Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  “You know the right dosage?”

  “To the last cc. They’ll get him awake no earlier than seven tonight. And Señor Zaragosa has damn little English, and by then the consulate will be closed and they will have met the wrong plane and it’ll all be one big confusion.”

  “Now it all depends on your getting him into the car.”

  “I’ll get him into the car, sweetheart.”

  “I don’t really believe in the money yet. Not that much money.”

  “Wait until you start fondling it.” He looked at his watch. “About another six minutes until kickoff.”

  It was a busy airport. They were coming in and taking off. The parked car was an oven. I was sweating through my suit. The tight hat was giving me a headache.

  “Let’s roll it,” Vince said.

  I drove to the airport and turned in the main drive. I passed the entrance to the parking lot and swung around and parked where we had planned, just to the left of the main doors for anyone coming out. It was ten minutes of three. Vince got out. A guard came over and said, “Buddy, you can’t park it here.”

  Vince gave him a broad grin, a half bow, and a flood of Spanish.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying but you can’t leave it here.”

  Vince, still beaming, patted the black fender and said, “Diplomatico! Diplomatico! Offeeessssial!”

  Another guard came over and said, “It’s okay, Harry. It’s okay for them jokers to park it in front.” They went away.

  Vince went in. He was gone five minutes. He came out alone and came to my window and said, “Be of good cheer, baby. I just made a phone call. Senor Zaragosa is expected at eight-fifteen this evening.”

  It felt very comforting to be able to stop watching for the legitimate sedan. “Is the flight on time?”

  “On the button.” He straightened up and looked toward the southwest. “And that very well could be it.” He punched my shoulder hard. The white teeth gleamed quickly. He went back inside.

  The minutes went by. I watched the main doors. I’d had the same feeling before when, once the ambush had been carefully arranged, all you had to do was wait for the far-off sound of truck engines. Or for the first sight of a platoon on the trail. Then you’d let their point go by and hope to hell he didn’t spot anything. And when the last man was within the ambush zone, Vince would open up and the first violent hammering of the weapon on full automatic would be lost in the surging chattering crash as we opened up with all we had.…

  Vince came out through the main doors. There was a stocky man with him, a man in a dark suit and a white straw hat, a man with a pale pyramidal face, heavy jowls dark with beard shadow, a pursed red mouth and sunken eyes. The small man carried a diplomatic pouch and a briefcase. Vince carried a large black suitcase as though it were very heavy. It was of black shiny metal with chrome corners and hardware. The chrome was dull and corroded, and there were dents in the black metal. Vince was talking volubly, gesturing with his free hand. The man had a remote and troubled look and his steps were lagging. Vince seemed to be urging him along.

  I got out, as instructed, and went around the rear of the car and opened the rear door, then went ahead and took the suitcase from Vince. I grunted when the strain came on my arm. It was like lead.

  The little man said sharply to me, “Momento! Alto!”

  I paid no attention. I opened the front door and heaved the suitcase on to the front seat. I slammed the door. Vince had the man by the arm, urging him toward the car. The man seemed to shrug and came toward the car. It was going to be all right. It was going to work.

  But then I saw the two men coming rapidly toward them, coming up behind them. Two lean men in sports shirts and pale jackets, focused on Vince and Zaragosa with an unmistakable intensity. And one hand coming out of the side pocket of a vivid yellow jacket, bringing with it a blued gleam of metal that was incongruous in the bright hot sunlight.

  “Behind you!” I yelled.

  As Vince spun around a slug at a range of ten feet knocked him a half step off balance. With perfect instinct and his miraculous reflexes, he swung Zaragosa in front of him and, in the same instant said, “Get the wheel!”

  I ran around the rear of the car. I skidded on the paving. I felt as if I were running in a dream, trying to run through waist-deep water. I heard two more shots. I could hear some people yelling, hear running footsteps, hear a woman’s startled scream. I piled into the car and turned the key and the motor caught.

