a paddle, he can't walk properly—and you have to follow him around like a lost sheep all the time. Makes me sick/'

  Scarlatti scratched his matted thick poll as if hunting there for fit answer. At last he came out with: "So you don't like itl"

  "No I don'tl" But then, as if aware that she might be going too far, her voice softened. **You might at lea
st have stayed and helped me build up the fireplace.''

  She had dipped dark water from the bayou, boiled it in a dented saucepan, and made coffee which fortunately tasted less evil than it looked. Burks and the giant had theirs first because she had seen fit to pack only a pair of cups.

  She brightened when Scarlatti, from a full mouth and with punctuative smacks of rehsh, complimented her cooking. Burks, scarcely touching his food, seemed bored. A full stomach made Scarlatti expansive—he told boastful stories of his past prowess in smuggling

  and prophesied profitable misdeeds for the future. One of his resounding backslaps ahnost shattered Hib-bert's spine. Carlotta sat rigid, her narrowed eyes festering with jealousy. Burks' cryptic gaze lingered long on her, roved to Hibbert and back to the woman again.

  Scarlatti had swilled enough coflFee to his taste. It was Hibbert's timi to use the cup. The giant held it forth. "Pour the kid some Java, baby.**

  She took the cup and reached for the coffee pot, then hesitated. Slowly she turned and stared full at Hibbert, and it was almost as though the force of her rancor thickened the air between titiem with shadow. She threw the cup, clattering and hissing, into the fire.

  **Let him get his own damn coffeel"

  *Why, you slutl'' Scarlatti limged forward and cracked the back of his hand across her face, flinging her down. She lay glaring up at him, her breath catching in a sob. He lunged up and toward her.

  Almost automatically, Hibbert said: "Nol Let her alone I'*