A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “Is this the way you were acting when you walked in and busted Leroy in the mouth?”

  “I was a lot calmer, I think.”

  Elmo looked at him for a few moments. He finally sighed audibly, peeled a small cigar and took his time lighting it. “So what’s got you all riled, boy? Dermond?”

  “If you can guess that good, guess the rest of it.”

  “Sure will. When you come into this, the idea was how you were going to he’p me slow those Save Our Bay folks down. Knowing them the way you do, you could do it quiet and gentle. So all of a sudden you find you somebody else is in on it. And I guess you want to know why.”

  “I very much want to know why.”

  “Lots of reasons. You turned out to have a softer heart than I give you credit for. That doesn’t mean I got no use for you now and in the future. It just means little things will come up best done by others. You bleeding about how Dermond got handled? Like my daddy used to say, a man with a plate glass ass shouldn’t walk where it’s slick.”

  “Leroy arranged the Dermond thing?”

  “He found some fellas to take care of it. The thing was to run him out of town fast, him and his pretty boy, so as when the Reverend Darcy Harkness Coombs gives his little talk at the public hearing on Wednesday night, he can point to Dermond as being one of the bird lovers exposed and run out of the county by the forces of decency. You standing up for a goddam degenerate, boy?”

  “Aren’t you trying to win too big, Elmo?”

  “In this game, Jimmy boy, there’s no such thing. Then, you losing your wife, it kind of took your mind off all that’s going on. And we figure you’ve been doing us a lot of real good by writing up how wonderful Palmland Isles is going to be. We figured you’d be a lot happier if you don’t have to mess with the rougher parts of this thing. If you couldn’t stomach it when Leroy give that big girl a little cuffing around, it’s best we took some of the dirty work off your hands. Like how Dermond got convinced it was time to leave town.”

  “I don’t care about Dermond, Elmo. I had to see you tonight to get something else straight. Jennings’ organization is pretty well gutted now. There’s four left on the committee, and about fifty members who haven’t been scared off. I assume Leroy’s little helpers are still on the job. I came here to tell you that nothing is going to happen to Kat Hubble. If anything is being set up, you better make sure it’s called off. If anything happens to her, I’m going to make you the sorriest man in south Florida, Commissioner.”

  Elmo wore a tiger smile. “Big words. Maybe, as the years go by, Jimmy, and we get to know each other good, you’ll stop wondering if I’m a damn fool. Leroy still wonders, sometimes. Ever since you busted his lip he’s been especially nervous about you. But what he can’t understand yet is how I got a lock on you that you couldn’t bust out of if you tried. You’re the most loyal man I’ve got. Now don’t stare at me so bug-eyed, boy. Think it out. I’d say the one thing you value most is the good opinion and respect of that nice little redheaded woman who is the widow of your best friend. And every little thing you’ve done for me has give me a solider lock on you. But I don’t want to push you past the point where you’d lose your own respect for yourself. I could make you do things you wouldn’t want to think about. I could tell you that if you didn’t do like I told you, I’d make sure that little lady found out just how you’ve been helping us and hurting them. Leroy has no call to be nervous about you, no more than I have. And that redhead isn’t going to be hurt in any way. She’s going to stay sweet and loving toward you, because that’s how you want her to be, and you’ll work to keep her that way. Before I ever talked to you I looked it all over careful. She’s a spirited woman. She looks up to you. I knew you’d be awful careful not to let anybody know you have any deal with me, because she might find out. And I want you real careful, like you’ve been. You can’t cross me, Jimmy, any more than Leroy could, or Buck, or Doc, or Bill, or Burt. Any one of you would be hurting yourself worse than me. So have no fear about anything happening to that little woman.”

  The office seemed slightly tilted, and Elmo Bliss looked half again life size. Jimmy moistened his dry lips and said, “It’s so strange. The best reason you gave me for joining your team was that if I didn’t, she might get hurt. That was the reason that meant the most to me. None of the reasons for it or against it seemed very important a few weeks ago. But that was … the one that counted.”

