The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “Why does he want to pay that much?”

  “He knows you. His name is Kayd. Bixby Kayd.”

  Staniker looked puzzled. “I know that name—Oh, great big fella? Big voice?”

  “Himself. One of Fer’s pack of old buddies. He guessed that if you didn’t know how to keep your mouth shut, Fer wouldn’t have kept you on. So the big fee includes keeping your mouth shut. That means it’s some kind of a business trip.”

  “A thousand dollars!” he said in a reverent tone.

  She stood up, fists in the pockets of her slacks. “So run along, Garry. Let’s pretend it’s been nice. Anything you might think I owed you, this pays it off. Right? Just stay away from me. Don’t come around any more. It would just remind me of how close I came to the jackpot.”

  As she had hoped, he pleaded with her to tell him what she was talking about. She refused, chopping at his pride as savagely as she dared, sometimes making his face turn sallow under his lifelong tan. She let him follow her into her bedroom.

  Finally, in a blazing imitation of anger, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll tell you, not that it is going to mean a damned thing because you’re not man enough to even recognize a chance like this. And you wouldn’t have the guts to grab it if you did. It’s too rough for you. It would take more than you’ve got. More than you’ve ever had. You see, Captain, you’ll have four and maybe five people aboard. Kayd and his second wife. His two children from his first marriage. Maybe a friend of his daughter’s. And because he was idiot enough to trust me, I guess because Fer trusted me, he told me something you’re not supposed to know. He’s going to bribe somebody in a big land deal. With cash money. And he’ll have that aboard.”

  “How much?”

  She had given careful thought to what figure she would tell Staniker. She knew it had to be a very substantial figure to make Kayd edgy about carrying it or having the hired captain know about it.

  “Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said mildly. “Cash money. Bribe money. The kind nobody knows about and it can’t be traced. Forget it. You’ll never even get a look at it.”

  “That much cash?” he said incredulously.

  “There was twice that in this house once,” she said. “One of Fer’s deals. You know how it works with men like that. They have tax angles to think about. Anyway—you can see why there’s no point in talking to you about it.”

  “It’s a lot of money, Crissy.”

  “And only one way to take it. You’d have to fake a disaster, Captain. An explosion or something. They’d have to go down with the boat, every one of them, dead because you’d have to kill them. And you’d have to hide the money somewhere in the islands, in a place so safe we could leave it there for months and months. You’d be the sole survivor. You’d have to have a good story and stick to it no matter how hard they tried to trick you. And when it all quieted down, you’d have to find a way to slip over there and pick up the money and bring it back. We’d split it down the middle, my friend. If you were gutsy enough to give it a try. And then we wouldn’t go hand in hand into the sunset, Captain. We’d head in different directions. I know what kind of a life I’d buy with it.” She tilted her head. “You’d probably go somewhere where you could buy a big old crock of a seagoing motor sailer and stock it with a couple of adventurous little floozies and go to the far islands of the Pacific. You could be their big daddy, their seafaring hero type.”

  She threw her head back and gave a loud jeering laugh. “You! Good God! Can you imagine a meat head like you bringing off anything like that? You’re too small time, Captain. You’d wet your pants even thinking about it. I can tell from the look on your face that the idea of killing six people is making your tummy-wummy turn over and over. Do you know the difference between you and a man? A man would remember that a lot of things can happen to people. Hell, their airplane might crash on the way back to Texas when the cruise is over. Mary Jane might slip on that dock some dark night and crack her skull on a rental boat. A man sees a chance and takes it. You know, Garry, your trouble is that you’d rather live small.”

  He reached her in three strides, clopped the side of her head with a big open palm and knocked her to her hands and knees, her ear ringing. “Get off my back!” he yelled.

  She looked up at him. “Get out of here. You bore me. You want to talk about it. That’s all. Just talk about it and scare yourself like a little kid at the horror movie. Go away, Chicken Staniker. Get out of here.”