  The two men were close. I saw Vince, with horrid effort, swing the dumpy weight of Zaragosa by crotch and neck and hurl him at the two men. It tumbled one of them and the other made a wild leap to jump clear, but landed off balance and fell. As Vince fell into the back I stepped the gas to the floor and swung in a wide screaming arc and aimed for the entrance from the highway. A fat man leaped, roaring, for his life. A guard jumped out, waving his arms, and jumped back. I heard Vince yank the back door shut. I took one quick glance in the rear vision mirror. Both men were running hard. Zaragosa was on the sidewalk, his briefcase and the diplomatic pouch ten feet from him.

  I picked a small hole in traffic and barreled out without stopping, wedging it larger as brakes yelped behind me and angry horns blew. When I came to the right turn toward town I was doing eighty. I hit the brake and slid through the turn and yanked it straight. I thought I heard a far-off siren. I passed other cars fast and wide, forcing oncoming traffic way over. I banged the brakes again, cut hard behind an oncoming truck into the left turn on the route we had practiced. I slowed to proper sedateness and, three blocks later, a light stopped us.

  Vince was on the floor in back. “How bad?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. I’m bleeding like a pig.”

  “Can you do anything about it?”

  “I’m trying to do something about it. Jesus!”

  “How about what’s his name?” I asked, starting up as the light changed.

  “When he took the second one I felt all the bones go out of him. I think he had it good.”

  “Who the hell were they?”

  “I think I’ve seen one of them before, but I don’t know where. So they wouldn’t be Kyodos’s people. Some kind of a leak, I think. Somebody with the same idea. Son of a bitch.” There was a wince of pain in his voice.

  “Where are you hit?”

  “High on the right, just over the collar bone. That was the first one. And the left thigh, high and inside.”

  “Could you drive a car?”

  “Christ, no! I’m beginning to feel a little foggy already.” I remembered the chauffeur hat and dropped it on the floor beside me.

  “Want to risk the hospital?”

  “That would be the end, wouldn’t it, sweetheart? Let’s go where we can get this leaking stopped. And in a hurry.”

  I drove as fast as I dared, circled the hospital and was able to park directly behind my station wagon. There was not much traffic on the street. I moved the black tin suitcase into the back end of the wagon. I went back to the Chrysler. One rear window was starred by a slug. I opened the door a crack.

  “Can you make it to the wagon?”

  “I’ve got to make it to the wagon,” he said. He had a soapy look under his tan. There was a sweet spoiled smell of blood in the car. Fortunately his suit was dark. The left pant leg was heavy with blood as was the right side of his chest and the right side of his back. I helped him onto his feet and tried to get him to lean on me, but he straightened himself and walked slowly and steadily to the station wagon and got in. He closed his eyes, fumbled in a pocket, brought out a handkerchief and a small bottle of clear fluid.

  “Might as well do all we can,” he said. His voice was weak. “Hypo, decal, fingerprints.”

  I worked as quickly and thoroughly as I could. A small boy stood on the sidewalk and watched me solemnly. I left the keys in the transmission in the hope the car would be stolen.

  “That looks like a bullet did it,” the small boy said, staring at
the rear window.

  “No. A kid did it with a rock. He looked just like you.” He thought that over and went away. I dropped the bottle of gas in the gutter. I took the chauffeur hat and walked to the wagon and started it up and headed north toward Route 92.

  “How are you holding up?”

  He was slouched in the seat, eyes closed. “Don’t waste too much time.”

  When I turned off 92 onto 301 we were soon in empty country. I looked at my watch. Almost four. And Vince had been bleeding since about ten after three. He looked bad. I turned on an obscure road, turned off it onto a dirt road and pulled off in a small hollow between two knolls. I parked in such a way that the bulk of the car would hide him from anybody who might come down the road. He was able to get out by himself. He stretched out on the ground. I pulled the trousers off. I knew I would find no spurting of bright arterial blood. Had that been the case he wouldn’t have lived until we got to the hospital. Venous blood came darkly, slowly, steadily from a round hole punched in the inside meat of his left thigh and from a larger ragged hole in the rear of the thigh. I opened my suitcase, ripped up a white shirt, made a pad for front and rear wound. I had two thirds of a pint of bourbon, souvenir of a dreary motel night in Tennessee. I splashed bourbon onto the torn flesh and onto the pads, then bound them firmly in place with strips from the shirt sleeves.

