The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  He sighed. “McGee, have you ever wondered if you don’t emit some sort of subliminal aroma, a veritable dog whistle among scents? I have read about the role that some scent we cannot even detect plays in the reproductive cycle of the moth. The scientists spread some of it on a tree limb miles from nowhere, and within the hour there were hundreds upon hundreds of.…”

  He stopped as we both saw the faraway, oncoming lights. It seemed a long time before they were close enough for us to hear the drone of the engine. We stepped into the roadway and began waving our arms. The sedan faltered, and then the driver floored it and it slammed on by, accelerating. Ohio license. We did not look like people anybody would want to pick up on a dark night on a very lonely road.

  “I was wearing my best smile,” Meyer said sadly.

  We discussed probabilities and possibilities. Twenty miles of empty road from there to the Tamiami Trail. And, in the other direction, about ten miles back to a crossroads with darkened store, darkened gas station. We walked back and I tried to pinpoint the place where the girl had come busting out into the lights, but it was impossible to read black skid marks on black macadam. No lights from any house on either side. No little wooden bridge. No driveway. Wait for a ride and get chewed bloody. So start the long twenty miles and hit the first place that shows a light. Or maybe get a ride. A remote maybe.

  Before we left we marked Miss Agnes’s watery resting place by wedging a long heavy broken limb down into the mud and jamming an aluminum beer can onto it. Miracle metal. Indestructible. Some day the rows of glittering cans will be piled so high beside the roads that they will hide the billboards which advertise the drinkables which come in the aluminum cans.

  Just before we left I had the final wrench of nausea and tossed up the final cup of ditchwater. We kept to the middle of the road and found a fair pace. By the time our shoes stopped making sloppy noises, we were swinging along in good style.

  “Four miles an hour,” Meyer said. “If we could do it without taking a break, five hours to the Tamiami Trail. By now it must be quarter to eleven. Quarter to four in the morning. But we’ll have to take a few breaks. Add an hour and a half, let’s say. Hmm. Five-fifteen.”

  Scuff and clump of shoes on the blacktop. Keening orchestras of tree toads and peepers. Gu-roomp of a bullfrog. Whine song of the hungry mosquito keeping pace, then a whish of the fly whisk improvised from a leafy roadside weed. Jet going over, too high to pick out the lights. Startled caw and panic-flapping of a night bird working the canal for his dinner. And once, the eerie, faraway scream of a Florida panther.

  The second car barreled by at very high speed, ignoring us completely, as did an old truck heading north a few minutes later.

  But a good old Ford pickup truck came clattering and banging along; making the anguished sounds of fifteen years of bad roads, heavy duty, neglect, and a brave start on its second or third trip around the speedometer. One headlight was winking on and off. It slowed down as if to stop a little beyond us. We were over on the left shoulder. I could see a burly figure at the wheel.

  When it was even with us, there was a flame-wink at the driver’s window, a great flat unechoing bang, and a pluck of wind an inch or less from my right ear. When you’ve been shot at before, even only once, that distinctive sound which you can hear only when you are right in front of the muzzle, is unmistakable. And if you have heard that sound several times, and you are still alive, it means that your reflexes are in good order. I had hooked Meyer around the waist with my left arm and I was charging like a lineman when I heard the second bang. We tumbled down the weedy slope into the muddy shallows of the canal. The truck went creaking and thumping along, picking up laborious speed, leaving a smell of cordite and hot half-burned oil in the night air.

  “Glory be!” said Meyer.

  We were half in the water. We pulled ourselves up the slope like clumsy alligators.

  “They carry guns and they get smashed and they shoot holes in the road signs,” I said.

  “And they scare hitchhikers and laugh like anything?”

  “The slug was within an inch of my ear, old friend.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “They make a little kind of thupping sound, which would come at the same time as the bang, so if it was farther away from my ear, I wouldn’t have heard it. If he’d fired from a hundred yards away, you’d have heard it, too. And if it had been a sniper with a rifle from five hundred yards, we’d have heard a whirr and a thup and then the shot.”

