v
Consort the first was slow to learn.
Consort the second was quick to burn.
The higher her worth, the meaner her fall,
And consort the third was the worst of them all.
Sweet Truth despises and high Honor reviles
The last man to king the queen of the isles.
They made their home in Miami. Miami! I could not imagine how my May could be happy among land people, especially those land people, but her letters were cheerful enough. They were short, yes, and infrequent. But the only news they ever contained was good. Dougie, she wanted me to know, had buckled down and was studying ocean-thermal engineering! It was too bad that it kept him away from home so much, but he was very clever at learning it. May herself was swimming, golfing, riding—always busy. And Jimmy Rex was happy to be back in his school. There was no word of whether the school was happy to have him. So there was some kind of a bright side for me. If I didn't have May, at least I didn't have Jimmy Rex, either.
So owner's country was all mine, and I rattled around in it lonesomely. I was in no mood for parties, and if Betsy wanted to be invited, she had the good sense not to tell me so. I kept busy. We were in a dozen big industries by then. We were selling liquid gases—oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen; solid CO2; ammonia, methanol, chlorine, caustic soda; small quantities of argon and helium, too, when we could find anyone to buy them. I was toying with the idea of microwaving energy to a low satellite and beaming it back to, say, Australia or Japan. Betsy's steel industry wasn't going anywhere, but I'd taken a tip from what Captain Havrila had said about the ships coming in in ballast; I had ours siphon sand up from port bottoms for ballast, and then we used the sand to make a slurry to scour out the fouling organisms in our deep intake pipes—no need to try to recover it! Of course, I wasn't the owner of the Fleet, and everything I did I had to ask permission of May for. But she gave it, every time. Because I had plenty to do, I should have been happy—or as happy as I could be expected to be, with my May married to a rodent that walked like a man. If I wasn't happy, part of the reason was that I got the letter I had been expecting for weeks. No return address. No name. Just the message:
The Commodore's orders are still in effect. I didn't know whether it was time for me to carry them out or not, so I flipped a coin. You won this time.
I almost wished the coin had come up the other way—better, I wished that my unknown pen pal would come and talk to me about it. If he decided to kill me afterward, well—I didn't want him to, but there were some bad nights when it seemed like a way out of a place where I didn't want to be. But God knew I needed advice—even from my assassin.
And then May's weekly letter said, "Please come and visit us," and enclosed with it was one from Dougie d'Agasto:
We have some important business to talk over, Jason. You'll come out of it rich. Besides, it's what May wants.
Even when the man was trying to be ingratiating he raised the hackles on the back of my neck. I had not forgotten the last deal he had offered me! I did not for one second think that he wouldn't have made the same offer again—except that he'd found a better one for himself. You don't have to steal the child when you can capture the mother.
I certainly did not want to talk over anything with Dougie d' Agasto, no matter how rich he proposed to make me. But it was May who'd asked me to come.
It is not a long flight from Papeete to Miami, but it uses up a whole night—you cross over five time zones. And so I arrived at ten in the morning with no more than an hour's sleep and my disposition cranky. I took a taxi from the airport to the address Dougie had given me. What I wound up in looked like a warehouse district and smelled like the city dump. A couple of gasoline-burner cars, half dismantled, rusted along the curb. We were only a block or two from Biscayne Bay—that accounted for part of the smell. At least two of the low-rise buildings on the block had been burned out and boarded up. An elderly black woman was throwing a bucket of hot, soapy water on the sidewalk in front of a little grocery store and attacking it with a broom. I walked up to her, carrying my overnight case. "Excuse me, I'm looking for Douglas d'Agasto," I said.
She straightened up. "Round back," she said. I thought there was some hostility in the way she looked at me, but she added, "You want me to help you with that bag?"
"Thank you, no. But it's kind of you to offer." I gestured at the soapy sidewalk. "I didn't really expect to see anybody doing that around here."
"I ain't from around here," she said, dismissing me. At least there seemed to be one decent person in the neighborhood to keep May company, I thought—but could d'Agasto really have May living in this wretched slum? Well, of course he could, if it suited his purpose—but not himself!
Of course, I had made a wrong assumption. Neither of them lived there. It was an office, not a home, and once you got to the inner courtyard, obviously a luxurious one. A slim black man appeared from a vined trellis and circled a marble fountain to ask what my business was. When I gave my name, he passed me on through a door—there was a very thick frame around it; weapons detectors, I realized—and into a handsome, huge waiting room.
