Free Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald Page B

ain’t getting on so smooth lately, and the reason might be right there at Shelder’s. You get any hint they’re scrappin’, Rob?”
    “Nothing specific. I think he’s drinking a little more than he was, from what Debbie Ann said. I thought it might be because he’s worried about his project. Pre-development sales are way off.”
    “Nothing surprising about that,” Corey Haas said. “He can’t make any time sales and give title, on account he has to have cash money to get the mortgage release. And there’s a strong rumor with the real estate boys the development may never get finished. Jamison has cut down to one salesman, and they set in that office over there without much happening. Just be-backs.”
    “Just what?” J. C. asked.
    “People use up an hour staring at a lot, scuffing their feet, then say we’ll be back. But they never do come back.”
    “That about does it for now,” Purdy Elmarr said. “You too dog-lazy to han’ me that bottle, J. C.? Thanks. Here you go, boy…”
     
    A little over an hour later, his mouth slightly numbed by bourbon, Rob Raines plunged his little MGA west over bad roads toward the Tamiami Trail. Liquor made the world exceptionally vivid and slightly unreal. Thoughts, doubts, ambitions, boiled in his mind. Did I make the right impression? I know how they’re using me, but are they also planning to use me in some other way I don’t know about? This is the edge of the big time. One toe in the door. Handle it just right. No mistakes. Then there’ll be fifty thousand, maybe thirty to keep after taxes and all, and they’ll let me in on another one. Elmarr will still use Dillon and Burkhardt for most of his business, but they’re getting pretty old. They took Stan Killian in with them, but Stan is a tanglefoot. They’re all getting along. But they’ll last long enough for me to get in solid.
    He thought about Jamison. A sitting duck. He had that big advertising agency background, and he’d done well , enough as a small builder, but he didn’t have a chance against Elmarr, Haas and J. C. Arlenton. Jamison had no briefing on those kind of men. They’d tear him apart like a chicken and suck the bones.
    He came out onto the Trail at the Stickney Point traffic light, and as he waited for his chance to turn south, all exhilaration faded and, without warning, he felt bleak, depressed.
    Is this what I wanted? Is this where I was headed? He turned south, into a long line of traffic on the Trail, boxed behind a car from Ohio. The hell with it. I’ll make mine. It’s all legal. That’s what the training is good for. So you know where the line is, and you can stay on the right side of it. That’s what they use you for, to find out just how far they can go. And the closer to that line you can work, and still guarantee safety, the more valuable you are to those boys.
    Forget all that idealism crap. It’s just a blindfold they put on you, so you won’t realize you’re living in a jungle. Whatever happened to Jamison was his own fault. He was like a stupid caveman who’d gotten lucky and felled a big piece of meat, and instead of hacking off all he could carry and taking it back to his cave, he was walking round and round it, stone ax in his hand. It was going to spoil before he could eat the whole thing, so now a bunch of them were watching him from the bushes, waiting for the right minute to spring. They weren’t even going to leave him with nothing—which they could. They were going to give him a little chunk to take home.
     
    His widowed mother, Dolores Raines, called Dee by her garden club friends, sat fatly on her heels in the backyard, wearing her big straw hat, bulging green slacks, khaki shirt and gardening gloves, troweling a flower bed. She grunted erect as he approached, turned, beamed at him, and kissed the corner of his mouth.
    “How did it go, sweetie? Are you going to be Purdy Elmarr’s new smart young lawyer? I’m so proud of you, sweetie.”
    “I guess