Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  “No. We won’t rush it. I got some things I want to do first. One of them is pick up a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “From up near Ocala where I come from. You’ll like her. She’s a good kid.”

  He had felt all along that Frank was closing him out, keeping him out of the center of things. The girl would be another door closed against him. Frank went after her in late August, taking the car. He was gone three days. It was bad while he was gone. The streets were different. He felt as though people were watching him. He felt as though at any moment somebody would look at him and recognize him and begin to yell. But Frank said people didn’t do that sort of thing. Take that man in the grocery store, while Frank had held the gun and he had cleaned out the cash drawer. Frank said if that man saw him on the street he would be a little puzzled. He would think he had seen him before, but he wouldn’t remember where or how. Billy hoped Frank was right.

  He had been thinking about girls a lot lately. There had only been that one time in the loft of the barn at Fowler’s place. He and Fowler and Dukie and that girl Christabelle, the one that wasn’t quite right in the head. It hadn’t been anything like he had thought it would be, and it had cured him of girls for quite a while, but now he was thinking of them again, and he felt a little unclean the way he was thinking about them. Funny, he thought, how you can be an escaped convict and have been in on fifteen … no, sixteen robberies with Frank and still feel guilty about thinking dirty.

  While Frank was gone he wondered what the girl would be like. Frank liked things with style. He guessed she would look like something out of the movies, and then the two of them would look down on him, instead of just only Frank. A real smooth dish, with silky legs and one of those wet red mouths and wise eyes. That’s what Frank would have. It made him feel small, thinking of how it would be after there were three of them, and he thought he would do an operation while Frank was gone, just to show him he could. He found a place that looked all right and he even went in and bought cigarettes there, but he couldn’t get his nerve all the way up to do it and he was afraid the man would see the bulge of the gun in his pants.

  So he worked each day and he went to the movies each night Frank was away, and on the fourth day when he got home from the supermarket, the Buick was parked by the garage apartment and he knew Frank was back with the girl.

  He went in and Frank introduced them. It shocked Billy when he saw the girl. She was just a plain country girl in a cotton dress and evidently not a damn thing else, standing there barefoot in the apartment, and she didn’t look over fifteen or sixteen. She had a kind of wide face and sleepy-looking eyes and she was built a little heavy, but she was really stacked. She pushed out on all parts of that cotton dress. “This is Hope Morrissey,” Frank said. “Billy Torris.”

  “Hi,” Billy said.

  “Hi, Billy,” Hope said.

  She had a thin country-sounding voice and she wasn’t at all like Billy had thought she would be. It made him look at Frank in a sort of different way, as though maybe Frank wasn’t what he had figured he was. Frank didn’t think she was too young or dumpy or anything. He seemed glad he’d brought her back, and glad to have her there. They seemed pretty used to each other. She couldn’t walk within five feet of Frank without him grabbing her, but she didn’t seem to mind or even hardly pay any attention. She’d brush on by like he wasn’t there. Anyway it was good to have somebody do the cooking, even if she couldn’t cook very good. She wasn’t very clean or very good about picking up around the place. Her ankles always looked sort of grubby and she never combed her hair much. Frank got clothes for her, but she liked to pad around in that old cotton dress, barefoot, humming to herself in a funny tuneless way.

  She slept in with Frank and just about as soon as they got in the room together, that noise would start and Billy would go on out a lot of the times and walk around until they were pretty certain to be asleep. Frank was at her all the time, it seemed like. Morning and night and then, on weekends, it was just better to be out of there and go to the movies or go over to the Beach. She certainly didn’t have anything to say. But after she came Frank would talk a lot more than before.

  He did a lot of walking alone in September and having her there made him think a lot more about girls than before. He got so he’d follow them on the street, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. Frank had started his big plans. He wouldn’t talk about them. But he spent hours drawing floor plans and going over maps. They did some small operations and one turned out a lot better than they had any right to hope. Over eight hundred, it was.

  Then on Monday, the day before yesterday, it all ended in a hurry. It was a hot night. He and Frank had been out looking around and then they went back and got Hope and they left the car right there by the apartment and the three of them walked down about three blocks to a place for some beer. Frank was wearing khakis and a purple sports shirt. Billy had on old jeans and a torn T-shirt. Hope wore one of her baggy cotton dresses and a pair of sandals. The bank roll was behind the loose board in the closet, along with the two revolvers. They had some beer and about midnight they walked back. They were a block from the place when Frank stopped and said, “Trouble!”

  Billy looked and saw the prowl car parked out by the curb. They walked slowly across the street. Frank wouldn’t let them hurry. They headed on back the way they had come. They went over a block and Frank made them wait while he went back to take a look. Billy was nervous. Hope just stood there waiting, chewing gum, patient as a cow in a field. Frank came back in about ten minutes.

  “They’re up in the place, looking around. I saw them. We got to get out of here.”

  “How?” Billy asked.

  “We got to get a car and we got to get some clothes. I’ve got about twenty bucks on me. You got anything?”

  “Two dollars.”

  They took the car out of a used car lot. It was a battered old panel delivery. On the side of it it said Hollywood Seafood Company. Frank crossed the wires, and it started all right. Billy got the plate off a pickup parked on a dark street.

