The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (40 page)

Not that it mattered now. Zo was dead and I was tagged. And if he hadn’t come forward before, I couldn’t expect
Señor Peso
to come out in the open now. Staring up at the stars, I remembered the dead girl’s words at the prison.

“
And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup
.”

It sounded logical. He’d made good to the tune of $36,000.00. Zo with her talk of Havana and a converted sponger putting in had obviously been under instructions that – if they had been carried out – would have proven profitable to me. No. I couldn’t blame
Señor Peso
for this. This was a personal affair between the dead girl and myself and the man who had killed her.

The night was cool. I put on my coat and lighted a cigarette just as a pair of headlights turned off the highway a quarter of a mile away and bounced down the rutted sand road toward the cabin. I kicked the screen door open and walked out and stood with my hand on the butt of the gun in my pocket, in the shadow of a big slash pine fifty feet from the wooden porch.

The car was blue and white, a state patrol car, with two uniformed troopers in it. They skirted the yellow jeepster and parked in front of the porch.

Getting out, one of them said, “It looks quiet enough to me. Probably a false alarm.”

“Probably,” his partner agreed. He flicked the car’s searchlight around among the trees, missing me by inches. Then he pointed it at the shoreline. “Lonely sort of place, though.” He was a bit impatient with his partner. “Well, go ahead. Bang on the door. Wake ’em up and ask ’em if anyone screamed.”

His partner banged the screen door. “State Police.”

When no one answered, he opened the screen and walked in, sweeping a path before him with his flashlight. A moment later I heard him whistle. Then the lights in the bedroom came on and he shouted to his partner:

“Hey. Come in here, Jim. That fisherman who called the barracks wasn’t whoofing. Some dame was screaming all right. But she isn’t screaming now. She’s dead.”

So much was clear. The man who had killed Zo had waited as long as he could, hoping her body would be discovered. When it wasn’t, he’d called the State Patrol. He really wanted to pin this thing on me and he didn’t want me to get too far away before the law stepped in.

I hoped the trooper would leave his keys in the car. He didn’t. Sliding out from behind the wheel, he clipped his keys on his belt before drawing his gun and striding into the cabin.

I inched over toward the jeepster. A few minutes before I’d been considering calling the State Patrol and turning myself in. Now I was damned if I would. I didn’t want to go back to Raiford. I didn’t want to die. At least not without seeing Beth and telling her I was sorry.

The ignition key was still in the jeep. Keeping it between me and the cabin, I walked the length of the patrol car, raised the hood as quietly as I could and yanked out a handful of wires. Then I walked back and climbed in the jeepster, crossed my fingers and kicked it over. Over the roar of the motor, I heard one of the troopers say:

“What the hell?”

Then I’d spun the jeepster in a sharp U-turn that threw up a screen of sand and was bouncing down the rutted road with both troopers shouting after me and spraying the back of the car and the windshield with lead.

I made the highway without being hit and into a little town on the north bank of a river. I had, at the most, a five- or ten-minute start. I’d put the patrol car temporarily out of action, but their two-way radio was still working. It would only be a matter of minutes before roadblocks would be set up and every law-enforcement officer in Dixie, Bronson, Alachua, Marion and Citrus counties would be alerted for a killer driving a new yellow jeepster.

A tired-looking tourist driving a mud-splattered ’48 with Iowa license plates was just pulling out of the town’s only filling station as I passed it. I drove on to the edge of town and the bridge across the river. There was a small gap between the black-and-white guard rail and the bridge.

Pointing the jeepster at the gap, I rammed down the gas and hopped out. It hit the gap dead-center and disappeared with a splintering of wood and a screech of metal. A moment later there was a great splash. The ’48 behind me braked to a stop and the tourist stuck his head out the window.

“Holy smoke,” he said. “What happened, fellow? Did your car go out of control?”

“No,” I told him. “I did.” I opened the door on the far side, climbed in beside him, and rammed the nose of the gun that had killed Zo in his ribs. “Look,” I said, “I have a date with a roadblock where this road joins US 19. That is, unless I get there first. How fast will this crate go?”

