Read The Corpse Without a Country for Free Online

have been mailed in a small envelope with a four cent stamp.
    Then the door closed and we were in darkness again. She said, apparently to someone else in the car, “If he did not go into the water, he has gone on one of these boats.”
    Her voice fascinated me. It was low and throaty and the accent was faultlessly British except for a slight but definite non-English rhythm to her speech.
    Whoever she had spoken to did not answer. She stood by the car a moment more and then, high heels clicking, started toward the boat where I was hidden.
    I raised myself to a crouch and sprinted away from the winch, toward the protection of the port side of the pilot house. I found a sliding door and drew it open. I ducked inside.
    I knelt, feeling beneath the instrument panel for a locker. When I found it, I slid the door aside, pushed the envelope onto a shelf behind a roll of charts, and slid the door shut again. Then I walked crawfish style out of the pilot house, shut the door, and lay down on the deck. It was dirty and smelled of tar.
    The woman had come aboard. I could hear her heels clicking as she circled the winch and the generator on the after deck. I thought about trying to work my way forward and jump onto the pier and make a run for it.
    But if I did she couldn’t fail to see me. And she might have a gun. And there was someone else waiting in the car.
    Besides, I was too late. I was listening for the click of heels, and when I failed to hear them, I assumed she had stopped walking. Then she appeared at the front corner of the wheelhouse, cutting me off from going forward. She held her shoes in one hand. And in the other she very definitely had a gun.
    Faint light from Arne’s
Norway Queen
, fifty feet to the left, showed her to me, and could not fail to show me to her. I stood up.
    She said, “Will you please come to my car now, Mr. Durham?”
    I did not “please” but I went. In the first place, she had a gun. In the second, she had called me by name; and I was curious.
    I turned and walked around the after end of the pilot house and jumped to the pier. She followed, staying a careful five feet behind me. When I hit the pier, I decided to see just how far she meant to carry this game. I started to run for the buildings.
    I found out. She was serious about the whole affair. She shot at me. I heard the odd poof that one of those pellet guns that use CO 2 as a propellent makes and I heard the thud of the projectile as it struck the planking by my feet. I stopped.
    She said in her throaty voice, “It is a rather silly little gun, Mr. Durham. But it shoots darts and they are very sharp. At this distance I could hurt you badly.”
    I didn’t doubt her a bit. I turned around. She said, “Where is that envelope with the report, Mr. Durham?”
    I said, “You must have me mixed up with someone else. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    She laughed at me. I didn’t blame her. My attempt had been a feeble one at best. She said, “I do not think I have confused you with someone else. Peter Durham: five-feet, eleven inches, weight one hundred and eighty pounds, thirty-three years old, brown hair with faint gray at the temples, a broad face—perhaps with a touch of American Indian in the past—large nose a little twisted, a small raised scar on the point of the chin. No, I do not think I am wrong.”
    I said, “You must have a good camera or telescopic vision.”
    “I never saw you until yesterday,” she said. “But I know you well.”
    I wondered who had been making a dossier on me—and why. I didn’t answer her, and she said, “The report now, please.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “Must I make you give it to me?”
    “I haven’t got it.”
    Her throaty voice held a thread of hardened steel. “I wish the report and also to search you.”
    I was getting hungry. I hadn’t eaten since morning. And when I get hungry, I irritate easily. I let that show in my voice. I said, “I haven’t got anything you want. And