The Crossroads Read online

  Praise for John D. MacDonald

  “My favorite novelist of all time.”

  —DEAN KOONTZ

  “For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction, period—and millions of readers surely agree.”

  —The Washington Post

  “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

  “Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Remains one of my idols.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

  —SUE GRAFTON

  “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

  BY JOHN D. MACDONALD

  The Brass Cupcake

  Murder for the Bride

  Judge Me Not

  Wine for the Dreamers

  Ballroom of the Skies

  The Damned

  Dead Low Tide

  The Neon Jungle

  Cancel All Our Vows

  All These Condemned

  Area of Suspicion

  Contrary Pleasure

  A Bullet for Cinderella

  Cry Hard, Cry Fast

  You Live Once

  April Evil

  Border Town Girl

  Murder in the Wind

  Death Trap

  The Price of Murder

  The Empty Trap

  A Man of Affairs

  The Deceivers

  Clemmie

  Cape Fear (The Executioners)

  Soft Touch

  Deadly Welcome

  Please Write for Details

  The Crossroads

  The Beach Girls

  Slam the Big Door

  The End of the Night

  The Only Girl in the Game

  Where Is Janice Gantry?

  One Monday We Killed Them All

  A Key to the Suite

  A Flash of Green

  The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

  On the Run

  The Drowner

  The House Guest

  End of the Tiger and Other Stories

  The Last One Left

  S*E*V*E*N

  Condominium

  Other Times, Other Worlds

  Nothing Can Go Wrong

  The Good Old Stuff

  One More Sunday

  More Good Old Stuff

  Barrier Island

  A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974

  The Travis McGee Series

  The Deep Blue Good-by

  Nightmare in Pink

  A Purple Place for Dying

  The Quick Red Fox

  A Deadly Shade of Gold

  Bright Orange for the Shroud

  Darker Than Amber

  One Fearful Yellow Eye

  Pale Gray for Guilt

  The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

  Dress Her in Indigo

  The Long Lavender Look

  A Tan and Sandy Silence

  The Scarlet Ruse

  The Turquoise Lament

  The Dreadful Lemon Sky

  The Empty Copper Sea

  The Green Ripper

  Free Fall in Crimson

  Cinnamon Skin

  The Lonely Silver Rain

  The Official Travis McGee Quizbook

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

  2013 Random House eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1959 by John D. MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  A shorter version of this novel appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, copyright © 1959 by The Hearst Corporation.

  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, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82687-9

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  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 anyway, 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.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ONE

  Just before dawn there was a subtle increase in the traffic, more of a pulsing insistence in the oncoming whinings and diminishing drones. Charles Drovek, president of the Crossroads Corporation, lay wakeful and restless in the bedroom of his home three hundred yards behind the showplace of the corporation, the Crossroads Motor Hotel, a ninety-unit Georgian structure with wide drives, landscaped terraces, a large swimming pool.

  Except for the time in the army, he had spent all of his forty-one years within range of the sound of this junction of major routes. During the day he was not aware of the droning whispering roaring flow. It was money flowing by. A predictable percentage of it would be left in the hands of the Crossroads Corporation.

  Too many times he had heard the long sickening shriek of rubber followed by the curiously prolonged, crumpling, jangling thud that meant blood and death.

  Seldom did he have a chance merely to listen to it. He knew that the flow was picking up because of the early ones, the travelers who rise before dawn to trust reflexes still sodden with sleep. It was a still night. He could identify the direction from the sound. Now on this Friday morning near the end of June, the tourists from the Midwest, the last stragglers who had wintered in Florida, were grinding north, up Route 71. Six hundred yards from where he lay, they were passing under the big bridge that lifted the east-west Route 82 gracefully over Route 71. Ten miles north of the cloverleaf interchange, traffic on 71 entered the city limits of Walterburg. Route 82 was a limited access bypass. Ten years ago the two routes had crossed in the heart of Walterburg.

  For over a half mile before reaching the interchange, and for three quarters of a mile after passing under 82, the northbound tourist passed through a carefully planned and regulated commercial area owned and operated by the Crossroads Corporation.

  At infrequent intervals there was a faint flick of reflected light against the bedroom window. That was caused whenever a northbound car or truck, traveling north on 71 transferred to 82 west. They would go through the underpass and then swing around the northeast curve of the cloverleaf. At one point in that curve the headlights swept across the Motor Hotel, and some of the light would reach beyond the knoll to where the children of Papa Drovek slept in the four homes owned by the corporation, on the wooded slope above the creek.