He looked at the gun in his ribs and swallowed hard. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve had it up to ninety. And my foot wasn’t all the way to the floor.”

I said, “Then put it there. As of now.”

It could be the law would figure out I was in Palmetto City. If it did, it wasn’t my fault. I’d left a trail only a snake with Saint Vitus dance could follow. I hadn’t doubled back once but I’d done a lot of twisting and changing of means of transportation. I’d kissed the Iowa tourist goodbye at Inglis after giving him the impression I had a boat waiting for me in Withlacoochee Bay. From there I’d picked up a ride on a fruit truck as far as Dunnellon and US 41. I’d taken a bus from there to Tampa and spent most of the day buying new clothes piecemeal.

When I’d finished buying slacks and a sport coat and a loud gabardine shirt and washing the blood from the back of my head, I looked a lot more like a northern tourist than I did a local boy who’d spent most of his life on the water.

The Tampa papers were filled with the thing. The headline on the evening paper read:

The story was about as I expected. The way the law figured it, Zo and I had staged a drunken party to celebrate my release. During it, we had quarreled and I killed her. I was, variously reported, seen north near Tallahassee, boarding a forty-foot sloop in Withlacoochee Bay, and hopping a south-bound freight at Dunnellon.

But the law was merely confused, not stupid. Once they sifted out the false reports, the net would begin to tighten. And Beth was in Palmetto City. The chances were there was a stake-out right now on the house in which she was living.

I’d taken a plane from Tampa to Palmetto City. But I didn’t dare take a cab from the airport to the return address she had given on her letter. I had been born in the town. I’d lived there most of my life. I knew all the cab drivers. All of them knew me. I also knew the law. Ken Gilly, a kid with whom I had gone to school, was now a lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau.

Getting out of the airport as fast as I could without attracting attention, I strolled past the dark ball park and out to the mole in the bay where, night or day, there were always a dozen or so northern tourists fishing. It was dark on the mole and as good a place to kill time as any.

My plans were all tentative. I wanted to talk to Beth. I wanted to tell her I was sorry things turned out as they had for us. Then I wanted to talk to one or two of the boys who still berthed their fishing cruisers at Bill’s Boat Basin. One of them, Matt Heely, owed me plenty. And I was willing to call it square for a free trip to Shrimp Cay.

It was too late for me to turn honest now. Once there I’d attempt to contact
Señor Peso
through channels and see what he had in mind when he had sent Zo to re-establish contact with me. If he decided I was too hot to be of any use to him, there was still the thirty-six grand in my Havana bank account. And a man had to be pretty stupid if he couldn’t have one hell of a time drinking himself to death on thirty-six thousand dollars anywhere south of the Tropic of Cancer.

The tide was in. The moon was right. You could have caught fish with dough-balls and a bent pin. At one o’clock I interrupted the excited shoe clerk from Chicago who was pulling in pig-fish, about the size of the ones I usually used as bait for snook, and who was teaching me how to fish, telling him that while it all was very interesting I thought I would turn in.

The return address on Beth’s letter was less than a mile from the mole. It proved to be a small white frame garage apartment on a palm tree- and bougainvillea-tangled alley on the south-east side of town, not far from the store in which she was clerking. It was a hell of a place for the wife of a man who’d made the money I’d made to live in. Shame heated the collar of my sport shirt. Swede had been right about the bloody tide, too. I must have been out of my mind to treat Beth the way I had.

Of course she could be living in the big old house on the island across the deep water channel from the mainland. But she couldn’t live there and work in town. The only way it could be reached was by boat. Unless she had rented the old place to bring in a little additional income, the chances were that nothing but snakes and raccoons and rabbits and field mice had lived on the island for three years.

There was no police car in front or in the alley. Keeping close to the wall, I climbed the stairs and rapped lightly on the door. Either Beth wasn’t asleep or she was sleeping lightly. Almost immediately she asked, “Yes? Who is it?”

I took a deep breath and told her. “Charlie.”

