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

because he could not use the carbine from the saddle sheath with those eyes looking at him and at the gun. He placed the slug perfectly, walking through a swimming landscape and was cried out before he got back to get the hands and the jeep with the dozer blade and the shovels and go back and bury Moon Lad before the
zopilotes
got to him.
    Two weeks later, he lost the first set, but took the second and third to eliminate Rooster Hines and thus get into the finals of the tennis championship, where he would face Bill Cupp, whom he knew he could take readily. He showered and joined the group of his friends at the pool and got into a spirited game of tag. Avoiding a tag he had run and taken a flat racing dive into the pool, only to have the hefty Indrigan girl surface directly in front of him. He had put his hands palm outward, hit her massive shoulder, felt the pain like hot knives in his right wrist, and knew even as he sat on the pool apron and saw the puffing begin that Bill Cupp had the trophy by default.
    And the following week the parents who would have applauded and celebrated victory were both dead.
    There was a kind of infection about disasters, both large and small. They were linked somehow. Most importantly, they did not strike with total randomness. It had been careless to run Moon Lad across that kind of country. It had been foolish to play the tag game when the pool was that crowded. Ask for two, and they give you the third free.
    He knew that it was not logical, and knew that superstition was a weakness. But long ago, after the world had gone wrong, he had vowed he would tighten down, that he would not let any first wedgebe driven in, and if there was a small disaster not of his making, then he would be double careful to keep chance at arm’s length long enough for the infection to heal itself.
    But now he could sense a new darkness. Lyd’s voluntary defection was a disaster which was making his days ever more bleak. The idiocy with the car was another disaster trying to happen. And it had some tenuous link with Leila, with Bix, with the Muñeca.
    He hunched his shoulders slightly and turned away from the window. He was a slender man of middle height, sandy hair, gray eyes, a face just round enough to give him a deceptive boyishness. He was slight enough so that in repose, had he not had the weathered pigmentation of the range lands, the sun-squint furrows near his eyes, he might have had a somewhat frail look. But in all movement he had a wiry precision, a taut and springy economy and swiftness of those with the inherited musculature and reflexes of the athlete. This was his vanity, its outward expression the excellent fit of custom shirts, tailored business suits, and the expensive informal clothes and sports clothes.
    He sat and stared at the phone and reviewed all the hints and rumors of Bix’s activities he could remember hearing during the past months. He narrowed the possible sources of information down to the two most likely—old Judge Billy Alwerd down in Brownsville, and big Tom Dorra who owned all those groves and had his home place over near McAllen. He knew that they had hitchhiked in a small way on some of Kayd’s previous operations, and he knew they had been seen together before the Muñeca had embarked from Brownsville for the trip up around the Gulf Coast and down around the Florida keys.
    He picked up the phone before it completed the first ring. Person to person to Mr. Samuel Boylston.
    “This is Jonathan, sir. Is Leila okay?”
    “I probably don’t know any more than you do. Just what’s on the news.”
    “I began to worry before there was anything on the news. You see, sir, yesterday was my birthday. She was going to phone me. You know how she is. She wouldn’t forget. And she’d make a real effort.”
    “I know.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I guess the only thing we can do is wait.”
    “I think, sir—I’ll go over there.”
    “What can you do that isn’t being