James Chase - Strictly For Cash

“That’s okay,” I said, trying to smile. “I’ve seen them. Get those gates open. I’m in a hurry.”

The guard’s cold, green eyes sneered at me.

“Then I guess they want to see you again. The call’s just come through. Sorry, but orders is orders.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing I was licked. “I’ll see what they want.” I slid the gear stick into reverse.

They stood watching me as I made a U-turn. They were still watching me as I drove back to the casino.

I parked the Buick below the terrace and got out. I was trembling, and blood hammered against my temples. I might have guessed I, wasn’t going to out-smart her quite so easily. She thought of everything: even with Reisner bleeding on her rug, she still had time to take care of me.

I walked down towards the beach. A car sneaked up beside me, and a girl’s voice said, “I’m going your way. Let’s go together.”

I stopped and looked at her: a cute blonde with bed in her eyes and a pert little face that knew all the answers, and the questions, too. She was in a yellow, strapless swimsuit that gripped her curves and set off a figure that’d make a mountain goat lose its foothold. On her fair, fluffy head was a big picture hat of plain straw, with a rose pinned to the under-brim. She was the kind of girl I wouldn’t have tangled with sober, but the kind I wanted the way I was feeling now.

I opened the offside door of the car and got in beside her. She drove on towards the beach, her small hands patting the steering-wheel in time to the swing that was coming over the car radio, and she kept looking at me out of the corners of her eyes.

“As soon as I saw you I knew I had to know you,” she said. “I like big men, and you’re the strongest, biggest man I’ve ever seen.”

I couldn’t think of anything adequate to say to that one, so I let it ride.

“What are you going to do — swim?” she asked, giving me a cute little smile that was supposed to have me on my hands and knees begging for favours.

“That’s the idea. Do you swim in that outfit?”

“Don’t you like it?”

“It likes you — I can see that.”

She giggled.

“We can always go somewhere where I needn’t wear it. Shall we?”

“It’s your car,” I said.

She spun the wheel at the next intersection and increased the speed.

“I know a place. We’ll go there.”

I sat staring through the windshield, asking myself if this was what I wanted. I didn’t know. I didn’t think so, but it had dropped out of the sky into my lap, and it might blunt the edges of what lay ahead of me.

“You’re Johnny Ricca, aren’t you?” she said as she drove the car along a narrow road lined on either side by royal palms. “How did you know that?”

“Everyone is talking about you. You’re the big-time gambler from Los Angeles. Someone said you were a gangster. I love gangsters.”

“Well, that’s good news. And who are you?”

“I’m Georgia Harris Brown. Everyone knows me. My father is Gallway Harris Brown, the steel millionaire.”

“Does he love gangsters too?”

She laughed.

“I never thought to ask him.”

She swung the car off the road and bumped over grass, over sand and pulled up on a lonely stretch of beach, screened by blue palmettos and palm trees.

“Nice, isn’t it?” she said, taking off her hat and tossing it on the back seat. She slid out of the car on to the sand. “Well, I’m going to have a swim. Coming?”

As I got out of the car I suddenly decided I wasn’t going ahead with this. I shouldn’t be here. I should be where I could be seen: where anyone looking for Reisner could ask me if I had seen him. I must have been crazy to have come with this blonde in the first place. If I couldn’t get away from the casino, the least I could do was to try to safeguard my own neck, and I wasn’t doing that by remaining in this out-of-the-way spot with this blonde who was one jump lower than an animal.

“I guess not,” I said. “I’ve just remembered I’ve work to do. You wouldn’t like to drive me back?”

The cute little smile went away as if wiped off by a sponge.

“I don’t get it,” she said, and her voice went shrill.

“Never mind: I’ll walk,” I said. “You go ahead and have your swim.”

I knew she’d take a swing at me, and she did. I gave her the satisfaction of landing on me. It would have been easy enough to have slipped inside her flying hand, but I didn’t want her to feel all that frustrated. For her size she carried a good slap. It made my cheek burn.

“So long,” I said, and walked away. I didn’t look back, and she didn’t yell after me.

Instead of keeping to the road I moved through the palmetto thicket, heading back the way I had come, but not paying much attention to where I was going. After a while I realized I had been walking for some time and I was still not within sight of the casino.

I paused to look around me. Over to my right I could see the blue, almost motionless ocean through the trees. To my left was a forest of mangroves. I had no idea now if I were walking away from the casino or towards it, and knowing I should get back there, I got worried.

This stretch of beach was as lonely and as deserted as a pauper’s funeral, and I was in two minds to turn back and make a fresh start when I heard a girl singing. She was singing Temptation , a song that had always given me a creepy sensation whenever I’d heard it.

She wasn’t tearing into it as most singers do, but singing it in an absentminded kind of way, as if her mind were only half concentrating on the song.

I moved forward cautiously, wanting to catch a glimpse of her before she saw me. From the sound of her voice she’d be around the next clump of mangroves.

My shoes made no sound in the soft sand. I got behind a shrub and peered over it.

She was sitting on a camp-stool, an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting in water-colours. I couldn’t see the painting, for she was facing me, and I wouldn’t have bothered much if I could have seen it. I looked at her: she was the only picture I wanted to look at.

She wore a blue and white bolero jacket that left her midriff bare, a pair of white shorts, and blue plastic and cork sandals. She was bare-headed, and her thick, short hair looked like burnished copper in the strong sunlight. She was as different from the blonde cutie as a Ming vase is from a vase you win at a shooting-gallery, and lovely without being sensational. Her eyes were big and blue and serious; her mouth, with just the right amount of lipstick, wide and generous, and her figure neat, compact and curved where it should be curved.

I stood looking at her. The Scotch was still giving me a false sense of security. I seemed to have stepped out of the darkness into the sunlight, and to have turned my back on something that was as unreal as a bad dream. Just to look at this girl, singing to herself, unaware of me, made Della and Reisner, and the immediate horrible future, go out of my mind the way dirty water leaves a sink when you pull out the plug.

I stood for maybe a minute, listening to her song, and watching her sun-browned hand and the paint-brush at work, wondering who she was and how she came to be in such an out-of-the-way place. Then suddenly she must have felt me watching her, for she looked up and saw me. She gave a little start and dropped her brush.

I came out from behind the shrub.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I heard you singing and wondered who it was.”

Not a very brilliant approach, but it was, at the moment, the best I could do. For the first time since I had left the cabin my voice didn’t sound like the croak of a frog.