The Damned by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

heels.”
    “Take him good?”
    She ran her tongue tip along her lower lip. “I’ve got about twelve hundred bucks’ worth of clothes stashed in that Cad, Benson.”
    “From me you won’t get twelve bucks’ worth of clothes.”
    “We won’t call that news, will we? You’re too smart to take.”
    “You got a place in San Antone?”
    “Such as it is, and it isn’t much.”
    “Well?”
    “Benson, maybe you move a little too fast, huh?”
    “Deal it this way. I spring for rent, food, and liquor. Can you cook in your place?”
    Her eyes turned wise. “You wouldn’t be trying to drop out of sight or anything? I mean if you’ve got trouble, don’t try to hand me any.”
    “I might have a little, but nothing I can hand you. You’d be clear all the way. This is Mex trouble. Across the line I’m fine. Only I might have to get across the hard way. You know Brownsville?”
    “Not too good.”
    “Two miles north of town on the main drag is a motel called El Rancho Grande. Maybe the old boy could drop you there. I won’t have a car.”
    “Then maybe we walk to San Antone?”
    “Maybe we do.”
    “I’ve been crazy all my life, so why change now?”
    He looked toward the river. Someone was rowing a boat across. Just one person in the boat. Bennicke cursed softly when he made out that it was the boy. He walked down the road with Betty Mooney and got to the bank as the boy pulled the boat up. The boy looked worried.
    He said, “Señor, the Dr. Reinares waits for a child to be brought to him. A snake has bitten the child and so he cannot leave. So he suggests that the señora be taken across in this boat and carried to him.”
    “Does he know it is a rich señora?”
    “I spoke of the Buick and of the gems in her rings, señor. He is a man who considers his duty, however.”
    “What’s he saying?” Betty demanded. Del Bennicke told her.
    She stared at the filthy boat, at the fish scales, at the floor boards awash. “She can’t ride in that, Benson.”
    Bennicke heard a shout from the far side of the river. The ferry had at last unloaded. A passenger car and a pickup truck crawled up the planks and were blocked on deck. The ferry began to move toward them.
    “So maybe we get her into a car and take the head of the line,” Bennicke said softly.
    Betty looked at the waiting cars. “That,” she said, “is going to be a good trick.”

 
Chapter Four
     
    BILL DANTON sat on his heels, sombrero pushed back off his forehead, tiny end of cheap Mexican cigarette pinched carefully between thumb and forefinger. In threadbare khaki work pants and T shirt with a rip in the shoulder, thonged sandals on brown bare feet, he looked no different than the Mexican farm workers he was chatting with. He and his father owned and ran, as partners, a big place near Mante. Cotton and rice. Work on the place had baked him dark. When he stood up, however, there was a rawboned Texan looseness about his big frame that differentiated him from the others.
    They sat near the river bank and he had taken a quiet amusement from the turista comments on Mexicans in general. He knew that none of them had picked him out as being as much Texan as Mexican. His pickup truck was the second vehicle in line. He had been on his way from Mante to Houston, accompanied by Pepe Hernández, his good friend, to pick up farm-equipment parts from the wholesaler.
    When he thought of it at all, which was seldom, Bill Danton sometimes wondered that one person could be, so completely, two people. Dad was responsible for that. Bill’s mother had died a year after he was born. At that time Dad had a place in the valley. Mostly citrus, and some land in vegetables. And the house had needed a woman in it, mostly to take care of the little guy. So Dad had hired a slim, timid, wide-eyed Mexican gal named Rosa. Bill guessed that, at that stage, Dad had most of the usual valley prejudice. You used wetback labor when you could get it. It was cheap labor and it made