Free Cape Fear by John D. MacDonald

killed or died of sickness.”
    “Are you threatening me?”
    “I’m not threatening you, Lieutenant. Like I said, we started pretty near even. Now you’re a wife and three kids ahead of me.”
    “And you want us to be even again.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    They stared at each other, and Cady was still smiling. He looked entirely at ease. Sam Bowden could find no way to control the situation. “Did you poison our dog?” he demanded, and immediately regretted asking the question.
    “Dog?” Cady’s eyes went round with mock surprise. “Poison your dog? Why, Lieutenant? You slander me.”
    “Oh, come off it!”
    “Come off what? No, I wouldn’t poison your dog any more than you’d put a plainclothes cop on my tail. You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
    “You did it, you filthy bastard!”
    “I’ve got to be careful. I can’t take any punches at you, Lieutenant. I’d get sent up for assault. Want a cigar? They’re good ones.”
    Sam turned helplessly away. Nancy had stopped working. She was standing looking intently toward them, her eyes narrowed, and she was biting her underlip.
    “There’s a real stacked kid, Lieutenant. Almost as juicy as your wife.”
    Sam turned back blindly and swung. Cady dropped his beer can and caught the punch deftly in the palm of his right hand.
    “You get one sucker punch in a lifetime, Lieutenant. You’ve had yours.”
    “Get out of here!”
    Cady had stood up. He put the cigar in the corner of his mouth and spoke around it. “Sure. Maybe after a while you’ll get the whole picture, Lieutenant.” He walked toward the shed, moving lightly and easily. He grinned back at Sam, then waved his cigar at Nancy and said, “See you around, beautiful.”
    Nancy came over to Sam. “Is that him? Is it? Daddy! You’re shaking!”
    Sam, ignoring her, followed Cady around the shed. Cady got behind the wheel of an old gray Chevy. He beamed at Sam and Nancy and drove out.
    “He
is
the one, isn’t he? He’s horrible! The way he looked at me made me feel all crawly, like worms do.”
    “That’s Cady,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly husky.
    “Why did he come
here
?”
    “To put a little more pressure on. God knows how he found out we’d be here. I’m glad your mother and the boys weren’t here.”
    They walked back to the boat. He glanced down at her as she walked beside him. Her face was solemn, thoughtful. This was not a problem that would affect only him and Carol. The children were within the orbit.
    Nancy looked up at him. “What are you going to do about it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What is he going to do?”
    “I don’t know that either.”
    “Daddy, do you remember a long time ago when I was little and the nightmares I had after we went to the circus?”
    “I remember. What was the name of that ape? Gargantua.”
    “That’s right. The place where they had him had glass walls and you held me by the hand and he turned and he looked right at me. Not at any of the other people. Right at me. And I felt like something inside me curled up and died. It was something savage that didn’t have any right to be in the same world I was in. Do you know what I mean?”
    “Of course.”
    “That man is a little bit like that. I mean I got a little bit of the same impression. Miss Boyce would say I was being unrealistic.”
    “And who is Miss Boyce? I’ve heard that name.”
    “Oh, she’s our English teacher. She’s been telling us that good fiction is good because it has character development in it that shows that nobody is completely good and nobody is completely evil. And in bad fiction the heroes are a hundred per cent heroic and the villains are a hundred per cent bad. But I think that man is all bad.”
    Never before, he thought, have we been able to talk on an equivalent, adult level without a mutual shyness. “I suppose I could understand him, if I wanted to. He was in a dirty, brutal business, and he was a combat-fatigue case, and he went right