Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

He carried the suitcases around to the back of the main building. His old yellow Olds sat in the sunshine. One tire looked soft. The spare key was in a little magnetic box on top of a frame member under the left rear corner of the car. It had rusted shut. He banged it against the bumper and forced it open. He unlocked the car, stuck the suitcases in, left all four doors open for a few minutes to air out the bake-oven heat. He rolled all the windows down. Never have to own another one without air conditioning, he thought.

He got in, pulled the doors shut, put the key in the ignition. Before he started it, he reached under the seat and slid his fingers along until he felt the thin packet of bills, folded once, he had scotch-taped to the underside of the seat. He pulled it loose, put it into his pants pocket along with the Banner check, Wezler’s card, and the money left from the insurance advance.

The car did not start. The battery began to fade. And he felt a sudden and quite unexpected wave of terror. If the car wouldn’t start, everything would go wrong. He made himself relax. That was ridiculous. If the car didn’t start, you walked over to the gas station over there and told Charlie your troubles.

When he tried again it caught. He revved the motor for a while before putting it in gear. He drove out and down the street and across into the Shell station. A boy was working on a car on the lift. Charlie came out of the station, a broad, bald man in gray coveralls, steel glasses, a smear of grease on his forehead.

“Figured you’d be back soon,” Charlie said, shaking hands.

“I got the card okay in the hospital. Thanks.”

“Hell of a time finding one that wasn’t some kind of funny joke. Nothing funny about six people getting blowed up. That tire’s way down, Garry.”

“Noticed it. Battery is low too.”

“I’ll check things out. You don’t look so great. Whyn’t you go in and set.”

Staniker went inside the station and sat in a plastic and aluminum chair. A fan turned back and forth, pushing stale air that smelled of gasoline and the perfumed deodorizing block in the nearby men’s room. In a little while Charlie came in and handed him an opened icy bottle of Coke. “Cells are okay. Battery level was down and I filled her up. Checked the tires all around. Your gas was full up. Oil is down maybe a half a quart.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

Charlie leaned on the desk. “I was thinking, if you’d been below too when she went, they never would have found out what happened. Mystery of the sea like they say.”

“Or if nobody had come along for another couple of days, it would have been the same deal.”

Charlie sighed. “You just never know. That Mary Jane was a real working woman. None of those people knew what hit ’em, I guess.”

“They never had a chance.”

“Those new folks Parky hired ain’t no improvement around here. They’re so sour I don’t go over for a beer even. I’d rather drive down to Smitty’s.”

“Well, I better be getting along. Thanks for everything, Charlie.”

“Where you going to go? Maybe move in with that stuff you got lined up down the bay shore? That one you used to work for?”

“You mean Mrs. Harkinson? I tell you, Charlie, I wish I could. But we broke up just a little bit before this last captain job came along. Broke it up big. No chance of mending that one. She was getting on my nerves anyway. I didn’t know you knew anything about her, Charlie.”

“Maybe I talked out of turn. The one told me was Fran, down at the sundries. A long time ago. Back in February maybe it was. Fran and Mary Jane, those two would tell each other their troubles I guess. Fran’s got her share for sure. As I remember Fran was bad-mouthing you for carrying on with that woman. I nodded, solemn as a preacher. Fran should know the fits I give my old lady back when I still had my hair.”

“Next time you see Fran you tell her I haven’t got a chance of moving in on that blonde. I guess she’ll say it serves me right. You know, Charlie, I wish now I’d — given Mary Jane a few more breaks than I did. I’m going to miss her. I miss her already.”

Charlie looked at him. “No trouble for you to find a woman. No trouble at all. But it won’t be easy to find a worker like her.”

As he drove away, Staniker thought that a lot of Crissy’s precautions didn’t make sense. But because everything else seemed to have worked out, perhaps it was best to go along with the whole thing. Nobody was going to check on anything at this late date. It was over and done, and the only thing left was a good way to go pick up the money. A good, safe, quick, quiet way.

And now he had to play more tricks. She wouldn’t tell him who had told her about this one. She had practiced it with him, in rush-hour traffic until they were both good at it. Any limited access highway with exit ramps and three lanes in each direction would do. Even when he knew how she was going to work it and she knew how he was going to work it, they had no trouble losing each other.

You hung in the fast lane, furthest from the exit ramps, and you found a hole in the traffic, and you adjusted your speed in relation to the hole so that when you were coming up on an exit ramp, you could speed up at just the right time, angle across the other two lanes and duck down the ramp. You then took the cloverleaf and got back onto the pike but heading the opposite way, and did it again. That put you back in your original direction, and anybody who had tried to trail you would be swept helplessly past the exit, locked in the river of fast traffic. He killed time, driving north. On Interstate 95 north of the airport, traffic thickened and he obediently played the game. “You see,” she had said, “we won’t know we’re really in the clear. They might be playing cat and mouse. And what does it cost to play it safe? Nothing. So do it? Don’t give me arguments. Do it!”

He drove west on the bypass, and after he had turned south again toward Coral Gables, just for luck, he played the game again, the second time cutting it almost too fine, making horns blare in anger and brakes shriek as he angled across.

The row of a dozen identical cottages was in a defeated area near Coral Gables. Heavy, unkempt tropical growth hemmed the cottages in, cutting off any chance of breeze. The pink paint on the hard pine siding was faded and flaking away, exposing gray wood. The woman lived in a larger cottage on the corner, on a bigger lot. She was four and a half feet tall. Her back was badly humped. Her voice had a metallic resonance, like announcements over a bad loudspeaker. Her face was stone gray, her hair the impossible yellow of industrial sulfur. She wore a green smock, blue canvas shoes, and she smelled like a boarding kennel.

She peered up at Staniker. She tapped a front tooth with a fingernail. “You was here before.”

“Couple of months ago.”

“Just one night like before?”

“Two weeks this time.”

“By God, you’re the first repeat business in I can’t remember. I don’t need to show you one. They’re all alike. Let’s see. Two and a half a day, fourteen a week. Two weeks I’ll make it twenty-five in advance, okay? And ten deposit on the utilities. You get that back when you give me the key back. The tax is just on the twenty-five. Seventy-five cents. Come in and sign the book, mister.”

He went onto her screened porch with her, signed the ruled notebook with her ball point pen that wrote in red. Gerald Stanley. General Delivery. Tampa. She turned the notebook around, made change, pawed through the keys in the shallow desk drawer.

“I got ten empties,” she said, “but there’s three of them need plumbing work I can’t afford, at least till by some kind of miracle I get nine full up. Mister Stanley, I better give you number ten, on account it’s the one furthest down from that one machine shop across the way there that went on night shift last week. It’s just up to midnight, but it does screech some. Mr. Mooney, my dear departed, said once we got zoned industrial it would be no trouble selling off the whole thing for nice money. It’s maybe a blessing he died before they zoned so damn much industrial there’s no market at all for it. Got to hang on by my social security until it gets better, if it ever does. Thank you kindly. You see anything that needs doing, come tell me. If it’ll cost money to get it done, we’ll move you to another empty.”