Darker Than Amber

by John D. MacDonald

  “But with no style, dear boy. Punks, no doubt.”

  He shook his head sadly. “You don’t want to believe me, sir. This is no game. Take my word. I don’t tell anybody about what you asked, I’m doing you a favor.”

  I manufactured a shudder and some difficulty in focusing on Albert. I put a five-dollar bill on the bar. “Suddenly, dear friend, I find myself in dire need of an empty bed rather than diversion. I have foundered on the rocks. Plymouth rocks. I trust we may pursue these matters when I have a less overwhelming sense of unreality.”

  With an egg-sucking grin Albert said, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, sir?”

  “Exactly. We have each made a new friend, and so the evening is not a total waste.” I walked my twelve-inch beam on out the door.

  Back in my hall of mirrors, spread eagled and supine on one of my two double beds under the cave-breath of the air-conditioning, I fit together the pieces I had, and I thought of them in three colors—green for the facts, yellow for the reasonable guesses, red for the ones I had to reach for.

  It puzzled me that to be totally stoned and heavily solvent did not make me attractive bait. Perhaps they could handle only so much bait at a time. If they hadn’t replaced Vangie-Tami, the other two might be diligently busy at the moment. They might both be off on cruise ships. They might be lying low until they were certain their previous ventures had not created unwelcome heat and attention. Or they could be setting up new pigeons—provided the execution of Tami had not made the group decide to suspend operations until they were certain she had not left them a little posthumous gift of trouble.

  One Mack had driven the car that had stopped on the bridge over our fishing hole. One Terry had dumped her over. And her reappearance when the bartender she spoke of had evidently betrayed her trust must have come as a sickening shock to those boys. I knew there was little logic in my absolute confidence that Vangie had not identified me as the rescuer, no matter what they might have done to her. She would have to give them a plausible story of rescue. Some fishermen under the bridge. And, having her return to get her money would be an indication she had not exposed the operation. Had they broken her to the point of making her tell the hiding place? I knew why I doubted it. In free fall to what she believed was her death, she had stifled the instinctive scream just to give Terry an awkward time. Knowing that the second attempt would kill her for sure, knowing that she couldn’t buy a thing with the money she had squirreled away, it seemed consistent with some inner toughness of fiber for her to deny them the money.

  I was dubious about the next step. The possibility of tracing Vangie’s bartender friend seemed remote. The aging shovel-jawed beach boy, Griff, would get very edgy if he should come across me again. Vangie’s five minutes in that kitchen intrigued me. It was a small kitchen. It wouldn’t take long to find out if the money was still there, or if Griff’s thorough search had found it.

  Getting into Seven B the second time would be more difficult. I could be certain of one thing. I was not dealing with a group of early risers. Sliding glass doors on aluminum tracks opened from the apartment living room onto the fenced patio area. They yield as if they were made to be opened with a tire iron.

  It was five after two. I picked up the phone and left a call for quarter to five.

  This time I had closed the outer gate. The inner latch on the sliding doors tore slowly under leverage, made a little clinking sound as it parted. In the dark apartment, I pulled the kitchen door shut behind me, clapped shut the aluminum venetian blinds, turned the lights on and went to work. The time it had taken Vangie to get the money meant a fairly intricate hiding place, something which had to be taken apart and replaced. Stove negative. Refrigerator negative. Wall oven negative. Dishwasher negative. Some of the nuts that fastened housings on were cross-threaded, indicating somebody had been there first, but there was no way of knowing if any of the places had turned up the jackpot. I stopped and leaned against the counter by the sink. I checked the disposal unit. Removing that housing would be no five-minute job, and it didn’t look as if there could be any space available inside it anyway.

  There was a kick stool beside the sink, the kind that rolls on concealed casters that retract when you step on it so that it stands firm. It was to give access to some of the cabinet shelves built too high to reach easily. No clue in any of them.

