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

I tried, but I didn’t do much good at it. I lay down on an old leather sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, but I kept seeing things behind my lids that I didn’t want to see, and I kept thinking about how Banty had never had any luck, and wondering if he could possibly have any this time, when we needed it most, and altogether it must have been a couple of hours before I finally went to sleep, which was almost time for me to wake up again. Banty woke me, and I got up, and he was ready to leave. It wasn’t light outside yet, but you had the feeling that it would be all of a sudden before long.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

“Good luck!”

“Keep an eye on that dame. She’s tricky.”

“You can count on me,” I said.

“I’ve got to,” he said, “and I do.”

He went out, and I could hear the jalopy start up and move off down the gravel road toward the highway, the sound of it growing fainter and fainter until it was gone completely, and then I went into the kitchen and lit a kerosene lamp and made a fire in the wood-burning stove. There was a full pail of spring water that Banty had brought in last night, and I put coffee on to perk and checked the supplies to see what I could find for breakfast. There was no bread or eggs or milk or butter, of course, nothing fresh, but there was a package of ready-mixed pancake flour and some cans of condensed milk. I found a skillet, made some batter with the flour and condensed milk, and fried some pancakes in the skillet that looked as good as you could want, if I do say so myself. By this time the coffee was done, and I went through the living room into the bedroom where Felicia Gotlot was, and she was awake.

“You sleep all right?” I asked.

“Wonderful,” she said. “It’s so comfortable being tied in bed that I’m going to sleep that way all the time from now on.”

“You want some breakfast?”

“If that’s coffee I smell, I’ll have some of that.”

“It’s coffee, all right. If you promise to behave yourself, I’ll untie you and you can come out to the kitchen.”

“My behavior, it seems to me, is pretty well determined. It’s your behavior that concerns me.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t bother you any.”

I untied her, and she swung her legs over the side of the bed, smoothing down the narrow skirt that had slipped up her thighs in the night. After rubbing her wrists for a minute and bending over to rub her ankles afterward, she stood up and went out ahead of me into the kitchen. I poured two cups of coffee and divided the pancakes into two stacks on a pair of tin plates that I found in a cabinet.

“I’d like to wash my face and hands,” she said.

“Go ahead. There’s some water in the pail there.”

“Where did it come from? Is there a well or something?”

“Not a well. A spring. There are springs all through these hills. Springs and caves.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“I was born down here. Not far from here.”

“Truly? I had the impression you were probably hatched from a billiard ball someplace in KC.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind.”

She washed in the cold water, using a pan beside the pail, and dried herself on a towel hanging from a nail in the wall. Then she combed her short hair with her fingers, lacking anything else to do it with, and we sat down at the table and began to drink coffee and eat pancakes. She ate as if she were hungry, which she probably was, and didn’t complain about not having any butter for her pancakes or sugar and real cream for her coffee, nothing like that. She was altogether a remarkable young dame, I’ve got to admit it, besides being the prettiest one I had ever seen close up in my life, or far away either, for that matter, in spite of being rumpled and tousled with last night still in her face.

She gave me an uneasy feeling, and I didn’t like it. It was the kind of feeling you get over some girl when you’re a kid, before you’re old enough to know better, and it makes you think crazy and act crazy. It’s bad in a kid and worse in a man. I wasn’t acting crazy yet because I hadn’t had time, but I found myself wishing all at once that she was someone besides who she was, Felicia Gotlot, and I was someone besides who I was, a guy called Carny, and that there was a chance of our being something to each other besides what we were and had to be but she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and there wasn’t. I hoped Banty would hurry back from KC, and meanwhile, I decided, I’d better think less about her and more about the quarter of a million dollars I was going to have all for my own to spend as I pleased.

It had got light outside, and by the time we’d finished our cakes and coffee it was light inside too, light enough to blow out the kerosene lamp, which I did. We washed up the tin plates and the skillet and went into the living room, and it looked like a long day, waiting and waiting for Banty and wondering all the time where he was and what he was doing and how long he would be, and it was made longer and worse by having started so early, and by the problem of what to do with Felicia Gotlot.

I decided not to tie her up again until night, unless she tried something tricky that made it necessary, and I told her this, and she said thanks, she appreciated it. Sarcasm.

“Remember I’ve got this .38 in my pocket,” I said.

“I remember.”

“Don’t think I won’t use it if you make me.”

“Would you?”

She found some old magazines and began to leaf through them, and I smoked and watched her for a while. Then I thought I’d have another cup of coffee, and went after it, and she said she’d have another cup too, and so I brought it. I sat down and began to drink my coffee, and she drank hers, but she kept looking at me over her cup with this odd expression.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

“Well, cut it out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking about what you might have been like as a kid in these hills.”

“I was dirty and ragged and ignorant.”

“You must have had a lot of fun.”

“Sure I did! My old man was a drunken bum and my old lady was a drunken slob.”

“Is that why you left home?”

“Partly.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Just to get away from these rocks and see if I could find a dollar to carry in my pocket.”

“Did you find one?”

“I’ve been doing all right.”

“Now you’re going to do even better, aren’t you? Now you’re going to have a whole quarter of a million dollars to carry in your pocket.”

“That’s right.”

“No, it isn’t. That’s wrong.”

“You think so? Wait and see.”

“Do you really imagine that fellow you called Banty can pull off something like this?”

“Sure. Why not? Banty’s smart.”

“I doubt it. Anyhow, he’s weak. He doesn’t have anything inside. He’s just some curly hair on top of nothing.”

“You don’t know him, that’s all.”

“I don’t have to know him. All I had to do was look at him and hear him talk. You’ll find out. He’ll botch the job and squeal on you, and both of you will end up in prison, and maybe in the gas chamber.”

“Shut up. If you haven’t got anything sensible to say, just keep your mouth shut.”

“Take my advice. Get out while you can. You could get away if you left right now.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“It makes no difference to me, really. I just hate to see you get into any more trouble than you’re already in. That Banty’s bad luck.”

“I should tie you in bed and leave you there.”

“Have it your own way,” she said.