John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

“What are the plans?” I said.

“With you gone, Pell, they haven’t got anything that will stand up in court. They can inconvenience the hell out of me, but they can’t prove anything for keeps.”

“Sounds logical. Gets you out of one jam and into another.”

It is distinctly a lot of Shinola about guys fresh from combat sneering at a feeble little thing like a Police Positive with a two-inch barrel. I did not feel confident that I could catch those slugs in my teeth and spit them back at him. I felt that they would make large holes in me and those holes would hurt like hell, and I wanted no part of them.

His face was more yellow than I remembered it. He still looked, though, as if he should be wearing a conductor suit. He chomped his underlip with those horse teeth.

He appeared to be thinking.

Skipper looked at him for a long time, then turned her face toward my chest. Her arm was around my shoulders. I didn’t blame her for looking away. A truly evil man is never pretty, particularly when he is busy contemplating evil. He gave a little shrug that meant he had made up his mind.

“Now do just like I tell you, and it won’t hurt either of you a bit.”

“What are we going to have, a suicide pact?”

He sucked the big teeth. It sounded like a Ubangi kiss. “Out the window hand in hand,” he said. “Lover’s leap. But you’ll be sleeping while you drop, kids.”

Skipper took a deep breath and began to tremble more violently. She wasn’t at all brave. Me, I showed no reaction at all, if you don’t count the sweat that was running down into my socks.

“Set her down,” he said. I did. “Now come here, girl. Circle around so I can keep an eye on smart boy. That’s a girl. Now turn around. Easy.”

As soon as her back was to him, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed her wrist, twisted it up between her shoulder blades. Her small whimper was quickly stifled. I saw her face turn gray.

“Now, smart boy, sit down at that desk and write. Move!”

Any hesitation I felt was immediately canceled out by her slightly shriller sound of pain. She didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. She stood and took it and shut her teeth hard on the pain of it.

Chess is a lovely game. The opponent starts making a series of forcing moves. You make the predicted answering move each time. And you wait and you hope to find a hole in the attack.

“Write what I say. ‘To whom it may concern. We are taking the only way out. We have no regrets.’ Got that?”

The hotel nib scratched along the stationery.

“Sign it,” he said.

I signed it. My own death certificate.

“Now don’t move. Put your hands flat on that table and don’t move a muscle.”

My chance. I put my hands flat on the table. My ears went to work for me. I could hear the grass growing in a park three blocks away. I could hear city traffic in Cleveland. And with my hands braced, I heard the soft scuff of shoe leather on the rug. I heard the fabric of his sleeve scrape against the fabric of the side of his coat as he lifted his arm.

I shoved myself back toward him, hard. With all the strength I could put into my arms and legs, I shot back at him. And shot back into the direct path of some damn fool who was driving through the hotel room with a tractor-trailer combo. He ran me down and smashed my head like a stomped pumpkin.

I was nine fathoms deep in a warm tank of oil, dirty oil that would raise hell with your ring job. I was swirled gently, end for end, in the depths of the oil tank. And then I stopped whirling and began to float slowly toward the surface, face down. Surface tension held me under, then let me up with a popping sound. Now I rested my cheek on top of the surface of the oil. And under my cheek the texture changed. From oil to hotel rug. The truck had run over my head with tire chains on.

I have a notoriously hard skull. In my school we used to have butting contests. Simon the Goat, they called me. Flushed with victory, I let a girl named Hortense tap me one day with the flat of a hatchet. She used both hands. I was punchy for three weeks but otherwise undamaged.

I had come recently from a place where, if you are knocked down, you do not sit up until reasonably certain that what you intend to sit on has not been shot off in the excitement.

Shoes whispered on the rug. Hard fingers got hold of my ear and twisted it. My head was lifted off the floor by the ear. When the fingers let go, I let my head bounce on the rug. I looked through the lashes of the eye closest to the rug. A large shoe was three inches from my nose. It went away. Beyond it I saw my girl. Not all of her. Just the pleasant curvature of her back as she lay face down on the floor. Her back moved just enough so that I could tell she was breathing.

And suddenly she was hauled out of sight. The window was over that way. I took a look. Barney the Beaver was dragging her to the window. I didn’t want my girl dropped out the window. My room was on the fourteenth floor. Barney had said we were going out hand in hand, not one at a time. Drop one first and somebody is going to look up in time to see the second party get thrust out. But it was hell to keep my head down and wonder if he’d changed his plans.

His feet came over again. He hoisted my ankles and dragged me over to the window, face down. I let my head roll to the side. Warmth touched my hand. Warmth under the girl’s clothes. The window slip up. Nice and wide open. Probably the Beaver planned to put us face down over the wide sill, side by side, then upsy-daisy with our heels.

Thoughts and conjectures were roaring through my mind like trains heading through a tunnel. And before the sound of the opening window had completely ceased, it occured to me that the most natural thing for any man to do when planning to drop a heavy package out a window is to take a look down and make certain that there is nothing in the way of the drop.

I counted up to the square root of minus three and came up fast.

Maybe some character comes to rescue the girl on horse-back, waving the lance like crazy. And some other joker bares his manly fists and whips the seven villains while she looks on, her eyes glowing with girlish pride. Me, I merely put each hand firmly against the two hemispherical sections where his shabby pants were the tightest and gave a nervous shove. I think I also gave a nervous giggle. I didn’t feel heroic. I even felt it was a dirty trick.

He went out like the fat clown who always gets pushed into the swimming pool. His legs scissored through the open window without even brushing the sides.

He must have taken a big gulp of that cold night air as he went out. Because the whistling scream started immediately, and he screamed all the way down through the night, like one of those whistling skyrockets they used to shoot off on the fourth of July.

When the scream stopped, I looked out cautiously, gagged weakly, and sat on the floor.

My girl had blood in her hair. I pulled her head into my lap. I kissed her lips, nose, cheeks, forehead, and eyelids. I tried to pick her up, but she had gotten too heavy for me. I looked at her, and Marj was something that had happened to another guy in another country in another generation. I knew that Skip would be very glad to know that this had happened to me, and I would tell her as soon as possible.

I struggled up with her and wavered over to the bed. There was a knock at the door. I opened it.

A chesty somebody beefed his way in and said, “You got some kind of fight going on in here, fellow?” As he asked the question, he was staring at Skipper.

My lovely sat up. Great girl. Bust her one on the head and she wakes up looking like a mattress ad.

“That is no woman, sir, that is—”

“Don’t give me no smart talk, bud.”