  At midnight she lay in darkness on her bed, aware of the invisible bulk of him beside her. He sighed and said, “It’s the only chance I’ll ever get.”

  “Talk talk talk. But you won’t do it.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I …”

  “Maybe you could. If you really want to. But I don’t think you want to.”

  He put his arms around her and pulled her close. “If you’d stop riding me and start helping me, honey. Maybe I can’t do it. Maybe I can. If we get it all planned out, maybe I can. I—I think of that much money and I feel sweaty. You know? Things have never gone right. It wasn’t my fault things didn’t work out so good. Luck evens out, maybe. A big one, to wash out all the little ones. But—what you should be doing is building me up, not tearing me down. Come on. Let’s talk more about it. Don’t fall asleep.”

  Her heart bumped with an almost painful excitement as she put her arms around him and smiled into the darkness. “I don’t want to play kid games, Staniker. Not with so much at stake. Not with two hundred and twenty-five thousand apiece on one big roll of the dice. Six people. Can you do arithmetic in your head? How much apiece, baby?”

  After a few moments he whispered, “Thirty-seven thousand five hundred.”

  “Suppose you could go to a place and walk in and they’d hand you thirty-seven thousand five hundred, no questions asked. All you’d have to do would be take them Mary Jane’s head in a brown paper bag.”

  She felt him shudder.

  She lunged over and turned the lights on. She bent over him and shook him. “I have to know! If you could fix it so she wouldn’t feel a thing, could you do that? For the money I gave you today, thirty-seven times over. Could you?”

  He squinted in the light. His face was sweaty. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, looked at her and looked away.

  “Yes,” he said in a husky voice. “If she—wasn’t in any pain. And I wouldn’t get caught for doing it. Yes.”

  She dug her nails into the slabs of muscle on his shoulders. She stared into his eyes. Barely moving her lips she said, “You know, we might be home free. We just might.”

  “You—you’ve got to help out.”

  “Garry, you’ll know every move. Believe me. You are going to go through it so many times that when it really happens, you won’t even have to think about it. It will be as if you were watching something happen. Trust me.”

  She watched his eyes. Long long ago Phil Kerna had taught her to watch for the special signs when a player decided to back his hand to the limit. Phil could tell when they had filled on the draw. When he believed that he had the better hand, and when the player was on his left, Phil would dawdle over his bet, keep scowling eyes on his cards, clatter his chips. That was his signal to her to study the player on his left. There was a point when the decision was made, to go all the way with the hand. The jaw would firm up, throat bulge with the dry swallow, chest lift in a long, deep breath, lids droop slightly to hide the eyes. Then, out of the cone of light over the table, too far away to see any cards of course, she would uncross and recross her legs, a motion Phil could see out of the tail of his eye. And with that signal he would bet into the do-or-die type.

  “Like a kid jumping off the barn, baby,” Phil would say. “Once they decide to go, they go no matter what. They don’t stop and think again when I bet into them. They just boost their bet that much.”

  When she read the expression wrong, he would thrash her after the session was over. She saw it now on Sta
niker’s face. She saw the instant when, in his mind, it changed from speculation to resolve.

  “I—I got to do it,” he said, and his heavy face looked slightly astonished at the realization there was no longer any other choice.

  She got up then and went into her dressing room, so filled with a strange hard exultant glee she did not dare remain close to him for fear it would erupt into a wild laughter that would upset and confuse him. She turned on a single light on the dressing table, and paced swiftly and silently back and forth, in and out of the area of light, across the soft, resilient carpeting. She saw distorted shadows of her naked body against the pale doors of closets and wardrobes, and caught glimpses of herself in the triple mirrors, lithe and swift, stalking and turning. Her legs felt springy and tireless and sweet. She set her teeth into her thumb knuckle, made a tiny snickering sound, whirled and sat on the dressing-table bench and smiled at the three images of herself, accepting their smiles in return. She arched her back and lifted her arms, pulling the solid breasts high. And then she identified what it was she felt. It was the sense of being young. All the time since Fer had been old, old, older. It was very, very good to be young again.

