Deadly Welcome

by John D. MacDonald

“Can I see that thing they bit on?” He held the lure so she could inspect it. “I will take the fish, and thank you very much, Mr. Doyle.” She looked at him dubiously, uncertainly. “I… I wonder if you would do me a great favor, Mr. Doyle.”

  “Anything I can, ma’am.”

  “I have been trying to get my brother to take an interest in something. I thought fishing might be good for him. Neither of us knows anything about it. I bought a pole and things, and we fished with frozen shrimp, but it was all very boring. We got some nasty little catfish, and one horrible looking flat thing, and some little things with prickers all over them. But what you were doing looks as if my brother might enjoy it. The pole and reel I bought are much, much heavier than that thing you use. Is it hard to use?”

  “No ma’am. It’s easy.”

  “And it wouldn’t be a… physical strain, I mean to catch something big?”

  “Anything too big will just bust loose.”

  “If I give you the money, could you buy the same sort of outfit for the colonel? How much would it cost?”

  “Less than twenty dollars for all he’ll need. I can get it and you can pay me later when I bring it around.”

  “Well… all right. And then could you show my brother how to operate it? I don’t really know if he will take any interest in it, but he does need some hobby. You see, he’s never really had a hobby. Except all those model airplanes when we were little. I used to help him. We’re twins. Then, when he was in school he worked. We both did. He didn’t work when he was at the Point, of course. He has always been such a… dedicated man. So diligent. There was no room in his life for the things other men did. The fishing and the sports. Oh, he always kept himself in wonderful physical condition through exercise, so he could better accomplish his work. I sometimes wish he’d had more… desire and opportunity to play. Then maybe he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable when she… Anyway, now that he can’t work he has nothing to fill his time. I don’t want to trouble you, Mr. Doyle, but I would… be most grateful to you.”

  “Glad to do it,” he said.

  “If you could find time to come around tomorrow with the fishing things? About this same time. He naps in the afternoon.”

  She thanked him again and put the two mackerel in the aluminum pot on top of the coquinas, the long slim mackerel tails protruding over the rim, rigid in death. He walked back toward the cottage with the single fish. Thus far it was all too easy. And would continue to be easy, very probably. It sometimes seemed terrifying to him that it was so utterly easy to disarm people by lying to them. People seemed so recklessly anxious to take you at your face value. They would believe what they wanted to believe, and you need only to guide their thinking in a gentle and unobtrusive way. It had worked so many times before, and it would work again. The fishing had been a lucky accident. But if it had not been the fishing, it would be something else. Celia M’Gann was obviously lonely. Once her suspicions had been quieted, she would have responded to casual friendliness. And, inevitably, he would have met the colonel. And, inevitably, made the chance to be alone with him. This fishing gambit did not alter anything. It merely accelerated things.

  He cleaned and fried the mackerel and ate it for lunch. He thought of going in to see the Larkin boat yard. And see Betty again. But it seemed too soon. He had accomplished one decisive step in the mission. And now it was waiting time until he could walk up the beach tomorrow with the new tackle.

  He stretched out on the bed and wondered who had taken over in Montevideo. He hoped they’d picked Schmidt. He wouldn’t mess it up the way some of the new kids might.…

  He came up out of sleep and heard somebody rapping sharply and insistently on the back door.

  chapter FIVE

  THERE WAS A SEDAN in the back yard, a dark dusty green with bumper aerial for short wave, and a red spot on the roof, and a faded yellow decal on the door that said Sheriff—Ramona County.

  A man stood on the back steps, a dark silhouette against the white shell glare of the back yard. Doyle had belted on his old seersucker robe. He felt sweaty and fogged by sleep.

  “I was sleeping,” he said.

  “So wake up,” the man said, and pulled the door open and came into the kitchen. He was about five seven, with a toughened leanness about him, a deeply seamed and sallow face, narrow eyes the color of spit. He wore bleached khakis, tailored to his body and freshly pressed, a pale, cream-colored ranch hat. The trouser legs were neatly bloused over black gleaming paratrooper boots in a small and curiously dainty size.

