Five minutes later he reached his personal castle, perched on precarious piling in a gap hewn from the mangroves. The moon made it, to Charlie, a thing of black-and-silver beauty, with Max’s yellow eyes gleaming from the porch floor like wicked, welcoming beacons.
Still muttering, Charlie waded out of the shallow-water ooze and stumped in squishing shoes up the ladder to his shack. The shrimp bucket he hung on a wall peg out of Max’s calculating reach. He found his pipe in the kitchen and loaded and lighted it, deliberately because the capacity for haste was not in him. His homebrew crock bubbled seductively and he took time out to raise the grimy toweling that covered it and sniff appreciatively.
“Ready to cap by the time I come back and get the shrimp graded,” he told Max.
He changed his dripping brogans for a pair of snake-proof boots and took down his .22 rifle from its pegs, not because he really imagined that anyone might have lived through such a blast but because strangers—them radio fellows two keys east, for instance—might take it into their heads to come prying around.
He was halfway across the key when the drone of Ellis’ launch entering his lagoon justified his suspicions.
A dying plume of steam rising from a circle of battered mangroves told him that no danger of fire impended, and he turned back in relief. It did not occur to him that the pilot of his hypothetical rocket might be lying desperately injured in the shallow water, at the mercy of sharks and crocodiles. If it had, he would not have moved to help. Any fool who got himself into such a spot, in Charlie’s rude philosophy, could get himself out.
The drone of the launch’s engine was loud when he reached his shack. The boat, handled by a pilot grotesque in what Charlie took at first for a diver’s helmet, was heading directly for his landing at an unsafe speed.
“Serve him right if he shoals on a oyster bed and rips his bottom,” Charlie said.
As if on cue, the boat swerved sharply. Its pilot came half erect, arms flung wide in a convulsive gesture. The engine roared wildly; the boat heeled, slamming its occupant against the right gunwale, and blasted straight for Charlie’s shack.
Miraculously, it missed the shack’s piling and lunged half its length upon the sand. The engine-roar died instantly. The pilot was thrown headlong overside, goldberg helmet flying off in mid-arc, to lie stunned at the foot of Charlie’s ladder.