  Frank said they should leave town. Hope sat warmly, heavily between them. Frank cursed as they drove out of town, through Coral Gables. After an hour or so he seemed to cheer up. He told Billy that they’d had some fun for a while anyway, and it wouldn’t be too rough to start over again. But it had to be in a new town. He’d heard New Orleans was a good town. They could operate on the way over, just to get money enough for the trip.

  After buying gas and eating, they had just a few dollars left when they got to Bradenton Tuesday night. Frank said he had been thinking about how to pull something quick and simple. He cruised around and they found a bar and he parked a half block away and sent Hope back to the bar. “No bum, you understand,” he said. “Somebody that looks like they got a couple of bucks.”

  “I never did nothing like this.”

  “You won’t have any trouble. It doesn’t look like a place they’ll throw you out of. Just wiggle it around and let somebody buy you a drink then tell him you know a better place you want to go to. Then walk him up this way and slow down when you get in those shadows there by the edge of that warehouse.”

  She was gone fifteen minutes. They stood leaning against the warehouse, waiting for her. When she came along with the man, they grabbed him fast. Billy didn’t even get a look at him. Hope went and got in the truck while they went over him. He had eleven dollars. Frank was so disgusted with the take that he kicked the man solidly in the head, twice. The next place worked better. The man had nearly forty dollars and he was smaller and easier to handle. Frank said there was no reason why it wouldn’t work all the way to New Orleans.

  “I don’t like doing it,” Hope said.

  “But you’ll do it, won’t you? Won’t you?”

  She gave a little gasp of pain and said, “Sure, Frank. Yes, I’ll do it. Gee, you wanta give me a cancer or something?”

  She slept in the back on the burlap sacks the rest of
the way up to the tourist cabins in Tampa. When they got the cabin, Frank said he should sleep in the truck and Frank and Hope would take the cabin.

  Now, in the rainy morning, it seemed like a big mess that would just get worse. It didn’t ever seem to occur to Frank that they could get caught. It was as though something was left out of Frank, some degree of fear and judgment that other people had.

  Billy wished they’d get up and then they could get out on the road in the rain and start making miles. He wondered how Frank was going to arrange to trade cars. They ought to anyway get some green paint and paint out that seafood sign. He wished Frank hadn’t kicked that man so hard. There in the dark shadows by the warehouse it had sounded too hard. Frank had grunted with the effort as he had kicked the man.

  It was, he guessed, about an hour since he had awakened. He was wondering if he should go and knock on the door. Then all of a sudden Frank and Hope ran to the truck and they each got in out of the rain, one on each side of him. The girl pressed warm and steamy against him and it made him feel strange.

  Frank handed him the keys and said, “You drive. I’m going to get in the back and get some sleep.”

  “How about breakfast?” Hope asked.

  “Save it until lunch, honey.” Frank climbed over into the back. “Okay. Let’s roll. Stay under the speed limit, Billy. Go up 41 to 98 and cut over 98 to 19.”

  Frank Stratter lay flat on his back in the panel delivery as it started up. He didn’t feel sleepy. He had wanted to think. And he couldn’t think and drive at the same time.

  Last night he had had bad dreams and he had awakened with a premonition of danger. The last time he had felt the same way he had been picked up a day later and eventually sentenced to five years. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. He knew that soon, very soon, when the very first decent chance came along, he would have to separate himself from these two kids. He did not know how he would do it It would depend on circumstances. On taking the right step at the right time. It might make sense to double back, maybe head down onto the keys. Let them keep running.

  Some day it would be nice to get up near Ocala, just long enough to make a chance to see June Anne. Long enough to hear her yelp at him. That would be very good to hear.

  June Anne Morrissey. He’d wasted a lot of time thinking about her while he was swinging that brush hook for the state. And then, like a damn fool, after he’d gotten set up down there in Miami, he had gone up after her, thinking she’d be glad to come along just to be near him. He’d driven up there and he’d had to hide out. Too many people around Ocala knew him. It had been over a day before he had a chance to see June Anne alone. He had to check to make sure she wasn’t being watched. Then he had to find a time when her folks weren’t there.

  She’d met him in the grove out behind the house after the short phone call. Now he knew he was lucky she hadn’t arranged for the police to meet him there.

  “What do you want?”

  “My God, honey, you sound unfriendly.”

  “What do you need? Clothes? Money? I’ll give you what I can and then you get out of here.”

  “I want you to come along with me. That’s what I came up here for. I got a car, clothes, money and an apartment. I think you ought to come along with me.”

  “I’d as soon go along with a snake.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Frank. It’s over. It was over a long time ago. You’re a known criminal, and you escaped, and a guard was killed. I don’t want any part of you. I’m engaged to Sonny Western.”

  “You’ll be marrying a hell of a nice batch of groves.”

  “That isn’t why I’m marrying him.”

  “You better change your mind and come along. Do some real living, June Anne, like we used to talk about.”

  “We talked about living well, but not your way, Frank. Not the way you’ve picked out for yourself. I said it and I meant it. I’d as soon go along with a snake. Now you better get out of here.”

