Read Online Dead in the Water by Ted Wood - Free Book Online

Winslow's living quarters.
    There were two rooms and a John.
    The first room had a table and one chair, a couch, a TV set, and a dry sink with a couple of bottles on the top of it. They were rye, all the same brand, sealed from the liquor store. This was where he obliged his guests with a little weekend blind-piggery.
    I checked the bottom half of the dry sink and found it locked. It was an unslippable lock, the dead-fall variety that needs to be forced, unless you had been in the Marines with a good ol' boy from Kentucky who shared his simple skills with you. It took me thirty seconds to open it and solve the riddle the groupies in the coffee shop.
    The sink had two old-fashioned cracker tins in it. One was filled with little plastic bags of marijuana, the other with pills. I took a few of them out and broke one open, tasting the bitterness on the tip of my tongue. Speed.
    I dug farther down and came up with some sealed packs of white powder. I left them sealed but put them into my shirt pocket. I didn't think they would be heroin. The security was too casual. I assumed they were speed for the occasional freak who shot the stuff rather than dropping it. Of course, if I'd been doing things by the book I'd have picked up a search warrant, then I could have scooped the lot and seen Winslow slapped inside. This way the law was going to be rougher on me than it was on him. So I closed the cracker tins and the dry sink, relocked the dinky little lock, and went through to the bedroom.
    Searching a room is a skill, like packing a suitcase. The pro makes it look easy. He checks all the places that people think he's never going to find, without disturbing the look of the place. I found that Winslow had more than seven hundred dollars in small bills, a collection of expensive pornography, most of it homosexual, and no gun or spare ammunition to indicate that he owned one.
    The last thing I went through was his wardrobe. It consisted a couple of pairs of check pants and a good windbreaker. There was one suit that looked as if it had last been worn when he came marching home from WW2. And there was a heavy jacket.
    In the jacket I found the first thing that tied him into my mystery. It was a map of the area, an ordinance survey large-scale job. It was nothing special in itself. He had another one, identical to it, pinned on the wall of the coffee shop for the formation of his guests. But what made this one special was pencil mark, a small neat cross in mid-channel, upstream from the narrows.
    I unfolded the map flat and checked references, not the figures but the lines of sight that crossed at that point on the waterway. It seemed that the point lay on a line between one small island and a prominent rock on the shoreline. That was the east-west axis. North-south it lay on a line between the mouth of the narrows and the mid-channel marker a mile upstream. I thought about it all for a minute. Then I folded the map and put it back in the jacket. It seemed to me that Winslow had picked out a rendezvous point in a remote part of the waterway. I wondered why. I wondered who he was planning to meet there and why he should choose a place that looked casual but was far away from any cottage or place here people might be watching. Perhaps it was the spot he had been heading for when his boat had been stopped by someone's cutting the fuel lines. It made the hairs on my neck tingle. It fitted. Winslow was tied in with drugs. That meant he could be involved with some heavyweight rounders. Perhaps they knew that Pardoe was coming to Murphy's Harbour. Perhaps they arranged to wait for him there, making sure that Winslow would bring him to them. Maybe they were the people that Pardoe was coming to visit.
    I nodded to Mrs. Sissie and left. Sam was outside, ignoring the vacationers who were making cootchy-coo noises at him. I whistled and he followed me back to the cruiser. I hit out for the office, excitedly forming my next plan. It was close to two