The giant thought a moment. “Ten years maybe. Twenty at the outside. I haven’t personally killed anybody.”
“Going to start now?” Dan asked.
Big Jim glanced down at the gun. “Possibly. You meant to get me, didn’t you?”
Dan shook his head. “Not that way. I meant to make sure you weren’t armed, then finish the slugging match we started in my hotel room.”
Big Jim examined him curiously. “You’re a persistent guy, Dan. You’ve tried to take me at least ten times since the first time I beat hell out of you twenty-five years ago. And all it ever got you was more bumps.” Stepping behind his desk, Big Jim dropped the gun in a drawer, locked it and put the key in his pocket.
“All right, sucker,” he said, grinning at Dan. “Come get your bumps.”
During the short part of a minute between Dan’s last remark to the bartender and the actual arrival of the state police, the bartender took off like a jet-propelled plane, leaving Stub still unconscious. Consequently when the troopers arrived, trailed by Adrian Fact and Adele Hudson, they found no one to explain the combination of the knob-less door next to the bar. A husky trooper was just preparing to solve the combination with an axe, when the door opened from inside and Dan Fancy staggered out.
Dan’s coat was gone and the whole left side of his shirt hung from his belt in shreds, exposing half his hairy chest and one naked arm. One of his trouser legs was ripped from cuff to hip, and flopped open to disclose blood welling from a perfect set of teeth marks in the fleshy part of his calf. His left eye was tightly closed and the other was slowly swelling shut. Blood from both nostrils dribbled across his mouth and seeped from the end of his chin.
Supporting himself with one hand against the door jamb, he focused his remaining eye blearily on Adrian Fact and opened the other hand to exhibit a large yellow molar, obviously not his own.
“I finally grew up to the big bum,” he said in groggy triumph.
Then he pitched forward on his face...
Martin Robinson stood stiff and straight as his son approached the group waiting for him at the prison gate, but something yearning in the old man’s expression told Dan he would bow right down to the ground for a smile from his son.
Eugene Robinson glanced without interest at Adrian Fact, swept his gaze curiously over Dan Fancy’s bruised features, then flashed his dazzling smile as he took both Adele Hudson’s hands and gave them a light squeeze. Apparently he considered it too public a place to exhibit more affection.
Last of all the young man turned to his father. “Hello, Dad,” he said tonelessly.
The old man winced. “Are you ready to come home now Gene?” he asked.
In a careless tone Gene said, “I rather thought I’d get married instead.”
Martin Robinson smiled eagerly. “Your wife will always be as welcome as you are, son.”
Watching, Dan Fancy’s stomach sickened in sympathy for the lonely old man. He turned to Adrian Fact.
“Mr. Robinson’s check clear through yet, Ade?”
The little man glanced at him in surprise and nodded. Dan directed his next question to Adele Hudson.
“You don’t think it would be unfair to take advantage of a young man who wasn’t in death row, do you, Adele?”
Puzzled, she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Just this.”
Raising one large palm, he covered the face of Eugene Robinson with it and pushed. The young man staggered backward, tripped over a hedge and sat in the dust with a thump. Swinging Adele up in his arms like a baby, Dan strode toward the taxi which had brought him and Adrian to the prison.
“What I want with a woman stupid enough to fall for a twerp like that is beyond me,” he growled. “But maybe eventually I can train some sense into your head.”
He stopped to begin the training.
“Dan!” she squealed. “Kissing in public! What will Eugene think?”
Houseboat
Originally published (originally appeared in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, April 1966.
Mike Faraday sensed something wrong about the two men shortly after they came aboard the houseboat. They were too well dressed for vacationing fishermen, a little too suave and their English too precise. They simply didn’t behave as New England businessmen. They impressed him as Europeans who had learned English somewhere, such as Harvard or Yale.
Mike Faraday didn’t look like a professor of theoretical mathematics. He was only thirty-two years old, wore a crew cut which made him look about twenty-five, and had the build of an Olympic swimmer. He had spent most of his life on the Mississippi, and was at home in the water as he was on land.
His wife Ellen, five years younger, had a swimmer’s body too, though hers was less muscular and more softly curved. She too had grown up on the river and knew it as well as he did.
They met the two strangers on the river bank near Vicksburg, where they had anchored the houseboat overnight in a small cove. The men were standing on the bank, casting with bass plugs, when Faraday came on deck shortly after sunup.
He wondered what in the devil they expected to catch in the Mississippi with plugs, especially so close to shore. There wouldn’t be anything but mudcat here, and they didn’t hit plugs.
Both men were dressed in well-pressed slacks, shined shoes, light cotton jackets over white sport shirts and Panama hats. Their fiberglass rods looked brand new and there were identical, shiny new tackle boxes at the feet of each.
Faraday threw them a friendly greeting and both men raised their hands in polite acknowledgment.
After breakfast Faraday planned to replenish their drinking water supply at a yacht club they had spotted the evening before about a hundred yards back up the river. He pushed the board they used as a gangplank over the river bank, which was only about six feet away. The two men reeled in their plugs, picked up their tackle boxes and came over nearer to examine the houseboat.
The taller of the two, a lean six-footer of about forty with a thin, sharp-nosed face, said, “That is an interesting boat. Where are you going?”
“New Orleans,” Faraday said. “We started from St. Louis.”
The other man, a bulky, wide-shouldered fellow of about thirty-five with a square, expressionless face, looked at the outboard motor on the stern. “That engine hardly looks powerful enough to push a boat that size.”
“Oh, we only use it for steering,” Faraday said. “We just drift with the current until we’re ready to anchor at night. The current’s only four miles an hour, so we only make about fifty miles a day, but we’re in no hurry. It’s just a leisurely fishing trip.”
“How are you going to get it back upstream?” the thin-faced man asked.
“That’s not our problem,” Faraday said with a grin. “It’s rented. The outfit that owns it will have it towed back to St. Louis at the end of the voyage.”
The two men looked at each other. The taller said, “Now there is what we should have done, Martin. Would not something like this make a wonderful vacation?”
The bulky man nodded. “What is the name of the company which rents these boats?”
“Callaway Houseboat Rentals in St. Louis. You can rent them for as short or long a trip as you wish. They charge fifty cents a mile, which works out to four hundred dollars in our case. That isn’t bad when you consider that it costs that much to rent a beach cottage for a couple of weeks.”
Both men looked the boat over with growing interest. Finally the taller said, “Mind if we come aboard to see it?”