  I looked at the ceiling fixtures. The one over the sink was a double circle of fluorescent tubing, the kind where the base fastens against the ceiling by means of a knurled center screw. I moved the kick stool over in front of the sink and turned off the lights, opened the blinds. The day was brightening rapidly and soon there would be the first horizontal rays of orange sunlight coming in from the Atlantic. Without any particular optimism, I undid the knurled screw. The base came down and hung by the wiring, a foot below the acoustic tile of the kitchen ceiling. The wires hung from the countersunk junction box. The base was round, perhaps sixteen inches in diameter. A crude rectangular hole had been cut into the tile beside the junction box. I reached up into the hole and over to the side, away from the junction box. The first packet I brought down was two inches thick, fastened with two red rubber bands. There was a fifty exposed on one side of it, a twenty on the other. The second packet was thinner, with a hundred on one side, a ten on the other. The third was the thickest of all, with twenties on either side. The last one was medium, exposing a ten and a fifty. I shoved them inside my shirt and rebuttoned it. I fitted the base back over the threaded fixture spindle, replaced the knurled screw, got down and rolled the kick stool away. Vangie had made a shrewd selection. The hiding place was obvious and unlikely.

  With a satisfying weight and bulk inside my shirt and with tire iron in hand, I went out the way I had come in. Just as I touched the gate latch, I heard a single crunch of a step on the brown pebbles behind me, and as I tried to spin, hard metal hit me briskly and solidly over the right ear. It wasn’t meant to knock me down. It was perfectly gauged to do exactly what it did. With the echoes of the first red and white explosion going off in my head, I staggered back against the gate. The tire iron clanked onto the pebbles. That kind of blow on the skull creates a wave of nausea in the back of the throat, clogging and receding, coming back in diminishing force several times as vision clears.

  In the increasing light I saw that shovel-jaw looked better in his flyboy sun glasses. His eyes were small, inflamed perhaps by his days on the beach, and his lashes were stubby, sparse and pale. They had the look you see in elephant eyes, a dulled and tricky savagery. He stood at a professional distance and held one of the most reliable and deadly of handguns aimed casually at my chest, dead center, a heavy Luger. I could see how neatly he had taken me. He had been tucked behind the plantings just to the right of the gate, perfectly content to wait there, knowing it was the only way out.

  He hooked a toe under the tire iron, flipped it far to the side. “You keep getting the wrong key, buds.”

  “You keep pretty good track of this place.”

  “I run the wire from a little Jap intercom through the wall, set it on dictate at full volume, the other half of it next to my bed. I get a week off one of those little nine-volt batteries. You came through loud and clear. I was expecting somebody. Not you. Somebody I know better. Turn real slow. All the way around. That’s nice. Hands flat against the gate. Keep them there. Walk your feet back toward me. A little more. Little more. Fine.”

  Even then he was careful. Long reach. Quick little taps with the fingertips. Fortunately he tapped the money bulge before he made any further investigation of the slight bulk in the right hand pocket of my slacks. And it is such an unlikely weapon carried in such an improbable place, it will even get past most hasty police searches.

  “Now keep yourself braced just like that with your left arm, and reach down and unbutton the shirt and shake that stuff out of there, buds.”

  The four packets fell. He tapped the shirt again at the waistline to be certain. Then he had me shift seve
ral feet to the side, maintaining the same helpless posture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him squat, gather up the packets, the gun now in his left hand. They went into the front of his shirt.

  He straightened up. “Where the hell was it?”

  “In the ceiling, up underneath the big light fixture over the sink.”

  “Fifty hours I spent in there. So the bitch told you.”

  “Or maybe I’m not as stupid as you are, Griff.”

  “I don’t make that kind of mistake, like letting you get me sore. I take it very calm, buds. I don’t care who you are. I don’t have to know who you are, or who told you what. All I have to do is keep my mind on this play until it’s over. What you do now is open the gate very slowly, and you open it wide. And you walk slowly down the drive the way you came, with me behind you. And then you go around your car and you get in on the passenger side, and very slowly you ease yourself over behind the wheel. Let’s go. There’s a busted door, a tire iron. I try to fire a warning shot and it gets you in the spine. It’s no sweat to me to testify, buds. Remember that. I’m clean as Girl Scouts in the area.”