  On the pocket of his shirt was pinned one of the most ornate badges Doyle had ever seen, large and golden, with some red enamel and some blue enamel. In a very legible way it said Sheriff, and in much smaller letters it said Deputy, and it said Ramona County, State of Florida, and bore some sort of ornate seal. He wore a black pistol belt with a black speed holster, old leather, shiny and supple with care and age, worn canted to bring the revolver butt-down to the level of “Gunsmoke.” A chrome whistle chain disappeared into the other shirt pocket. A black night stick hung from the other side of the pistol belt, white leather thong suspended from a small brass hook.

  He brought into the kitchen the slow creak and jingle of petty authority, and a thinly acid edge of sweat, a back-swamp accent and an air of mocking silence. Doyle felt irritated by his own feeling of intense wariness. It was a legacy from the faraway years when there would be trouble and men like this one would come to the bayou and go to Bucket Bay. You let them swagger through the house and poke around as they pleased. You never told them anything. And you never made a fuss because they would put knots on your head.

  Yet on another level he sensed his kinship to this man. That light-eyed cracker sallowness, the generations of bad diet and inbreeding behind both of them that had resulted, curiously, in a dogged and enduring toughness, a fibrous talent for survival.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Alex said.

  “Sure you’ve seen me before, Doyle. Turkey Kimbroy and I, we tooken you over to Davis long time ago to he’p you get in the army. If’n they’d shot your ass off, you wouldn’t be back here giving me problems.”

  “I’m not making any problems.”

  “That’s what I got to be sure about. Turkey don’t have no problems any more. Fool nigger had a razor hung down his back and when Turkey beat on him a little, nigger took one swipe and spilled Turk all over the side of the road. Made me a carefuller man.”

  Doyle remembered how this Donnie Capp had been on that long-ago ride, a pale slim blond man with a limp, not afraid to be friendly to the boy they were taking in.

  “What’s that got to do with me, Donnie?”

  The thin mouth tightened. “I get called Donnie by my friends. Niggers and thieves, they call me Mister Deputy, sir. You try it.”

  “Mister Deputy, sir.”

  “That’s nice. Now stand still a minute. Okay. Now you just walk on ahead of me slow while I look around some.” Capp made a leisurely and careful inspection of the cottage. He found the money belt on a hook in the back of the bedroom closet. Doyle made no protest as he took it out and unzippered it, fingered the money.

  “Maybe you better come along in and tell Sheriff Roy how come you got all the cash money, Doyle.”

  “If you think it’s necessary, I’d be glad to.”

  “Then you can tell me how you got it.”

  “You can look in the top bureau drawer on the left again, Mister Deputy, sir. Under the shorts. A folder with passport and visas and work papers and pay vouchers.”

  He opened the folder, looked at the papers, threw folder and papers on the bed.

  “But right now you got no job, right?”

  “No job. Not yet.”

  “Where do you figure on working?”

  “Some place around here.”

  “I don’t figure that way. I don’t figure that way at all. Over in Davis we got pictures of you and we got prints and they’re in a file. And that there is what you call a dead file.
Now I don’t want to have to go move that file up into the other file, the one where we keep the records of people living around here. I’m just lazy, I guess. You know, maybe you forgot to stop by and register as a known criminal, Doyle?”

  “Would that be necessary? It was a suspended sentence.”

  “I’m not up on all my law, but maybe it would have been sort of friendly of you to stop by when you come in and not let me find you by accident. And you could have brought us up to date on the police trouble you’ve had since you been gone.”

  “There hasn’t been any.”

  “Guess you been clever about it, huh?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Always glad to oblige.”

  “Why are you on my back? I’m not in any trouble. I don’t intend to get into any. I came back here because… this is home. That’s all. There isn’t any law about that, is there?”

