“I just can’t believe it, Howie!” she exulted. “It sounded so crazy, but you got away with it! How you got that notice into the paper I’ll never understand.”
“Simple,” he said complacently. “I just mailed the money and told them to run it on a certain date. I said you had no relatives here and as your employer I was taking care of things. Of course, honey, you realize that from now on Lotta Corey is dead. What did you say when you moved out of that rooming-house?”
“Like you told me, I told the landlady I was having trouble with my heart again — she knew about that time I thought it was a heart attack for sure, but it turned out to be only indigestion — so I was going back home for treatment by my doctor there.”
“Fine. And you haven’t lived here long enough to have made friends who’d be likely to investigate your disappearance. And now under the new name you can afford a decent apartment in another part of town, and things are going to be a lot easier for both of us.”
“I’ll say! And you’re really putting the whole $20,000 in my name?”
“Why not, sweetie? After all, you made that first call, finking on yourself! You’ve earned it.”
“In the office and out,” she smiled. “Oh, look, Howie, we forgot — it’s $19,000. You have to pay $1000, don’t you, to that unemployed actor who made the phone calls from your script?”
“Oh, yeah. He was pretty good, wasn’t he?”
“He worries me,” said Lotta, frowning. “What’s to keep him from talking?”
“Talking where? He must guess something, but suppose he goes to the fuzz. What can he do to me that wouldn’t involve him in a charge of extortion — to say nothing of agreeing to be a murderer?”
“Oh, I see, Howie. You’re so smart!”
Howard Renfrew looked at her meditatively. She was lots of fun, and without her he didn’t know how he could have endured his dreary marriage any longer. But $19,000 wasn’t going to last forever, and heaven knew how many years more he must wait and hope that Madge would die before him — she had ten years on him at least, in his opinion — and make him a millionaire.
Well, when he came to that bridge, he’d cross it. He’d think of something.
Lotta gazed equally meditatively back at him. $19,000 was a nice bit of money. But Howie really was going to seed, and a young pretty girl could do better than that for herself now that she had enough to buy new clothes and things. Set herself up without having to work, for one thing. Or maybe some day she could make a nice nest egg for herself by threatening to snitch. She hadn’t been involved in any plot. Well, time enough ahead to make plans about that.
She refilled their glasses.
No Time to Lose
by David Ely{©1971 by David Ely.}
You are probably familiar with David Ely’s work through his novels — TROT, SECONDS, THE TOUR, and POOR DEVILS. His short stories are often tales of horror and the macabre, of terror and gripping suspense, of irony and sardonic humor. Here is David Ely’s newest, and as you will discover, it projects, in a single short story, all these qualities…
He had heard rumors that such places existed, and he had assumed that the rumors were true, for experience had taught him that every human demand would somehow find a source of supply, no matter how difficult or outrageous the demand might be.
And yet he never would have imagined that he himself would be involved in it. He was badly frightened. He knew he might be making a terrible mistake, that he might be on his way to death, not life — and although he was not a religious man he moved his lips in prayer as he sat shivering and perspiring, and all the time he was aware of the dull erratic movements of his heart.
“How much longer?” he asked the driver.
“One more hour, Mr. Kipp.”
The car was moving at moderate speed, for the road was steep, narrow, and dangerously pitted. The moon cast a treacherous light; it made the landscape seem gentle. It wasn’t, though. Mr. Kipp knew that it was a harsh, rough devil of mountainous upcountry, scarred with deep ravines, its cliffs so baked by sun and scoured by cloudbursts that no living things could grow except for bitter grass and a few stunted scrubby trees. And, of course, the cactus — cactus everywhere, giant plants that seemed to leap up like sentinels as the headlights swept them.
Mr. Kipp shrank back in his seat. Those stiff vegetable figures with upraised arms might be warning him — go back, go back — and yet, ambiguously, they pointed to the heavens, which meant the freedom of eternity — and also death everlasting.
He sought to avoid such thoughts by conversing with the driver. “You must be used to this trip,” he said.
“I’ve done it before, Mr. Kipp.”
“But surely the bulk of your supplies and equipment can’t be brought in on a road like this.”
“It comes air freight,” the driver replied. He was a short swarthy man whose careful English betrayed only a slight accent. “There’s a little landing pad for helicopters, Mr. Kipp.”
“I see.”
Mr. Kipp reflected that it would have been far more comfortable for him to have come by helicopter, but he supposed that it would have been more difficult to keep his arrival secret that way. They had insisted on secrecy, and he had been so desperate, so driven by panic, that he had obeyed without question, even though his animal sense of security protested against being so completely cut off.
He had flown to Mexico City two weeks ago. Then, following the instructions given at every stage, he had traveled south from town to town, from one hotel to the next, establishing himself as a vacationing businessman with a leisurely interest in church architecture but with no particular schedule or itinerary, except that his course was south, always south.
And now he was far to the north. If something went wrong he could never be traced. The authorities, when finally notified by his family to search for him, would look fruitlessly in Oaxaca and Chiapas and perhaps as far as Yucatan, until, in time, he would be listed as missing, presumed dead. There would be nothing whatever to connect his disappearance with the private estate of Dr. Benavides in the rough wilderness of Durango, hundreds of miles to the north.
The car struck a pothole, swerved, and skidded to the edge of the road. Mr. Kipp moaned and clenched his fists, waiting for the fall — but the driver managed the skid quite nicely, and Mr. Kipp’s hands soon stopped trembling enough to open the little bottle he kept in his coat pocket. He took out a tranquillizer pill, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it, dry.
“Oh, God,” he prayed again, silently. “Pull me through this one, God.”
He thought of the ether and the knife, and he thought, too, of his heart, laboring fitfully, and in his anguish he cursed its weakness. How bitter it was to have struggled up in life as he had, to have overcome so many enemies and obstacles — and now, still youthful at the age of 50, to find that it could end forever for him at any moment.
“I’ll give you everything I’ve got, God,” prayed Mr. Kipp, as though the operation were to be performed by some priest or bishop, instead of by the cashiered Army surgeon, Benavides. “Everything, God. I swear it.” But Mr. Kipp, a creature of habit, sensed that he was making a sort of contract, the terms of which were perhaps unnecessarily generous, and so he amended it somewhat. “All I want is a little comfort, God. Maybe fifty thousand a year. The rest I don’t care about, God. I’ll give it to the church, to charities, whatever you want, God.”