Pale Gray for Guilt by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

lumpy road. I walked around to where Puss still sat on the sawhorse. She looked up at me.
    With a small frown she said, "My heart bled for you the way you went reeling around in shock, McGee. You really took it hard. Your dear old buddy has gone to the big marina in the sky. The hard way. Came to get your bilge pump! God's sake, Travis!"
    I sat on my heels and squinted up at her. Dark red hair and disapproval, outlined against a blue December sky.
    "Win a few, lose a few, honey," I said.
    "What are you?" she asked.
    I stood up and put my hands on her upper arms, near the shoulders and plucked her up off the saw horse and held her. Maybe I was smiling at her. I wouldn't know. What I was saying seemed to come from a strange direction, as if I were standing several feet behind myself. I said some nonsense about smelling these things out, about sensing the quickest way to open people up, and so you do it, because if you don't, then maybe you miss one little piece of something you should know, and then you go join the long long line of the dead ones, because you were careless.
    "And," I heard myself say, "Tush killed himself but not with that damned engine block. He killed himself with something he said, or something he did, and he didn't know he was killing himself. Maybe he didn't listen very good, or catch on soon enough. I listen very good. I catch on. And when I add up this tab and name the price, I'm going to look at some nice gray skin, honey. Gray and pale, oily and guilty as hell, and some eyes shifting around looking for some way out of it. But every damned door will be nailed shut."
    I came out of it and realized she was making little hiccupy sobs and looking down and to the side, and her cheeks were wet, and she was saying, "Please, please."
    I released her and turned on my heel and walked away from her. I went a little way up the road. I leaned against the trunk of an Australian pine and emptied my lungs a few times. A jay yammered at me. There were tree toads in a swamp somewhere nearby. Puss came walking very slowly up the road. She came over to me and with a quick, shy smile leaned her face into my neck and chest.
    "Sorry" she whispered.
    "For nothing?"
    She exhaled. "I don't know. I asked you what you were. Maybe I found out, sort of."
    "Whatever it is, I don't let it show, Puss. Ten more minutes and I would have been kindly Trav forevermore."
    She pushed herself a few inches away and looked up at me. "Just smile with your eyes like kindly ol' McGee, dear, to kind of erase that other… that other look."
    "Was it that bad?"
    "They could bottle it and use it to poison pit vipers."
    "Okay now?"
    She nodded. "Sure." Her eyes were a sherry brown, almost a tan, and in that good light under the tree I could see the area right around the pupil, a corona of green. "He was a special guy?"
    "He was that."
    "But can't even a special guy… give up?"
    "Maybe, but if that one ever had, it wouldn't have been like that."
    We walked back toward the dead marina, my arm around her strong waist. "Call it enemy country," I explained. "He's dead, and it solves some problems for some people. And they'll want to forget all about it as fast as they can, and they won't know anything about anything."
    I got the camera off the boat, a battered old Retina C-III, and put in a roll of Plus X. I hand-cranked the block as high as it would go before it wedged against the tripod poles. I got wire and pliers out of the toolbox aboard, fastened wire to the ratchet stop. I took pictures as I went along. When I yanked the wire, the great weight came down to thud against the hard dirt with a shock I could feel in the soles of my feet, while the drum clattered and the cable rasped through the rusty pulley. I craned it up and left it the way it had been.
    She watched, and had the grace not to ask why. I didn't rinse my hands in the river. I waited until we were well out into the bay.
    Then I put it at dead slow, right at 700 rpm, and told her to head down