There a handsome small woman with rose-red hair conducted me to the very office of Douglas d'Agasto himself. I've seen pictures of a bigger office. It belonged to that old dictator, Mussolini. "Uncle Jason," d'Agasto cried welcomingly, rising to wait for me to cover the fifteen meters to his desk before he stretched out his hand. "Glad you could come! Sorry to make you come to my office first, but I figured we might as well get the business out of the way so you could relax when we get to the house." I let him shake my hand. "What's the business we're talking about?"
He nodded approval of my directness. He was just as direct. "May wants to own the Fleet free and clear. No more trustee. No other owners. So we want you to turn the trust over to her and sell her your stock. We'll pay you fifty million dollars for it, Uncle Jason."
He had not invited me to sit down, but I sat down anyway. "I'm not your uncle," I said, "and my stock's not worth that much. Fifteen or twenty at most. It doesn't matter, though, because I don't want to sell."
"May really wants you to—"
"What May wants me to do, May will tell me to do herself."
The look he threw me was instant anger on top. That didn't bother me a bit. Underneath was a cocky confidence, though, and that did. "In that case," he said, spreading the dimples on the sun-tanned face with a wide smile, "we better just get our asses out to the house so she can do that little thing. I think you're going to like our place."
If what Dougie meant was that I would think it very luxurious, I knew that sight unseen. I had been signing the fund transfers into May's account to pay for it. The luxury started long before we got there. We were only a block or two from Dougie's boat dock on the bay, but there was a chauffeured car waiting in the courtyard to take us there. As we pulled out into the street, I saw the old black woman pause in shining her cracked store window to glare at us over her shoulder. I appreciated that; at least now I knew who the hostility belonged to. We got in a hydrofoil with a three-man crew and screamed down the waterway, under causeway bridges, past small islands, until we came to a large one. We coasted along it for a while. There were lavish estates along the shore; then there were none, just mangroves and cypress, until we came to a dock that could have handled an oaty-boat. Well, not really. I exaggerate. But the dock was an exaggeration, too. There was no vessel he might want to own that would need that much space.
The house was as grand as I could have expected, but the grandest part was May running down the green, green lawn to meet me. She hugged me twice as tightly as I had expected, then leaned back to look at me. And I at her. It was my veritable sweet May, as ever was, the clean, clear face, the thoughtful, wide-set eyes, the silky hair—"You look tired," I said. I hadn't meant to, but it was true. It was not polite, so I added, "Too much golf, I suppose."
The smile flickered, but it came back fast. "It's more like too much not seeing you, Jay. Come on in! Oh, Jason—I've missed you so much!"
If consulted by the tribunal when it is time to decide how long Dougie d'Agasto should roast in hell, I will say on his behalf that at least he let us alone to talk. He excused himself at once. He went up to his "study" for an hour, came down for lunch, and immediately took off in the stiltboat for most of the afternoon—it was for his tutoring in thermal engineering, he said. So I had May to myself. I saw the house. I heard how Jimmy Rex was doing. May told me that the secessionist mobs were pretty worrying when they rioted, but maybe they were right and this part of Florida should anschluss with Cuba. She wanted to know if I'd seen much of the big new Chinese boats that were being launched, or any more dead fish. I even had time for a nap before dinner; and not once did she bring up the trust, or I.
Dinner wasn't grand—just very good, with all the things in it that May had known I liked all her life. When the coffee was on the table, Dougie chased the servants out of the dining hall and leaned back.
"So tell him, honey," he said with that smile that was on the very verge of curdling into a smirk.
May looked reluctant, but she didn't put it off. She put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and she gazed at me. "You've been as good a father to me as my father ever was, Jason."
Those were not the words I most wanted to hear from her, but under the circumstances they were about the best I could expect. I reached across and patted her hand.
"So don't think I'm not grateful to you, dear, because I am. I always will be. But I'm not a child anymore. I'm a grown woman, married—" Three times married, I thought, and she was thinking the same because she hesitated—"married, with a child. As much of an adult as I'm ever going to be, Jason. So I'm asking you to dissolve the trust." Dougie pursed his lips and nodded judiciously, as though he had just heard the idea for the first time and thought that by and large it might be sound. He didn't say anything. That was just as well, for I might have said something in return that could never be unsaid. "You don't have to sell your own stock if you don't want to, Jay," she went on. "Dougie thought that might be a good idea for you, but it's up to you. But, please, will you do the other?"
