Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“You haven’t told me yet where Nora is.”

“About a hundred miles from here. The first place I thought to check. The natural place for a woman to run when she’s scared and in trouble.”

“Home?”

“What used to be. Down on the farm.”

“Regression, as the psychs say. You were sharp to think of that right off the bat, Corey. You’re quite a psych yourself.”

He got up suddenly and walked over to a pair of matched windows overlooking a small court in which, below, there was some green stuff growing.

He stood there looking out for a minute or more, and then he turned and walked back but did not sit down again.

“You and Nora were always close, Mark, back there when we were kids. Closer than ever Nora and I were. I used to hate you for that, but it doesn’t matter any longer. It’s one of the things I’ve gotten over. The point is, she’ll be in danger. I believe that or I wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t listen to me, but she might to you. Will you go talk to her?”

“Why should I?”

“Do you have to have the reasons spelled out?”

“I can’t think of any.”

“As a favor for me?”

“I don’t want to obligate you.”

“For Nora, then?”

“Nora wants me to leave her alone. She told me so.”

“Not even to save her life?”

“Nora’s a big girl now. She associates with dangerous characters and makes up her own mind.”

He stood looking down at me, his face as bleak and empty as a department store floorwalker’s. Turning away, he picked his hat off the floor and held it by the brim in his hands.

“I guess those kinks are bigger than I thought,” he said.

He went over to the door and let himself out, and I kept on sitting in the chair, thinking about a time that he’d recalled. She used to ride into town to high school on the school bus, Nora did. Corey and I were town boys. We were snobbish with the country kids until we met Nora, who was a country kid, and then we weren’t snobbish any more. She was slim and lovely and seemed to move with incredible grace in a kind of golden haze. She was so lovely, in fact, that she intimidated me for almost a full year before we finally got together on a picnic one Sunday afternoon. After that, I began to know Nora as she was — as a touchable and lusty little manipulator, almost amoral, who already had, even then, certain carefully conceived and directed ideas about what Nora wanted out of life. I didn’t love her any the less, maybe more, but I resigned myself to the obvious truth that I was no more at most than a kind of privileged expedient.

After high school, Nora and Corey and I drifted at different times across the hundred miles to the city. At first we saw each other now and then, but later hardly at all. Corey became a cop. Thanks to luck and cards and certain contacts, I learned to live well without excessive effort. As for Nora — well, I had just refused to do her a favor at Corey’s request, but there had been plenty of others to do her favors, as there always are with girls like her, and some of the favors came to five figures. Jack Kirby had not been the first. Maybe he would be the last.

I stood up and walked over to the windows and looked down into the court, down at the green stuff growing. I wasn’t used to the radiance of day, and the light seemed intensely bright, and it hurt my eyes. My head ached, and I wondered if I could stand another double shot, or even a single, but I decided that I couldn’t. Turning away from the windows, I walked back across the living room and into the soft and seductive dusk of the bedroom. I lay down on the unmade bed and tried to think with some kind of orderliness, and the thinking must have been therapeutic, for after a while I lost the headache, or became unaware of it.

Granted, I thought, that Nora knew the identity of Jack Kirby’s visitor, who was also Jack Kirby’s killer. Corey was convinced that she did, and Corey was a bright guy. Being a bright guy, it was funny how he could go so far wrong from a good start. It was funny, a real scream, but I didn’t feel like laughing. Because she’d refused to talk, because she’d run and hid to escape the pressure that would certainly have broken her down, Corey assumed that she was afraid of the consequences of pointing a finger, the vengeance of a killer or a killer’s hired hand, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She had run from the pressure, true, but she had kept her silence simply because she did not want Jack Kirby’s visitor to be known. For old times’ sake. It was touching, really, and I appreciated it.

I went over in my mind again with odd detachment, as if I were reviewing an experience of someone else, the way it had happened that I had killed Jack Kirby. I hadn’t intended to, although it was a pleasure when I did, and all I’d actually intended when I went up to his apartment that night was to pay an overdue debt of a couple of grand.

I had lost the two grand to Kirby in a stud game that proved to be the beginning of a streak of bad luck. In the first place, to show how bad my luck was beginning to be, I lost the pot on three of a kind, which is pretty difficult to do in straight stud. In the second place, to show how fast bad luck can get worse in a streak, I didn’t have the two grand. All I had to offer was an IOU with a twenty-four-hour deadline. The deadline passed, and I still didn’t have the two grand. My intentions were good, but my luck kept on being bad. I got three extensions on the deadline, and then I had a couple of visitors. They came to my apartment about the middle of the afternoon, a few minutes after I’d gotten out of bed. I’d seen both of them around, and I knew the name of one of them, but the names didn’t matter. It was a business call, not social. They were very polite in a businesslike way. Only one of them talked.

“Mr. Sanders,” he said, “we’re representing Mr. Jack Kirby in a little business matter.”

“Times have been tough,” I said.

“Mr. Kirby appreciates that, but he feels that he’s been more than liberal.”

“Thank Mr. Kirby for me.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Kirby wants more than thanks. He wants to know if you’re prepared to settle your obligation.”

“How about a payment on account? Ten percent, say.”

“Sorry. Mr. Kirby feels that the obligation should be settled in full. He’s prepared to extend your time until eight o’clock tomorrow night. He expects you to call at his apartment at that hour with the full amount due and payable.”

“Tell Mr. Kirby I’ll give the matter my careful attention.”

“Mr. Kirby wants us particularly to remind you of the urgency.”

“Fine. Consider me reminded.”

“Mr. Kirby wants us to remind you in a manner that you will remember.” This was the clue to go to work, apparently, for that’s what they did. I wasn’t very alert yet, it being several hours until dark, and I put up what might be called a sorry defense. In fact, I didn’t put up any defense at all. The mute suddenly had me from behind in a combination hammerlock and stranglehold, and the talker, looking apologetic, belted me three times in the belly. At the door, leaving me doubled up on the floor, the talker stopped and looked back, an expression of compassion spreading among the pocks on his flat face.

“Sorry, Mr. Sanders,” he said. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

I wasn’t able to acknowledge the apology with the good grace it deserved. After they were gone, I began to breathe again, and a little later I successfully stood up. The beating had been painful, but not crippling.

It was a break in a way, the beating was. It was the nadir of the streak, the worst of the bad luck, and now that things had got about as bad as they could get, they began immediately to get better. What I mean is, I took the ten percent I’d offered Kirby’s hired goons and ran it through another game of stud and brought it out multiplied by twenty. A little better than four grand in paper with not an IOU in the bundle. By midnight I had in my possession, as the talking goon had said, the full amount due and payable.