Dead Low Tide, page 19
Nineteen
WARGLER STOPPED at four-thirty to tell us his troubles, and find out how I’d happened to go down to the bridge at Vera Key. He seemed depressed.
“By God, son, we’ve done about everything I can think of. Got four planes working now, checking every boat in a hundred mile area headed away from here. Pilots say the damn fools wave at them. Put an alert on the ship-to-shore. Even got that Air Force crash boat out of Sarasota working for us. Tying up all waterways traffic. Not a trace of the guy. This is going to look awful bad for me. I hate to think about it, even.”
“He can’t get away, though, can he?” Christy asked.
“There’s one way I hate to think about, girl. Suppose he sees an empty dock. O.K. Herd the people below, kill ’em, tie up the boat and take off. And we can’t check every cruiser tied up to a dock on the coast. He’s had enough time, with luck, to be out of the state by now, if he’s running. But I keep getting the funny feeling he’s hanging around. Maybe it isn’t so funny after all. He didn’t have any money on him. He must have hid that forty thousand someplace. It would be nice to use it for running. Maybe he doesn’t want to run. Maybe he wants to wait for it to get dark and start killing some more people.”
Christy shuddered. “Hey! Cut it out.”
“You can’t figure those crazy people. They play God. Our rules don’t mean a damn to them. Well, I’m going back to see what’s happening, if anything.”
He drove off. With all that talk about darkness, daylight seemed very precious. And there didn’t seem to be enough of it left. Not nearly enough. If he was still loose at dusk, I was going to take Christy into town and ask to have her put in a cell.
We wandered aimlessly down to the bank of the creek and out to the mouth of it where it flows into the bay. It was as good a place as any, because we were on fairly open land there, the brush way behind us. Some trout fishermen were circling slowly in the flats, over the weeds. One of the commercial fishermen went by straining his eyes to spot the surface whirls that mullet make.
“I just wish it was over,” Christy said. “If he gets away I’ll never … really feel safe again.”
The channel curves to within twenty yards of the mouth of the creek before cutting back out into the center of the bay. A cruiser came slowly down the channel with two girls in bright skimpy clothes sitting in the trolling chairs, rods over the stern. I put my arm around Christy.
“They’ll get him.”
“Gosh, I hope so.”
I wondered vaguely what the girls were after, trolling down the channel. Reds, maybe. But the rods looked a bit hefty for that. And they weren’t working the rods at all. And then, far behind the cruiser I saw an unweighted spoon prancing foolishly on top of the water. Anybody that stupid, I decided, doesn’t deserve a fish. A hell of a waste of a nice big mahogany cruiser, about twenty-eight foot. The girls looked like store window dummies, the way they were sitting, as though heat and monotony had paralyzed them.
Maybe part of it was the ridiculous demonstration of how not to fish. And part of it could have been their very rigidity. But the metallic glint from the shadow of the cabin overhang brought it all into focus. It froze me for one tenth of one unbelievable second, and then I grabbed Christy’s wrist and nearly yanked her arm off. She let out a startled yelp punctured by a flat crackling sound that came across the water. I wasted no time looking back. Christy caught panic from me and did her share of running and zigging and zagging until we crashed, stumbling and falling, into the delightful brush. There was another crack and something that whipped through the leaves. I rolled over and over, shoving her ahead of me.
Beyond the fringe of brush we scrambled up again and headed for my house. I dared then, to turn and look back, just in time to see Roy Kenney in smeared white shirt and khaki pants climb on top of the cabin roof, rifle in his hand. A twenty-two, from the sound of it. He stared toward us, and I shoved Christy around a corner of the house. The cruiser rocked then, oddly, and came to a stop, staggering Kenney a bit. He turned and yelled down at whoever was at the wheel. They had gone aground and Roy, for a while, had lost interest in pot-shooting.
He was a pleasant target against the blue late afternoon sky. I went into the garage and grabbed the big spinning outfit. Eight feet of glass surf-casting rod, with a big Rumer Atlantic spanning reel carrying three hundred yards of fifteen pound monofilament. It is a luxury I bought myself, and I use it for tarpon and kings. That character silhouetted against the sky, yelling and waving his arms, had taken a shot at my lady. He had tried to choke her and drown her.
The rod was rigged with a big number six Reflecto spoon, and a heavy rudder sinker a foot from the spoon, wire leader connecting them. I had used it last for surf casting when the kings were running close off shore.
The cruiser was grunting and straining in full reverse. Christy gave a despairing cry as I ran out with the rod in my hand. I ran down to the open place near where we were first standing. Roy Kenney had his back to me. He was bent forward a bit from the waist, peering down at the bow where the craft had gone aground. I could read the name on her. The Sea Flight, out of Tampa.