  Truck traffic was heavy. From time to time he could hear the far-off chuff of air brakes as one of the big rigs would turn into Truck Haven, south of the interchange. A few dollars coming in, a few pennies for the net.

  He picked up his watch from the night stand and looked at the luminous dial. Ten of six. At this hour Truck Haven was the only service facility operated by the corporation that was open. It was open twenty-four hours a day. Gas, diesel oil, minor repairs, bunkrooms, showers, a big lunchroom. Funny, he thought, how counter girls for Truck Haven are so hard to find—the right kind. They have to be clean and brisk and pretty. Good-tempered and earthy. Not tramps. But willing to kid along with the drivers. Man comes in off the road for pie and coffee, he wants to kid around with a pretty girl who remembers him from the last time. Even though tips were unexpectedly good, there was a turnover. And when you put a few sourball girls in there you could read the result on the gross, not right away but a couple of weeks later. Funny how so many tourists stop there too. At night they see the big rigs, patient as elephants in the floodlights, and stop to gas up and eat. Wise kids and service people made more trouble for the girls than the truckers ever did.

  In ten minutes the Crossroads Pantry, down there across from Truck Haven, would open. By now people would be packing up to get out of the Midland Motel, slamming their car doors, yapping at their kids. Midland was simpler and cheaper than the Crossroads Motor Hotel. And it emptied out earlier.

  The next thing to open would be the Motor Hotel Restaurant, up here just north of the Motor Hotel. Seven o’clock opening. Then the big gas station across the way. All the stuff, like nets reaching out into that endless traffic flow, seining dollars.

  The window had turned gray. Clara, ten feet away, rolled over and snorted once in her sleep. Tanked again last night, he thought with familiar distaste. And suddenly he couldn’t remember if he had heard Nancy come in last night. He had meant to stay awake. He knew he could not get back to sleep wondering about her. He got up quietly and went down the hall, listened for a moment outside her door, then turned the knob, opened it and looked in. His fifteen-year-old daughter lay sleeping, her back toward the door, her young hip mounded high under the blanket, her dark hair spread on the pillow in the gray of dawn.

  Just as he reached his bedside he heard the siren, a sustained screaming, coming fast, dying after it had cleared the road ahead, arrowing south, picking up again far below the underpass. The state police, he thought. He got into bed, heard the second siren coming. Ambulance. Something bad down south on 71, probably at the River Road crossing. They needed a light down there. Just as one was needed up at the Crossroads Shopping Center. But too many lights, too many accidents, and sooner or later the state boys would swing 71 all the way around Walterburg. And that would really bitch the
gross. He made a mental note to arrange a casual conversation with Randy Gorman, the County Road Commissioner. Randy would know if the state boys had started thinking and planning. Good thing he’d hiked the quality of Randy’s usual gift case of hooch last Christmas.

  Today, he thought, I’d better go up and see Papa and take him his check and ask him about the automobile agency. I’m going to do it anyway. But I have to ask. Better keep thinking about more lease deals all the time. Insurance against their moving 71 away from us.

  He realized he couldn’t get back to sleep. He showered and shaved, put on gray flannel slacks and a lightweight wool shirt in slate-blue color. He went to the kitchen, put two heaping spoons of powdered coffee in a mug, ran the hot water until it was as hot as it would get, filled the mug, and carried it out into the sweet fresh smell of the June dawn. He walked down to where the sound of the morning brook was louder than the traffic.

  In him the Polish blood of Anton Drovek and the Irish blood of Martha McCarthy had made a big-boned, driving man, sandy hair on hard skull, strong hard face, bright-blue skeptical eyes, deep chest and wide shoulders. A man of shrewdnesses and subtleties, of occasional wisdom and infrequent self-doubt and boundless energies.

  He sipped the coffee and looked at the other three houses. Carried them on my back, he thought. Pushed them and bullied them and yanked them along with me. Took all the chances. Built it up in spite of them.

  And then, in his moment of wisdom he grinned inwardly at himself. Big shot! And where would I have been, where would any of us have been if it hadn’t been for Papa, who just happened to start his little Crossroads Market on exactly the right spot, and had that peasant land hunger to go with his small successes, so that he kept buying and buying? His success, not mine. It’s gotten so big I don’t think he understands it any more. But probably he does. More than I think.

  He thought of his father with love. They all should try to visit the old man more often. He wouldn’t last a hell of a lot longer. Seventy-one this year.