Authors: John D. MacDonald
He got in, pulled the doors shut, put the key in the ignition. Before he started it, he reached under the seat and slid his fingers along until he felt the thin packet of bills, folded once, he had scotch-taped to the underside of the seat. He pulled it loose, put it into his pants pocket along with the Banner check, Wezler’s card, and the money left from the insurance advance.
The car did not start. The battery began to fade. And he felt a sudden and quite unexpected wave of terror. If the car wouldn’t start, everything would go wrong. He made himself relax. That was ridiculous. If the car didn’t start, you walked over to the gas station over there and told Charlie your troubles.
When he tried again it caught. He revved the motor for a while before putting it in gear. He drove out and down the street and across into the Shell station. A boy was working on a car on the lift. Charlie came out of the station, a broad, bald man in gray coveralls, steel glasses, a smear of grease on his forehead.
“Figured you’d be back soon,” Charlie said, shaking hands.
“I got the card okay in the hospital. Thanks.”
“Hell of a time finding one that wasn’t some kind of funny joke. Nothing funny about six people getting blowed up. That tire’s way down, Garry.”
“Noticed it. Battery is low too.”
“I’ll check things out. You don’t look so great. Whyn’t you go in and set.”
Staniker went inside the station and sat in a plastic and aluminum chair. A fan turned back and forth, pushing stale air that smelled of gasoline and the perfumed deodorizing block in the nearby men’s
room. In a little while Charlie came in and handed him an opened icy bottle of Coke. “Cells are okay. Battery level was down and I filled her up. Checked the tires all around. Your gas was full up. Oil is down maybe a half a quart.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
Charlie leaned on the desk. “I was thinking, if you’d been below too when she went, they never would have found out what happened. Mystery of the sea like they say.”
“Or if nobody had come along for another couple of days, it would have been the same deal.”
Charlie sighed. “You just never know. That Mary Jane was a real working woman. None of those people knew what hit ’em, I guess.”
“They never had a chance.”
“Those new folks Parky hired ain’t no improvement around here. They’re so sour I don’t go over for a beer even. I’d rather drive down to Smitty’s.”
“Well, I better be getting along. Thanks for everything, Charlie.”
“Where you going to go? Maybe move in with that stuff you got lined up down the bay shore? That one you used to work for?”
“You mean Mrs. Harkinson? I tell you, Charlie, I wish I could. But we broke up just a little bit before this last captain job came along. Broke it up big. No chance of mending that one. She was getting on my nerves anyway. I didn’t know you knew anything about her, Charlie.”
“Maybe I talked out of turn. The one told me was Fran, down at the sundries. A long time ago. Back in February maybe it was. Fran and Mary Jane, those two would tell each other their troubles I guess. Fran’s got her share for sure. As I remember Fran was bad-mouthing you for carrying on with that woman. I nodded, solemn as a preacher. Fran should know the fits I give my old lady back when I still had my hair.”
“Next time you see Fran you tell her I haven’t got a chance of
moving in on that blonde. I guess she’ll say it serves me right. You know, Charlie, I wish now I’d—given Mary Jane a few more breaks than I did. I’m going to miss her. I miss her already.”
Charlie looked at him. “No trouble for you to find a woman. No trouble at all. But it won’t be easy to find a worker like her.”
As he drove away, Staniker thought that a lot of Crissy’s precautions didn’t make sense. But because everything else seemed to have worked out, perhaps it was best to go along with the whole thing. Nobody was going to check on anything at this late date. It was over and done, and the only thing left was a good way to go pick up the money. A good, safe, quick, quiet way.
And now he had to play more tricks. She wouldn’t tell him who had told her about this one. She had practiced it with him, in rush-hour traffic until they were both good at it. Any limited access highway with exit ramps and three lanes in each direction would do. Even when he knew how she was going to work it and she knew how he was going to work it, they had no trouble losing each other.
You hung in the fast lane, furthest from the exit ramps, and you found a hole in the traffic, and you adjusted your speed in relation to the hole so that when you were coming up on an exit ramp, you could speed up at just the right time, angle across the other two lanes and duck down the ramp. You then took the cloverleaf and got back onto the pike but heading the opposite way, and did it again. That put you back in your original direction, and anybody who had tried to trail you would be swept helplessly past the exit, locked in the river of fast traffic. He killed time, driving north. On Interstate 95 north of the airport, traffic thickened and he obediently played the game. “You see,” she had said, “we won’t
know
we’re really in the clear. They
might
be playing cat and mouse. And what does it cost to play it safe? Nothing. So
do
it? Don’t give me arguments. Do it!”
