Free The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald Page A

anxiety.
    She stated her fact, strangely confident I would accept that fact as completely as she did. In a little while she slumped over against the door and fell asleep. I felt indignant. How could she be so damned certain she had not given herself over into the hands of a Junior Allen of another variety? Where did all this suffocating trust come from? Here was a mature woman who did not seem to know that the wide world is full of monsters, even after one vivid example. I had the feeling that if I told her I was taking her to the cannibal isles to sell her for stew meat, she would wear the same Mona Lisa smile of total acceptance.
    I am just not that trustworthy.
    Below decks the Busted Flush was very hot and very stale and offensively damp. A power failure had kicked the air conditioning off. I had set the thermostat at eighty when I left, minimum power expenditure, just enough to keep it from getting the way it was. I reset it for sixty-five. It would be an hour before it was comfortable. I took her to a place where we could get a good lunch, and brought her back.
    She came aboard. I toted her gear aboard. She looked around, mildly and placidly interested.
    I stowed her and her gear in the other stateroom. She took a shower and went to bed.
    I found nine days of mail clogging my box. I weeded it down to a few bills, two personal letters.
    I phoned Chook. She wanted to know where the hell I'd been. It pleased me that Cathy hadn't told her. I said I'd been staying with a sick friend. She gave me Cathy's number. I phoned her.

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    She sounded ver y guarded, but said she was alone and told me I could come and see her, and told me how to find it. it was over in town, the top floor of a cheap duplex behind one of the commercial strips along Route One. Pizza, Guaranteed Be treads, Smitty's Sheet Metal, Bonded Warehouse. She lived beyond neon and the windwhipped fragments of banners announcing forgotten sales.
    It was stinking hot upstairs. All buff plaster an d ragged wicker, straw and old bamboo. A big fan whizzed and whined by a window, blowing the warm air through. She wore sleazy shorts and a faded halter top. She explained that she shared the place with another dancer from the group and a girl who worked in the local television station. She had two card tables set up. She was stitching away on new costumes for the group. Extra money, she exlained. She offered iced tea.
    I sat in a wicker chair near the hot breath of the fan and told her about Mrs. Atkinson. Not all of it. She worked and listened. When I leaned back my shirt stuck to the wicker. It had become August while I wasn't looking. She moved around the tables, nipping and stitching, bending and turning, and I was too aware of the modeling of those good sinewy legs, agleam with sweat, and the rock-solid roundness of the dancer butt. What I didn't tell her about Lois, she seemed perfectly able to guess.
    She carried pins in her mouth. The material she worked with was gold and white.
    "I thought you'd changed your mind,' she said.
    "No."
    "There's no reason why you shouldn't, Trav."
    The pins blurred enunciation.
    "Were there names and addresses in the letters?"
    She straightened. "The ones there were, I put them separate. I can get them for you."
    She brought them to me. I read them while she worked. She had a little blue radio turned low, the music merging with the noise of the fan. CNICA, Havana. Voice of the land of peace and freedom and brotherhood. No commercials. Nothing left to sell.
    V-Mail, from a long-ago war.
    Dear Wife: I have been well and hopping you are the same and the girls too have bought a money order and sending it along later do not try to save all instead buy what you need.
    I have had a lot of flight time this pass two months but for me it is all cargo work and not dangerous so don't worry about it none. it rains a lot this time of year, more than home even.
    Since Sugarman got sent elsewhere, we have a new pilot his name is Will