Where Is Janice Gantry? by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

device. He was just outside the brightness that streamed out of the drugstore, yet he looked as if he might be waiting for someone to come out.
    I had gotten back behind the wheel. I could see him through the windows of the car next to mine, a spare shadowy figure in the humid night.
    Now what? I asked myself. Sam Brice, public eye. On any T.V. show they would have cast me as the heavy. Maybe at twenty-nine, moving too fast toward thirty, I would still have been acceptable for the rugged hero part had I not spent eleven seasons in football. Four in junior high and Florence City High, as All-State fullback. Four in the semi-pro brand of college ball played in Georgia, as defensive linebacker and defensive end. Three seasons—
almost
three seasons—in the National Football League as a two hundred fifteen-pound offensive tackle, a little bit light for that job of work, but compensating with quickness and balance.
    Take those eleven years of eating cleats and spitting blood and being bounced off the frozen turf, and add the unavoidable social fist fights, and you have a face to loan bill collectors. Store teeth, a crooked jaw, a potato nose, miscellaneous scars and lumps and the tracery of long ago clamps and stitches.
    It is, as they keep saying, a sport involving body contact. If I was casting the T.V. series, I would put myself in as the big dumb ugly assistant to the brilliant hero, the comedy relief who bungles the simplest orders, but comes through with the muscle in the clutch. The weight is still at two hundred fifteen, but it requires work and thought to keep it there, and I often wonder why I bother. An automatic reflex in the pride department, perhaps.
    The long minutes went by. Kids came out of the drugstore and drove away. Replacements arrived.
    Finally a curious thing happened. The stodgy little black Renault turned in and went chugging across the great expanse of empty parking area. It gave one irritable bleat of the horn. Charlie was already on his way toward it. It had stopped thirty feet from the phone booth.
    I didn’t begin to actually believe it until he had gotten into the little car and it had started up again. She had bought itway back when we had been together. She had driven out to the cottage with it many many times.
    I wanted to know what right Charlie had to bring Sis Gantry into the picture. I didn’t have to ask myself why she’d let herself be sucked in. Anything with a broken wing would get her immediate attention.
    Suddenly I knew it was my fault. I had told Charlie of her blind belief in his innocence. He had needed someone for some service I either couldn’t handle, or he had decided I wouldn’t handle. He had been sorting over the people he knew, wondering who to ask. And I had handed him Sis on a platter.
    “Goddamn you, Charlie Haywood,” I muttered, and swung around into amateur pursuit. The streets of Florence City are too empty on any given night in August. I knew Charlie would be alert for any sign of a car following them. And I knew both of them would know my wagon, Sis particularly.
    It helped a great deal to have them head directly for the causeway and City Bridge. Horseshoe Key is five miles long and in all its length it is seldom over a quarter-mile wide. Orange Road is the paved road that extends the full length of the Key. The commercial strip takes up most of a mile, right in the middle of the Key opposite the bridge and including the Orange Beach section. If you turn right when you get onto the Key, you head north through the junkier part of the commercial section, and then through an area of cottages and beach houses set too close together, until the road ends at the North Pass Public Beach. If you turn south you pass stores, bars, restaurants, and than a batch of pretentious motels with pretentious names, and suddenly you are in the land of the Large Money, the big homes you can’t see from the road, and you can read all the neat signs that say No Stopping, No