  “You know, Doyle, the end of this here county is about the cleanest end of any county in the state. Roy likes for me to handle it just the way I do, on account of he doesn’t like sending in bad figures on crime up to Tallahassee. And he knows I know this end of the county better than anybody, so he just rides along and he lets me handle it all my own sweet way. You understand?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And one way I do, anybody making for trouble, I just up and run ’em off. Let ’em light some other place. Let ’em go spoil the crime figures in some other county. Now if there’s a family or something concerned, then I let ’em stay. But I persuade them to stay out of trouble. You haven’t even got a job, so it’s no trouble to run you off. Besides, I don’t like having you out here on the beach. You stay down in Bucket Bay, I might think on letting you stay ’round.”

  “I want to stay right here.”

  “What you want and what you get is two different ends of the rabbit. All this here for miles around is my little ole bait bucket. I keep it nice and clean and throw out the spoiled bait. It isn’t good for a fella like you not to have a job. You lay around and get ideas and pretty soon you make me some trouble. But I’ll show you I’m not a bad guy, Doyle. You paid a month rent, and it ain’t likely you can get it back. So all you got to do is ask me nice if you can stay here, and tell me you won’t make trouble.”

  “I’d like to stay. Please. And I won’t make trouble.”

  Donnie Capp smiled in a thin way and unhooked the night stick, and glided toward Doyle. “Now I’ll be quietin’ you down a little.”

  Just as Doyle started to back away, raising his arms, the stick smashed down on the point of his left shoulder, bruising the nerves, numbing his arm from shoulder to fingertips. In painful reflex, he struck out at Capp with his right fist. Capp stepped aside and paralyzed his right arm with the same cruel and scientific blow, then shouldered him back against the wall beside the bedroom doorway. He could not raise either arm.

  Capp jabbed the end of the club into the pit of Doyle’s belly, doubling him over. And then, calmly, professionally, he went to work. Through the haze of pain and confusion of impact, Doyle realized that he was getting a scientific head beating. No blow was enough to destroy consciousness. And, in between the rhythms of the blows on his skull, Capp was taking practiced strokes at shins and thighs, forearms and biceps, hips and calves. And, in one area of cold and special horror, Doyle realized that the man was crooning softly along with his grunts of exertion. “Now… a little of this… and some more… of that. And a touch here… and here.”

  He was only partially aware of it when Capp straightened him up and belted him across the belly and rib cage. He swung one almost gentle blow into the groin, and Doyle heard his own hoarse yell, coming from an echoing, metallic distance. He doubled, took a harder blow than any of the others, directly over the ear, and tumbled forward, sensing the impact of hitting the floor, but feeling no pain from it. He lay on his side, knees against his chest, in a welcome silence.

  With his eyes half open he could see the shiny black boots six inches from his face. Capp was somewhere above him, a thousand feet tall, talking to him in a remote voice.

  “… have the miz’ries for a couple days, Doyle. But you’ll keep thinking on this long after you’re walking real good. And you’ll be nice and tame. On account of you know you make any trouble for Donnie Capp and he’ll come back and we’ll try it again, with a lot of different tricks I didn’t even use. And we’ll keep practicin’ on it ’til we get it down perfect enough for television. Why, there’s niggers I ain’t laid this stick on in years, and all I got to do is show it to them and they turn white as a piece of soap. I want every time you think of Donnie Capp, you get sweaty. Then you’ll be real good and safe to be around decent folk.”

  He saw the boots turn, and he heard the footsteps as Donnie went through the cottage. He heard the screen door slap shut, and then a car door, and then the explosive roar of a powerful motor. The motor sound died away.

  He sobbed once, more in shame and anger than in pain. After a long time he began to slowly uncoil, straightening his body an inch at a time, enduring the agony. He rolled over onto his face, worked himself up onto his elbows and was wrenchingly ill. And then, like a half-trampled bug, he crawled a hundred miles to his bed. When he had rested long enough, he could pull himself up onto his knees and from that position squirm onto the bed. The effort exhausted him. There was a roaring in his ears. He turned and groaned and at last found the least agonizing position. And knew he could not sleep. And slid away then, sweaty, into sleep…

  A moist and wonderful coolness on his forehead awakened him to a world where the face of Betty Larkin was close to his, vast and out of focus, her mouth angry and her eyes concerned as she held the cold cloth against his forehead. He became aware that it was a late afternoon world of slanting sun, and aware that his body was one vast throbbing, shimmering pain.

