Never Live Twice by Dan Marlowe

Author:Dan Marlowe [Marlowe, Dan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4119-3
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 1990-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter viii

I STOPPED IN AT A BAR and had a couple of drinks The first pair seemed to do so much for me I had two more. Over these, I sat and did some thinking about Ted Blaine, from the moment he’d forced the car door open under water in the canal, right up to the present. None of the thinking changed my mind at all about what I was going to tell Paul Carpenter.

At ten o’clock I was parked on the shoulder of the road in front of the intersection of Ramsay Road and Courtenay Street. I’d only been there five minutes when the single-tail-lighted automobile appeared. It did a slow left turn in the intersection and swung left on Courtenay, west, away from town. I pulled in behind it. We noodled along at about thirty-five for twenty minutes, with houses getting scarcer and the country growing up around us. Then the taillight turned sharp right, onto a narrow road with a canal on either side and barely room enough to pass an oncoming car. Ten minutes of that and the taillight went out suddenly. The car shot ahead down the road, out of sight. I eased over to the side and stopped, killed the motor, and lighted a cigarette.

While I was waiting, I unscrewed the under-the-dashboard ‘bulb that goes on when a car door opens. I had already made up my mind not to tell Carpenter about the blackmailer. Until I found out why I was paying off, I wasn’t telling anyone. And maybe not then. I could think of at least one reason whose shape and dimension I didn’t like.

I had time to smoke the cigarette and another before anything happened. I knew Carpenter was making sure I hadn’t been followed. I didn’t see where he came from when he showed; the door opened on the passenger’s side, and there he was. He slid into the seat, closed the door, took a light from my cigarette for his own, and waited for me to speak. It was dark in the car, but I could make out the outline of his features.

“Mackey tried to kill me this morning,” I began. I told him how. “The big bastard was standing beside me waiting to catch half my head on the fly when the boom split it,” I concluded.

The tip of Carpenter’s cigarette glowed a deeper red as he drew on it. “So?” he inquired.

“So bag up your own walnuts around here. I’m through.”

His exhalation was almost a snort. “What happened to all that chutzpah I had to listen to in that hotel room in Jacksonville? You sound different now.”

“And the sound you’re hearing now is the official sound, my friend.”

“You’ve been drinking,” he said accusingly.

In the close confines of the car he could smell the four drinks on me. “You expected something different?”

He gestured impatiently. “You’re really crapping out?”

“I am.”

“But why? Why, for God’s sake? What’s different now? You knew this was no high tea when you came down here.

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