The Revengers by Donald Hamilton

“Oh, and check on a name for me, please. George Winfield Lorca.”
    I heard a soft whistle. “Watch yourself, friend. That name packs a punch.”
    “I’m just an ignorant desert dweller,” I said.
    “I’ll send you what I can get in an asbestos envelope. Tell Fred to have his fire tongs handy.”
    “I get the message,” I said. “I’ll wear my bulletproof union suit known as BVD when I land in the British West Indies known as BWI. Only they aren’t that any longer, are they?”
    “No, they’re pretty much an independent nation now. Good luck.”
    “Eric out.”
    As I stepped out of the booth I saw that one lonely brown pelican had, after all, put in an appearance. He was sitting perched on top of one of the dockside pilings I had to pass, in the stump-like way they have, long beak tucked in close to long neck. He gave me a baleful look as I approached and spread his wings and glided away, instantly transforming himself from a figure of fun to a creature of remarkable grace. Even the outsized bill looked right when he was flying.
    I walked gingerly over to the rental car in my bare feet, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and returned to the boat. There was no sound from the forward stateroom as I shaved in the diminutive cubicle called a head, utilized the apparatus known as MSD, and made myself reasonably respectable; shoes, shirt, and the works. I hoped Harriet had fewer protective and possessive feelings about her galley than Martha had about her kitchen, although that was not exactly a comfortable thought. My life seemed to be getting a bit complex with regard to the opposite sex. Risking displeasure, I fired up the stove, which operated in normal fashion on butane gas, a relief. Some boat cookers use alcohol or kerosene and require priming; and while I was checked out at an early age on Coleman gasoline camp stoves, which operate similarly, my rustic-stove techniques had become pretty rusty of late.
    I started heating water for instant coffee—Harriet seemed to be of my own persuasion in this respect—and found bacon and eggs in the small boat refrigerator; also some canned orange juice, which always seems unnatural in Florida. All those citrus groves and you’re supposed to drink it out of a can , for God’s sake? But the last time I got real, fresh-squeezed, breakfast orange juice handed to me in a restaurant, I recalled was in a motel in a little Mexican mining town with the odd name of Heroica de Caborca, where they were too far from civilization to know any better. The galley was very neat and tidy, but it was a sailor’s neatness, not a cook’s neatness. There was nothing to indicate that cooking was anything but just another boat chore to the owner, like polishing the fittings or scrubbing the decks. There were no intriguing, specialized, culinary implements in evidence, or oddball spices. When the deckhouse table was set and the bacon was draining on a paper towel, I went downstairs—oops, below—to wake my lady.
    She was kind of breathtaking lying there asleep, tanned and lovely; she had always been a spectacular lady. She had declared war upon the United States of America because of the arbitrary way its bureaucracy had condemned some land she’d owned and loved for purposes of which she did not approve—it had been part of a sizeable estate she’d inherited up there in Maryland. I could have sympathized with her angry feelings if she hadn’t picked her allies so badly, disregarding their motives and political beliefs in her desire to strike back at the establishment that, she felt, had robbed her of an important part of her birthright—and if, as I’d reminded her the night before, she hadn’t caused the death of one of our people in the course of her vengeful operations.
    She’d come close to killing me, or having me killed; and in the end only the breaks of the game had prevented me from killing her or sending her to prison. Despite our differences, however, I’d been relieved