The Neon Jungle by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: suspense
Publisher: Gold Medal
Published: 2012-07-04T11:00:39+00:00

Chapter Eleven.

THOMAS ARTHUR KARSHNER came up out of sleep, up out of dreams of thirty years ago. His bedroom glowed with the soft yellow of sun against the closed blinds, and he knew it was late. He lay quite still, retasting the vividness of the dream, knowing it would fade soon, wanting to hold it as long as he could. It was odd how, these past few years, the past was becoming more vivid. A sign of age, perhaps.

This dream had been of Caroline. Warm, young, alive, lovely. Not the thick fleshy body he had buried in ’34, but the younger Caroline of those years right after the war. In the dream she had been looking for something in that New York apartment where they had lived. He had been helping her look. Yet she wouldn’t tell him what it was they were searching for. Some precious thing that had been mislaid. The loss of it had frightened her in some obscure way.

The dream faded and the apartment was gone, and all Caroline’s warmth dwindled to those few photographs, quite faded, of a slim woman in awkward outdated clothes. He lay and wondered what Caroline would think if she knew. How he would find the words to explain it to her, explain how it had come about.

You see, dear, it started in such a vague way. It wasn’t as though there was any signpost. He’d been pointed out to me. There can be a certain fascination in evil. That was back when they were nailing so many of them for income-tax evasion when they couldn’t get them on other counts, and it worried him. I didn’t know that, at the same time, I was being pointed out to him, pointed out as a man who could make arithmetic do sly tricks. It started as a small service I performed for him. It amused me to do it. It gave me, with my friends, an amusing notoriety. You see, Caroline, he is not the sort of man to leave you alone if you can perform a service he wishes to buy. His affairs, even then, were vastly complicated. He wished to use me for other small services, all legal, of course. Yet he had to know he could trust me. And he is a very uncomplicated man in personal relationships. A trustworthy person is a person who does not dare to hurt you. He framed me with the casual efficiency with which a riding master saddles a horse. I was restive under the bit, and he soothed me with what he called “a yearly retainer.” It soon became quite clear that he resented any work I did for others. My services for him became more and more extralegal, until at last the mere fact of having performed those services was as effective as the documentation of my private vices. For a long time I thought of myself as trapped. But I did not become truly trapped until I became aware of my comfort within the trap.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.