Dead Low Tide (24 page)

“Come on, baby,” I said softly, reeling. “Come on to daddy.”

He had not made a sound. He stopped struggling. I kept the rod tip high so he wouldn’t foul against the bottom. He came in oddly docile. He came in and there was a spreading red stain in the water. I could see the two girls and a man standing on the cruiser, staring at me. There was too much red in the water. I went down the bank. He was on his back. His eyes were half open. The big spoon lay across his throat.

The barb had gone into the side of his throat. His struggles had torn the wound a bit too deep. I threw the rod up the bank, got his wrists and dragged the body up onto the bank. And then I went over a little way and I was sick. There was no end to being sick. The worst, perhaps, was, that with the life out of him, that flat sheen of evil was gone. And he was just a youngish man, dead, with a face you would not notice
twice, with brown hair, with one button on the white shirt that did not match the others, with the pores of his cheeks a bit enlarged, and accented by the slant of the late sun. Death is a word. It is in every issue of every newspaper. It is in the slap-dash novels, casual as cornflakes, with the cool-eyed young hero looking with satisfaction at the corpse, reholstering the trusty weapon.

I was sick, and when I got over that I couldn’t look at it there on the bank, and I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. It was a grotesquerie, and an abrupt distortion and dislocation of the soul. I couldn’t get a crazy picture out of the back of my mind. Me, standing for the camera, with rod and smile, and that thing on the bank hung up by the heels.

I knew that Christy was close by me. And I knew that helped.

There was a lot of unreality about the next few days. Once the two girls and the man on the cruiser had been quieted down, they were able to tell how Roy Kenney had dropped onto the boat, how there had been something in his face that made any thought of resistance impossible and implausible. The twenty-two rifle had been aboard, for their standard game of plinking empty beer cans out in the Gulf.

They told how he had directed them around the south end of Vera Key and back north through the Gulf. Three times he had tried to head north, but had been forced to swing slowly back as the search planes came close and low. He had crouched back in the protection of the cabin, forcing the two girls to smile and wave and pretend to troll. And he spoke endlessly at last of going back to “get” somebody. They had headed back into the bay and he had made them troll up and down,
up and down the channel off the creek, until finally the man and girl had appeared on the shore and he had fired at them, so shocking him that he had inadvertently run the cruiser aground at the side of the narrow channel.

An adventure magazine signed them up for a ghost written article, and a brisk-talking man tried to make the same deal with me, calling it a “natural,” but all I wanted to do was try to forget that long slow-motion time of the silver spoon twinkling in the air, dropping toward the man on the cabin roof. The wire service gave it fat coverage, and I was an unwilling national celebrity for all of two days. And I couldn’t go out on the street without running into the clumsiest, crudest jokes imaginable. The first time that happened I went back and took the rod and reel and heaved the whole rig as far out into the bay as I could manage, and turned away without even waiting to see it hit.

In all of it, Christy was the only one who seemed to understand.

Electric shock therapy brought Joy Kenney out of it. They tell me she looked forty when she was released, and went away. Steve told me what she said. Roy had told her about a man named John Long who, if he found out something, would very dearly want to kill him, and probably would try to. And later he told her that John Long had the evidence he wanted, and that Long’s wife had been careless, and that he had an idea John Long had found where he was living by following Mary Eleanor. She told them all this, Steve said, in a flat gray hopeless voice. It had been one of those improbable coincidences that always seem to be happening that got her into John Long’s office. She thought that would give her a
chance to warn Roy or help him, and maybe a chance, she thought, to talk John Long out of too violent an answer to adultery.

And Steve said it was a good guess that John Long had studied the cut-out pictures of Roy’s face so thoroughly that he immediately saw the resemblance between Roy and Joy, and I had witnessed his momentary confusion. The cut-out heads, by the way, were recovered from a Miami firm of investigators.

George got his stolid mind set on the missing money. He plodded in and took Roy’s gray car apart. Then he took the shack apart. Then he took the island apart. He found the forty thousand and the negatives and another set of prints, unmutilated, in a wide-top gallon glass jar, made waterproof and lashed to mangrove roots below the low tide mark fifty feet from the shack. And in finding the money, they found out a little bit more—or perhaps a little bit less—about the way Roy Kenney’s mind worked. More than half the money had been cut up with scissors. He had cut little lewd clever twisted paper silhouettes, contorted mannikins, out of the money. They showed considerable artistic talent, and obviously represented many hours of work. In an odd way, there was an inevitability about it; it was perhaps the ultimate violation of one of our gods, a god that Kenney refused to do homage to.

How the pictures were taken, and when, and by whom, were never discovered.

The grotesque death I had caused had made something gray happen to me, and Christy seemed to understand.

I couldn’t seem to rise off the ground. Then the next Saturday came along, and in midafternoon there was a booming
rain that lasted fifteen minutes, and left the air washed and clean and clear. I’d been at meetings most of the day, and it was settled as to how we’d go ahead with Key Estates starting on Monday. I got my car back that day, with a complete new motor, and I drove back to my place and Christy was sitting again on her steps. The sun was on her and she was brown and she wore skimpy shorts and narrow halter, both in white with dime-sized red polka dots. I stopped and she came to the car and put her hands on the door and yanked them back. “Ouch!”

“You always do that.”

“I’m a dull girl. But I know what day it is. Saturday.”

“And Wilburt is getting along without you?”

“To a limited extent.” She stared at me and I looked back for long seconds, and we both looked away at the same instant. “Andy?”

“It
is
Saturday.”

“Where were we, Andy, when we were so rudely interrupted?” I looked at her cheek and saw a faint redness under the tan and knew what that cost her in pride, and it made me a little ashamed.

“The sensible thing to do is to backtrack. Re-create the mood. Wear the blue, Christy.”

There was gladness in her eyes. “Give me … forty minutes.”

I drove to my place, laid out fresh clothes. I showered and while I was under the spray I thought of how it would be, how it would very definitely be. We would drive to Sarasota, and the copper mugs would be chill, and Charlie Davies would play “Penthouse,” which is indeed a very fine thing, and on the way back the top would be down and there would
be a ridiculous number of stars and she would sit close beside me, and light my cigarettes for me, my big blonde with warm night wind in her hair.

And something inside me, something that had been dragging me down, beat its wings hard enough to get off the ground, and then began to fly very well indeed. I out-roared the water with “Shortnin’ Bread” and remembered, sort of all at once, that I was that guy … that fella shot with luck, that superbly happy jerk named Andrew Hale McClintock.

JOHN D. MACDONALD
was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.