Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  I watched them handle the handguns I gave them. I gave Gavin the Airweight Bodyguard from the bedside holster, and gave Donnie the Colt Diamondback from the medicine cabinet hidey-hole. They checked the weapons with reassuring aplomb, spinning the cylinders, dry firing, then loading. I took the nine-millimeter automatic pistol for myself, the staggered box magazine holding the full fourteen rounds.

  Then I showed them what I had in mind. I made them practice the routine over and over until they could get into their hiding places quickly enough to suit me.

  There is a full-length mirror affixed to the bulkhead at the end of the short corridor between the two staterooms. Quite a while ago I had a master carpenter move the bulkhead out a few inches and make a stowage locker on the other side shallower. The two-way glass mirror is hinged on one side, held in place by a catch which can be released by shoving a wire brad into an almost invisible hole in the right side of the mirror frame. A man can step in, pull the mirror door shut, fasten it with a simple turn block. As it is only twelve inches deep, he cannot turn around. He has to step in backward, and he can watch the corridor from there. Donnie fit the space with little to spare. Gavin fit reasonably well in the stowage locker in the lounge, the one with the upholstered top used for extra seating. I had emptied it out before their arrival. There was a small hole near the floor which gave him limited vision and better hearing.

  “I want to make sure I understand,” Gavin said. “We’re backup. We’re insurance. If there’s big action, we bust out and take him if we have to. Or if things start to go sour for you, the code word is Preach?”

  “If I have to use it, I’ll yell it, and I’ll be moving fast by then.”

  “What does this dude look like? Is there just one?”

  “You’ve probably seen him in movies. He played the part of Dirty Bob.”

  Donnie spoke up in his slow deep voice. “He’s nothing but a movie actor, isn’t he?”

  “Outlaw biker first.”

  “And he’s been killing women,” Gavin said. “I read about it. He’s a bloody big sod, that one. Is he really mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he want with you, McGee?”

  “He blames me for the death of a friend, the man who put him in the movies. I don’t think he needs much reason. I think he is probably certifiably insane.”

  “When do you think he’ll show up?”

  “Yesterday he was in Los Angeles. He was there looking for my address. He’s had thirty or more hours to get here.”

  “People know his face, don’t they?” Donnie said.

  “One time that I know about, he and his friend came across the country on motorcycles in fifty hours.”

  “Good time,” Gavin said, “but it beats you to death.”

  “If it turns out that there is any way to take him alive, I’d like that.”

  “To give to the law?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, if you keep us out of it,” Donnie said. “We’ll keep it in mind. But it looks safer if we kill him. How long do we go before you decide he isn’t coming?”

  “Until Sunday night?”

  “Preach didn’t tie any strings on it,” Gavin said. “So it’s whatever you say, mister.”

  “You’ve been … uh … involved in this sort of thing before?” I asked.

  “Better you shouldn’t ask,” Gavin said with a sandy little smile. “We eat here, I suppose?”

  “I put provisions aboard. And liquor.”

  “Donnie and me, we don’t drink except after a job is over. Look, I didn’t mean to turn you off about what you asked. I’ll tell you this much. For what you’ve got in mind, you won’t find any better south of Atlanta. Okay?”

  “Glad to know it.”

  “You live aboard here all the time?” Gavin asked. “What do you do for a living? You retired?”

  I smiled at him. “Better you shouldn’t ask.”

  “Anyway, Preach must owe you a big one. I’m not asking.

  Okay? I was just making a remark.”

  Twenty-one

  The slightest pressure on the mat where people come aboard the Flush from the dock at the stern, where the hinged rail is flipped over and latched, rings the small warning bell—a solemn bong, like a discreet telephone in an advertising office.

  It sounded in the early afternoon on Friday, on a day that seemed hotter than all the rest, hot enough to bring the water in the yacht basin to a slow boil, bubble the varnish on the play toys, make the metalwork too hot to touch. The sky hung low in a thick white glare. The air conditioning groaned away, eating my purse. Through the narrow gaps in the draperies I could see the tourists on the docks, milling around in slow motion, straining for a good time.

  At the bong, I was in the galley, looking at the labels on the canned goods. Gavin and Donnie were in the lounge. They slipped quickly, quietly, neatly away to their assigned places.

  The pistol was tucked into my belt, under the oversized yellow shirt, slanted on the left side, grip toward the right, handy for grasping. There are many schools, going back to the flintlock dueling-pistol days when it was thought advisable to present one’s body in profile to the opponent, the right side—the side without the heart in it—nearer the opponent. The gunslinger school had its own mythology. I had long since worked it out to my own satisfaction. It was the shortest travel distance for my right hand, and as I pulled it free, I could pivot into a full-faced squat, weapon held in two hands, aiming it for full instinctive spray, like a man putting out a fire at gut height.

  I touched it through the shirt to be certain it was properly positioned, went to the rear entrance to the lounge, thumbed the curtains aside, and saw Meyer’s solid and reliable face a few inches beyond the door.

