The Last One Left Read online

  Praise for

  John D. MacDonald

  “MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”

  —ROGER EBERT

  “MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  “John D. MacDonald remains one of my idols.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment.… A thoroughly American author.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”

  —USA Today

  “MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”

  —Sarasota Herald-Tribune

  The Last One Left is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition

  Copyright © 1967 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1995 by Maynard MacDonald

  Foreword copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1970.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8527-6

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-82708-1

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover Design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Forest Johnson/Masterfile

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  “Extreme terror gives us back

  the gestures of our childhood.”

  —Chazal

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  by Dean Koontz

  WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

  Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

  Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

  I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

  Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

  Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

  Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more. Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

  In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of Strangers to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyw
ay, but I took his advice to heart.

  In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

  Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

  One

  AT THE SMALL bon voyage party at the Delmar Bay Yacht Club Kip and Selma had given Howard and Junie Prowt a little brass plaque to affix to one of the bulkheads of the HoJun. It read “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small!”

  Pull off the backing paper and press the gummed back of the plaque to any smooth clean surface.

  Out in the middle of the Gulf Stream, at ten o’clock on the bright morning of a windy and cloudless day in May, Howard Prowt, braced on the fly bridge of his thirty-four-foot Owens cruiser, knew the precise corner of the exact drawer where he had stowed the gift, and fought the absurd compulsion to go below and find it and peel it and stick it up.

  The stacks and tan cubes of Fort Lauderdale were below the horizon astern. He had plotted his course exactly as he had been taught in the Power Squadron classes, making the proper allowance for the northerly run of the Gulf Stream, and for standard deviation and compass deviation. He had computed his time of arrival at Bimini on the basis of 2300 rpm on his twin 150’s. They had left Pier 66 at 8:30 and had passed the sea buoy at fourteen minutes before nine. At eleven minutes past noon the HoJun should reach the channel across the bar outside Bimini harbor.

  Nobody told you how it would be. How it would feel. That was the trouble. They just said it could get a little dusty out there in the Stream. They didn’t tell you about the strangeness, the alone-ness, the strange blue color and the power of it. There was an indifference about it, a lack of interest in you and your little boat. It changed the way everything looked and felt.

  Howard Prowt kept trying to scan the dials, to check oil pressure, temperature, rpm’s—and to check the performance of the automatic pilot against the compass, then would find himself staring, mind empty, braced for the next long lift of the hull, the teeter, the crash that would send water flashing white out to either side of the bow.

  It’s a good day to cross, he told himself. They build them for this.

  The HoJun had felt massive, ponderous, trustworthy in all the other places he had taken her since accepting delivery last November. She had looked large tied up at their backyard dock on Heron Bayou, sizeable in the yacht club boat basin. He had learned exactly how she would respond in all conditions of wind and tide, priding himself on that gentle touch on the throttles which would ease her so close to a dock that Junie, on the bow, could step ashore with the line and put the loop over a piling. There had been several short cruises, and one long one—up to Stuart and through the lake and down the river to Fort Myers, then down the Gulf Coast to Marathon, and back home through Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay. He had taken her into some ugly chop in the Gulf, and had handled her in a tricky following sea. In his navigation he had always double-checked his course and had the pleasure of seeing the target markers, after long runs, loom out of the sea mist.

  But this was not the same. It made everything else seem like pretend. This was not the same sea they had watched two years ago from the recreation deck of the little Italian cruise ship which had taken them through the Caribbean, as far down as Curaçao.

  They had stood at the rail and looked down onto that sea. This one lifted, rose, pushed itself up into great gleaming humps higher at times than his line of vision on the flying bridge, with one in ten foaming white against the incredible laundry-blueing blue as the wind toppled the tip of it. He tensed his stomach each time the HoJun seemed to hesitate before lifting to it. Atop those long silky bulges he could see for miles, see the random pattern of the waves breaking. Then she would tilt, smash—making a jangling and thumping and clattering below, and a moment of noise, vibration and cavitation from the twin screws—then glide down the far side of the hump to that point where, as she dug her nose deep and sent water slashing back against the pilot house windshield and the fiberglass which protected the fly bridge, he could not see more than fifty feet in any direction.

  He held fast against the motion, telling himself that this was not some deadly and dramatic shift in the weather pattern. It was just as the man at Pier 66 had predicted. “Wind swinging very slow, Mr. Prowt, be almost direct out of the east in an hour, and a couple points north of east by the time you’re clear of the Stream. Be a pretty fair swell, nothing you can’t take okay; but once it’s swiveled all the way out of the north, the five-day forecast says it’ll be maybe three days before I’d want to take it across. So you go now, you’ll be fine. It won’t have time to build the Stream up to a chop. I’d say you’ll have a ten-knot breeze, freshening come evening. A pretty day to cross.”