  “Thank you, Travis, for the information I hope never to need.”

  He started to clamber the rest of the way up and I grabbed him and pulled him back. “Rest awhile, Meyer.”

  “Reason?”

  “If we assume it is sort of a hobby, like jacking deer, he is rattling on out of our lives, singing old drinking songs. If it was a real and serious intent, for reasons unknown, he will be coming back. We couldn’t find where the young lady busted out of the brush, but we didn’t have headlights. He does, and he may be able to see where we busted the weeds. So now we move along the slope here about thirty feet to the south and wait some more.”

  We made our move, found a more gradual slope where we didn’t have to keep our feet in the water. Settled down, and heard the truck coming back. Evidently he had to go some distance to find a turnaround place. Heard him slow down. Saw lights against the grasses a couple of feet above our heads. Lights moved on beyond us, the truck slowing down to a walk. Stopped. The engine idled raggedly. I wormed up to where I could part the grasses and look at the rear end of the truck. Feeble light shone on a mud-smeared Florida plate. Couldn’t read any of it. Engine and lights were turned off. Right-hand wheels were on the shoulder. Silence.

  I eased back down, mouth close to Meyer’s ear. “He better not have a flashlight.”

  Silence. The bugs and frogs gradually resumed their night singing. I held my breath, straining to hear any sound. Jumped at the sudden rusty bang of the truck door.

  I reached cautiously down, fingered up a daub of mud, smeared my face, wormed up the slope again. Could make out the truck, an angular shadow in the starlight, twenty feet away.

  “Orville! You hear me, Orville?” A husky shout, yet secretive. A man shouting in a whisper. “You all alone now, boy. I kilt me that big Hutch, right? Dead or close to it, boy. Answer me, Orville, damn you to hell!”

  I did not like the idea of announcing that there was nobody here named Orville. Or Hutch.

  Long silence. “Orville? We can make a deal. I got to figure you can hear me. You wedge that body down good, hear? Stake it into the mud. Tomorrow you call me on the telephone, hear? We can set up a place we can meet and talk it all out, someplace with enough people nearby neither of us has to feel edgy.”

  I heard a distant, oncoming motor sound. The truck door slammed again. Sick slow whine of the starter under the urging of the fading battery. Sudden rough roar, backfire, lights on, and away he went. Could be two of them, one staying behind and waiting, crouched down on the slope, aching to put a hole in old Orville.

  I told Meyer to stay put. Just as the northbound sedan went by, soon to overtake the truck, I used the noise and wind of passage to cover my sounds as I bounded up and ran north along the shoulder. I had kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut to protect my night vision. If anyone were in wait, I hoped they had not done the same. I dived over the slope just where the truck had been parked, caught myself short of the water. Nobody.

  Climbed back up onto the road. Got Meyer up onto the road. Made good time southward, made about three hundred yards, stopping three or four times to listen to see if the truck was easing back with the lights out.

  Found a reasonably open place on the west side of the road, across from the canal. Worked into the shadows, pushed through a thicket. Found open space under a big Australian pine. Both of us sat on the springy bed of brown needles, backs against the bole of the big tree. Overhead a mockingbird was sweetly, fluently warning all other mockingbir
ds to stay the hell away from his turf, his nest, his lady, and his kids.

  Meyer stopped breathing as audibly as before and said, “It is very unusual to be shot at on a lonely road. It is very unusual to have a girl run across a lonely road late at night. I would say we’d covered close to four miles from the point where Agnes sleeps. The truck came from that direction. Perfectly reasonable to assume some connection.”

  “Don’t upset me with logic.”

  “A deal has a commercial implication. The marksman was cruising along looking for Orville and Hutch. He did not want to make a deal with both of them. He knew they were on foot, knew they were heading south. Our sizes must be a rough match. And it is not a pedestrian area.”