  I unlocked the door, and just as I swung it open, the delayed warning hit me. There had been something wrong about Meyer. I backed away and he came in, moving in such a slow and uncertain way, it was as if he had forgotten how to walk. He wore a dull apologetic smile, and all the bright hot light had gone out of his little blue eyes.

  The old man was right behind him, bent over, nodding, muttering to Meyer. A wattled old man with a naked polished skull, a soiled blue long-sleeved shirt, dark greasy pants, sneakers.

  He urged Meyer in, slammed the door behind them with a flip of his elbow, and then, as he straightened to full height, he pushed Meyer roughly ahead of him. Meyer stumbled and nearly went down. I saw the weapon revealed, the one he had been holding against Meyer’s back, four short ugly barrels of a large-caliber derringer. Grizzel stepped over to me and said, “Pull the front of that pretty yellow shirt up, Ace. Slow and easy.”

  With the four barrels aimed at my face, I didn’t feel as if I even dared breathe. He lifted the pistol out of my belt with his left hand, squatted, and placed it on the floor, and with the edge of his foot he scuffed it into a corner without looking at it.

  I glanced at Meyer. There was going to be no help there. It happens sometimes. I think it is the deep unwavering conviction that life is about to end. It is an ultimate fear, immobilizing, squalid. It crowds everything else out of the mind. There is no room for hope, no chance of being saved. I have seen it happen to some very good men, and most of them did indeed die badly and soon, and the ones who did not die were seldom the same again. Were a man to awaken from sound sleep to the dry-gourd rattle of a diamondback coiled on his chest, head big as a fist, forked tongue flickering, he would go into that dreadful numbness of the ultimate fright.

  “You’ve changed,” I said in a dry-mouthed voice.

  “Sit on the floor!” Grizzel said to Meyer. Meyer sat so quickly and obediently he made a thick thudding sound. Grizzel kept his eyes on me. “Down a hundred pounds. Tried to hold at one ninety, but it wouldn’t stop. Something in here, eating on me, Ace. Like fire and knives, all the time. That old fart trying to buy hash for his misery, I put him out of it, and now I got it myself. We got to find some nice quiet way to do you, Ace. Right in the middle of a
ll these boats and folks. Maybe your best buddy in all the world can give me a little help with you.”

  “Why me?” I asked.

  His eyes were the same. Nothing else. “Why not you? You and Joya fucked up the world for Peter K and yours truly. With Freaky Jean’s help. All my life you smartass people have been on top. It’s my final sworn duty to bring you down, every one of you I can get to, and I have got to a lot so far.”

  “Including the Senator?”

  “No time for confession hour. Wish I had time to tell you about the snuff job on that movie-queen pal of yours. Would have made a great tape, Ace.” He motioned toward his crotch with his free hand. “Old King Henry here hasn’t lost an ounce, and he can go as good as he ever did. Should have seen Jeanie’s eyes too, when she saw who the hell it was she was talking to, who this skinny old man all bent over, with the whiny voice and limp, who he really was. Strong kid. Fought nice. That’s when it’s best, when you got a fighter.”

  “You get around pretty good, pretty quick.”

  “Stall, stall, stall. I don’t think I’m going to get any help from your dearest closest buddy here, which is what everybody calls him. Peed his pants. I travel nice, Ace. Good luggage, good clothes, first class all the way. Money came mostly from country stores, where by the time you bust the second finger on them, they tell you what shelf the money is hid on, and it is more than you can imagine. Tried a bike, but the bones of my ass are too close to the surface. These are my working clothes, Ace. Harmless old saggy fart, shuffling around. Lots of wrinkles from the weight dropping off so fast.”

  His glance flicked away from me and back again, over and over, so quickly it gave me no chance at all. He was looking the interior over. “What I want you should do, Ace, is let yourself down very very slow and easy. Thaaaaat’s it. Hitch a little bit more toward me. Now lay back nice and slow. Good boy.”

  He sidled into the galley, moving with the speed of an angular bug, and emerged instantly with one of my steak knives in his left hand. “You won’t hardly feel this at all, Ace.”

  He moved cautiously toward me. Beyond him I saw the padded cover of the stowage locker lift silently, and I saw Gavin stand up, right hand high, holding the throwing knife. I think Grizzel saw a reflection of the movement out of the corner of his eye in one of the lounge ports. And he was quick. My God, he was quick! He swiveled and fired, and the slam of the shot in that enclosed space was deafening. Gavin’s grunt of effort came simultaneously with the shot. There was a silvery glint in the air, and Grizzel dropped with an eerie bony thud. He dropped loose, agawk, open eyes almost immediately dusty, without further breath or quiver, wearing the braided leather grip of the throwing knife in the crenelated socket of his throat, under the loose jowls. The slug had taken Gavin in the center of the chest, banged him back against the bulkhead, and from there he had rebounded to fall face down, heart shredded, toes still hooked over the edge of the locker.

  Donnie squatted beside him and laid his fingers on Gavin’s throat. “Goddamn,” he whispered. “Oh, goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.”

  I could hear no running outside, no shouts of query, or noises of excitement. The muffled explosion had passed unnoticed.