He drove west on the bypass, and after he had turned south again toward Coral Gables, just for luck, he played the game again, the
second time cutting it almost too fine, making horns blare in anger and brakes shriek as he angled across.
The row of a dozen identical cottages was in a defeated area near Coral Gables. Heavy, unkempt tropical growth hemmed the cottages in, cutting off any chance of breeze. The pink paint on the hard pine siding was faded and flaking away, exposing gray wood. The woman lived in a larger cottage on the corner, on a bigger lot. She was four and a half feet tall. Her back was badly humped. Her voice had a metallic resonance, like announcements over a bad loudspeaker. Her face was stone gray, her hair the impossible yellow of industrial sulfur. She wore a green smock, blue canvas shoes, and she smelled like a boarding kennel.
She peered up at Staniker. She tapped a front tooth with a fingernail. “You was here before.”
“Couple of months ago.”
“Just one night like before?”
“Two weeks this time.”
“By God, you’re the first repeat business in I can’t remember. I don’t need to show you one. They’re all alike. Let’s see. Two and a half a day, fourteen a week. Two weeks I’ll make it twenty-five in advance, okay? And ten deposit on the utilities. You get that back when you give me the key back. The tax is just on the twenty-five. Seventy-five cents. Come in and sign the book, mister.”
He went onto her screened porch with her, signed the ruled notebook with her ball point pen that wrote in red. Gerald Stanley. General Delivery. Tampa. She turned the notebook around, made change, pawed through the keys in the shallow desk drawer.
“I got ten empties,” she said, “but there’s three of them need plumbing work I can’t afford, at least till by some kind of miracle I get nine full up. Mister Stanley, I better give you number ten, on
account it’s the one furthest down from that one machine shop across the way there that went on night shift last week. It’s just up to midnight, but it does screech some. Mr. Mooney, my dear departed, said once we got zoned industrial it would be no trouble selling off the whole thing for nice money. It’s maybe a blessing he died before they zoned so damn much industrial there’s no market at all for it. Got to hang on by my social security until it gets better, if it ever does. Thank you kindly. You see anything that needs doing, come tell me. If it’ll cost money to get it done, we’ll move you to another empty.”
She gave him the key. “Like I must have told you last time because I tell everybody, the only three rules I got is don’t smash the place up, don’t steal the furnishing, don’t set fire to it.”
He drove down the row to number ten. There were no garages, but each had a narrow driveway. The untrimmed shrubbery brushed the sides of the car at the driveway mouth. He turned hard right and parked in front of the bungalow steps. The car was out of sight of the road. The front door stuck. He had to kick it to get it open. The layout was exactly the same as the one he’d taken overnight the second week in April after Crissy had told him to find a place where he could hide, a place where they could safely meet after he came back alone from the Bahamas. He remembered how out-of-place she had looked when she had joined him there after dark.
Living room, bedroom, hallway, kitchen, bath. Old porch furniture, torn grass rugs, crusted stove, plastic ashtrays, swaybacked double bed, water stains on the ceiling, gloom, dust and the smell of dampness, and cockroaches scuttling swift and clever in kitchen and bath. Rust stains in the toilet and the sinks. Patched windowshades, gray curtains, jelly glasses, corroded tableware, a refrigerator that made a chattering, whining vibration when he plugged it in.
He brought his suitcases in. He stood in the silence of the cottage and heard, outside, the early evening songs of the mockingbirds,
hiss of truck brakes and grunt of diesel horn, a continuing sound of some heavy piece of automatic shop equipment, a slow, brutal whickity-bump, whickity-bump, mingled with the less regular sound of metal being cut at high speed, a prolonged screeching.
He left and drove to a little Handy-Andy food store a few blocks away. As arranged he called Crissy’s number from an outdoor pay booth. It was 532–1732. It was six thirty.
After the third ring Crissy said, “Hello?”
“Charlie there?”
“What number were you calling?”