  “I smell a heavenly fragrance,” he said.

  “Shut up. Sit up so I can get your shirt off.”

  The shoulder wound was not bleeding as badly, but it had an uglier look. I think the slug nicked the collar bone so that when it emerged it was tumbling. The thick shoulder muscles looked badly ripped. I used the same treatment, and rigged a sling for his right arm out of two halves of a shirt sleeve after I helped him into a fresh shirt from his suitcase. I got him into dark blue slacks. I scraped a hole with the tire iron and buried the ruined suit and shirt. After he had taken the second long drink from the bourbon bottle, his color improved.

  “Thank you, Doctor Jamison,” he said.

  “You’re going to need a legitimate doctor.”

  “In good time.”

  “What the hell do we do now, Vince?”

  “Hole up where we can look at the money.”

  I helped him into the car. I drove back to Route 301. I thought we should stop as soon as we found a place, but he wanted to put more miles between us and Tampa. I remembered the chauffeur’s hat and scaled it out into some heavy roadside scrub.

  I picked up the five o’clock news out of a Tampa station on the car radio. He covered the international and national scene in about twelve seconds and then got down to the meat. He seemed to be getting a big boot out of it. It must have been a dull week in Tampa until all this happened.

  Señor Alvaro Zaragosa was entirely dead, mostly of a bullet through the heart. The killers had attacked the “diplomat” from —– while he was standing talking to an un-known man beside a chauffeur-driven sedan in front of the terminal building at Tampa International Airport. The un-known man had made good his escape in the sedan in a “hail of bullets.” The assassins had escaped in a blue and white Ford sedan bearing local license plates. The “diplomat” had arrived from South America on a three o’clock flight en route to the regional consular office in Tampa. The diplomatic pouch and other official papers were left behind by the assassins when they fled. The man attacked along with the dead “diplomat” was described as tall, swarthy, powerfully built, wearing a dark brown suit, a straw hat and sun glasses. It is believed that he spoke no English. The consul, when contacted, had no comment to make on the assassination. Police had blocked all roads and were still looking for the chauffeur-driven sedan and the blue and white Ford. He gave a very sketchy and somewhat erroneous description of the gunmen.

  When he started on the baseball scores, I turned it off.

  “We got through before the road blocking bit,” Vince said.

  “It looks that way.”

  “I’ll bet that consul is very damned confused. People will come winging down from Washington. But there shouldn’t be any big hooraw about it.”

  “No?”

  “Why should there be? Zaragosa was a nonentity. Nothing is missing. They’ll figure that the little man had gotten himself mixed up in some kind of a smuggling deal, and it was a falling out of thieves. And they won’t want to have an abuse of diplomatic courtesy publicized. Kyodos may be mildly disappointed but he won’t give too much of a damn. There’s always a market for his products. And he’ll tie it up with Peral smashing Melendez. I’m surprised it wasn’t on the news wires in time for that joker to let us know about it. It might come out just fine, Jerry.”

  “Sure. It’s fine. You’ve got two bad holes in your hide, one man is dead, and those two playmates are undoubtedly looking for us. Everything looks rosy.”

  “Pile on some more miles, Jerry boy. Move this wagon.”

  At the time of the six o’clock news we were just beyond Ocala. I missed the hour by a few moments and turned on the radio in the middle of one of those self-nominated oracles with a voice like a mixture of corn syrup and cathedral bells: “… little news out of the country, we do know that the strong man, General Peral, with the loyal assistance of his small but effective professional army, has utterly crushed the Melendez revolt. The capital city is under martial law this evening, and all citizens have been requested to stay off the streets. Reliable sources have informed your reporter that except for the few who were shot down resisting arrest, the entire Melendez group has been captured and imprisoned. The insurgent strong point at Melendez’s Hacienda de las Tres Marias has not yet been reduced, but it is completely surrounded and surrender is expected momentarily, if indeed it has not already occurred.

