Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

She awakened not knowing for a little time where she was. Then it came tumbling back into her head. She got up and went to the money Bix had given her. The money made it real. The money made all the rest of the money possible.

She willed Staniker to come to her. He came strolling in at four thirty in the afternoon, smelling of beer, complaining about the condition the rental skiffs had been in when they were returned. The terrace was in shade at that time of day. They sat at a table, and she fixed drinks and brought them out. She had told Francisca she would not need her. At last Staniker noticed how unresponsive she was. “Is anything wrong?” he asked. “You sore about something, Cris?”

“How’s the job hunting?”

“Something will turn up.”

“Oh, certainly. Because you make such a marvelous impression these days, Captain. Let me list your charms. You’re getting a beer belly. You missed a couple of places on your jaw when you shaved. You smell sweaty. Look at your fingernails. It’s been a year, Captain, a whole year since you ran a good boat for good pay. And downhill all the way. Haven’t you noticed?”

“What the hell , Cris!”

She leaned toward him and said with a slow and deadly emphasis. “Do you know what’s going to turn up for you? More of the same, Captain. More of just what you’ve got. Nothing. Ten years from now your Mary Jane will be working as hard as she is right now. And by then you won’t even pretend to work. You’ll hang around the marinas with the other old nothings. You’ll tell lies about the navy and about the Bahamas and about me. I’ll be somebody you used to know, Garry. Just lies, my friend. Beer and dirt and no money and fancy lies that not even the other old bums are going to believe. Starting today I think I’m going to become somebody you used to know. You never had it. I guess that’s the secret. You always looked as though you had it. You acted as though you had it. But on the inside, Garry, nothing. Nothing I need. Nothing I can use.”

“What are you trying to do to me?” he whispered.

“Me. You’re doing it to yourself. You just haven’t noticed. You’re a slob. Everything you’ve touched has turned to nothing. It’s your great talent, wouldn’t you say?”

“I had some bad luck, but...”

“Your luck is going to change? Why? Because you’re so young and competent and charming? Staniker, you are a silly, stupid, middle-aged man who puts dark goop on his gray hair and keeps forgetting to hold his belly in when he stands up.”

“Do you know what you are!”

“Go ahead. Say it. It will help me decide.”

He hesitated too long. “Decide what?”

She laughed. “It’s all pretty funny, you know. We’ve run the string out, you and me. We’re both on the long downhill ride. The big chance came along, and it’s too late for us to try to grab it. Maybe back when you had some guts left and some pride. When you still wanted things badly enough to go after them.”

“How do you know how bad I want things? What do you mean, big chance? What are you talking about?”

“You’re not hard enough, Garry. Believe me, you couldn’t carry it off. I couldn’t take the chance. Not with you. You’d mess it up somehow. And the sad part of it is that I haven’t got time to find the right man for it. A hard man. One I could trust. So instead of a big, beautiful cake, all you get is a couple of crumbs. You might as well have the crumbs. He did ask for you.”

She reached into the pocket of her slacks and took out the little packet of bills Kayd had given her. They were folded once. She flipped them onto the table. “Go ahead. Pick them up, Captain. You’ve got a job. That’s an advance on your salary.”

His big hands shook as he counted it. “A job?”

She forced a yawn. “Running a boat. What else? You aren’t able to do anything else, are you? Six weeks, or so, beginning about the middle of this month. Oh, and he wants your wife aboard too, to cook. He wants to cruise the Bahamas. He said it’s a fifty-three foot cruiser, custom built, twin diesels. He’s bringing it around the Gulf from Texas and when he gets in touch with me I’ll tell him how to get in touch with you. He’ll pay three thousand total. That’s five hundred a week for the pair of you.”

“Why does he want to pay that much?”

“He knows you. His name is Kayd. Bixby Kayd.”

Staniker looked puzzled. “I know that name — Oh, great big fella? Big voice?”

“Himself. One of Fer’s pack of old buddies. He guessed that if you didn’t know how to keep your mouth shut, Fer wouldn’t have kept you on. So the big fee includes keeping your mouth shut. That means it’s some kind of a business trip.”

“A thousand dollars!” he said in a reverent tone.

She stood up, fists in the pockets of her slacks. “So run along, Garry. Let’s pretend it’s been nice. Anything you might think I owed you, this pays it off. Right? Just stay away from me. Don’t come around any more. It would just remind me of how close I came to the jackpot.”

As she had hoped, he pleaded with her to tell him what she was talking about. She refused, chopping at his pride as savagely as she dared, sometimes making his face turn sallow under his lifelong tan. She let him follow her into her bedroom.

Finally, in a blazing imitation of anger, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll tell you, not that it is going to mean a damned thing because you’re not man enough to even recognize a chance like this. And you wouldn’t have the guts to grab it if you did. It’s too rough for you. It would take more than you’ve got. More than you’ve ever had. You see, Captain, you’ll have four and maybe five people aboard. Kayd and his second wife. His two children from his first marriage. Maybe a friend of his daughter’s. And because he was idiot enough to trust me, I guess because Fer trusted me, he told me something you’re not supposed to know. He’s going to bribe somebody in a big land deal. With cash money. And he’ll have that aboard.”

“How much?”

She had given careful thought to what figure she would tell Staniker. She knew it had to be a very substantial figure to make Kayd edgy about carrying it or having the hired captain know about it.

“Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said mildly. “Cash money. Bribe money. The kind nobody knows about and it can’t be traced. Forget it. You’ll never even get a look at it.”

“That much cash?” he said incredulously.

“There was twice that in this house once,” she said. “One of Fer’s deals. You know how it works with men like that. They have tax angles to think about. Anyway — you can see why there’s no point in talking to you about it.”

“It’s a lot of money, Crissy.”

“And only one way to take it. You’d have to fake a disaster, Captain. An explosion or something. They’d have to go down with the boat, every one of them, dead because you’d have to kill them. And you’d have to hide the money somewhere in the islands, in a place so safe we could leave it there for months and months. You’d be the sole survivor. You’d have to have a good story and stick to it no matter how hard they tried to trick you. And when it all quieted down, you’d have to find a way to slip over there and pick up the money and bring it back. We’d split it down the middle, my friend. If you were gutsy enough to give it a try. And then we wouldn’t go hand in hand into the sunset, Captain. We’d head in different directions. I know what kind of a life I’d buy with it.” She tilted her head. “You’d probably go somewhere where you could buy a big old crock of a seagoing motor sailer and stock it with a couple of adventurous little floozies and go to the far islands of the Pacific. You could be their big daddy, their seafaring hero type.”