Free Deadly Welcome by John D. MacDonald Page A

stretched out on the bed and wondered who had taken over in Montevideo. He hoped they’d picked Schmidt. He wouldn’t mess it up the way some of the new kids might.…
    He came up out of sleep and heard somebody rapping sharply and insistently on the back door.

chapter   FIVE
    There was a sedan in the back yard, a dark dusty green with bumper aerial for short wave, and a red spot on the roof, and a faded yellow decal on the door that said
Sheriff—Ramona County
.
    A man stood on the back steps, a dark silhouette against the white shell glare of the back yard. Doyle had belted on his old seersucker robe. He felt sweaty and fogged by sleep.
    “I was sleeping,” he said.
    “So wake up,” the man said, and pulled the door open and came into the kitchen. He was about five seven, with a toughened leanness about him, a deeply seamed and sallow face, narrow eyes the color of spit. He wore bleached khakis, tailored to his body and freshly pressed, a pale, cream-colored ranch hat. The trouser legs were neatly bloused over black gleaming paratrooper boots in a small and curiously dainty size.
    On the pocket of his shirt was pinned one of the mostornate badges Doyle had ever seen, large and golden, with some red enamel and some blue enamel. In a very legible way it said
Sheriff
, and in much smaller letters it said
Deputy
, and it said
Ramona County, State of Florida
, and bore some sort of ornate seal. He wore a black pistol belt with a black speed holster, old leather, shiny and supple with care and age, worn canted to bring the revolver butt-down to the level of “Gunsmoke.” A chrome whistle chain disappeared into the other shirt pocket. A black night stick hung from the other side of the pistol belt, white leather thong suspended from a small brass hook.
    He brought into the kitchen the slow creak and jingle of petty authority, and a thinly acid edge of sweat, a back-swamp accent and an air of mocking silence. Doyle felt irritated by his own feeling of intense wariness. It was a legacy from the faraway years when there would be trouble and men like this one would come to the bayou and go to Bucket Bay. You let them swagger through the house and poke around as they pleased. You never told them anything. And you never made a fuss because they would put knots on your head.
    Yet on another level he sensed his kinship to this man. That light-eyed cracker sallowness the generations of bad diet and inbreeding behind both of them that had resulted, curiously, in a dogged and enduring toughness, a fibrous talent for survival.
    “I’ve seen you before,” Alex said.
    “Sure you’ve seen me before, Doyle. Turkey Kimbroy and I, we tooken you over to Davis long time ago to he’p you get in the army. If’n they’d shot your ass off, you wouldn’t be back here giving me problems.”
    “I’m not making any problems.”
    “That’s what I got to be sure about. Turkey don’t have no problems any more. Fool nigger had a razor hung down his back and when Turkey beat on him a little, niggertook one swipe and spilled Turk all over the side of the road. Made me a carefuller man.”
    Doyle remembered how this Donnie Capp had been on that long-ago ride, a pale slim blond man with a limp, not afraid to be friendly to the boy they were taking in.
    “What’s that got to do with me, Donnie?”
    The thin mouth tightened. “I get called Donnie by my friends. Niggers and thieves, they call me Mister Deputy, sir. You try it.”
    “Mister Deputy, sir.”
    “That’s nice. Now stand still a minute. Okay. Now you just walk on ahead of me slow while I look around some.”
    Capp made a leisurely and careful inspection of the cottage. He found the money belt on a hook in the back of the bedroom closet. Doyle made no protest as he took it out and unzippered it, fingered the money.
    “Maybe you better come along in and tell Sheriff Roy how come you got all the cash money, Doyle.”
    “If you think it’s necessary, I’d be glad