Free The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald Page B

became. He's right near the top, and it is a seventy-billion-dollar-a-year business. So at twenty-two I'd moved a couple of steps up the ladder. And when I was twenty-five I woke up. I saw some lines here by any eyes and some lines across my throat, and I knew that when I stopped being some kind of rarity that Art could show off to his buddies, I would be out on my keister with maybe a little gift of money to ease the transition. After I walked out and after Arturo located me, he sent some of his guys to talk me back home, but I wasn't having any. After a couple of phone calls he gave up. I had answered an ad in the local paper, and I wanted somebody who couldn't toss me out whenever he felt like it, so I took dead aim at my new boss, Billy Ingraham. I wanted a longer future than I was going to get in Miami. I have to tell you all this so you'll understand the rest of it."
    "I wondered about you, Millis. You seemed a little out of focus."
    "You've got a good eye. You made me nervous. Anyway, right after the identity of the girl from Peru broke in the news, Arturo got in touch with me. He said it was very important, and it had nothing to do with our previous friendship. That's what he called it. Friendship. So I sneaked off to a motel room and met him there.
    "He told me that he was facing a very heavy situation. He said that the girl, Gigi, who got her throat cut, was the niece of the top man in the drug business in Peru, in Lima. This man, Isidro Reyes, is the brother of Gigi's father, the diplomat. It is a big powerful family, and apparently this Gigliermina was the darling, the apple of everybody's eye, and engaged to a young lawyer from another strong family down there. Everybody down there was enraged, and word had come through that they wanted everybody involved in that killing to be punished. Arturo said he had been keeping track of me, for old times' sake, and he said it was strange that our lives should cross again in this manner, but he had to find out if somehow Billy had gotten those kids killed in the process of getting his stolen boat back,
    "We talked a long time. I told him about you and how you had found the Sundowner using aerial photography, and how you had phoned the Coast Guard and Billy the day you located the boat with the bodies aboard. He wanted to know if I was sure you hadn't found it several days earlier and then maybe got impatient when nobody else came across it and reported it. I said I was positive it had not happened that way. And I said Billy would never have told you to get the boat back no matter who you had to kill. And I said that the counterfeit money didn't make any sense in any scenario where you killed them. He thanked me for my time and said I'd been a big help. We shook hands and then we realized how funny that was and we laughed and I kissed him, and that was that. Now Billy is dead. Murdered. And I can't think of anyone who'd want him dead except some crazies in Peru who got the whole thing wrong."
    So I told her all about my gift book, and the blood of children sprinkled to a height of fifteen feet on the back wall of the storage room of a dress shop named the Little Boutique. She looked at me in total consternation. "I know Artura believed me. We had good communication. He'd gotten over being hurt and angry. I know he believed me. He said it was going to make it more difficult. Usually nobody would be interested in some bloody little mess down in the Keys. Somebody delivered too little or asked too much, or somebody else stepped into the picture at the wrong time. Nobody would care. But this time the wrong person died and so they would have to unravel it. It begins to sound like what I was thinking early this morning, McGee. They can't find out what happened, so they're killing people who could have done it, just to have something to show."
    "There's another way to guess it."
    "How?"
    "They found out who really did it and they would rather not touch them."
    She agreed, saying