  “It was the heaviest one I had,” Elmo admitted. “But why should you or anybody act like I’m a bad man? Chrissake, boy, we’ve been giving folks something to take their mind off the hot weather. What do they say? Bread and circuses. Dog packs need rabbits to chase. It angries up the blood and keeps folks young. I was going to get those two Army fellas pushed out of the picture too. We could have got to Jennings through his Chinaman wife, but then I got to thinking it would take the joy out of the public hearing if there was nobody to show up at all on the other side. They’ll need somebody to boo at, and it might as well be Jennings and Lipe, standing all alone against the multitude. If Jennings has any idea of taking the fight further after the clobbering we’ll give him, we can take his mind off it later on. And Lipe, without Jennings, isn’t worth cutting up for chum. So who’s been hurt too bad? Dermond, Mrs. Rowell, the Sinnat girl? They all blameless, boy? And look at the good that’ll be done to more folks than you can count. There’ll be fat pockets in this county.”

  “You … you can understand why I got upset.”

  “Because you didn’t think it through. But I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t know how you can do it. But you’d best keep Miz Hubble away from that public hearing. She’ll have no speeches to make. She’s done all she can. You keep her away. It’ll all die down fast afterwards. You’ll see. But folks will be heated up Wednesday night. People could get roughed up, even if no real harm is meant.”

  For most of that Monday evening he had been without the bright static images in his mind. He sat at his desk in the newsroom and wrote about promotions and zoning appeals, meetings and resolutions, a Pigeon Town knifing, a drainage control project. He shrank himself into a little rubbery figure at a matchbox desk, running scrawled notes and short phone calls into rapidity-click, whappety-clack of pica black on yellow paper, bucked through rewrite, initialed at the desk, slugged, linotyped, copyread and locked up.

  But later he was to remember that the image started before the phone call came. He did not know exactly what it was when it began. It was a shadowy something, and he could see the typed words well enough through it. Then it began to tower over him, a huge thing, ominous, silent. The words were gone and he was in a wild, still, lunar country. He stood in blackness at the foot of a bulge of mountain. There was some piercingly bright light beyond the mountain, shining on the long smooth concave curve of snow that led to the summit. To his right was a shadowy roundness where the light leaked around a wider portion of the great promontory. Suddenly perspective and proportion seemed to click into place, and he realized that it was a woman’s breast, his eye so close to the base of it that for a moment he listened for the velvety thud of her heartbeat against his ear. The concave line of snow was the whiteness of her skin against the light beyond.

  At midnight, after the phone call, as he was driving to the hospital, the image was still there. The lights of the oncoming traffic shone through it. After he had parked and was walking toward the emergency entrance, the vision left him. It did not fade as the others had. It merely moved slowly upward until it was beyond the furthest upward tilt of his vision.

  Kat was waiting for him in the small alcove beyond the emergency room. She sprang up when she saw him and came to him, her eyes swollen. He held her in arms that felt wooden. She rolled her forehead back and forth against his shoulder, saying, “The dirty bastards. The horrible filthy dirty bastards.”

  “Where’s Ross?”

  “He’s with her right now. He’s waiting for the sedative to work.”

  “Has he reported it
?”

  “Yes. It was outside the city. Two deputies were here. They left a little while ago. What good can they do? She didn’t know those people. She didn’t get a look at any of them.”

  “Who’s the doctor?”

  “The one who was on duty in the emergency room. He’s quite nice. He was very upset about it. Dr. Bressard.”

  “Does Ross expect me to go to her room?”

  “No, dear. He was lucky enough to get a private room for her. He told me to wait for you down here, and for us both to wait for him. It shouldn’t be long now.”

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  “I think Ross ought to.”

  Ross came down five minutes later. He seemed to walk very carefully, like a man trying not to limp. His expression was thoughtful. “She’s asleep now. It won’t wear off for a while. I’ll come back here so I’ll be with her when she wakes up. Let’s go get a drink someplace.”

