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

You take the triplets Banty held in a stud game in Kansas City. Anyone would consider it the best kind of luck in the world to hold a hand like that in a game of stud, one in the hole and two showing, and anyone with any brains at all would back it up with his grandmother’s pension if necessary. But what seems like good luck one minute may turn out to be bad the next, and it’s just about as bad as luck can be, when you consider the consequences, to hold triplets when the guy across the table is holding a straight. About the only way you could make it worse would be to bet your triplets with money you didn’t have on the table, or anywhere else, and to have someone like Archie Flowers holding the straight. And Banty did. And Archie was.

I wasn’t there, but Banty told me about it. I hadn’t seen him around for a day or two, so I went up to his room to see if he was there, and there he was. He hadn’t shaved, and he’d been drinking. He’d have been drinking still, except that the bottle was empty and he didn’t have enough money to buy one that wasn’t.

“What’s the matter, Banty? You don’t look good.”

“Look, stupid,” he said, “don’t come up here telling me how I look.”

He called me stupid lots of times, and some of the times I didn’t like it, even though it was true, which I admit, but I never made a big thing of it because we had been pals for a long time, and I kept waiting around for him to start having the luck to go with his brains, and hoping that some of it, when he did, would rub off on me. Anyhow, I let it pass, not saying anything, and pretty soon he told me about the stud game and losing a bundle on the triplets.

“How much did you lose?” I asked.

“Three grand.”

“Where did you get three grand?”

“I didn’t have it,” he said, “and that’s what’s got me worried.”

“You mean you owe Archie Flowers three grand?”

“Minus about five hundred that was on the table.”

“That leaves twenty-five hundred.”

“You’re a real genius, Carny. You can do arithmetic problems in your head.”

“Well, I don’t blame you for being worried. How long did Archie give you to raise it?”

“I’ve got until morning, and morning’s coming too soon. You got any money?”

“Not that kind, Banty. You know that.”

“I don’t mean the kind it would take to pay off Archie. I mean enough to get me out of town.”

“Not enough to get you far enough.”

“How much is that?”

“Maybe a hundred. Maybe a little less.”

“That’s better than nothing. What I’ve got to do is get away and give this some thought, and you can’t think very clearly in the hospital with a broken head, not to mention other bones, and you can’t think at all, if bad comes to worse, on a slab in the morgue.”

“Where you planning to go?”

“I was thinking about going down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

“Who’s Uncle Oakley?”

“Not is. Was. He’s dead. He had this farm down in the hills, about a couple hundred miles south, and he left it to my cousin Theodore when he died, but Theodore doesn’t live on it and can’t sell it, because it’s nothing but a shack on forty acres of rock. So there it is with no one home, and it’s a place to go until I can think of a better place.”

“What I’d like to know is how you plan to raise twenty-five centuries on forty acres of rock.”

“Never mind. I’ll do the thinking, which is out of your line. Uncle Oakley’s farm is safe, if not productive, and that’s what’s important at the moment. My mind is made up to go there, and now’s the time for us to start.”

“Us? Did you say us?”

“Certainly I said us. Do you expect me to go off to the hills without even someone to play two-handed stud with? Besides, there will be a certain amount of work to do, and you may be useful.”

“Dammit, Banty, I don’t want to go down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

“The hell you don’t!”

“I don’t, and I won’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

“All right, Carny. We’ve been pals a long time, and I thought we’d be pals forever, but I guess I was wrong. If you won’t go, you won’t, and I won’t either, and I hope I never see you again. You get out of here and don’t come back, and don’t even bother coming to my funeral if Archie Flowers kills me tomorrow for not paying off the twenty-five hundred I owe him.”

Well, how do you feel and what can you do when a pal talks like that? You feel like a heel, that’s how, and you do whatever he asks to get him out of the trouble he’s in, that’s what, and that’s how I felt and what I did. Banty packed some things in a bag, and we went over to my place on Troost, a room over a secondhand furniture store, and I packed some things in a bag, and we started out together for Uncle Oakley’s farm in Banty’s ’56 jalopy. While we were driving south out of town, I counted the money I had, and it came to $98.63. Banty took it and put it in his pocket and said he’d pay me back every cent of it, even though I’d be using my share of it for food and cigarettes and things like that, and even though he was furnishing the car for the trip besides. It shows how Banty was. He was a free-spender and knew how to treat a pal.

We got out of town on a highway going south, and after a while we came to a service station, and Banty drove in and stopped at the pumps, because the car needed gas. There was a little restaurant attached to the station, a short-order joint for truck drivers, really, and this reminded Banty that he’d been on a bourbon diet for quite a while, until the bourbon ran out, after which he’d been on a diet of nothing at all, nothing being all he could afford after the stud game. We went inside and had hamburgers and pie and coffee, which took maybe half an hour, and when we came out again, the jalopy was gone, but the attendant said he’d only parked it off to one side, out of the drive. He’d parked it in an open space between the station and a place next door, and this place was one of these highway nightclubs, and it wasn’t any cheap dump, not by a long shot. It was built of gray stone and glass brick, and there was a formal hedge all around it, and a lot of green plants growing in stone urns along a curved drive coming up to the entrance from the highway. When someone opened the front door, going in or coming out, I could hear music for a few seconds, a classy jazz combo, and I wished Banty and I could go in there and have a few drinks and some fun, but we didn’t have the time or the money, and so we got in the jalopy and started south again for Uncle Oakley’s farm.

We drove along pretty fast for about an hour, and then I went to sleep. I must have slept for almost another hour, and when I woke up we were at least a hundred miles down the highway with maybe another hundred to go. Banty was smoking a cigarette and humming a little tune off-key. I listened to the tune for a while, trying to place it, but I kept thinking all the time that I could hear something else, another sound besides the engine and the wind and Banty’s humming, but I couldn’t decide what it was exactly, or if it was really anything at all besides my imagination. I kept listening and listening and trying to decide what it was and where it came from, if anything from anywhere, and finally I decided it was the sound of snoring in the back seat, which didn’t seem likely. I turned my head, though, to see if it possibly was, and damned if it wasn’t. The sound was snoring, and it was a girl doing it.

“Banty,” I said, “who’s that girl in the back seat? You know her?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Banty said. “You crazy or something?”

“Honest.” I said. “There’s a girl in the back seat, and if you’ll only listen you can hear her snore.”