  “And Hutch,” I added, “was the taller, and the biggest threat, and I moved so fast he thought he’d shot me in the face. And, if he had a good, plausible, logical reason for killing Hutch, he wouldn’t have asked Orville to stuff the body into the canal and stake it down.”

  “And,” said Meyer, “were I Orville, I would be a little queasy about making a date with that fellow.”

  “Ready to go?”

  “We should, I guess, before the mosquitoes remove the rest of the blood.”

  “And when anything comes from any direction, we flatten out in the brush on this side of the road.”

  “I think I will try to enjoy the walk, McGee.”

  “But your schedule is way the hell off.”

  So we walked. And were euphoric and silly in the jungly night. Being alive is like fine wine, when you have damned near drowned and nearly been shot in the face. Perhaps a change of angle of one degree at the muzzle would have put that slug through the bridge of my nose. So we swung along and told fatuous jokes and old lies and sometimes sang awhile.

  Two

  At the first light of oncoming dawn, just when the trees were beginning to assume shape and identity, we came out at the intersection of Florida 112 and the Tamiami Trail. There was a big service station and garage across the main highway. The night lights were on. The sign over the office door said: MGR: AL STOREY.

  Traffic was infrequent, and very fast. I was heartened to see a squat, muscular wrecker with big duals on the rear, and a derrick with a power hoist. It was going to take muscle to pluck Miss Agnes out of the canal. The more muscle, the less damage to her.

  We looked the place over. Coke machine and a coin dispenser for candy bars and cheese crackers and such. I found a piece of wire and picked the lock on the men’s room. We washed up. There was no other building within sight. Management had thoughtfully provided a round cement table and benches off to one side, with a furled beach umbrella stuck down through the hole in the middle of the table.

  As half an orange sun appeared over the flat horizon, off in the direction of Miami, we sat at the table and ate our coin-slot breakfast and spread the contents of the wallets on the cement top to dry. Licenses and money. The mosquitoes had welted us abundantly, but I knew the evidence would disappear quickly. There is a kind of semi-immunity you acquire if you live long enough in mosquito country. The itch is caused by the blood thinner they inject, so they can suck the mixed fluids up their narrow snouts. But the redbug bites are something else. No immunity there. We both had them from ankles to groin. The itch of the chigger bite lasts so long that the mythology says they lay eggs under the skin. Not so. It is a very savage itch, and the only way to cut the weeks down to a few days is to use any preparation containing a nerve-deadening agent, along with a cortisone spray. The sun warmed us and began to dry the money. More cars and trucks began to barrel through with fading Doppler whine. A flock of ground doves policed the area. I scratched the chigger bites and thought of a big deep bed with clean white sheets.

  At twenty of seven an oncoming VW panel delivery slowed and turned in and parked on the other side of the building. Two men in it, both staring at us as they passed out of sight. The money and papers were dry enough. We gathered them up and started toward the front of the place and met one of the men at the corner of the building. A spry wiry fifty. Khakis, baseball cap, with AL embroidered in red over the shirt pocket. I could hear the twanging and banging as the other man was sliding the big overhead doors up.

  “You broke down someplace?” Al asked. It was complimentary. We did not look as if we could afford to operate a bicycle.

  “We went into the canal last night, a ways up 112.”

  “Lots of them do,” said Al. “Narrer road with a lot of lumps in it. Lots of them don’t get out of the car neither. Let me get the place opened up, and when my other man comes on we’ll see about getting you out.”

  “Hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I slipped the lock on your men’s room so we could clean up.”

  He gave me a quick and narrow look and went quickly to the door to the men’s room and inspected the lock. He found the right key in his pocket and tried it. “Long as you didn’t bust nothing, okay. How’d you do it?”

  “Piece of wire.”

  “That there’s supposed to be a good lock.”

  “If it was, I couldn’t get in. It looks good, but it’s builders’ junk. If you’ve got the same junk on your main doors, you better get them changed.”

