John MacDonald - The Deep Blue Good-Bye

“Back to the Bahamas?”

“Maybe. I thought I could find where he was, and ask around and get some idea where he was headed. Did he ever say anything about things he wanted to do, or places he wanted to go?”

“He said something one time about going around the Gulf Coast and over to Texas.”

“Oh, fine.”

“Trav, you know he could be tied up at some private place, like he was tied up at my dock.”

“That’s a lot of help too.”

“You asked me. I’m trying to help.”

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated peabrain lizards didn’t make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn’t seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her.

Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen is less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.

“Find me that boat,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“What specific or general thing do I have to know that will enable me to locate it?”

She stood up slowly and thoughtfully and went off to take her shower. I knew it was an emotional strain for her. She was trying to wipe every memory of that period out of her mind. And now I was forcing her to remember. They would be tangled memories, filtered through alcohol.

Suddenly she came racing into the lounge. She wore one of my big blue towels in sarong fashion, and had a white towel wrapped around her head. Her face looked narrow and intent. Her features looked more pointed.

“That last trip,” she said. “I don’t know if it will help. We stopped at some sort of a boat yard in Miami. I can’t even remember the name. Something about a new generator. He kept complaining about the noise the generator made. They took up the hatches and got down in the bilge and did a lot of measuring. The man said it would take a long time to get the one Junior Allen wanted. It made him angry. But he ordered it anyway. He left a down payment on it. He ordered some kind of new model that had just been introduced.”

She sat beside me and we looked at the Yellow Pages. She ran a slender fingertip down the listings. She stopped. “That’s it. That’s the one.”

Robinson-Rand, down below Dinner Key, off the Ingraham Highway. Shipyard, storage, No job too large, no job too small.

“Maybe it hasn’t come in yet,” she said in a thin little voice. She shivered. “I’m scared, Trav. I hope it came in and he got it and went away. I hope you never find him.”

I had bought Lois a lunch and sent her back to the houseboat. I parked Miss Agnes in Robinson-Rand’s sizable lot. Even in the summer doldrums, it was a brisk place. Their storage areas looked full. They had long rows of covered slips, and two big in and out structures for small craft. The shop areas were in big steel buildings. Saws and welding torches and power tools were in operation, even on a Saturday afternoon, but I could guess it was only a skeleton crew working. They had a lot of big cradles and hoists, slips and ways. The office area was built against one end of one of the shop buildings, near a truck dock.

There was one girl working in the office, a plump, impersonal redhead with one eye aimed slightly off center.

“We’re not really open,” she said.

“I just wanted to check on a generator that was ordered, find out if it has come in yet.” She sighed as though I had asked her to hike to Duluth. “Who placed the order?” Sigh.

“A. A. Allen.”

She got up and went over to a bank of file cabinets. She began rifling through cards. “For the Play Pen?” Sigh.

“That’s right.”

She took the card out and frowned at it. “Ordered June second. That’s a Kohler 6.5A-23. Goodness, it should be in by now.”

“Doesn’t it say on the card?”

“No, it doesn’t say on the card.” Sigh. “All I can tell from the card is that it hasn’t been delivered or installed.” Sigh.

“Does the card say who handled the order?”

“Of course the card says who handled the order.” Sigh. “Mr. Wicker: He isn’t here today.”

“Joe Wicker?”

“No. Howard Wicker. But people call him Hack.”

“Do you keep a running list of the boats you have in?”

“Of course we keep a running list of the boats we have in.” Sigh. “Down at the dock office.”

“Of course you keep a running list of the boats you have in. Down at the dock office. Thanks a lot.”

She looked momentarily disconcerted. “Excuse me. The air conditioning isn’t working right. And the phone keeps ringing. And people keep coming here.” Sigh.

“I’m sorry too. Be of good cheer, Red.”

She smiled and winked the crooked eye and went back to her gunfire typing.

I phoned the only listing for a Howard Wicker from a chilly saloon. A very small child answered and said, “Hello.” No matter what I said, it kept saying hello. I kept asking it to get its daddy and it kept saying hello, and I began to feel like Shelley Serman. Then the child gave a sudden howl of anguish and a woman with a tense exasperated voice came on the line.

Hack was out in the yard. Hold the line. The child came back on and started giving me the hello again. Tearfully.

“Yes?” Wicker said.

“Sorry to bother you on your day off. I understand you installed a Kohler 6.5A-23 on a forty-foot Stadel custom, and I’d like to know how it worked out.”

“What? Oh. I don’t know what you mean. It’s a good rig. If there’s room for it, and you don’t hit over a second thousand watt peak demand, it’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”

“I mean noise and vibration and so on.”

“It’s quiet enough for that rating. You’re asking about a boat called the Play Pen?”

“I think that’s the name.”

“We got the generator in last Monday or Tuesday, and it hasn’t been installed yet. They’ve phoned in a few times asking about it. I expect they’ll phone in again this week. Then bring the boat around and we’ll put it in. You want to see how the job goes, I could let you know. What have you got now?”

“An old Samson 10KW diesel. Manual and noisy. And big.”

“It would depend on peak load, if you could get along with less.”

I told him I would appreciate it if he’d give me a ring when the appointment with the Play Pen was set up. A collect call in Lauderdale. He wrote the number down and said he would.

“It won’t be too long, will it?” I asked. “The Play Pen is in the area?”

“Far as I know. He knows it’s due about now.”

I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tin-work, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.

Miss Agnes squatted, docile under the roar of rain, and I tried to pull Junior Allen into focus. Like the most untidy little hoodlum knocking over a Friendly Bob Adams Loan Office, he was on a short rein. Or reign. In these documented times, where we walk lopsided from the weight of identifications, only the most clever and controlled man can hope to exist long on a hijacked fortune. And Junior Allen was a felon. Maybe he was clever, but certainly not controlled.