  They walked to a small cocktail lounge two blocks away. It was a warm still night. They could hear the radios in the cars that drove by. They sat at a red plastic horseshoe booth in the back. Kat slid in first. After they had ordered, Kat said, “I haven’t heard all of it, you know. How did they get the drawings?”

  The low wall lamp had an opaque shade and a weak orange bulb. Ross Halley’s face was in shadow. The light shone on his lumpy, malformed hands. He tore off small bits of the paper napkin, rolled each into a pellet and dropped it into the black plastic ashtray. “I didn’t know the drawings were missing. I didn’t know anything was missing. I haven’t had time to check. Saturday afternoon we went to the beach. I took a camera along to get some casual beach stuff. Background for future work. I wanted to get her mind off this damn Palmland deal anyhow. We got back a little after four. Somebody had pied my studio. Dumped all my work, all my files and records and materials in the middle of the floor, poured everything onto it that would pour, and stirred it up with a broom. The tubes of color they squirted on the walls. The way they got in, they broke my outside studio door open. They wedged something in there and pried it open and splintered the door all to hell around the lock.”

  “Did you report it?” Kat asked.

  He stared at her with a blank expression. “What was the point? Did it do any good reporting they cracked a window ten days ago heaving a rotten cabbage at the house? When Jackie saw what’d been done to my workroom, I’ve never seen her, or anybody, so mad. She scared me, she was so mad. When that was over she cried as if her heart was broken. Sunday she was still mad, but it was a deep slow burn. I fixed the door, put a new bolt on the inside. We worked all day long cleaning the place up, salvaging what we could. I haven’t got any kind of insurance that covers that sort of thing. I checked and I don’t. Actually, it’s a hell of a loss. It made me feel sick. All the work I do for a long time is going to be just that much harder to get right. Now, understand, I’d been telling her to be careful, but when she went out tonight, I should have gone with her. She went out about eight o’clock, just to drive over to the mainland and pick up some cigarettes. We were nearly out. I guess they were waiting for her to come out, and followed her. I guess if we’d both gone out, it would have been the same thing. I don’t think they were going to let me stop them.

  “She went over to that shopping center at Bay and Mangrove. It was just about full dark by then. When she came back to the car, just as she opened the door, somebody eased up behind her and pulled some kind of big thick bag down over her head. She’s a strong girl, but they didn’t give her a chance. They grabbed her and hustled her into a nearby car and drove out of there. They’d wrapped some fast turns of line around her. It was so airless in that bag she panicked, and she thinks she fainted. But Bressard found a lump on the side of her head, so maybe she didn’t. When she came out of it, she was being carried along a path in the woods. When they found she could walk, they stopped carrying her. They walked her with her arms twisted up into her back. The bag was gone and she wasn’t tied. They had flashlights. She thinks there were at least four of them, and no more than six, all men, all in dark clothes, all wearing black hoods with big eyeholes and a big place for the mouth. They came to a small clearing. She could hear traffic a long way away. They spoke in whispers, and they used no names.

  “They told her to take her clothes off, or they’d be ripped off. She tried to run and she tried to stall. Nothing worked. She did as they told her. They tied her to a big live oak tree, her face to the tree, so big she couldn’t reach around it. She said she was blubbering and bellowing by then. There was a length of line fastening one wrist to the other. They wanted to show her something. They put the lights on it and held it where she could see it. Her head was turned to the side, her cheek against the tree. It was one of my drawings of her. I did a lot of them. I kept about twenty of the best ones. Some were charcoal, some pastels, some ink. Nude studies. Nothing lascivious, for God’s sake. They were unmistakably her. I can get a good likeness. I did them years ago. I love her. I love how she’s built and the way she looks. These were a private labor of love, something between me and my wife. Our business. Nobody else’s. The head man whispered to her, ‘Did you pose for this?’ The question steadied her down. She said of course she did, and why not? Her husband is an artist, she said. Only a sick mind would see anything wrong in acting as a life model for your husband. He told her to answer yes or no, and he asked her again. She said yes. As soon as she said it, there was a sort of whistling, whirring sound behind her, and then such a terrible smashing pain across her naked back she bucked hard against the tree and screamed. The man tore the drawing in half, whispered, ‘Repent!’ and held up the next one and said, ‘Did you pose for this?’ Along about the fourth drawing, she tried saying no, to see if that was what they wanted. When she said no they hit her twice, once for posing and once for lying. She said she would have done anything in the world to stop them. She begged. She said she repented. Toward the end she was going into a half-faint after each lash. She hung against the tree.