He told her 532–1710. The last two digits were the number of the bungalow he was in at the Mooney Cottage Court. She said he had the wrong number. He said he was sorry and hung up.
He bought twenty-five dollars’ worth of groceries, beer and magazines and went back to number ten. He parked closer to the steps to make room for her small white car beside his. He felt hungry. He ate half a thick sandwich of cold cuts and cheese, but the next big bite turned into a gluey ball in his mouth. He went in and spat it into the toilet, gagging as he did so. He stripped down to his shorts, put a fan on a chair beside the bed to blow the air across his body. Under the weak bedlamp he sipped cold beer and tried to read one of the magazines. He had to keep going back and reading the same part over. Finally he threw it aside. The beer tasted watery. Night was coming. Crissy would come with the night.
He felt as if it had all been one long linked series of events. Everything had happened in the order it was supposed to happen. It was like looking out a train window and seeing the familiar stations one after the other. It had all been designed right from the day they headed out toward the Stream with the Muñequita in tow, to bring him full circle right back to this place. It was as if the train had stopped. It was on a siding somewhere. They had unhooked the engine and taken it away.
• • •
Night was coming, and the Sergeant went over to the table and pumped the pressure up in the gasoline lantern. He cracked the valve and lighted the mantle. It made a hissing sound and filled the shack with its hard white light.
Leila Boylston sat crosslegged on a cushion on a wooden crate. She wore one of the new pair of slacks, the blue ones, and a blue and white checked blouse. She looked down at the dusty sole of her bare foot. Another sob came. A wrenching thing—half snort, half hiccup. So maybe that one was the last. Funny how you could be cried out and have so many dry sobs remaining. Her face felt bloated.
Before he sat down the Sergeant reached and gave her shoulder a little pat. “Now there,” he said. The shyness and gentleness of it made her give him a small quick smile.
“I guess my mind was trying to remember all along,” she said. “I’d get little flashes, like pictures, that didn’t make any sense. Terrible little parts of it. But when I saw you kneeling down there and cleaning that fish.” She shuddered again.
“You said part of it, Missy, when you were out of your head. Those were the bad times for you, yelling and sweating and churning around. I thought it was bad dreams.”
“She was the last. Maybe she was dying anyway. I don’t know. She was running out of the lounge toward the stern when the bullet hit her. Stel. Stel there on the teak cockpit deck in the light that shone out from the lounge, and the boat dead in the water, rocking so far over and back loose things were all thumping and jingling and banging. I was on the roof of the lounge part, holding onto the ladderway that went up to the fly bridge. She was crumpled against the big fish box. Making that terrible sound. With every breath. Like a cawing. And he was below me. Right below me. He kept working
the bolt on that rifle and firing at her. But it was just a click every time. It was empty but he kept firing at her. Firing and yelling at her to shut up. He dropped the rifle. It was always up on the flybridge, in clamps. Sometimes Mister Bix fired at beer cans back in the wake with it. Or sharks.”
“Now Missy.”
“He went running back to where Stel was. He tried to kind of saw at her neck with that fish knife. But her head and neck were—loose. Too wobbly to cut. She kept cawing …”
“Missy!”
“He pulled her away from the fish box and straddled her on his knees. She was on her face. He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her head up and back. And with the knife he …”
She stopped. His hands were hurting her shoulders. She seemed to hear the echoes of her own voice in the shack, too shrill, too loud. The Sergeant was shaking her.
“I’m all right. I’m all right now. Let me finish,” she said in her normal tone. “I remember the end now.”
“It’s a bad thing to talk about.”
“He let go. He dropped her. Into all the wetness spreading on the teak. I was
glad
the noise stopped, the noise she was making. That’s terrible, I guess. To be glad. He stood up slowly and he saw me. It gave him a terrible start. I guess he had lost track or something. I guess he thought she was the end of it. He came slowly toward the ladderway, never taking his eyes off me. He didn’t have the knife. He’d left it in that—puddle. I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make my hands let go of that ladder, not even when he was out of sight and then he appeared again, and stopped, his head a little ways above the level of the roof of the lounge part where I was standing. He held onto the railings and swung out to one side to look up at me. His eyes were so big and round. And the
whole bottom part of his face was … soft and loose. And he had a funny little smile. People drop things by accident and they break and they know they’re valuable and that’s the smile they wear.”