Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

She threw her head back and gave a loud jeering laugh. “You! Good God! Can you imagine a meat head like you bringing off anything like that? You’re too small time, Captain. You’d wet your pants even thinking about it. I can tell from the look on your face that the idea of killing six people is making your tummy-wummy turn over and over. Do you know the difference between you and a man? A man would remember that a lot of things can happen to people. Hell, their airplane might crash on the way back to Texas when the cruise is over. Mary Jane might slip on that dock some dark night and crack her skull on a rental boat. A man sees a chance and takes it. You know, Garry, your trouble is that you’d rather live small.”

He reached her in three strides, clopped the side of her head with a big open palm and knocked her to her hands and knees, her ear ringing. “Get off my back!” he yelled.

She looked up at him. “Get out of here. You bore me. You want to talk about it. That’s all. Just talk about it and scare yourself like a little kid at the horror movie. Go away, Chicken Staniker. Get out of here.”

At midnight she lay in darkness on her bed, aware of the invisible bulk of him beside her. He sighed and said, “It’s the only chance I’ll ever get.”

“Talk talk talk. But you won’t do it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you I...”

“Maybe you could. If you really want to. But I don’t think you want to.”

He put his arms around her and pulled her close. “If you’d stop riding me and start helping me, honey. Maybe I can’t do it. Maybe I can. If we get it all planned out, maybe I can. I... I think of that much money and I feel sweaty. You know? Things have never gone right. It wasn’t my fault things didn’t work out so good. Luck evens out, maybe. A big one, to wash out all the little ones. But — what you should be doing is building me up, not tearing me down. Come on. Let’s talk more about it. Don’t fall asleep.”

Her heart bumped with an almost painful excitement as she put her arms around him and smiled into the darkness. “I don’t want to play kid games, Staniker. Not with so much at stake. Not with two hundred and twenty-five thousand apiece on one big roll of the dice. Six people. Can you do arithmetic in your head? How much apiece, baby?”

After a few moments he whispered, “Thirty-seven thousand five hundred.”

“Suppose you could go to a place and walk in and they’d hand you thirty-seven thousand five hundred, no questions asked. All you’d have to do would be take them Mary Jane’s head in a brown paper bag.”

She felt him shudder.

She lunged over and turned the lights on. She bent over him and shook him. “I have to know! If you could fix it so she wouldn’t feel a thing, could you do that? For the money I gave you today, thirty-seven times over. Could you?”

He squinted in the light. His face was sweaty. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, looked at her and looked away.

“Yes,” he said in a husky voice. “If she — wasn’t in any pain. And I wouldn’t get caught for doing it. Yes.”

She dug her nails into the slabs of muscle on his shoulders. She stared into his eyes. Barely moving her lips she said, “You know, we might be home free. We just might.”

“You — you’ve got to help out.”

“Garry, you’ll know every move. Believe me. You are going to go through it so many times that when it really happens, you won’t even have to think about it. It will be as if you were watching something happen. Trust me.”

She watched his eyes. Long long ago Phil Kerna had taught her to watch for the special signs when a player decided to back his hand to the limit. Phil could tell when they had filled on the draw. When he believed that he had the better hand, and when the player was on his left, Phil would dawdle over his bet, keep scowling eyes on his cards, clatter his chips. That was his signal to her to study the player on his left. There was a point when the decision was made, to go all the way with the hand. The jaw would firm up, throat bulge with the dry swallow, chest lift in a long, deep breath, lids droop slightly to hide the eyes. Then, out of the cone of light over the table, too far away to see any cards of course, she would uncross and recross her legs, a motion Phil could see out of the tail of his eye. And with that signal he would bet into the do-or-die type.

“Like a kid jumping off the barn, baby,” Phil would say. “Once they decide to go, they go no matter what. They don’t stop and think again when I bet into them. They just boost their bet that much.”

When she read the expression wrong, he would thrash her after the session was over. She saw it now on Staniker’s face. She saw the instant when, in his mind, it changed from speculation to resolve.

“I... I got to do it,” he said, and his heavy face looked slightly astonished at the realization there was no longer any other choice.

She got up then and went into her dressing room, so filled with a strange hard exultant glee she did not dare remain close to him for fear it would erupt into a wild laughter that would upset and confuse him. She turned on a single light on the dressing table, and paced swiftly and silently back and forth, in and out of the area of light, across the soft, resilient carpeting. She saw distorted shadows of her naked body against the pale doors of closets and wardrobes, and caught glimpses of herself in the triple mirrors, lithe and swift, stalking and turning. Her legs felt springy and tireless and sweet. She set her teeth into her thumb knuckle, made a tiny snickering sound, whirled and sat on the dressing-table bench and smiled at the three images of herself, accepting their smiles in return. She arched her back and lifted her arms, pulling the solid breasts high. And then she identified what it was she felt. It was the sense of being young. All the time since Fer had been old, old, older. It was very, very good to be young again.

Now, remembering, and sitting at the dressing table and putting on the last careful touches of makeup to create the desired impression on Oliver Akard, she gave herself a bright little nod. It disconcerted her to do such a thing without thought of plan. Lately there had been too many of these puppety little actions, too many grotesque images flickering through her mind. Time to take a tight hold, girl. A lot has been done and there is a lot to do, and when it is all over you can act as batty as you please. This was going to need all her attention. It was the first time she had seen Olly since the news of Staniker’s rescue.

“Crissy?” Oliver called softly from the bedroom. “Crissy?” She had not heard him slide the glass door open or shut it again.

“In here, darling. In the dressing room. Come here, darling.” She made her voice drag, made it sound dispirited enough to match the eyes she had so expertly smudged.

Forty minutes later the scene was developing as she had planned it. He had kept asking what was wrong, and she kept denying there was anything wrong, and finally, as he began tremblingly to couple with her, she gave a cry of despair, wrenched herself away, went in a stumbling tearful run to her bathroom and locked herself in.

When at last she came out she put on a dark robe and sat on the chaise and made him sit on the foot of the bed, ten feet away.

“I had no right to fall in love with you, Oliver. Please go now, while I’ve got the strength to send you away. Forget it happened. I don’t want to hurt you. I have to get out of your life.”

After he pleaded and demanded for a long time she said, “All right. Maybe it’s a kind of punishment. You won’t want to touch me ever again after I tell you. It will make it easier for you to go. You see, I was playing a game of pretend. I made myself believe he was never, never coming back, and so that gave me the right to something — decent.”