I didn't look at Dougie again. I didn't have to, for I could feel the temperature of his smile . . . and I could feel it drop to zero as I said, "If I do that, May, I will be killed. It's your father's orders." And I spread before them the nineteen letters I had received from my unknown assassin. And I told them what the Commodore had said to me.
Dougie slammed his fist down on the table. It was thick teak, but it shook. I didn't look at him, and he didn't say a word. May, with tears in her voice, said, "You mean my father paid someone to have you killed? But that's horrible!"
I touched her hand again. "No, love, it's not. He was right to make sure of me. If I'd failed you, it would be fair punishment." And wished I were more sure that I hadn't failed her already.
May was crying openly now. It was her husband's place to comfort her, but her husband was studying the nineteen letters, their envelopes, their postmarks. I got up and went around the table, knelt beside her, and put my arms around her. No one said anything for a while. I would not have minded if that while had gone on indefinitely, with May warm and unresisting in my arms, but at last Dougie had finished his chain of thought. He swept the letters in a fan across the table and sat back. "I guess you're not lying," he stated.
In my arms May stirred and detached herself. "Jason doesn't lie to me," she told him, "ever!"
"I don't think he could have cooked up all these letters," he said, "so let's say you're right. What about it, Jay? Don't you have any idea who this person is?"
I hesitated, but it was too late to do the person any harm. "I thought for a while it might be Captain Havrila," I admitted, "but he died six months ago, and I've had letters since."
"Never tried to find out? See where they were mailed from? Find the people who mailed them?"
"How could I?" For that matter, why would I want to? I had accepted the situation as just when the Commodore had laid it on me.
He nodded. He wasn't agreeing, he was only recognizing the fact that I didn't have the guts or the determination to do anything about the situation. "What we can do," he proposed, "is get you the best damn guards you ever saw in your life. Twenty-four hours, round the clock. As long as you live. And forget about fifty million, I'll go to—"
"Dougie, stop it!" cried May. He blinked at her, but she stared him down. Then she turned to me. "What you've said changes everything, of course. So that's out. We'll go on the way we are for the present."
And I expected an explosion from Dougie. I didn't get one. I was slow to learn that the only safe expectation about Dougie d'Agasto was that he would never do what I expected him to do, but always something worse. He nodded, and picked up the letters and stuffed them in a pocket and gave us both a sunny smile.
"In that case," he said, "anyone for a game of billiards?"
If Dougie d'Agasto did not get what he wanted out of our meeting, he got quite a lot in other ways. He got the right to tell me what to do. Every one of his letters of instruction was countersigned by May herself, but there was no doubt who had written them.
His instructions were not all that wicked or dumb, to be honest—perhaps there had been worse ones that May refused to sign. Cancel the plans for another ore pumper—well, the manganese nodules were a drug on the market these days, with so many boats fishing for them. Kill the iceberg project and sell off the tugs—it had become a running sore in our cash-flow accounts anyway. He never attempted to keep me from spending any sum on keeping the Fleet seaworthy and comfortable for its crews, but he did veto almost every plan for expansion. He was hoarding capital, it seemed. No doubt there was a plan, and no doubt I would find out about it sooner or later.
Meanwhile I followed his orders, and life was not all that bad. The officers and crews liked me, I think. Not just on the flagship. When I flew to Dubai to sign the sale papers on the sailing tugs and pay off the crews, they took me out for a night on the town. I could not have expected that from forty men and women I had just fired, and they weren't angling for other places in the Fleet—they were all fine sailors, and there were plenty of jobs. They were simply saying good-by to a friend, and I was touched. I was also very, very drunk, and when at last I got back to the flagship I was still parched and headachy, but not unhappy—at least not until I saw that Betsy's private VTO was parked on the landing deck.
"I thought," she said, "it was time I paid you a visit, since you don't ever come to see me."
She was not a person I wanted for a friend, but I didn't particularly want to offend her, "You are always welcome on May's fleet," I told her, with a great deal of politeness and not nearly as much truth, and I called the housekeepers' section chief to tell them that they were to prepare suitable accommodations. Of course, they were way ahead of me. They had put fresh flowers in the vases and ice in the bowls in the suite that sheikhs and sovereigns occupied when they were our guests. For a wonder, Betsy didn't pout when I told her I had to work for a bit—"I've been away quite a while," I said, "and I really need to—" And she put her finger against my lips, with a smile that under any other circumstances I would have called flirtatious.