A moment of silence followed. Then slippered feet scuffed across the floor and only a screen door separated us. A single beam of moonlight, flooding in through a hole in the vine that almost covered the porch, spotlighted her white face. I’d forgotten she was so pretty. Even with her cheeks stained with tears and dark lines under her eyes, she was beautiful. And one time she had loved me and I had thrown her away for a mess of Zo.

Pressing her nose against the screen she said, “You shouldn’t have come here, Charlie. The police were here not two hours ago and I promised Ken Gilly I’d call him if you did contact me.”

I said, “Then you know?”

She brushed a lock of red hair away from her forehead. “Yes. I know. It was in the papers.”

I got it off my chest with a rush. “I didn’t do it, Beth. I didn’t kill her. And I didn’t open your letter, I didn’t realize what it was, until after I’d reached the cabin. When I did read it, I told Zo I was coming back to Palmetto and you. And that was when it happened. Someone slugged me and shot Zo.”

She said, “And you expect me to believe that?”

I asked, “Have I ever lied to you, Beth?”

She thought a moment. “No. That’s one thing you’ve never done.” She unhooked the screen. “Come in. Come in before one of the neighbors sees you.”

Inside the room I tried to take her in my arms but she pushed me away.

“No. I want time to think. This may change things for both of us. What do you intend to do now, Charlie?”

I told her.

Beth said, “In other words, if you can evade the law and get out of the country, you’re going right back in the same old racket. You’re going to work for this
Señor Peso
again.”

I asked her what else I could do.

She told me. “Be a man. If you didn’t kill that girl there must be some way we can prove it.”

I asked her, “How?”

She shook her head. She was standing so close to me that one of her curls brushed my face. It was all I could do to keep from digging both of my hands in her hair and pulling her to me. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Then, woman-like, she persisted, “But there must be some way. Perhaps Mr Clifton could help us.”

He was the guy she worked for. I’d never liked him. Few of the local people did, even if they did trade in his store. A cocky little Yankee, he’d come to Palmetto City twenty years before and built an idea into the biggest business in town. He wouldn’t be undersold. If a fellow merchant ran a loss leader costing from two cent, Clifton would lose five to get the business. And he had.

From a two-by-four dry-goods store he’d branched out into a block-square four-story-high merchandise carnival, handling everything from apples to zithers. If you couldn’t buy it at Clifton’s, it wasn’t for sale.

I asked, “Why should he help us?”

Beth was frank about it. “Mr Clifton’s in love with me. He’s asked me to marry him. He even offered to buy the old house out on the island so I’d have some money and wouldn’t have to work while I made up my mind whether or not to divorce you.”

I said, “Oh, yeah?”

Beth put me back in my place. “
You
should get sore.”

The strain was beginning to get me. I sat down on the edge of the bed and buried my head in my hands. “Okay, honey,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got a beef. Not with the way I’ve loused up our lives.”

She sat down on the bed beside me. “Kiss me, Charlie.”

I said that after the way I’d treated her I shouldn’t think she’d want me to. Her lips inches from mine, she repeated, “I asked you to kiss me, Charlie.”

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. But it wasn’t the way I kissed Zo. It was more like I’d kissed her in front of the altar after the Reverend Paul had finished marrying us and the world was going to be our oyster. She was something sweet and beautiful and fragile. She was good. She was something that had been missing out of my life for a long time.

When I lifted my face, her eyes were shining in the dark and patting my cheek with one hand she kissed me back of her own accord. “It’s going to be all right, honey,” she told me. “I don’t know how we’ll do it. But we will
make
it right.”

A car purred to a stop in the alley. Heavy feet began to climb the stairs. A moment later there was a light knock on the door.

Standing up in front of me, Beth asked, “Yes?”

“It’s Ken again, Beth,” Gilly told her. “I’m sorry to disturb you but I thought you ought to know. Charlie’s been traced to a men’s store in Tampa where he bought a complete new outfit. We’re setting up roadblocks on the causeway and all roads leading into Palmetto City.”

“Oh,” Beth said. “Oh.”

Ken sounded tired. “I wish the guy hadn’t headed back this way. Heaven knows I don’t want to make the pinch. Charlie’s my friend. But what can I do?”