  • • •

  Now, remembering, and sitting at the dressing table and putting on the last careful touches of makeup to create the desired impression on Oliver Akard, she gave herself a bright little nod. It disconcerted her to do such a thing without thought of plan. Lately there had been too many of these puppety little actions, too many grotesque images flickering through her mind. Time to take a tight hold, girl. A lot has been done and there is a lot to do, and when it is all over you can act as batty as you please. This was going to need all her attention. It was the first time she had seen Olly since the news of Staniker’s rescue.

  “Crissy?” Oliver called softly from the bedroom. “Crissy?” She had not heard him slide the glass door open or shut it again.

  “In here, darling. In the dressing room. Come here, darling.” She made her voice drag, made it sound dispirited enough to match the eyes she had so expertly smudged.

  Forty minutes later the scene was developing as she had planned it. He had kept asking what was wrong, and she kept denying there was anything wrong, and finally, as he began tremblingly to couple with her, she gave a cry of despair, wrenched herself away, went in a stumbling tearful run to her bathroom and locked herself in.

  When at last she came out she put on a dark robe and sat on the chaise and made him sit on the foot of the bed, ten feet away.

  “I had no right to fall in love with you, Oliver. Please go now, while I’ve got the strength to send you away. Forget it happened. I don’t want to hurt you. I have to get out of your life.”

  After he pleaded and demanded for a long time she said, “All right. Maybe it’s a kind of punishment. You won’t want to touch me ever again after I tell you. It will make it easier for you to go. You see, I was playing a game of pretend. I made myself believe he was never, never coming back, and so that gave me the right to something—decent.”

  “He? Who?”

  “Staniker, of course. Garry Staniker, that brutal bastard who somehow got to own me, Oliver. I kidded myself. I thought I could lift my head and begin to live again. I cheated myself and I cheated you. I’m so—so terribly ashamed.”

  Then she told him the story of a silly woman, of a short cruise on the Odalisque, a faked breakdown, a lonely anchorage, too much to drink, of fighting him off until it seemed easier to let him have his way. The boy looked stunned and sickened. She sighed, “After that, I guess I stopped caring for a while. I’m a mature woman. I had a married life for a time. He’s a very clever sensuous brute, you know. It was purely physical, dear, not like what you and I have. But I can’t lie to you about it. I got pleasure from it. He saw to that. Finally I realized I had to get out of the trap. I tried. God knows I tried. I thought that by selling the boat I’d be rid of him. So he started coming here. I fought it. Believe me, I fought it. But he is a strange man. I think there’s something sick and wrong and dangerous about him. He’d laugh at me when I begged him to let me alone. When I irritated him too much, he’d beat me. He’s told me that no woman he’s ever had has walked out on him, and no one ever will, and that until he gets tired of me, I have no choice at all. When he comes back, Oliver, it will all be the same as it was before. There’s nothing either of us can do about it. I even tried to kill myself once, but I didn’t have the courage.”

  The words bowed his strong, young shoulders, made his face pale and sweaty, gave him a nauseated look.

  “You’ve been a miracle I didn’t deserve, Oliver. I should have known it couldn’t be really true, to have you make me feel so proud, and so cherished. Please leave, dear. Right now. I’ll never forget you.”

  “I can’t leave you!”

  “Now is the time to leave me. He’s hurt, and it will be weeks, maybe, before he comes back. His wife is gone now. I think what he’ll do is move in here with me, and there’s no way in the world I can stop him. I’m a coward, dear. He’s trained me, with those beatings. He knows all the ways to hurt.”

  He came lurching to her, bungling and clumsy, to hold her and make his groaning sobs and protests, his young heart in a terrible agony and, she knew, under the agony was the sly desire to keep on having her as long as he could.

