Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (39 page)

It was there, the cloaca, as it most certainly had to be, as it inevitably had to be
aváykn’
this was what else there was to uncover; this girl, this ghost, Alecto, the unceasing pursuer, born of a single drop of the God-blood Uranus ripped upon the earth, had stripped my memory integument by integument by slow integument until now there was no layer at all, nothing at all between my eyes and the pool of horror that was spinning faster and faster, climbing the inside walls of my skull, flooding me; and I cried aloud in terror and the color of it was black and I fell to the ground, crawling towards her, trying to get under her dress …

‘…don’t be frightened,’ I heard her saying.

‘I was at the stables,’ I said. ‘Those horses. They’re wild. They broke down the fence. I thought they were going to run over me.’

‘Stables? Horses?’ I heard her say.

Then I saw that this was Margaret, kneeling beside me, holding my head. I looked around at the cloaca; and now I saw that it was not the cloaca, but a shack, a greenskeeper’s shack.

‘You fainted,’ she said. ‘Something frightened you.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She helped me up.

‘I’m all right now,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the noise.’

‘Noise?’

‘The screaming. It’s not very manly to scream. I apologize.’

‘You didn’t scream,’ she said. ‘You just reached out for that little house and fell. …’

She held my hand tightly.

‘The bench is over there. There by the lake. See?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘Can you walk? Are you all right?’

‘I can walk. I’m all right,’ I said.

‘Are you positive?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘Then you won’t be needing this any more,’ she said.

She flung something from her, and in a moment I heard a splash in the lake.

It was my automatic. No, I wouldn’t be needing that any more…

I looked at her.

‘I am going away,’ I said. ‘I am going away.’

‘I am going with you,’ she said.

‘No…’

‘Yes.’

‘Turn loose my hand.’

She tightened her fingers around mine. ‘Please, let me try to help you,’ she said.

‘I killed you once,’ I said. ‘Do not make me kill you again. …’

She turned loose my hand.

I walked away into the darkness. …

I
UNLOCKED THE DOOR
of the apartment and went in.

The living-room was empty. The bedroom door was closed. The faint smell of champagne in the shattered Jeroboam still hung in the room.

The bedroom door opened and Holiday came out. She was wearing a wrapper. She closed the door.

‘Well’ she said. ‘So you’ve come back’

‘I came back to get my money. I left it in the drawer. I’m going away.’

‘Are you?’

‘I’m going away.’

‘Are you? Why are you going away?’

‘I’m just going,’ I said.

‘You and the rich girl,’ she said. ‘In her Cadillac …’

‘Alone,’ I said. ‘I’m going away alone.…’

I went into the bedroom. The bed was mussed. The bathroom door was closed and I thought I heard somebody in there. Mandon? Jinx? Highness? What would be the color of the puddle of fat if the black boy were melted down? Wouldn’t it be black, too? Well, now I’d never know…I’d never know how it felt to kill all the people I didn’t like. …

I went to the drawer and took out my money.

She came in and moved to the head of the bed.

‘Which direction are you heading?’

North, north by east, north, north-east, north-east by north, north-east, north-east by east, east, north-east, east by north-east, east by south, east, south-east, south-east by east, south-east, south-east by south, south, south-east, south by east; south, south by west, south, south-west, south-west by south, southwest, south-west by west, west, south-west, west by south; west, west by north, west, north-west, north-west by west, north-west, north-west by north, north, north-west, north by west what did it matter now? ‘Any direction,’ I said.

‘Take a souvenir with you,’ she said.

She tossed something at me. I missed catching it and stopped to pick it up. It was a bullet that had been fired.

‘What’s this?’

‘A bullet.’

‘A bullet?’

‘If you had a magnifying-glass you could see the brains on it. If you had a magnifying-glass you could see Toko’s brains on it.’

Toko’s brains? I looked at her. She was holding my old thirty-eight, pointing it at me, the thirty-eight I had used to kill her brother.

‘They dug it out of his head before they buried him,’ she said. ‘Just routine.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘This,’ she said. ‘Put ’em together…’

She tossed me another bullet, but this time I didn’t try to catch this one. I wanted it to fall to the floor so I could have time to get out my automatic. I crammed the money in my pocket and stooped to pick it up, and reached for my automatic.