"May I try your pool out, Jay?" she asked, quite politely, and she occupied herself with swimming and lazing around the big waterfall that sheeted down the glass of the owners' suite and into the pool, while I did what I had to do. Which was only partly business. Mostly it was sucking oxygen out of a bottle and swallowing aspirin, because if I had Betsy for a guest I wanted a clear head.
She had asked that dinner be served out in the garden, and when I came out to see her, she was wearing something long and filmy and white, with white hibiscus tucked into a diamond tiara on her hair. "How very nice you look," I said, as required. She smiled dreamily, watching the butler pour the wine.
"To us," she said, and then, when we had each taken a sip, "How fresh and clean the air is here, Jay."
"I hope it stays that way," I said, because there had been rumors of Betsy's next plan for expansion and diversification. She gave me a thoughtful look, but she was too busy being sweet to follow it up. All through the meal she was all sweet prattle and gossip about rich friends and reckless doings. It was quite a meal. The chef had had time to do his best, and so it was mahimahi and rack of lamb from our own flock, and a compote of mostly ugly-fruit for dessert with enough kirsch in it so that I didn't require an after-dinner brandy. Or, after the previous few days in Dubai, at all want one. Betsy had no such restraint. She ate every scrap and drank all that was poured, and when it was done she sighed, "I wish I had your cook, Jay! I guess I can tell you that I've tried to hire him away."
"I know," I said. I also knew the reason he had told me for turning her down—young Betsy was a terror to her servants.
"You know a lot about my business, don't you?" she purred, watching me. "I think you meant something by that remark about the air pollution,"
I shrugged. "I have heard," I said carefully, "that you are contracting for large amounts of Australian coal. The only thing I can think of you wanting to do with it is pyrolize it into gasoline, so we'll have a floating Galveston out here."
"You have very good sources of information, Jay. I do too. You were a fool to turn Dougie down, you know."
She was sitting between me and the setting sun. I moved to get the sun out of my eyes so that I could see her better, and she laughed and hitched her chair closer to me. "You're always a surprise to me, Jason," she said. "Those nineteen letters coming in all these years, and nobody knew but you."
I had finally puzzled it out. "You've got a spy in May's house," I said.
"My dear Jason! Of course I'm always interested in what's happening with my sister."
"She's not your sister."
"I think of her as my sister." She hitched her chair a bit closer, and our knees touched. "Would you like to know how I think of you?"
Now, the advancing years had not made me any more handsome. I was older than Betsy's father. I could not think of any reason why she would be after my body, but her eyes were half closed, and her lips were half smiling, and her voice was husky.
I got up to replenish her drink, and when I was seated again, we were no longer touching. "Why was I stupid, Betsy?"
"Accidents happen," she whispered over the rim of her glass. "You've got a few good years left if you're careful, Jay." I moved restlessly, rejecting the implication. "May has more than that," she went on, "unless there was an accident. Why, do you know, Jason, under the terms of the Commodore's will, if May died your trusteeship would terminate? And then you'd have nothing to say about what happened to her stock."
"It would just go to Jimmy Rex."
"And if something happened to Jimmy Rex?" I was getting angry—it was not because she was putting new thoughts in my head, for what angered me was that these same thoughts had occurred to me long since. Fortunately for my peace of mind I had reasoned out an answer to that. "May's money," I said, "is a lot, but it's nothing compared to what Jimmy Rex is going to inherit from his grandmother. The Appermoys have billions, and Jimmy's the only heir."
And Betsy laughed out loud. "To think," she marveled, "that you were the one who got us interested in the dead fish!"
I nodded as though I understood. I doubt that I fooled her. I did not understand at all, and to make time to help puzzle it out I poured myself a brandy after all, I dawdled, savoring the Courvoisier. Either she was being deliberately mystifying, or I was more tired and hung over and, yes, already slightly drunk all over again than I thought. Perhaps I had not made myself clear? The logic was very simple. Nothing would happen to Jimmy Rex—at least nothing that Dougie might arrange—as long as his grandmother was alive, because Dougie would not endanger his chances of somehow getting his hands on the Appermoy fortune. What dead fish had to do with all this I did not know, and Betsy was not helping me think. She leaned forward, with her eyes as close to sparkling as she knew how to make them, and licked the lobe of my ear. "You're an exciting man, Jason," she whispered.