  “I didn’t get the license number,” he said in a low and rusty voice.

  “Do you feel awful?”

  “I’ve never felt worse. Nobody has ever felt worse.”

  “I phoned Gil Kearnie to come out here too, and he ought to be along soon. Dr. Kearnie. He’s new here and very good.”

  “How did you know about this?”

  “I heard Donnie Capp talking to Buddy near the office. I just caught a few words and Donnie was talking about something he’d done to you. I know Donnie, so I went out and demanded to know. He said it wasn’t any business of a nice girl like me, but he had heard you had come back so he’d come out here and got you quieted down. I said I didn’t know you were excited. Then Buddy laughed at me and said that Donnie had just given you a little taste of the Ramona massage. So I called Donnie a dirty, sadistic little monster and I drove right out here. You didn’t answer so I came in. And you looked so terrible, I hurried back and phoned Gil and came back here. He should be here any minute. I could kill Buddy for acting like he thought it was funny for Donnie to come here and hit you.”

  “It’s an old southren custom, Miss Betty. Head beating. I can be thankful it was by an expert. It’s the amateurs who kill you.”

  When Dr. Kearnie arrived, Betty let him in and went out into the other room while Dr. Kearnie examined him. Except for the mustache and the tired wise look around his eyes, Kearnie looked eighteen.

  After poking and prodding, Kearnie dressed the two places on Alex’s skull and the one place on his left shin where the club had split the skin.

  “He didn’t hit you across the kidneys?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Good. That will save you a lot of pain. And that’s dangerous. In some cases he’s done some permanent damage.”

  “You’ve treated other… victims, Doctor?”

  “A few. He’s an expert. He’s had years of practice, and he enjoys his work. I don’t think there’s any need of X-ray in your case. The ribs feel firm. If there’s continuing pain, come on in to the office. You’re in good shape, Mr. Doyle. If you have to take a beating, it helps to be in condition.
I’ll leave you something for pain. You’ll feel a hundred years old tomorrow. My advice is force yourself to move around. Get out in the sun. Swim. Bake it out.”

  “And forget it?”

  Kearnie raised one eyebrow. “That wouldn’t come under the heading of medical advice. But I don’t believe it would be… practical to try to do anything about it. Not without several witnesses who can be kept beyond the reach of the deputy and his club. He’s a psychopathic personality.”

  “How about the bill?”

  “Drop in at the office. The nurse will have it. Take one of these every four hours. Two, if the pain is severe.” He snapped his bag shut and stood up and for a moment ceased to be the formal and professional young doctor. “The psychological effects of a beating are interesting, Mr. Doyle. The standard result is a great big desire to keep your head down so it won’t be whipped again.”

  “I think that’s what he had in mind. Then I’m an exception.”

  “What’s your reaction?”

  “I’m going to fix his wagon, Doctor. I don’t know how. I just want him one time, without that gun and club.”

  “I hope you get him. It would be a pleasure to have to patch him up.”

  After Kearnie left, Betty came back in and said, “Isn’t he a lamb?”

  “A nice little guy.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I’d like some water so I can take one of those things he left, because I am hurting slightly fierce. And then if I can lean on you, I’d like to make it to the plumbing section. When I’m back in bed you can take off.”

  “No food?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And I think you will.” She got water and he took the pill. He got his legs over the side of the bed and she pulled him to his feet with slow and gentle strength. He got his left arm around her shoulders. His arm felt like a big sausage roll full of putty. She put her brown right arm around his waist. She walked him slowly to the bathroom, helped him in, closed the door on him. When he came out he opened the door himself and took two teetering steps before she could hurry to him to support him. She told him he was the color of a sheet of paper, and helped him into bed. She brought his cigarettes, found more pillows and propped him up. He sat and smoked and inventoried his bruised areas, and listened with a certain domestic pleasure to the busy sounds she was making in the kitchen.