Murder in the Wind by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

ever try to hide it from you he’s one of old Stitch Flagan’s ragged-ass kids. That’s Stitch that come down here from Georgia forty years ago and went broke in celery and finally ended up as a commercial fisherman and went night netting in the Gulf after mackerel thirty years back and drownded out there, him and two of his boys, Johnny’s brothers they were. Johnny would have been along and drownded too, except he was hot after some gal down in Osprey and run out and his old man couldn’t find him and took off without him. Johnny must have been twenty-two or so about that time. Husky kid and real woman crazy. Funny thing, it was after Stitch and the two boys drownded that Johnny began to take sort of an interest in money. He begun to go after it the way he’d been going after every piece of pussy from Arcadia to Punta Gorda.
     
    Johnny Flagan blew the sandy stubble out of the razor, coiled the cord, put razor and cord in the plastic box and put the box in the toilet article case he used on trips. He checked the case to see that everything he needed was there, and carried the case into the bedroom and put it beside his suitcase. The air conditioner made a dissonant buzzing sound. Babe slept heavily under a single blanket. Johnny dressed quietly and quickly in a nylon shirt, figured red bow tie, cotton cord suit. When the suitcase was snapped shut he went over and sat on Babe’s bed, put his hand on the big warm mound of the blanketed hip and shook her gently.
    “Hey, honey!” he said softly. “Hey!”
    Babe came walrusing up out of sleep, circling her eyes around and then focusing them on him, frowning and saying, “Wass?”
    “No flights today. I’m starting earlier and taking the Cad.”
    “Huh? You be careful. Don’t you drive when you’re drinking.”
    “I’ll be careful. I’ll phone you when I know when I can get free. Okay?”
    “Be careful.”
    He kissed her and carried his suitcase to the bedroom door.
    “Johnny?”
    “Yes, honey.”
    “You going to give that Charlie a bad time?”
    “He’s got a bad time coming to him.”
    “You going to fire him?”
    “I don’t know yet.”
    “If you could just scare hell out of him it would be easier on me, knowing her and all.”
    “I’ll see,” he said. He shut the bedroom door behind him. The rest of the house was warmer—muggy and gray and cheerless. It was a big house with long stretches of terrazzo, glass jalousies, graceless furniture. Though they had lived in it several years, it had a flavor of transiency, an uncaring coldness.
    Ruth had cleared the newspapers off the dining room table, but she had known enough not to touch the business papers he had laid out and worked on the night before. His orange juice, in a tall glass, seemed the only bright spot of color in the long dim room. The morning paper lay beside his place. It was damp from the rain. He sat down and unfolded the paper and called out, “Ruth!”
    She pushed the swinging door open and came out of the kitchen immediately, carrying his plate in one hand, coffee pot in the other, as though she had been waiting there just beyond the door for his call. She was a slim woman, quite tall. She was in her late twenties and she was just a shade or two darker than some of Babe’s more heavily tanned friends. There was a look of austerity in her face, the sharp nose and thin lips not at all Negroid. In all the years she had worked for them, she had never looked directly at him. She walked with the contradiction of her nature clearly expressed—there for all to see. Cold face and rigid bearing, no sway or dip to her shoulders. Yet whenever she turned to walk away he would look automatically at the back of her, at the sway back and the strong outthrust hips and the swinging suggestive cadence.
    There had always been tension between them. Tension and a certain wary understanding.
    “Good morning,” she said, her voice crisp and cool.
    “‘Moanin’, Ruthie,” he said, reacting to her