"For God's sake, Betsy!" I protested, not quite sure whether it was the sense of what she was saying that I objected to, or her warm, moist tongue in my ear. I was getting to be an elderly man, but I wasn't dead. I didn't like Betsy at all. She was not beautiful. But she was young, and she was healthy, and she was wearing at least a hundred dollars' worth of French perfume in the folds of the clinging gossamer gown. I tried to redirect the conversation. "Will you please tell me what you're trying to say?"
She smiled mistily and leaned back—it was not a way of putting space between us, it was only so that she could throw her breasts out. I did not fail to notice them. "Jason," she murmured, "I think better when I'm lying down. In bed. With a nice warm body next to me."
There was no possible doubt in my mind that it was Betsy's intention to add me to her already outstanding collection of lovers. I am embarrassed to say that at that moment I could almost believe that it was for my own aging body's sake—almost. I croaked, "Why are you doing this, Betsy?"
"Aw . . ." She pouted. Then she shrugged. "Because I want everything that belongs to May. But I promise you it'll be worth it. I'm really good, Jason. And I also promise you," she added, getting slowly up and tugging me to my feet, "that in that nice big bed that you sleep in, that used to be May's, after the important stuff has been taken care of, I will tell you everything you want to know, and it will truly fascinate you."
On that promise she cheated me, though not on anything else. I did not sleep much that night. When I woke at daylight and remembered who I had for a bedmate, she was gone. I pulled myself raggedly out of bed and threw a robe on, and while I was puzzling over what had happened, I heard a jet scream. I went to the lanai and there was Betsy's plane, a bright blue-white trail streaking across the pink morning sky. She had gotten what she wanted, and gone.
She spoiled my sleep for more than one night. I could not get out of my mind what she had said and hinted. The worst was the implication that Jeff's death had not been an accident. Dougie was filth, of course. I had not thought he was a murderer, at least in my conscious mind; but now that Betsy had made me think about it, I could not doubt it anymore.
I called in the security chief again, and from then on I was never without a couple of huskies within call.
But that protected only me. What could protect my May? Logic told me that it would not make sense for Dougie to harm May as long as the boy would simply inherit—nor would it be reasonable for him to want the boy out of the way as long as Jimmy Rex stood to inherit the vast Appermoy billions. It would surely pay Dougie to bide his time, at least until the old lady died.
But the stink of dead fish showed me there was something wrong with that chain of reasoning. Betsy knew what it was but, typically, had not told me. So I started other inquiries into motion.
They weren't necessary. Before my agents had a chance to report, a morning came when I was awakened by the Fleet bursar pounding at the door, bursting with news. The dead fish had done the Appermoys in. For old man Appermoy had not been able to resist one more villainy before he died. The glassy pellets he dissolved the radionuclides in for disposal were not expensive. It was not usually worth his while to steal in so trivial an area. But there was a strike in a settling farm that he had not been able to buy off, and an accident to one of the vitrifying plants that put him behind schedule, and so he had eight hundred ton lots of high-level radioactive waste with no legitimate place to put them. He had dumped them, raw, into his seamount. Of course, they had begun to dissolve into the sea almost at once.
Appermoy had not killed the Pacific Ocean, for it was too big for even him. But he had so polluted three million square kilometers that fish were dying. The family had been able to keep the lid on—it is cheaper to bribe than to comply—until the weather betrayed them. For a solid month the Hawaiian winds blew the wrong way. They swept the waters out of the west, and washed radioactively hot waves onto Oahu and Maui and the Kona coast.
The damage was too immense for bribes to work anymore, and they were a land-based conglomerate. So the land law could reach them, and that meant something like twenty billion dollars in damage suits already, with more in the offing, and the lax government agencies forced at last to stir themselves. "I'm sure," said the bursar gleefully, "that the old lady's tucked a few million away in pocket change here and there. But the company's bust!"
So Jimmy Rex had lost most of his legacy . . . and May had lost her insurance.