The automatic was not there … Alecto had thrown it into the lake.

‘Cobbett!’ Holiday called.

The bathroom door opened and Cobbett came out. He was wearing long white underwear.

‘Tell him,’ she said.

‘I brought the bullet down myself,’ he said. ‘It’s the bullet that killed Toko. It came from that gun.’

‘We tested them tonight,’ Holiday said. ‘Ballistics …’

So now she knew. ‘It was a mistake. It was an accident,’ I said.

She lifted the thirty-eight.

‘Get back in the bathroom, Cobbett,’ she said.

Cobbett went back into the bathroom.

‘You got a nice set-up here, you and Mandon and Jinx,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving it to you. You can have it.’

‘Big stuff. Phi Beta Kappa. The Old Master,’ she said.

‘You know how this thing is rigged,’ I said. ‘My brother is the biggest minister in New York. My brother is the biggest minister in the United States. His name is the Rev. Stephen C. Apperson. He has that recording. Unless he hears from me once a week he will play it. Let me go and he will hear from me once a week. I swear he will. If he does not hear from me he will play the record. If he plays the record all this falls down. You know what will happen to Webber and Reece and Mandon and the others…’

She just smiled. She was Tisiphone. Tisiphone, Alecto … and where was the third? Wasn’t there a third?

I knew she was going to shoot, and I leaped at her and the flame from the thirty-eight met me half-way.

I felt nothing. I had been hit, but I felt nothing. I had nothing left with which to feel.

I saw the fire again, but I did not feel it this time, either. I dropped across the foot of the bed and started falling, but I wanted to laugh: this was a fine joke on her. I had already fallen, out there, in that grove of beeches, by the cloaca, this that was falling dead now was not I, it was only the physical residue of me, it was nothing…

There was another flash of fire and my eyes went out and now I could see nothing. I could see nothing and could feel nothing, but I had a vestige of awareness left that made me know that I was pulling my knees up and pushing my chin down to meet them, and that at last I was safe and secure in the blackness of the womb from which I had never emerged. …

Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American author whose hardboiled novels documented Americans’ hardships during the Depression and post-war periods. His most famous work,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
, was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and directed by Sidney Pollack.

McCoy was born on April 14, 1897, in Pegram, Tennessee, and grew up in Nashville. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family didn’t have much money. Although he was an avid reader, McCoy never finished high school. After a move to Dallas, Texas, he joined his father in sales at age sixteen.

McCoy worked as a traveling salesman through his teens, then joined the United States Army Air Corps. During World War I, he flew missions in France as a navigator and aerial photographer. He earned the Croix de Guerre from the French government after piloting a plane safely home despite suffering two bullet wounds. After the war, McCoy returned to Dallas and took up journalism. As a reporter, he exaggerated and invented details to make his stories more interesting, leading to frequent dismissals from Dallas papers. During this time he also met and married his first wife, Loline Sherer, with whom he had one son. He would later divorce and marry twice more, and had two children with his third wife, Helen Vinmont.

By the mid-1920s, McCoy’s interest in storytelling led him to publish his first fiction. Through the 1930s, he published more than a dozen crime and detective stories in
Black Mask
, a popular monthly pulp fiction magazine that was also printing the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time.

In 1931, McCoy moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. Though he failed to gain much notice as a leading man, the author did have some success writing script scenarios for the big studios. One such project described characters participating in a dance marathon; that scenario became the basis of his first novel,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
(1935). The novel distills many hallmarks of McCoy’s writing, including a tough style, wry observations of class disparity in the 1930s, and a hard look at the dehumanizing effects of poverty.
They Shoot Horses
fared better with European audiences than with American readers, a trend that McCoy would see throughout his writing career.

After the publication of
They Shoot Horses
, McCoy returned to screenwriting, churning out scripts for successful westerns such as
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
and brooding noirs such as
Persons in Hiding
. He also continued writing novels, most notably
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
(1948), considered one of his best. That same year, McCoy suffered a mild heart attack. Though he resumed working, his health declined and in 1955, he died of a third heart attack while at home in Beverly Hills.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1948 by Horace McCoy

cover design by Andrea C. Uva

978-1-4532-4673-3

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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