  With a certain suspicion and reluctance he thanked me and hurried off to get his station set up. I wandered around. The place was well run. Tidy and clean, tools in the right places, paperwork apparently under control. The other fellow was big and young. It said TERRY on his pocket. Snug trousers and tapered shirt and big shoulders. Face that could have looked handsome in a rugged way, but the eyes were set too close together, and the chin receded just enough to keep the mouth ajar. So he merely looked tough, coarse, and dumb. They were beginning to get some gas trade and some diesel fuel business.

  Then a Highway Patrol sedan stopped at the near island. Al went to take care of it, then called and waved me over. The trooper was older than average, and heavier than average, with a broad red face and very large dark sunglasses.

  He asked me if I was the owner and then if I had my license and registration. Then he sighed and dug around for the proper form and we went inside the station and used Al’s desk.

  After copying the information off my license, he studied the registration. Miss Agnes’s age apparently upset him. “A Rolls Royce what?”

  “Well, a custom pickup. I mean somebody turned it into a pickup truck a long time back.”

  “Is it worth all the trouble and the expense to get it out of where it is, McGee?”

  “She … uh … it has a certain sentimental value.”

  “Pass the inspection? Got the sticker on the wind-shield?”

  “All in order, officer.”

  He sighed again. “Okay. Any other vehicle involved?”

  “No.”

  “Where and when did it happen?”

  “About twenty miles north of here on Route 112. A little after ten o’clock last night. I was heading south.”

  “How fast?”

  “Sixty to sixty-five.”

  “In a crock that old?”

  “She’s very able, officer.”

  “You were driving and your friend there was with you. And you were going sixty-five and no other vehicles were involved and you put it into the canal?”

  “Not exactly like that. A woman ran across the road directly in front of me. She came out of nowhere. I had to swerve to keep from hitting her.”

  “Sure you didn’t?”

  “Absolutely positive. I nearly lost it right there. I was all over the road trying to bring my car out of it. I finally started to make it. Then a rear tire blew and that did it. She went in fairly easy. It’s in about ten feet of water, aiming back the way we came, resting on the left side. We got out of it. Then we came here and waited until Al showed up to open up.”

  “Point of departure and destination.”

  “We were coming from Lake Passkokee and going home to Lauderdale.”

  “Twenty miles north from here would put you in Cypress Coun
ty. Here. This copy is yours. Al will probably call them on his radio when he’s in range. If Sher’f Norm Hyzer has a car come out to look it over, this is your proof you turned in the accident report. And maybe your insurance will want to take a look at it, too.”

  He went out to his car. I saw him talk into the hand mike and knew he was checking in to make sure there was nothing out on the car or the driver. It is standard procedure and seldom forgotten, as nothing makes a cop look sillier than finding out later that the plausible stranger is wanted for a bank job.

  He talked for a long time, then reached in and hung the mike up, shoved his hat back a little with one paw, and unholstered the Police Positive with the other. “Okay. Both of you. Face down. Spread it out. Grab the back of your neck.”

  Quick, rough, thorough, and very cautious. Officer Nagle was a competent cop.

  “What’d they do, Beef?” Al asked.

  “I wouldn’t hardly know. All I know is Norm wants ’em, and he’ll be coming right along to get them.”

  “Isn’t there something about rights?” I asked humbly.

  “If I was the arresting officer, I’d read you what it says on the little card, McGee. But all I’m doing is detaining you, a professional favor for the sher’f of Cypress County. Move back there in the shade, and lean against the wall. Move a little farther apart from each other, boys. That’s fine.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Meyer said.

  He looked owlishly astonished. “Me? How can I be making a mistake doing what the man asks me to do, asks me nice? Any kind of mistake in this is all Norm Hyzer’s, and I hear he doesn’t make too many. Int that right, Al?”

  “They seem to keep on electing him up there,” Al said. From the tone I guessed he wasn’t a Hyzer fan. He headed out to the island to take care of a dusty Buick with a noisy fan belt. The big young one named Terry stood and stared at us with vacuous, adenoidal intensity.