Since I no longer believed that Jeff's accident had been an accident, I had to believe that an accident could easily happen to May and her son. What could I do to prevent it? I ruminated a thousand plans. I could confront Dougie with my suspicions and warn him that he was being watched—foolish idea! The one thing you could not do to Dougie d'Agasto was frighten him off. I could warn May. I could tell her what I believed and beg her to leave him. But that was almost as foolish. If she had been willing to listen, she would never have married the creature in the first place. The best plan was the one that I rejected most positively and at once. I could, I thought out of my anger and despair, do to Dougie himself what I feared he would do to May.
But I could not stoop so low, though for many years I have wished I had.
And while I was stewing over whether to call May, and what to say to her if I did, I got a call from her. She looked troubled and very weary, but she was trying to sound happy. "Good news, Jason," she cried, though her eyes made liars of her words. "Dougie says we won't have to worry about that—that letter problem, anymore. He says he is certain of it. He has gone to get documentary proof, and he'll bring it to you." But she added, although I could see that it cost her, "But you're the one who has to decide if the proof is enough, Jay. I'll abide by whatever you decide."
And two days later, before dawn, Dougie's plane screamed in. It woke me from my sleep. By the time I got to the landing strip he was gone, the pilot waiting by the ship to pass on his instructions for me. Mr. d'Agasto had had the deck crew take his materials down to the scavenging deck. Mr. d'Agasto would wait for me there. Mr. d'Agasto asked that I join him at once.
Mr. d'Agasto was getting on my nerves. Why the scavenging deck? It was not much more than a sewer head—when we built lips around the oaty-boats, we could no longer throw our garbage over the side, so there was a well that opened out under the hull. It was a tiny, dirty chamber down near the waterline, not a place where anyone went for choice. I didn't like Dougie's choice of a place, I didn't like getting orders from him—most of all, of course, I didn't like Dougie himself. But I went. And all the way down on the hoist, and all across the wide, hissing, rumbling of the boat's workings as the tram carried me through the low-pressure turbine decks, I was wondering if this was a scheme of Dougie's to kill me and dump me down the scavenging well, I had not forgotten what he was.
I also had not forgotten some of the other things Betsy had told me. They were not useful things. They were what she thought were sexually stimulating things. They had to do with Dougie's tastes: How he liked to do that, she said, showing me that, and also this, demonstrating this, and most of all he likes to do these others . . . But some of those others I would not allow at all, and my stomach turned as the images formed in my mind of what went on between Dougie and my May in their private hours. So I did not want to see the man at all. And if it was his plan to kill me—well, then at least I would never again be troubled with these poisonous thoughts.
He did not have any such plans, it turned out.
He was alone in the scavenging chamber. It reeked, for he had opened the main access hatch and the oily, warm water was only a few meters below, with all its leftover stinks. Dougie had a great packing case at his feet, and he was smoking a joint to combat the stench. "Close the door," he ordered.
I did as I was told. Dougie could see that I was ill at ease. It amused him. 'This won't take long," he promised, "Help me open the box."
I did that, too, very obedient to his instructions. The box was very heavy, and there was waterproof sacking around it, a metal container nearly two meters long. It was sealed and locked. "You take good care of your documents," I panted as I lifted one corner so that Dougie could unlock the strapping.
He laughed—I did not then know why. It took him some time to get the lid open—
The lid of the coffin.
A terrible miasma of decay poured out. The body inside was days dead, but I could recognize the tired old face. In life it had belonged to Elsie Van Dorn. "I never thought of her," I gasped.
"You don't have to think of her anymore," chuckled Dougie. "You're really pretty dumb, old man. It stood to reason that the Commodore would have arranged for your guard dog to get some money. All I had to do was get a look at his private bequests—you know how that's done, don't you?" I flinched, but didn't meet his eyes. "Once I found her, it wasn't hard. She even had copies of the letters in her safe-deposit box."
I could not speak. I could only stare at poor Elsie, who had loved the child she had cared for and at the last paid the tariff on that love.
"You've seen enough? You're convinced?" And Dougie shoved the box into the scavenging chute. It was a two-meter drop, splash, gone forever into the secret deeps of the ocean. "So you don't have any excuse anymore, old man," said Dougie, "and I've had the papers drawn up for you. Here they are. Sign."
And of course, as soon as he could get back to Miami with the signed papers, May turned over all her stock to him. I had begged her not to. She wouldn't meet my eyes on the phone as she said, "I feel—anyway, I hope—that once he has what he needs, he won't have to—"
She stopped there and shook her head, not wanting to name what he "had" to do otherwise. And Dougie d'Agasto was crowned king of the grazing isles.