  “Suddenly there were no more drawings. She heard them whispering to each other. They cut her wrists loose. She slid and fell. She heard them hurrying away, going away through the woods, and she lifted her head so she’d know what direction to go in. She rested for a long time, then, with her eyes more accustomed to the darkness, she was able to find her clothes. It took her a long time to put them on. She wandered off the path on her way back toward the highway. She forced her way through the brush and went through a deep ditch and up onto the shoulder. She was on the Bay Highway, about a mile this side of Everset. Two young boys picked her up, probably thinking their luck had provided them with a fine drunken blonde. She wasn’t walking very well. As soon as she was in the car she fainted. Apparently the boys discovered the blood soaking through her shirt and slacks. Instead of dumping her anywhere, they drove her to the hospital and dumped her out there. She sat on the curb near the driveway to the emergency entrance. A nurse spotted her out there and came out and looked at her, then went back in and came out with another nurse and a stretcher. She told them to call me. When I arrived, Bressard was still working on her. He had a lot of cleaning to do, from where she’d rolled over into the dirt when they cut her loose. He thinks it was a heavy length of braided leather. Every swing sliced her open. The highest one is across the top of her shoulders, and the lowest one is across the back of her thighs a couple of inches above her knees. He says the worst places are where two marks cross. He did some stitching on those places. They had to treat her for shock and loss of blood. I saw her back. It’s a dozen colors. If it wasn’t for the shape of her, you wouldn’t know what it was.”

  “Wicked,” Kat whispered. “Cruel and wicked.”

  “She told me about it after we were up in the room. The pain isn’t so bad. He froze it somehow. She told me in bits and pieces, not orderly like I’ve told you. There’ll be scars for a long time. Maybe as long as she lives. She was always a girl who was proud of not having any scars and blemishes. And she
never liked being hurt. If she’d scald a finger cooking, it would scare her and upset her.”

  “Don’t talk about her that way,” Kat said. “Don’t use the past tense, Ross, please.”

  He gave her that strange thoughtful look. “Isn’t it accurate? What makes you think the Jackie we know is still living?”

  “Don’t, Ross!”

  “They took it all out of her, Kat. All the joy and the spunk and the spirit. It all leaked out of her back. You can’t do that to a woman like that and expect to have much left. She’s dull now, Kat. Her eyes are dull and her face is dull, and you can see how she’ll look when she’s old. She doesn’t give a damn whether they fill your goddam bay or leave it alone. She’s in a world she doesn’t like any more, because now she knows there’s no part of it you can trust. She trusted too much, and I didn’t trust enough. I suppose I could go looking for those people. And if I’m as unlucky as I think I am, I might find them. Once I found them, I’d have to kill them. There’s no other conceivable thing to do. And how much good would that do Jackie? So I’m not even going to look. When she’s well enough, we’ll move along. I don’t think either of us will want to stay here.” He looked at Jimmy in a slightly puzzled way. “Kat thought you could write this up. But you can’t. And we wouldn’t want you to. We don’t want to advertise anything or fight anybody. We’re going to take our losses and run, kids. And if you have any sense, Kat, you’ll run too.” He finished his drink and stood up. “I want to be right there in case she wakes up.”

  “Ross,” Kat said. “Maybe it won’t be as …”

  He leaned one hand on the table to brace himself, reached with his right hand to cup her cheek in a clumsy way. “For everything you’re thinking … for everything you’re wishing … thanks.”