  With great reluctance she at last accepted the compromise she had sought. “All right then. We’ll be selfish, Oliver. We’ll crowd our whole lifetime into whatever time there is left before he comes back. From now on we’ll pretend there isn’t any ending to us.”

  He began to make brave sounds about how he would drive Staniker away from her and keep him away. “Shush, darling. Let’s not spoil the time left by talking ugliness and silliness and things that won’t happen. Just—love me. Make me forget everything but you.”

  Afterward, she studied his face in his heavy sleep, in the indirect glow of the bedside light. He looked haggard, yet very young, like a child after too much carnival, tickets for every ride, the belly queasy under the weight of candied apples.

  As she got up and closed the interconnecting doors so she could take her shower without awakening him, she remembered how Spook used to talk about them. Spook had acting talent and a sense of mischief and a contempt for the men she could hook. “Look, kid, what have they got? They’ve got the drearies, these sad dull little jobs and houses and wives and irritating kids. The movies and the TV people have these huge, glamorous problems, and the marks feel left out. So along with the trick I give them a little theater, like maybe my old man is a U.S. Senator and he’s spent thousands trying to find me, or I have a rare and unusual kind of blood disease I caught in Arabia. I like to cry a little. Where else are these drearies going to buy genuine romantic stuff? Put them through the wringer, kid, and you establish a nice repeat business and a little bonus on the sly to help you out with your problems.”

  As she was lazily drying herself after her shower she found herself reaching further back into memory, back to one of the games of her childhood. It had been years since she had thought of it, and she did not know what had brought it to the surface just now.

  Each Sunday at the Home, when they filed out of the hall after supper, there would always be a bowl of those round hard candies on the table by the door, and old Satchel-ass would be sitting behind the table watching it like an eagle. If you had a dining-hall demerit that week, you got waved on by. If not you could take one, picking it up between thumb and first finger with the other fingers curled out of the way so you could have no chance to get more than one. They were each wrapped in a twist of white waxy paper, so that the color showed through, but if you hesitated to look for a color you wanted, she’d wave you by and your chance was gone.

  Some of the kids chomped theirs up as they walked out of the building, and others rolled it on their tongue to make it last a long time, and if you stuck it back in the pocket of your cheek behind your teeth, it would last practically forever. But she ha
d always saved hers for the games of Last One Left.

  About nine or ten girls was the best number, each putting in one candy, and you had to look inside the paper to be sure nobody had wrapped up one already sucked a little. You drew the hopscotch squares on the cement playground with the edge of a piece of shale, with one candy in a corner of each square, making the jumps hard enough so that on the very first time some would jump onto a line, or lose their balance when they picked up one of the pieces, and it would be weeded down until only the winner was left, and the nine or ten pieces belonged to her.

  Crissy won more consistently than anyone except a tall spry skinny colored girl named Shacks. When Shacks won she would stand and whinny with crazy laughter, and go whinnying off with the candy, until finally she got on everyone’s nerves so badly Crissy and three others had cornered her in the john after lights out. It had taken a long time and a lot of effort to make her start crying, and it wasn’t until then they found out she was so damned dumb she’d thought it was Laughs One Left, and the whinnying was because she thought it was the name of the game.

  Crissy remembered the pleasure of being the Last One Left, and often, after winning she would save the treasure until lights out, and then unwrap as many as six in a row, putting each one in her mouth and trying to identify the flavor, then roll them around with her tongue until all flavors blended, and finally chomp them all into sweet splinters and powder and juice, knowing that in all the nearby beds the ones still awake could hear the night feast and know what it was.

  Twelve

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the day after Staniker was brought back to Nassau, when Sam Boylston returned to his room at the Nassau Harbour Club, Jonathan Dye seemed unchanged in any way. He was still sitting in the straight chair by the desk, hunched and miserable, arms resting on his knees, knuckly hands dangling.

  His color was poor, eyes puffy, his beard a dark shadow on the angular jaw and long throat.