Gulf Coast Girl by Charles Williams

drop. “Don’t go out of the house at night while I’m gone,” I said. “If you have to come downtown, do it during rush hours when there are lots of people on the streets.”
    “I’ll be all right,” she said.
    “If you see a car behind you on the way home, don’t worry about it. It’ll be mine.”
    I followed her out. It was an upper-bracket suburb out near the country club. She pulled into a drive and stopped under a Carport beside a two-storied Mediterranean house with a tile roof and ironwork balconies. I stopped at the curb, looking along the streets where the old, peaceful trees made shadowy patterns in the lights and all the lawns were sleek and well-kept. Violence? Here? Then I turned my head and stared at the house across the street. The windows were all dark. But they were in there, watching her as she got out of the car and fumbled in her bag for the key. She waved a white-gloved hand, and went inside.
    I went on, looking the place over. It was the second house from the corner. I turned at the intersection and drove slowly down the side street. There was an alley behind the house. A car was parked diagonally across the street from the mouth of it, in the shadows under the trees, and as I went past I saw a man’s elbow move slightly in the window. They had it covered front and back. There’d be one at the other end of the alley.
    All I had to do was get Macaulay out of there alive. And by that time they’d be after me, too.
    * * *
    I drove the car out on the pier and as I got out I thought of him down there somewhere below me in the impenetrable blackness of night and silt-laden water, and for a moment he wasn’t a vicious little hoodlum but just somebody who’d been alive a few hours ago looking at sunlight and feeling hungry and thinking about girls and inhaling smoke from a cigarette. I brushed it away savagely. There wasn’t any time for being morbid about a dead gangster. I’d be dead myself very shortly if I didn’t get out of there.
    I hurried down the ladder. The waterway was dark and still, like a jungle river, and it was hot in the thick clots of shadow below the side of the pier. When I opened the door and went inside the trapped air was stifling. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three.
    I went out in the galley and put some water on to heat in the big electric percolator, and then examined my face in the bathroom mirror. The puffy places were worse. That was all right, leaving here, because I wanted them to remember me, but I had to start work on them so they’d be gone by the time I returned. My stomach felt as if I’d been run over by a tank, but at least that wouldn’t show.
    While I was waiting for the water to heat I pulled the bag from under my bunk and began to pack. Carter was going to think I was a sad bastard, quitting with ten minutes’ notice, but if I wanted eulogies I could stick around and there’d be lots of them at the funeral. I shaved, and put the toilet gear in the bag. The clothes hanging in the bathroom were still wet. I rolled them in a newspaper and packed them anyway.
    The water was hot. I poured it into a pan and started a new batch heating. Sitting on the side of the bunk with the pan before me on a chair, I shoved the hand in and let it soak until it was, as red as fire coral while I squeezed out a cloth with the left and held it against the puffed places on my face. It was intensely still except for the humming of the fan, and the minute I stopped moving and planning the room was full of her. Knowing it was absurd didn’t make any difference. She was everywhere.
    She slid toward me and I kissed her again with that odd sensation of being suddenly overrun and flooded with her like a compartment below water line when the bulkhead buckles under pressure of the sea. One minute there’d been only that unstoppable trickle of her running through the mind, and the next I was drowning in her.
    Nuts, I thought irritably. Who ever heard of anything as stupid?