The Last One Left by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

little more than that. I have some sources. I’ll nose around and see if I can get some kind of a hint about what kind of business he was combining with pleasure this time.”
    “Will you let me know? Off the record, of course.”
    “That’s going to depend on what it is.”
    After he hung up, Sam Boylston got up and walked over and stood with his hands shoved into his hip pockets, looking out the window wall, across at the empty asphalt acres of the Northway Shopping Plaza, and the new Valley Citizens Trust building beyond. He realized that he was staring at another byproduct of what Lyd called his compulsion to neaten up the world. With the increase in the size of their practice and the need for a larger staff and larger quarters, he and his partner, Taylor Worth, had started looking around.
    They had found Bern Wallader sitting on this big tract, planning an eventual shopping center, fretting over traffic counts, moving all too slowly and conservatively, and planning too small. At that time Sam had just become a director of Valley Citizens and had known of the bank’s need to find a new site. After a long talk with the bank president, and a confidential talk with the appropriate people in local government, and another with some people in Houston specializing in the planning and construction of suburban shopping complexes, he had boosted Bern Wallader into nervous and apprehensive action, finally getting him to move only by putting up collateral and signing notes in return for a piece of the action. Now in addition to twice the number of retail outlets Bern had thought feasible, there was the bank, the professional office building, and acres of new housing going on on the rearward land which Sam hadoptioned the day he began to believe Bern Wallader could be persuaded to begin taking risks.
    And it had started merely because they had needed more space and hadn’t been able to find anything suitable and had wondered if anyone would build to their requirements. It was a strange knack for commercial serendipity. Or perhaps, he thought, it was merely a trick of objectivity. You saw what was quite logical and necessary, and wondered why people dragged their feet, complained of digestive pains, worried about reducing their obligations before starting something new and, when they had something feasible, had this strange compulsion to dwarf their own concepts. With a geometrically increasing increment of nearly three hundred thousand new souls in the Republic each and every month, only the most visionary projects could hope to keep pace. Most minds were dim and dingy places, and most thinking a slow and muddied flow, full of unidentified emotional debris, obsolete concepts, frightened rites and superstitions.
    When things did not move, you checked until you found that point where the minimum leverage would create the maximum motion. It took time, certainly. And a cold and lasting attention to both the details and the total objective. You had to conceal your impatience with those associates who could not keep pace, and take practical advantage of those on the other side of the table with the same defects.
    And why should Lyd disapprove of that? Wasn’t it the essential stuff of survival? Did she want softness, apathy, amiable sloth?
    You had to hold on tight, or it could all go wrong. That was something Lydia Jean didn’t comprehend. He looked back across the years to the way it had all gone bad, so quickly. He had been taking Moon Lad, his big gray, across open country at a full run and the left foreleg had gone deep into the unseen hole, big bones cracking like a tree branch, and as he had rolled over and over across the turf he’dheard the strange, breathy screaming of the big, beloved horse. It kept trying to get up and could not, but stopped the terrible noise and lay watching him as if confident he could fix any bad thing. He had taken off his T shirt and fashioned a blindfold for the horse, patting him, talking to him,