  She stood tall in the shadowy grove, the house lights below and behind her. He took one step and struck her with his fist and she went down and began to sob. He stood over her, feeling a strange unlikely urge to cry also. Then he stepped around her and went down the shallow hill and past the house and out to the road. He turned down the road to where he had left the car. He heard the running steps behind him. He spun around, fists clenched. He could see by the starlight that it was a girl, not as tall as June Anne.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Hope, Frank. I snuck up there and I heard her. I’m glad you hit her.”

  “She’s your own sister.”

  “Anyhow I’m glad. Frank, I want to come along with you.”

  He laughed at her. “You’re just a kid.”

  “You haven’t seen me in two years. I’m grown up.”

  “Go on home, Hope.”

  She moved closer and thrust against him, catching his arm in her hand. “Take me along,” she demanded. “They won’t ever catch you. Take me along.”

  He felt the warmth of her. He put his arm around her. She felt like a woman. He looked up toward the dark grove. He thought of June Anne and he smiled. He held Hope a little tighter.

  “Want to go get your stuff?”

  “I’m afraid she’ll catch me.”

  “Okay. Come along, kid. Come along for the ride.”

  They rode through the night in the Buick and when he thought of June Anne and her folks he had to laugh to himself. Hope sat very close to him. He did not get a good look at her until he saw her in their motel room in Orlando. The idea seemed to turn sour when he looked at her. She was nowhere near as pretty as June Anne. The heavy glossy brown hair was the same, but that was all. She had a pudding face and rather small eyes. But she was grown up. She had been right about that. She was built low to the ground like her old man. She had big strong hips and big round breasts.

  It was strange the way she had acted. The only time there had seemed to be any urgency in her was when she had begged to come along. Once the decision had been made, she settled into a placid acceptance. In the motel there was no girlish shyness about her. Nor any of the devices of modesty. She acted as though this were the thousandth night they had spent together, no more remarkable than any that had gone before. It irritated him that she should take it all so much for granted. He decided then that he would get up first in the morning and drive away and leave her there. It would make the revenge against the Morrissey clan no less sweet.

  But he learned that her bovine placidity was due to her almost complete indifference to everything in the world except the immediate gratification of her body. And in that special area of interest she was anything but placid. He knew the next day that he had found a strange one—a highly specialized organism. In her outside interests and accomplishments she was on no more than a third grade level. By morning he had no intention of leaving her behind. He felt obscurely ashamed of himself for taking her along, and he knew he could never introduce her to anyone without feeling apologetic, but he could not part with her.

  He could not have parted with her then, but he could now. But only because he sensed danger in staying with the two of them. He would leave her to the kid. He doubted that it would make any special difference to her. She seemed to lack the capacity to feel any special attachment for anyone. She was alone in the world and there was only one other individual in the world. That was Man, and it did not matter what face he wore or what language he spoke. He had to admire her for her single-mindedness, her unthinking drive and purpose. She was remote as a mountain, yet attainable as the next breath. No one would even come to know her—if indeed there was anything to know beyond the physical. So divorced was her preoccupation from normal human emotions that he felt quite certain that had he shared her with the kid from the beginning, it would have made no difference to her at all. It would have been, to her, perhaps a more desirable arrangement. He knew that should he stay with her, he would gradually become more violent with he
r until, one day, he might kill her. Not out of anger. Just in an attempt to pry up the lid and see if there was anything underneath, or if the box was entirely empty.

  He had not yet killed anyone, but he knew that the wanting to do it was buried in him. Buried not as deep as it used to be. Buried not deep at all last night when he had kicked at the head of the stranger on the ground. Seeing the end of Big Satch had clarified the wanting. He wondered why he should wonder about killing someone. It was the stupid thing to do. They hunted you twice as hard. And when they got you, they would kill you in turn.

  And, as the truck rolled through the rain, he wondered why he was as he was. A job wouldn’t be bad. He’d even enjoyed washing the cars, getting them gleaming clean. And he’d never required much money. He could get along on very little. The fact that it was there made you want to take it. Taking it was a gesture of contempt for all of Them. Taking it was a way of saying something. As taking a life would be a way of saying something. Maybe saying, Here comes Frank Stratter.

  Sometimes he would have a dream where he heard people in the street going Ah and O. He would get up and dress and go out to see what the trouble was. They were standing there, all of them, looking up into the night sky and he would look up there too and he would see his name in great letters of steady fire written all the way across heaven. Frank Stratter. Then they would begin to recognize him and they would move away from him in fear and go into all their houses and leave him standing there alone looking at his name and how it was written up there, higher than anything in the world.

  The small truck droned on. There was a smell of aged fish inside it. The floor was hard under the burlap. He lay half smiling at the roof of the truck and he saw how huge the name was, and how the letters glowed. Frank Stratter. Frank Stratter.

  [The boy drives the stolen truck. He is conscious of the placid willing dampness of the girl beside him, and also conscious of the ominous clatter of the worn engine every time he gets the speedometer above forty. He knows motors and it sounds to him as though the main bearings are nearly gone. Too much push and it will give out entirely. The truck is a junker.