  Never get cute with the competent ones. Amateurs with guns in their hands are dangerous, but there is almost always a delay before they can bring themselves to actually fire at a human being. The competent ones are not hesitant.

  When I was behind the wheel, he closed the door, hitched close to it, rested the Luger barrel on his left thigh, aimed at my middle, his thick finger on the trigger.

  “Get your keys, buds, and start it up. Keep it at thirty-five. Go out to the highway and turn south.”

  I was one docile fellow. I wanted no lead tearing through the irreplaceable parts of wondrous, inimitable, precious me.

  “How far?” I asked.

  “Keep going.”

  After a mile or so I said, “Did they make Terry do it the second time too?”

  “He was away. Shut up.”

  “You could be making a mistake, Griff.”

  “So when I find out, I’ll cry a little.”

  The beach clutter thinned out. He told me to slow down. He had me pull over onto the right shoulder until the road was clear of the meager morning traffic in either direction. Then, at his direction, I drove diagonally across the highway, up a rutted sandy track and pulled around behind a huge billboard advertising that oceanfront piece, eleven hundred feet of Atlantic Beach, four hundred feet deep from highway to tide line, for sale or lease.

  The orange-red rising sun was lifting out of the sea, the gap between it and the steel blue horizon widening. He made no mistakes getting me out of the car. We walked across sandy hummocks, past tall clumps of sea oats. We came to a swale between brown dunes which seemed to satisfy him.

  “What you do now, buds, very slow, is you lie down right there flat on your back.”

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “When you goof a play, the cost comes high. You should know a thing like that. The little ball drops in the wrong hole. Stretch out, boy. They find the Luger in your hand. After I put one in the side of your head, I even let you fire one out to sea in case some clown takes a paraffin test. There’s no history on the Luger, and I put no prints on the car. The surf noise like that, who hears two shots? Nobody sees us here. We’re out of sight. I was sleeping in swim trunks. So I roll the loot in my clothes and walk all the way back down the beach. Maybe I find a pretty shell. Who knows? Just stretch out nice, buds.”

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Don’t use them.”

  “I got my own. How about it?”

  “Stop stalling and … okay, light one. It’ll look like you thought it all over and decided to take the jump.”

  I slapped my shirt pocket, reached into the right hand pocket of my slacks. The spring release jacked the little Bodyguard into my hand, and I fired once, falling to the right, rolling hard, every nerve arched tight waiting for the slug. I ended up in a prone position, braced on my elbows, left hand clamping the gun wrist to steady it. He was down. I saw his right hand on a slope of sand, the fingers opening and closing. The Luger stood upright in the soft sand a foot from his hand, barrel sunk straight down. I walked to him on my knees, holding the gun on him. I circled him, picked up his weapon, tossed it a dozen feet behind me. The upper right side of his chest had a spreading red stain sopping the thin yellow fabric of the sports shirt. He coughed weakly and blood ran from the corner of his mouth down into the coarse sand.

  The reddened eyes looked vaguely at me. “Tricky bastard,” he said in a half whisper. “Should have known you were taking it too easy. My play would have been check you out better. Christ, everything feels as if it was going all loose inside me.”

  “Where’s Terry?”

  “Screw you, buds.”

  “You aren’t hit as bad as you think, Griff. The sooner you answer, the sooner I go get an ambulance.”

  He turned his head, coughed a heavier gout of blood into the sand. He closed his eyes. “Ans Terry. Him and the Whitney bitch. Monica Day.”