I didn’t know how soon he would turn. I took the line off the pickup, hooked it around my finger and swung back. I knew I could reach the distance easily. I was used to the rod and the line and that particular amount of weight and what I could do with it.
I let go, ready to turn and run like a rabbit if it was a bad cast. The big spoon twinkled in a high arc, the line bellying after it. I saw Kenney straighten up. I saw then that it was in a perfect line, but too far beyond him. I nipped the flowing line with my finger, and hooked the line onto the manual pickup. I saw the twinkling spoon fall over his shoulder, fall in front of him, and as it did so, I reared back and set the hook with a hard slanting swing of the big glass rod.
There is never any doubt when you set a hook. There is either resistance or there isn’t. I hit something solid. I saw arms flail wildly, saw the rifle fly, saw the man stagger backward off the edge of the cabin roof and fall into the water with a mighty splash, completely missing the narrow catwalk around the cabin.
He came up, and he splashed and struggled and took some line. Not the clean, good, thrilling run of a tough fish, but a few nasty, dull little tugs. I kept pressure on him. He tried to turn back to the cruiser but I swung him around and began to reel him in. He had the same inertness as a big grouper after the first hard effort to get free. His arms splashed at the water.
“Come on, baby,” I said softly, reeling. “Come on to daddy.”
He had not made a sound. He stopped struggling. I kept the rod tip high so he wouldn’t foul against the bottom. He came in oddly docile. He came in and there was a spreading red stain in the water. I could see the two girls and a man standing on the cruiser, staring at me. There was too much red in the water. I went down the bank. He was on his back. His eyes were half open. The big spoon lay across his throat.
The barb had gone into the side of his throat. His struggles had torn the wound a bit too deep. I threw the rod up the bank, got his wrists and dragged the body up onto the bank. And then I went over a little way and I was sick. There was no end to being sick. The worst, perhaps, was, that with the life out of him, that flat sheen of evil was gone. And he was just a youngish man, dead, with a face you would not notice twice, with brown hair, with one button on the white shirt that did not match the others, with the pores of his cheeks a bit enlarged, and accented by the slant of the late sun. Death is a word. It is in every issue of every newspaper. It is in the slap-dash novels, casual as cornflakes, with the cool-eyed young hero looking with satisfaction at the corpse, reholstering the trusty weapon.
I was sick, and when I got over that I couldn’t look at it there on the bank, and I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. It was a grotesquerie, and an abrupt distortion and dislocation of the soul. I couldn’t get a crazy picture out of the back of my mind. Me, standing for the camera, with rod and smile, and that thing on the bank hung up by the heels.
I knew that Christy was close by me. And I knew that helped.
There was a lot of unreality about the next few days. Once the two girls and the man on the cruiser had been quieted down, they were able to tell how Roy Kenney had dropped onto the boat, how there had been something in his face that made any thought of resistance impossible and implausible. The twenty-two rifle had been aboard, for their standard game of plinking empty beer cans out in the Gulf.
They told how he had directed them around the south end of Vera Key and back north through the Gulf. Three times he had tried to head north, but had been forced to swing slowly back as the search planes came close and low. He had crouched back in the protection of the cabin, forcing the two girls to smile and wave and pretend to troll. And he spoke endlessly at last of going back to “get” somebody. They had headed back into the bay and he had made them troll up and down, up and down the channel off the creek, until finally the man and girl had appeared on the shore and he had fired at them, so shocking him that he had inadvertently run the cruiser aground at the side of the narrow channel.
An adventure magazine signed them up for a ghost written article, and a brisk-talking man tried to make the same deal with me, calling it a “natural,” but all I wanted to do was try to forget that long slow-motion time of the silver spoon twinkling in the air, dropping toward the man on the cabin roof. The wire service gave it fat coverage, and I was an unwilling national celebrity for all of two days. And I couldn’t go out on the street without running into the clumsiest, crudest jokes imaginable. The first time that happened I went back and took the rod and reel and heaved the whole rig as far out into the bay as I could manage, and turned away without even waiting to see it hit.
In all of it, Christy was the only one who seemed to understand.
Electric shock therapy brought Joy Kenney out of it. They tell me she looked forty when she was released, and went away. Steve told me what she said. Roy had told her about a man named John Long who, if he found out something, would very dearly want to kill him, and probably would try to. And later he told her that John Long had the evidence he wanted, and that Long’s wife had been careless, and that he had an idea John Long had found where he was living by following Mary Eleanor. She told them all this, Steve said, in a flat gray hopeless voice. It had been one of those improbable coincidences that always seem to be happening that got her into John Long’s office. She thought that would give her a chance to warn Roy or help him, and maybe a chance, she thought, to talk John Long out of too violent an answer to adultery.