  “Your reporter has warned many times of the danger to the free world of such revolts. This would appear to be another Communist-inspired attempt to upset the government of one of the strong friends of this country. It appears that the Melendez group has been stockpiling weapons for many months, and it was only through chance, through some circumstance we will never know, that the government was advised in time.”

  “How wrong can you be?” Vince said.

  “We have just received a new bulletin, and it seems to add the final touch to our story. Raoul Melendez employed a beautiful personal secretary named Carmela de la Vega. In some way Carmela received warning in advance of the government’s move to crush the incipient rebellion. Though not a licensed pilot she took off today in a single-engine airplane owned by Melendez in a desperate attempt to cross the border and land, two hundred miles away, at the city of Viadiad. It is perhaps possible that as a loyal citizen of the Americas, she was the one who informed Peral, then fled in case the Melendez forces should achieve victory and control. Perhaps she planned to land and disappear. We shall never know. For Carmela de la Vega’s desperate gamble did not pay off. She crashed on landing and was instantly killed.”

  A younger sounding man with an even more unctuous and juicy voice began to advertise a dainty deodorant. I turned it off. I took my eyes from the traffic to glance at Vince. His face was carved from hard stained wood. There was no expression on it.

  “Flew it right into the ground,” he said finally. “Had the tendency. Lousy depth perception. Either bang it in hard, or try to land thirty feet in the air.”

  “How much farther can you go?” I asked him.

  “Not too far, Jerry. I lost too damn much fluid. I’ve got to have water pretty soon.”

  We holed up at Stark, Florida. The motel was new. It was after dark. The round and pleasant woman behind the desk told me that she had a twin bed double. I said I would sign for my friend if it was all right. He was asleep when I pulled in, I told her. She said that would be fine. The boy would show us where to park and bring ice.

  I followed the boy and parked by Number 20. After he had unlocked it and handed me the key, I sent him after ice. While he was gone I helped Vince inside. He could barely walk even leaning most of his we
ight on me. I met the boy at the door when he brought the ice, and tipped him. I brought the luggage in, made certain the door was locked. I fixed the blinds and pulled the draperies across the windows. The air-conditioner huffed and whined busily. Vince sat in the only armchair. It took five glasses of water before he felt satisfied.

  “Better get to bed.”

  “First I look at what we’ve got. First I want to be sure we haven’t got a suitcase full of roof tiles, baby.”

  “That’s a hell of a thought.”

  I put the suitcase on the floor in front of the chair, on its side. It was locked. The two locks were sturdy. I went out and got the tire iron. I pried the locks open, opened the suitcase. A piece of coarse off-white cloth covered the contents. I snatched it off and looked at what we had.

  5

  A one-dollar bill has a humble and homely look. A five-dollar bill has a few meek pretensions. A ten is vigorous and forthright and honest, like a scout leader. A twenty, held to the ear like a seashell, emits the far-off sound of nightclub music. A fifty wears the faint sneer of race track. It has a portly look, needs a shave, wears a yellow diamond on the little finger. And a hundred is very haughty indeed.

  Then there is quantity. A wad of ones in the bottom of a grubby pocket, or fanned between the fingers in an alley game. Or three frayed fives in a flat cheap billfold. Then there is the flashy billfold, padded fat with ones and fives and tens and twenties. Next step is the platinum bill clip, with its dainty burden of twenties and fifties, crisp and folded but once. After that is the unmarked envelope with its cool sheaf of hundreds, slipped from hand to hand in the corridor of a government building.

  Or there are banks. And when you get up to the window there is a stack at the teller’s elbow that can stop your heart.

  When cute little girls visit the mint the kind man sometimes lets them hold a million dollars. In ten-thousand-dollar bills, the sort of bills that circulate inside the mysterious and cabalistic recesses of the Federal Exchange System. One hundred of them. A little packet only so thick for a whole million dollars. And if the little girl should cut and run with it, it wouldn’t do her a damn bit of good.