  Abruptly he opened his eyes very wide, threw his head back and stared at the sky. His body arched twice, thudding down against the sand, and he kicked his heels against the sand, then slowly softened and dwindled into stillness. The slug had evidently severed one of the big arteries in the right lung. It hadn’t taken long. I stood up slowly, slid the Bodyguard back into the spring catch. I looked around. I could hear traffic sounds merged with the wash of the surf. It numbs, always, even when you keep asking yourself what other choice you had. Somebody watched him pull himself up by the crib bars and stand cooing and drooling, and thought him a damned fine baby. Far down the beach I saw an early morning family moving slowly my way. Two large shapes, two tiny shapes covering more ground. I reached down, yanked the yellow shirt out of the waistband, recovered the four packets, buttoned them back inside my shirt. I thought of wrapping his hand around the Luger and putting a second slug into the same hole. But who shoots himself high in the right side of the chest?

  I saw a piece of weathered board in the sea grass, a splintered piece of one-by-six a little over two feet long. I squatted near the deepest part of the swale and, working as hard and as fast as I could, using it as a crude shovel, I made him a hole as long and as wide as he was, and almost as deep as he was thick. I checked his pockets, found nothing, took another look at the beach and saw how much progress the family had made. I tugged the body down parallel with the trench, then rolled him one half turn to drop face down into it. Next I slid my board under the Luger and dropped it beside his ear and used the board to shove it down into the sand. Like a nightmare bulldozer I crawled around the area, shoving the board with two hands like a bulldozer blade, covering him over, borrowing from all sides of the swale to fill the pocket a good two feet deep above his thick dead brown neck, and at one point heard myself making a small foolish whimpering sound, shut my teeth hard and cut it off. I stood up again, sweaty and weak. The family was heading back from whence they came, back probably to a motel breakfast. The sand was too dry to take any identifiable imprint. A footstep left a shallow pocket of sliding sand. I scraped the coughed blood under. There was no sign of him. The wind might uncover him in a day. Or cover him ten feet deeper. I walked back to the car. I had to think out the normal automatic motions of walking, lift of the foot, bend of the knee, swing and placement of the foot, and the alternate procedure with the other leg.

  I backed the car away from behind the billboard, got stuck for a heart-stopping moment, rocked it free and came out to find nothing on the road except two big trucks, both receding in opposite directions.

  I unlocked my mirrored room and walked into it, realizing I had absolutely no memory of the drive back. I looked out my windows and knew it was full morning, and I knew that when Griff had eaten yesterday’s three meals, he hadn’t any idea they would be the last three. I wondered if the girl with the sun-sleepy whine of voice was nested in her sleep in Seven C, her body resting from Griff’s use of her, dent of
his head in the neighbor pillow.

  The records say that forty thousand men disappear every year in this country. A great many of them stay lost. People don’t look very hard.

  I could guess what the others would think. Griff had been teamed with Vangie-Tami. The execution could have made him uneasy. If he came across her money and left, he would be difficult to find. I put the chain on the room door. I locked myself in the bathroom, put her money on the countertop, and with the little kit from the side pocket of my suitcase, I cleaned out the short barrel of the Bodyguard, replaced the missing round, shoved it back into the clip against the spring pressure.

  I removed the rubber bands, sorted the money by denomination and counted it twice. Her guess had been optimistic. Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty. Taking mostly fifties, I put the eight hundred and sixty into my wallet. I banded the rest of it into one solid brick, wrapped it in a dirty shirt and stuffed it into the glove compartment and locked it.

  I took a long, long shower. I stretched out on the bed. So go home, McGee. Why not? It’s just another salvage operation, only this time you get to keep it all. The wench is dead. And these are rough folks. Right now the sun would be burning down on your open eyes, waiting there for somebody taking a short cut to the beach to come across the car and then the suicide. Scratch one Vangie and one Griff. They cancel out. So go home. There’s enough in the kitty now to take you to a year from Christmas, and a very lush year at that.

  Sure.

  And spend the whole year wondering at what moment they were knocking off what new pigeon, now that they’d cleaned up the operation by disposing of the one weak link.

  Monica Day.

  Who the hell was she? And why did she sound familiar? Bit parts? Ans Terry. Anselm. Ansel. Known as one big powerful son of a bitch who could kill people with his hands.

  So, very probably, could Griff.

  And so had I. And it didn’t feel any better than doing it with a gun. In fact, it felt a little worse.