And Steve said it was a good guess that John Long had studied the cut-out pictures of Roy’s face so thoroughly that he immediately saw the resemblance between Roy and Joy, and I had witnessed his momentary confusion. The cut-out heads, by the way, were recovered from a Miami firm of investigators.
George got his stolid mind set on the missing money. He plodded in and took Roy’s gray car apart. Then he took the shack apart. Then he took the island apart. He found the forty thousand and the negatives and another set of prints, unmutilated, in a wide-top gallon glass jar, made waterproof and lashed to mangrove roots below the low tide mark fifty feet from the shack. And in finding the money, they found out a little bit more—or perhaps a little bit less—about the way Roy Kenney’s mind worked. More than half the money had been cut up with scissors. He had cut little lewd clever twisted paper silhouettes, contorted mannikins, out of the money. They showed considerable artistic talent, and obviously represented many hours of work. In an odd way, there was an inevitability about it; it was perhaps the ultimate violation of one of our gods, a god that Kenney refused to do homage to.
How the pictures were taken, and when, and by whom, were never discovered.
The grotesque death I had caused had made something gray happen to me, and Christy seemed to understand.
I couldn’t seem to rise off the ground. Then the next Saturday came along, and in midafternoon there was a booming rain that lasted fifteen minutes, and left the air washed and clean and clear. I’d been at meetings most of the day, and it was settled as to how we’d go ahead with Key Estates starting on Monday. I got my car back that day, with a complete new motor, and I drove back to my place and Christy was sitting again on her steps. The sun was on her and she was brown and she wore skimpy shorts and narrow halter, both in white with dime-sized red polka dots. I stopped and she came to the car and put her hands on the door and yanked them back. “Ouch!”
“You always do that.”
“I’m a dull girl. But I know what day it is. Saturday.”
“And Wilburt is getting along without you?”
“To a limited extent.” She stared at me and I looked back for long seconds, and we both looked away at the same instant. “Andy?”
“It is Saturday.”
“Where were we, Andy, when we were so rudely interrupted?” I looked at her cheek and saw a faint redness under the tan and knew what that cost her in pride, and it made me a little ashamed.
“The sensible thing to do is to backtrack. Re-create the mood. Wear the blue, Christy.”
There was gladness in her eyes. “Give me … forty minutes.”
I drove to my place, laid out fresh clothes. I showered and while I was under the spray I thought of how it would be, how it would very definitely be. We would drive to Sarasota, and the copper mugs would be chill, and Charlie Davies would play “Penthouse,” which is indeed a very fine thing, and on the way back the top would be down and there would be a ridiculous number of stars and she would sit close beside me, and light my cigarettes for me, my big blonde with warm night wind in her hair.
And something inside me, something that had been dragging me down, beat its wings hard enough to get off the ground, and then began to fly very well indeed. I out-roared the water with “Shortnin’ Bread” and remembered, sort of all at once, that I was that guy … that fella shot with luck, that superbly happy jerk named Andrew Hale McClintock.
By John D. MacDonald
The Brass Cupcake
Murder for the Bride
Judge Me Not
Wine for the Dreamers
Ballroom of the Skies
The Damned
Dead Low Tide
The Neon Jungle
Cancel All Our Vows
All These Condemned
Area of Suspicion
Contrary Pleasure
A Bullet for Cinderella
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
You Live Once
April Evil
Border Town Girl
Murder in the Wind
Death Trap
The Price of Murder
The Empty Trap
A Man of Affairs
The Deceivers
Clemmie
Cape Fear (The Executioners)
Soft Touch
Deadly Welcome
Please Write for Details
The Crossroads
The Beach Girls
Slam the Big Door
The End of the Night
The Only Girl in the Game
Where Is Janice Gantry?
One Monday We Killed Them All
A Key to the Suite
A Flash of Green
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything
On the Run
The Drowner
The House Guest
End of the Tiger and Other Stories
The Last One Left
S*E*V*E*N
Condominium
Other Times, Other Worlds
Nothing Can Go Wrong
The Good Old Stuff
One More Sunday
More Good Old Stuff
Barrier Island
A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974
THE TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES
The Deep Blue Good-by
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker Than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain
The Official Travis McGee Quizbook
About the Author
JOHN D. MACDONALD was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
John D. MacDonald, Dead Low Tide
