Эллери Куин: The Killer Touch

TRACY DUNN — A frail ethereal beauty who was needled by her husband to an addict’s fate; she had been on H so long she didn’t know there was any other letter in the alphabet

ROLF DUNN — A swaggering soldier of fortune — usually someone else’s. This international mastermind couldn’t kick the habit of killing after the war

BURTON MARCH — His idyllic vacation on a lonely island was thronged with daydreams and nightmares

CAPTAIN O’RTAN — An island-hopping mariner who is always on deck for a sexboat. His prepossessing build was a caution to men and a challenge to women

COCO — This islander’s disposition was indicated by the color of his hats: white — glad; red — angry. He was wearing a blue — sad: no-guest, no-fish, no-tip chapeau

JOSS LEEDS — The tippling landlady of an island purgatory who disappears into her bottle as magically as a genie

GODFREY — Dishwasher, beachboy and bellhop, he is so rickety that his legs look like parenthesis..

JATA — The tall thin blue-black woman from Petit Martinique who exists in a world of death, blood, and black magic

MAUDIE — She stuck as close and as tenaciously to Burt as a plastic adhesive

BUNNY DEVORE — The only thing soft about this sadistic stripper was her brain; her specialty dance demonstrated the symbolism of the gun

ACE SMITH — A hardened gunman whose modern weapons were ineffectual against primitive rage and vengeance

HOKE FARNUM — His emotionless face had the color and texture of pie dough with the features pressed in — but he was half-baked

She sat alone on the bed, and the kerosene lamp played its flickering shadow-light on her drawn face. Outside, the surf pounded the minutes to shreds, reducing time to a soft pulp without substance or division. She raised her hands from the writing pad on her lap and ran her fingers through her black hair. Her hands moved jerkily as though in answer to someone else’s command. She felt her hair lying warm and heavy on the backs of her hands; the hair too seemed not to be a part of her. She sniffed and felt the swollen congestion inside the bridge of her nose. Moisture filmed her eyes as she looked back down at the paper, giving the dark blue lines an outline of light.

... so there seems no point in going on, dreading every tomorrow and regretting each yesterday ...

It sounded melodramatic, the kind of farewell a B actress would write in the hope that it would appear in the newspapers. She tore out the sheet and started another:

Dear Rolf ,

Three nights on this island and a week away from you have given me a chance to think about all that has happened and I have decided

She drew a line through the last phrase, and added: since I married you . Still the letter seemed a sticky, sentimental coating on the purity of the act she was about to commit. The act wouldn’t hurt Rolf. Inconvenience him, yes. Anger him even. But she could never hurt him, any more than she had ever been able to please him.

Tracy gasped as pain gouged her stomach. She pressed her palms flat against it and felt the pain-taut muscle trembling beneath the skin. She touched a finger between her breasts and felt the perspiration, slick, greasy cold. I’m getting sick, and it’s too soon. I wanted to get everything done before...

She rose abruptly from the coconut-fiber mattress, belting her white terrycloth robe around her waist. She felt nervous, edgy. There were flashes at the edge of her vision. The stone wall of the room had an unpleasant glow; the furniture was haloed. Overhead, the thatched roof crawled with shadow-life. She heard rasping noises, creaks, murmuring voices in a distant room.

But there is only one room and the other cabins are empty ...

She carried the lamp onto the lean-to veranda, her rubber sandals grating on the sand-strewn concrete floor. A breeze struck the lamp, causing it to dip low and send up a gray spiral of smoke. She adjusted the wick and set the lamp on a hand-hewn table beside a stack of mold-smelling magazines. Fate, Astrology, Your Future ... The nearsighted woman who owned the island supplied her guests with the kind of reading she herself liked. Joss at least believed in something.

A soldier crab tried to scuttle beneath her feet, clattered against the table, then folded its claws and lay still. Tracy toed the unresisting object across the floor, opened the screen door, and kicked it out onto the sand. She watched the crab stick out an exploratory claw, turn itself upright, then scuttle away into the night. She stepped out onto the sand and glanced right, then left. The adjacent cabins were dark and silent. Palms rustled overhead, and a tinny cha-cha beat came from the direction of the beach club. The boys had turned in Radio Trinidad on their battery set. No doubt the cleaning women had already locked themselves in their shack, and Joss would be drunk. Nobody would know, nobody would care...

Salt-crusted grass crunched beneath her feet as she walked toward the sea. She thought of frost on the churchyard on Sunday morning, walking in patent-leather shoes with her mother and father on either side, smelling respectively of perfume and shaving lotion. Then the odor of ancient varnish biting her nostrils, and the woody-musty smell of the song book in her hands. She had loved to sing hymns, sending her voice out among the others and having it return... a hundredfold. She’d liked that, and the part about casting your bread upon the waters...

Her mind returned to the aching stiffness in her joints. Railroad vines snatched at her bare ankles as she walked toward the phosphorescent surf. When she reached the sand she kicked off her sandals and walked barefoot. Once she’d loved to feel warm sand against her feet; now it was only an irritation, and even the air felt unpleasant on her face, like spiders crawling. Her nose ran and her eyes watered. She had a terrible awareness of the flesh clinging to her bones, of each joining of cartilage, muscle, and tissue; of her brain lying overhead, each movement causing pain to flare up behind her eyes.

Hate my body, hate it hate it hate it.

The sea lay like a pall of smoke, inviting.

The prickly weight of the bathrobe was gone. She left the clothing lying on the sand like dead skin, diseased and discarded. The water was exactly the temperature of the air; it was a pressure on her legs and no more. She stumbled over a rock and barnacles gouged her knees like cinders. She climbed over the reef, felt the coral cut into her feet, and told herself it didn’t matter.

The sea was high. A wave swelled up, towered overhead, then collapsed and buried her in greenness. It wasn’t water, it was raw force tearing her apart, lifting her body high and slamming it down, dragging her across an object which raked her body with long sharp claws, then leaving her to gasp on the reef. It lifted her again, higher and higher, swinging her in a silken hammock. She relaxed, feeling relief from the pull of muscle in her shoulders, stomach and chest; she drew in a deep breath and waited for her lungs to fill with water—

Air came in.

She opened her eyes and found herself on the sand. A bubbling carpet of surf came forward, buried her, and left her again. Oh, I didn’t know it was so hard to drown. If only I could swim, I could go far out...

She was tired. She lay there and let the air dry her body. After a time she rose and dressed. The surf teased, bubbling forward, hissing back.

Back at the cabin, she carried the lamp into the bathroom. She smelled the salty-musty odor of old swim suits, and heard the drip-drip-drip of the shower-head which hung like a drooping rusty blossom. She set the lamp on the low stand beside the washbasin and peered at the warped and mottled image in the mirror. She felt a curious, cold detachment toward herself. The upward glow of the lamp shadowed her forehead with the arch of her brows, unplucked and heavy in the center. Her nose seemed long and thin, and the white crescent scar on its tip looked more prominent than ever. Her wet hair lay flat on her skull and framed her narrow face like a cowl. High cheekbones shaded her eyes, and the line of her jaw lent her cheeks a hollow aspect.