The Shark-Infested Custard by Charles Willeford

Author:Charles Willeford [Willeford, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780307490858
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1993-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

19

On the ground floor, panting, I leaned with both hands against a concrete post and vomited a thin stream of sour bile. My stomach convulsed a few more times, but by breathing heavily through my mouth, I managed to regain control of my body and check my desire for further flight. My shirt was soaked through, and my seersucker suit jacket was damp beneath the arms. I removed my jacket, and wiped my streaming eyes and face with my shirt sleeve.

I had left my car key, on the ring with all of my other keys, in the car door. Cars raced noisily into the parking garage seeking, but not finding, a space on the first floor before they took the ramp on up to the second or the third or fourth. Because I could ride the elevator, I never wasted my time looking for a space on the bottom floor when I came to the airport. I drove to the top floor immediately, where there were almost always empty spaces. I tried to remember what the makes of the other cars up there were, but I couldn’t. I also wondered if Mr. Wright was on the top floor, lurking madly about to exult over the explosion. I also wondered what the time was on the alarm clock attached to the dynamite in my back seat.

I looked at my watch. It was eight-twenty-two. If Wright had a sense of order, he would set the explosion for eight-thirty or nine p.m.—if he had a sense of order. A man crazy enough to put dynamite in another man’s car was unlikely to have a sense of anything. My mind wasn’t functioning too well either, or I wouldn’t have taken a chance. But I took the chance, hoping, as I rode the elevator to the top floor that I would encounter Mr. Wright. If I did, I would disarm him, feed him his pistol, and then throw the sonofabitch over the rail from the fourth floor and watch him splatter when he hit the asphalt below.

I approached my car. The door was still hanging open. I retrieved my keys, glanced into the back seat, and noticed that the red paper on one of the sticks of dynamite was loose and flapping. I looked a little closer. The exposed end of the dynamite stick resembled a piece of sawed wood. I folded the driver’s seat down over the wheel, and gingerly fingered the tissue paper, unfolding it back a little more. It was merely red tissue paper wrapped loosely around a short length of broomstick. So were the other two “sticks.” The wires attached to the alarm clock didn’t do anything either. There was no battery, and there were no dynamite caps in the three sticks of wood. The bomb was a fake. I threw the wrapped wooden sticks and the alarm clock on the concrete floor and got into the car.

I opened the glove compartment and discovered that my .38 pistol was missing.

There was no way, that I could figure, for Mr.

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