John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“I don’t want the money!”

“We want him to think he had a ball. Here, dammit!”

“All right. But I can’t see why he’d—”

“Win, lose, or draw, we rumple the hell out of that bed, rub lipstick on the pillow, squirt some of your perfume on him, undress him, and leave him in the bed. And dump the rest of that bottle into the john.”

“Okay. But you know, he didn’t seem like somebody who’d—”

“For chrissake, Penny!”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“We knew it was a big man. We know he was from out of town. We know he went to see Pike.”

He checked the other pockets. Then the girl asked about the shirt pocket. He rolled me onto my back again. She was standing close. I opened my eyes just far enough to make out the shape and distance of his head as he bent over me. I hit him solidly in the side of the throat with my right fist, rolling my body to the left as I did so to give it more leverage, and then swung my legs in a wide arc at floor level. I clipped her right at the ankles and she landed flat on her back with a very large thud for a girl that size. Her friend had rolled over onto his back and back up onto his knees. He got up just as I did. He was making gagging, strangling sounds. Eyes bulged. Mouth hung open. Sandy-blond with a lot of neck, shoulders, and jaw. Look of the college lineman six years later, twenty pounds heavier, and a lot softer.

But as he got his back against the wall, he pulled a blue-black and very efficient-looking revolver out of somewhere and aimed it at my middle. I stopped very suddenly and took a cautious step backward, and raised my arms, and said, “Easy now. Easy does it, friend.”

He coughed and gagged and massaged his throat. He spoke in a rasping, traumatic whisper. “Back up and sit on the edge of the bed, smart-ass. And hold the back of your neck with both hands.”

I obeyed, slowly and carefully. Penny was still on her back on the floor. She was making a horrid articulated sound with each inhalation. She had hiked her knees up. Her clenched fists were against her breast. The fall had knocked all the wind out of her.

He went over and looked down at her. Her breathing eased. He gave her his hand and he pulled her up to a sitting position, but she shook her head violently and pulled her hand away. That was as far as she wanted to go for the moment. She hugged her legs, forehead on her knees.

“Two hours you said,” he whispered. “Or three.”

“He... he must be resistant to it. He had enough for... a full-grown horse.”

With his eyes on me, he moved the straight chair over and placed it about five feet from me, the back toward me. He straddled it and rested the short barrel on the back of the chair, centered on my chest. “We’ll have a nice little talk, smart-ass.”

“About what? This lousy setup? I’ve got eight hundred on me, so take it. Wear it in good health. Leave.”

She got to her feet, took one step, and nearly went down again. She hobbled over toward the head of the bed, her face twisted with pain.

“My ankle,” she said. She was having a clumsy evening.

“We are going to have a little talk about Dr. Stewart Sherman, smart-ass.”

I frowned at him, my bafflement entirely genuine. “I never heard of the man in my life. If this is some variation of the badger game, friend, you are making it too complicated.”

“And we are going to talk about how you are putting the squeeze on Tom Pike. Want to deny seeing him today?”

“I went to see Maurie and Biddy, the two daughters of Mick Pearson, a friend of mine who died five years, nearly six years ago not that it is any of your business.”

There was a look of uncertainty in his eyes for just a moment. But I needed more advantage than that and, remembering their very personal little squabble, and remembering how she had reported having no trouble at all with me, I thought of an evil way to improve the odds.

“Like I said. Take the eight hundred and leave. Your broad was pretty good, but she wasn’t worth eight hundred, but if that’s the going rate, let me pay.”

“Now, don’t get cute,” he said. His voice was coming back.

“Man, the very last thing I am going to be is cute. My head hurts from whatever she loaded my drink with. We had this nice little romp and then, instead of settling down, she wants to go out to some saloon. She said we could come back afterward. So I get dressed and she wants a drink, so I fix two drinks and I drink mine, and the last thing I remember is seeing her watching me in a funny way as she’s putting her clothes on. Then the lights went out.”

“He’s making it up! It wasn’t like that at all, darling!”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise and tried to look as though a slow understanding was dawning on me. I nodded. “All right. If she’s all yours, buddy, then I’m making it up and it wasn’t like that at all. Never happened.”

The shape of his mouth was uglier. Without taking his watchful stare off me, he said to her, “How could you figure he’d wake up? How could you figure he’d tell me? A little fun on the side, darling?”

“Please!” she said. “Please, you can’t believe him. He’s trying to—”

“I’m trying to be a nice guy,” I said. “It never happened. Okay, Penny?”

“Stop it!” she cried.

“Maybe the only way you can keep me from using this gun is by proving it did happen. Tell me... some things you couldn’t know otherwise, smart-ass.”

“Pale yellow bra and panties with white lace. Freckles, very faint and small but lots of them, across the tops of her breasts. A brown mole, about the size of a dime, maybe a little smaller, two inches below her left nipple and toward the middle of her, like maybe at seven o’clock. And when she was making out, she called me Rick. If you’re not Rick, you’ve got more problems.”

The blood had gone out of his face. Instead of turning his eyes, he turned his whole head toward her.

In a breathy dog-whistle squeak she said, “But he knows because... I never... when he was...”

“You cheap little bum,” he said in a pebbly voice. “You dirty little hot-pants slut. You...”

And by then his head was turned far enough, and I made the long reach for the kick and put a lot of energy and hope and anxiety in it, because there was so little barrel jutting out over the back of the chair. But I hit it hard enough to numb my toes and hard enough to kick it out of his hand and over his head. It hit the wall and bounded back, spinning along the rug. He pounced very well and even came up with it, but I was moving then, adjusting stride and balance as I moved, and got my turn and my pivot at the right place and, keeping my wrist locked, put my right fist into the perfect middle of that triangle formed by the horizontal line of the belt and the two descending curves of the rib cage. He said a mighty hawff and sat solidly on the floor about four feet behind where he had been standing, rolled his eyes back into his head and slumped like Raggedy Andy. I scooped up the revolver and knelt beside him and checked heart and breathing. It is a mighty nerve center, and fright had added lots and lots of adrenaline to my reaction time, and it can so shock the nervous system that the breathing will stop and the heart go into fibrillation.

I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and I lunged for the girl and caught her just as she got her hand on the door. I spun her back into the room, forgetting her bad ankle. She fell and rolled and started to get up, then lay there curled on the floor, making little smothered hopeless sounds of weeping.

Her Rick was too big to fool with, and I found a couple of wire hangers in the closet, leftovers hung in with the wooden kind that fit into nasty little metal slots so you won’t steal them. I straightened one into a straight piece of wire, then held his wrists close together by grasping both his arms just above the wrist in the long fingers of my left hand. I put the end of the wire under my left thumb and then quickly and firmly wrapped it around his wrists as many times as it would go, then bent and tucked the two ends under the encircling strands. It is a wickedly effective device. And quick.