MacDonald, John D – Travis McGee 18 – The Green Ripper

I sat at the little pull-down writing desk again, and I wrote a letter to Meyer:

I will take this up to the office and give it to Linda and tell her to hold it a few days and then give it to you. By then I will have added the keys to this boat, and to the Munequita and to the car. I will have emptied out the perishables and turned off the compressors and arranged for disconnect on the phone. I am enclosing five hundred in cash I better make that eight hundred to take care of expenses around here. I will have put the phone on temporary disconnect and arranged for my mail to come to you. Today is December 18th. If I am going to be able to make it back here, I will get word to you somehow on or before June 18th. If you don’t hear by then, everything here belongs to you. Franlc Payne has a will on file to that effect, witnessed and all. I don’t really know what is mak

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John. MacDonald ing me act the way I am acting.. You would know more about that than I, probably. I have this very strong feeling that I am never coming back here, that this part of my life is ending, or that all of my life is ending. I have been bad company a lot of the time the past few years, going sour somehow. Gretel was the cure for that. I came back to life, but not for long. And this is what the stock market guys call a lower low. I just feel futile and ridiculous. You are the best friend I have ever had. Take care of yourself. Make a point of *. If I don’t come back, what you should do is move aboard the Flush, peddle your crock boat and the Munequita and the Rolls, and throw a party they will never never forget around here.

I put it in a heavy brown envelope and left it unsealed. It was dark. I tools a walk around my weather decks. The night smelled like diesel fuel. A nearby drunk was singing “Jingle Bells,” never getting past the sleigh, starting again and again and again. The boulevard hummed and rustled with cars, and there was no sound at all from the sea. A woman laughed, a jet went over, and I went back inside. Somebody working his way into his slip

The Green Ripper made a small wake, and the Flush shifted, sighed, and settled back into stillness.

On the following Saturday morning I found the same man at the Petaluma cemetery, the one Gretel and I had dealt with when we had flown out with John Tuckerman’s ashes. He was cultivating and reseeding two parallel curving scars in the soft green turf. He was a broad muscular old man with a bald head and thick black eyebrows. He wore sneakers and crisp khakis. He dropped the tool, dusted his hands, and tilted his head to one side as he looked up at me.

‘weren’t you here way last spring? With the Tuckerman girl?”

“With Gretel Howard. Her married name.”

“What you got there?”

‘QVell… she died. Gretel died. This is her ashes.”

He mopped his face and turned slightly away and looked upward into a tree. He sighed. “Sorry to hear it. Even if it was a sad time for her, bringing her brother’s ashes here, it wasn’t hard to see you and she were real close, real happy with each other.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones.”

“Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure.”

“I tell people it’s the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel’s folks, they died premature, but it wasn’t sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-ass question. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

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