  But nobody had described the absolute indifference of these swells, and the way they dwindled the HoJun to a silly little toy, and its owner to a foolish, childish fellow who had wanted to play captain.

  He had listened on the 100-watt ship-to-shore, heard nothing but nasal, casual, fishing-hunting talk on one channel, Miami marine placing phone calls on another, silence on the Coast Guard Emergency channel.

  One of these ponderous wallowing tumbles will tear a gas line loose and one engine will die and the spark from the other will ignite the loose gas in the bilge. Or a battery will shift and pull a cable loose and the engines will both die. Or some seam will give way in the hull, bringing in more water than the bilge pumps can handle.

  Another painful abdominal cramp made him gasp and hunch himself. Great time for food poisoning. That lobster last night?

  And, Oh God, here comes the biggest one yet!

  She lifted up and up, toppled over the crest with an uneasy corkscrewing motion, the cavitation lasting longer, glided down the blue hill and smashed her bow deep enough to send solid water streaming back along the side decks.

  Exactly what the hell am I doing out here?

  “I think, honey, that next May we’ll cruise the Bahamas. Get Kip and Selma to go along. Take a whole month pooting around. Maybe go over as far as Eleuthera. How about it?”

  When you have enough boat to get to the Bahamas, and when you live so close, and when maybe next year they’ll make you Fleet Captain of the Delmar Bay Yacht Club, then you go. Or they’ll think you incompetent or timid.

  So I’m timid, he thought. Outboards they bring over here. They race from Miami to Nassau when the seas are higher. Any boat has a lot of safety factor, and this one was new six months ago. But I came out past that sea buoy feeling like Horatio Hornblower, and right now I am one scared, retired wholesale grocer from Moline out in the middle of all this tumbling blue indifference that doesn’t care whether I sink, blow up or make it across.

  Always wanted a cruiser.

  God, just get me there!

  Junie, fighting for balance, clutched at his arm, startling him. She tottered away with a jolly whoop of dismay, grabbed at the pilot seat, settled into it and grinned at him. Her grin was uncharacteristically broad, her gray eyes not properly focused, her sandy-blonde hair matted damp with sea water, her color so bleached under her deep tan it gave her flesh an odd saffron tone. Above her denim halter her skin had a plucked-chicken look, so pronounced were the goose pimples.

  He knew that she was both nauseated and terrified, and trying with a touching gallantry not to show either. But terror had to be stronger than the nausea, because she hated the increased swing and dip of the flying bridge, avoiding it except when it was dead calm.

  Neither of us belong here, he thought. It’s all some kind of pretend. She’s a fifty-eight-year-old
housewife and mother from Moline, and since we moved down here she’s dieted and exercised and trimmed herself down, and baked herself brown, turned from gray to blonde, wears these play clothes, even talks in ways which would puzzle the placid Moline matron of two years ago. But it is all pretend for both of us—damn fools out of a yachting magazine ad, tricked finally into playing our game out here where all of a sudden it’s all turned real.

  “Getting rougher, darling?” she called over the sound of wind and sea and engines.

  “Staying about the same. You feel better?”

  “A little.” The fixed smile stayed in place, even when she stared ahead.

  Full fuel tanks, he thought. Full water tanks. And that damned couple of tons of provisions we carried aboard and stowed. Riding lower in the water than she ever has, and we have to get into this.

  He made a businesslike routine of reading all the gauges, wearing his seamanship frown.

  “Something wrong?” she called, the smile gone, her mouth pinching tight, bloodless lips sucked in, looking suddenly like an old, old woman garbed for some vulgar ingenue role.

  “There’s not a damn thing wrong!”

  “You don’t have to shout at me, Howard. I mean—I don’t understand the engines and things. And it just seems to get—worse and worse.”

  He patted her on the shoulder. “Everything’s fine. Really fine.”

  “Will—the whole trip be like this?”

  “WE ARE CROSSING THE GULF STR—” He caught himself, changed his tone. “Honey, this is the only rough part.”

  “If you aren’t nervous, why do you act so cross?”

  “I am not nervous. I am not cross.”

  He wondered if it would be different—better—if Kip and Selma had been able to cross with them instead of flying over day after tomorrow to Bimini. Most of their gear was aboard. Kip had some kind of meeting at the last minute. Of course Kip didn’t know item one about seamanship, piloting and small-boat handling. Nor did Selma. But maybe four people wouldn’t get as …