Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

The night is balmy and still.

Eddie has already started the engines.

The Sundancer is idling at the dock.

The two women come striding out of the darkness beyond, moving rapidly toward where he is crouched over the forward line. He does not recognize them until the dockside stanchion lights pick them up, and then he sees that it is Alice and her sister, Carol. He shakes his head and smiles because Alice looks so utterly ridiculous and helpless, her left foot in a cast, limping across the dock like a cripple. And then he sees the pistol in her hand, and the smile drops from his face. He loosens the line from its cleat and tosses it aboard. In the next instant, he leaps aboard himself, and reaches into a locker alongside the wheel.

“Where are the kids?” Alice shouts.

He is already behind the wheel.

Alice does not raise the pistol in her own hand until she sees that what he’s taken from the locker is a gun.

“Put it down!” he yells.

The thirty-two is shaking violently in her fist.

“Give me the children and leave,” Alice says. “You’re Edward Graham now, you can forget all this.”

“But will you ?” he says, and smiles thinly. “Will your sister ? Will the kids ?”

The gun in his fist is a nine-millimeter Glock. It looks very large and very menacing, and it is pointed at her head.

“You know the penalty for kidnapping in the state of Florida?” he asks.

His tone is almost conversational. He could be giving a little talk on the wisdom of investing in growth stocks.

“You can leave Florida,” she says. “Take your girlfriend and—”

“My wife,” he corrects.

“Your…?”

“Kidnapping is a life felony, Alice. If they ever catch up with us…”

“No one will even try, Eddie. Just let the kids go !”

“Well, no,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

And throws the engines into reverse.

She hears a click in the dark.

Is there a safety on the gun?

Has he just thrown off a safety?

She hears two simultaneous voices.

“ Don’t, Eddie!”

“No, Daddy!”

The first voice is the voice Alice has heard so many times before on the telephone, the voice of the woman she came face-to-face with outside the Shell station’s ladies’ room, the woman she now sees again, rushing up from below, holding out her hand beseechingly to Eddie. His wife, Alice thinks. His wife.

The second voice is a voice Alice has not heard since the morning they learned that Eddie drowned out on the Gulf.

The second voice belongs to her dear son, Jamie.

“Don’t hurt Mommy!”

His son’s voice has no effect on him. He still has the Glock in his right hand, pointed at Alice’s head. His left hand is still steady on the stainless steel wheel as he starts to maneuver the Sundancer away from the dock.

This is the man who once matched her foot to a midnight blue slipper.

This is the man she once loved with all her heart.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

Opens them again at once, and fires.

Fires another time.

And yet another.

Blood spurts on his yellow windbreaker. She sees him crumpling over the wheel. The boat swerves back and bangs violently against the dock. She throws down the gun, and leaps onto the boat, and rushes to her son where he stands trembling just outside the slatted wooden doors leading below. The black woman whose name she still does not know says nothing. Her eyes are darting, calculating.

“Mom?”

Ashley comes from below, her eyes wide.

She glances once at her father where he lies slumped and still over the stainless steel wheel smeared now with his blood. Then she, too, rushes into Alice’s arms.

The black woman hesitates a moment longer, and then suddenly leaps ashore.

“Gee, no,” Carol says, and points the pistol at her head.

They have called all the real estate agents and condo rental offices they could find in the Yellow Pages, and have even visited one personally, but have not come up with any information on a blonde and a black woman having rented any kind of dwelling at any time during the past two months. Or at any time at all, for that matter.

So there is nothing to do now but make love again.

Rafe reflects afterward, as they both lie spent and damp on rumpled sheets in Jennifer’s bedroom, that there’s a certain time of day in Florida when a hush seems to come over the entire land. The traffic seems to come to a halt, the streets are all at once deserted, even the insects and the birds seem to fall suddenly still. Overhead, the ceiling fan rotates lazily, scattering dust motes climbing shafts of silvery moonlight. Lying on his back beside her, Rafe thinks that maybe it’s this way everywhere in the world after you’ve just made love to a beautiful passionate woman, maybe there’s just this, well, this sort of serenity that comes over you. A stillness that causes you to believe your heart has stopped, causes you to believe that maybe you’re even dead. And causes you to think.

He knows he’s going to be leaving here soon.

He knows he’s going to get out of this bed, and shower in this lady’s bedroom, put on his Jockey shorts and his jeans and his denim shirt, and his socks and loafers, and then either take a taxi or ask her to drive him to the truck stop where he’s parked the rig, knows he is going to walk out of this bedroom, and out of this house, and never see this woman again. Because no matter what Eminem has to say about opportunity knocking just once or whatever the words were, seize the moment, seize the music, he knows that maybe such dreams are okay for a talented kid on 8-Mile Road, but they’re just not there for people like Rafe who don’t know how to rhyme.

Opportunity may have come knocking when he learned about all those phony bills out there someplace, and maybe it kept knocking and knocking when he found this beautiful passionate woman willing to chase the dream with him, but man, there is no way on earth he is going to find those two chicks sitting on that fake bread, no way in the world at all. He has tried to seize the moment and the music, but his hands have closed on nothing but thin air.

So he knows he will now go back.

Knows he will go back to Carol and the kids, knows in his deepest heart that eventually he will go back to jail, too, that’s what recidivism is all about. It’s all about making the same mistakes over and over again. Going back home again to a woman he no longer loves and kids he never wanted, going back on the shit again, too, and getting caught with it, and going back to jail as a three-time loser who once upon a time heard opportunity knocking, and opened the door to let it in, and found nobody standing there, nobody at all.

It’s kind of sad, really.

It’s kind of so fucking sad.

She drives him to where he parked the rig.

They stand outside the cab in the harsh bright overhead lights, and they hold hands, both hands, his outstretched to hers, hers clasped in his, and he tells her he’s sorry this didn’t work out the way he was hoping it would, tells her he can still think of a hundred and six ways the two of them together could have spent all that money. He tells her he’s never met a woman like her in his entire life, tells her that these few days he’s spent with her have been the happiest days in his life, he wants her to believe that. He tells her that there are a couple of things he still has to straighten out back home in Atlanta, but that as soon as he’s taken care of these few little odds and ends, he’ll be coming back down here to Florida, where he hopes she’ll be waiting for him.

“Wait for me, Jenny,” he tells her, though she’s asked him not to call her Jenny, but he’s already forgotten this.