John D McDonald – Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber

With a satisfying weight and bulk inside my shirt and with tire iron in hand, I went out the way I had come in.

Just as I touched the gate latch, I heard a single crunch of a step on the brown pebbles behind me, and as I tried to spin, hard metal hit me briskly and solidly over the right ear. It wasn’t meant to knock me down. It was perfectly gauged to do exactly what it did. With the echoes of the first red and white explosion going off in my head, I staggered back against the gate. The tire iron clanked onto the pebbles. That kind of blow on the skull creates a wave of nausea in the back of the throat, clogging and receding, coming back in diminishing force several times as vision clears.

In the increasing light I saw that Shovel Jaw looked better in his flyboy sun glasses. His eyes were small, inflamed, perhaps by his days on the beach, and his lashes were stubby, sparse and pale. They had the look you see in elephant eyes, a dulled and tricky savagery. He stood at a professional distance and held one of the most reliable and deadly of handguns aimed casually at my chest, dead center, a heavy Luger. I could see how neatly he had taken me. He had been tucked behind the plantings just to the right of the gate, perfectly content to wait there, knowing it was the only way out.

He hooked a toe under the tire iron, flipped it far to the side. “You keep getting the wrong key, buds.”

“You keep pretty good track of this place.”

“I run the wire from a little Jap intercom through the wall, set it on dictate at full volume, the other half of it next to my bed. I get a week off one of those little nine-volt batteries. You came through loud and clear. I was expecting somebody. Not you. Somebody I know better. Turn real slow. All the way around. That’s nice. Hands flat against the gate. Keep them there. Walk your feet back toward me. A little more. Little more. Fine.”

Even then he was careful. Long reach. Quick little taps with the fingertips. Fortunately he tapped the money bulge before he made any further investigation of the slight bulk in the right-hand pocket of my slacks. And it is such an unlikely weapon carried in such an improbable place, it will even get past most hasty police searches.

“Now keep yourself braced just like that with your left arm, and reach down and unbutton the shirt and shake that stuff out of there, buds.”

The four packets fell. He tapped the shirt again at the waistline to be certain. Then he had me shuffle several feet to the side, maintaining the same helpless posture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him squat, gather up the packets, the gun now in his left hand. They went into the front of his shirt.

He straightened up. “Where the hell was it?”

“In the ceiling, up underneath the big light fixture over the sink.”

“Fifty hours I spent in there. So the bitch told you.”

“Or maybe I’m not as stupid as you are, Griff.”

“I don’t make that kind of mistake, like letting you get me sore. I take it very calm, buds. I don’t care who you are. I don’t have to know who you are, or who told you what. All I have to do is keep my mind on this play until it’s over. What you do now is open the gate very slowly, and you open it wide. And you walk slowly down the drive the way you came, with me behind you. And then you go around your car and you get in on the passenger side, and very slowly you ease yourself over behind the wheel. Let’s go. There’s a busted door, a tire iron. I try to fire a warning shot and it gets you in the spine. It’s no sweat to me to testify, buds. Remember that. I’m clean as Girl Scouts m the area.”

Never get cute with the competent ones. Amateurs with guns in their hands are dangerous, but there is almost always a delay before they can bring themselves to actually fire at a human being. The competent ones are not hesitant.

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