  Donnie placed my Colt carefully on the coffee table. He said, “Just hold tight, huh. I’ll come back with the word.”

  Meyer and I were alone with the bodies. He looked up at me with the querulous expression of a child who cannot understand why it has been so punished. Tears ran down his face.

  I helped him up and he looked down at Grizzel’s corpse and walked woodenly to the head and closed the door quietly behind him. I heard the water running.

  Donnie returned in a half hour. His eyes looked pink and irritated. In his slow and heavy voice he said, “What will happen, it will be a cleaning truck, maybe in three quarters of an hour, and the security will let them in here for a pickup, right? This carpeting is shot. Better you shouldn’t try to get it cleaned. They will take it up and roll them up in it at the same time and horse them out to the truck, and you can forget it from then on. Any stains came through, they’re your problem. Preach don’t want no contact from you.”

  “What will they do with them?”

  “Usually it’s construction foundations where they go.” He straightened and sighed. “Me, I got to tell his girl he had to go back home to Sydney, Australia, on a family emergency.”

  Epilogue

  On an August afternoon I worked the Busted Flush into a bayou ringed with mangrove down near the mouth of the Snake River, below Naples. There, like a mother spider, I began building my web of lines, finding good holding ground for anchors, tying off other lines to the sturdiest mangroves, and making allowance for big tides.

  A medium hurricane named Carl was due to bash Cuba by midnight, on a course that would carry its diminished muscle up through the Straits of Yucatán. We would get some of the fringe of it, and if it curved back toward the Florida west coast, we might get a hell of a lot more of it than we wanted.

  We had plenty of fresh water, fuel, and provisions, and Annie was excited and stimulated by the idea of sitting it out. The afternoon was hazy white, with high tendrils of unusual-looking clouds and some burly rain clouds over the Gulf.

  After she had helped me do everything I felt we could do to assure our safety, we went up onto the sun deck and sat under the canopy at the topside controls in the big captain’s chairs where we could watch the weather.

  Out of nowhere she said, “I still feel pretty strange about you getting yourself associated with people like that Preach.”

  “Who is associated?”

  “How about through that Indian person, that Mits?”

  “She owns the whole ball game now.”

  “But doesn’t she give you money?”

  “She tries hard.”

  “Doesn’t it come from some kind of rotten source, like drugs?”

  “Probably. Indirectly.”

  “Am I boring you?”

  I turned and grinned at her. “Not most of the time.”

  “It’s just that I want you to be—”

  “Respectable?”

  “That’s not the right word. It’s not as stuffy a word as that.”

  “Independent?”

  “Closer.”

  “That is something I have always been, Annie, and always will be. I steer through a pretty crowded track, and once in a while I brush up against a Preach, who wants to tame me by breaking my elbows, or a Dirty Bob, who wants to punish me by killing my friends. Okay, I have a lot of moves. Earnest apology. Happy sapistry. A good straight left hand when needed. They nearly had me quelled, kid. That was before all this with Esterland.”

  “Will you tell me all about it sometime?”

  “Probably. They had the lid almost hammered down on me. But I couldn’t take a life that flat. You know. Things have to move. Like, I lied to you about not being able to run away from the storm. We probably could have. But this is a better way.”

  “I know we could have. I checked the charts.”

  “I have a lot of trouble with bright women.”

  “You couldn’t stand any other kind.” She hesitated, biting her lip. “After the storm, are we going to hurry back to Lauderdale?”

  “If you can call anything this crock can do hurrying.”

  “I think about Meyer.”

  “So do I. Look, he has to be alone for a time. Maybe it is long enough by now. I hope so. He failed his image of himself because I think he fashioned that image a little too closely to his image of me. I am more of a physical person than Meyer. He has too much imagination. That’s what helps people break themselves. He didn’t expect it. He’s been in tighter spots. This time he saw something in the crazed, dying, evil eyes of that man. He saw his death there, and it sucked the heart right out of him. And he’s ashamed, though he shouldn’t be.”

  “Have you told him he shouldn’t be?”

  “Of course. I told him it can happen to anyone at any time, and I t
ried to tell him it had happened to me too. It almost did, once. But not quite. And I couldn’t lie well enough to convince him.”

  “What will happen?”

  “He’ll want to get into something rough. He’ll look for a chance to try to recover his self-respect. And it might be a very close play indeed to try to keep him from getting himself killed. He seeks that absolution, the end of shame. And that is a primitive reaction. Whatever it is, I am going to have to help hunt for the situation, and I am going to have to see that he gets away with whatever foolish move he makes.”

  “Then he’ll be okay again?”

  “Practically. Not quite. Because he knows it can happen.”

  A breeze came skitting into the bayou, silvering the black water. She lifted her face to it. “Hey! Feel that!” It faded away, and a mosquito sang into my ear. “Will we get a lot of wind?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will it turn into a constant shrieking like they say?”

  “Maybe. But it is a roaring kind of shriek. Deeper than plain old shrieking.”

  “Could we maybe, while it’s roaring or whatever, make love?”

  “I will certainly see if I can arrange it, Annie. I will put some thought to it. I really will.”

  For Dorothy again

  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)