The Dreadful Lemon Sky 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

  “John D. MacDonald 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

  Praise for the Travis McGee series

  “There’s only one thing as good as reading a John D. MacDonald novel: reading it again. A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.”

  —JOHN SAUL

  “One of the great sagas in American fiction.”

  —ROBERT B. PARKER

  “In McGee mysteries and other novels as well, MacDonald’s voice was one of a social historian.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  The Dreadful Lemon Sky 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.

  2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1974 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 2002 by Maynard MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

  Excerpt from The Empty Copper Sea by John D. MacDonald © 1978 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  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.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1964.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82677-0

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © John Coletti/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  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

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Empty Copper Sea

  Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.

  —SANTAYANA

  Introduction

  Lee Child

  Suspense fiction trades on surprising and unexpected twists. Like this one: A boy named John Dann MacDonald was born in 1916 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, into the kind of quiet and comfortable middle-class prosperity that became common in America forty or fifty years later but which was still relatively rare early in the century. Sharon was a satellite town near Pittsburgh, dominated by precision metalworking, and John’s father was a mild-mannered and upstanding citizen with secure and prestigious salaried employment as a senior financial executive with a local manufacturer. Young John was called Jack as a child, and wore sailor suits, and grew up in a substantial suburban house on a tree-lined block. He read books, played with his dog, and teased his little sister and his cousin. When he was eighteen, his father funded a long European grand tour for him, advising him by letter “to make the best of it … to eat and function regularly … to be sure and attend a religious service at least once on each Sunday … to keep a record of your expenditures as a training for your college days.”

  Safely returned, young Jack went on to two decent East Coast schools, and married a fellow student, and went to Harvard for an MBA, and volunteered for the army in 1940, and finished World War II as a lieutenant colonel, after thoroughly satisfactory service as a serious, earnest, bespectacled, rear-echelon staff officer.

  So what does such a fellow do next? Does he join General Motors? IBM? Work for the Pentagon?

  In John D. MacDonald’s case, he becomes an impoverished writer of pulp fiction.

  During his first four postwar months, he lost twenty pounds by sitting at a table and hammering out 800,000 unsold words. Then in his fifth month he sold a story for twenty-five bucks. Then another for forty bucks, and eventually more than five hundred. Sometimes entire issues of pulp magazines were all his own work, disguised under dozens of different pen names. Then in 1950 he watched the contemporary boom in paperback novels and jumped in with his first full-length work, which was followed by sixty-six more, including some really seminal crime fiction and one of history’s greatest suspense series.

  Why? Why did a middle-class Harvard MBA with extensive corporate connections and a gold-plated recommendation from the army turn his back on everything apparently predestined, to sit at a battered table and type, with an anxious wife at his side? No one knows. He never explained. It’s a mystery.

  But we can speculate. Perhaps he never wanted a quiet and comfortable middle-class life. Perhaps, after finding himself amid the chaos of war, he felt able to liberate himself from the crushing filial expectations he had previously followed so obediently. As an eighteen-year-old, it’s hard to say no to the father who just paid for a trip to Europe. Eleven years later, as a lieutenant colonel, it’s easier.

  And we know from what he wrote that he felt he had something to say to the world. His early stuff was whatever put food on that battered table—detective stories, westerns, adventure stories, sports stories, and even some science fiction—but soon enough his long-form fiction began to develop some enduring and intertwined themes. From A Deadly Shade of Gold, a Travis McGee title: “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” From the stand-alone thriller Where Is Janice Gan
try?: “Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.”

  These two angles show up everywhere in his novels: the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden, which included people, animals, and what we now call the environment—which was in itself a very early and very prescient concern: Janice Gantry, for instance, predated Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by a whole year.

  But the good knight’s armor was always tarnished and rusted. The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion. Where did it come from? Not, presumably, the leafy block where he was raised in quiet and comfort. The war must have changed him, like it changed a generation and the world.

  Probably the best of his nonseries novels is The Executioners, which became Cape Fear as a movie (twice). It’s an acute psychological study of base instinct, terror, mistakes, and raw emotion. It’s about a man—possibly a man like MacDonald’s father, or like MacDonald himself—who moves out of his quiet and comfort into more primeval terrain. And those twin poles are the theme of the sensationally good Travis McGee series, which is a canon equaled for enduring quality and maturity by very little else. McGee is a quiet man, internally bewildered by and raging at what passes for modern progress, externally happy merely to be varnishing the decks of his houseboat and polishing its brass, but always ready to saddle up and ride off in the service of those who need and deserve his help. Again, not the product of the privileged youth enjoyed by the salaried executive’s son.

  So where did McGee and MacDonald’s other heroes come from? Why Florida? Why the jaundiced concerns? We will never know. But maybe we can work it out, by mining the millions of words written with such haste and urgency and passion between 1945 and 1986.

  LEE CHILD

  New York

  2012

  One

  I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators. A shot rang off steel bars. Another. I came bursting up out of sleep to hear the secretive sound of the little bell which rings at my bedside when anyone steps aboard the Busted Flush. It was almost four in the morning.

  It could be some kid prowling the decks for a forgotten camera, portable radio, or bottle of Scotch. Or a friendly drunk. Or a drunken friend. Or trouble. I could not know how long I had slept past the first ting of the bell. I pulled on a pair of shorts and went padding through the blackness, past the head and the galley, through into the lounge to the locked doorway that opens onto the sheltered deck aft. The handgun which I had slipped from its handy recess before I was totally awake felt cold in my grasp.

  I heard a small knocking sound, secret and tentative. “Trav?” A husky, half-whispering girl voice. “Trav McGee? Trav, honey?”

  I moved over to where I could see through the glass at an angle, just enough to make out the girl shape of the small figure huddled close to the door, out of the brightness of the dock lights. She seemed to be quite alone.

  I called through the closed door, “Who are you?”

  “Trav? Don’t turn on any lights, huh? Please!”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me! It’s Carrie. Carrie Milligan.”

  I hesitated, then sheathed the revolver under the waistband of the shorts, cold against belly flesh. I unlocked and let her in and locked the door again.

  She hooked one arm around me and hugged her small self tightly against me and let out a long breath. “Hey, hello,” she said. “No lights. Okay? I don’t want to get you involved.”

  “Lights will get me involved?”

  “You know what I mean. If somebody was close, if they knew I came over toward this way and they watched and saw lights go on here, then they’d want to find out.”

  “So I can black out the captain’s quarters.”

  “Sure. It’ll be easier to talk.”

  I took her by the hand and led her back through the darkness. Just enough light came in so that the lounge furniture made bulky shapes to the left and right. When we reached my stateroom I released her and pulled both thicknesses of draperies across the ports. Then I turned on a light, the reading lamp over the bed which makes a bright round pattern on a book and leaves the rest of the room in darkness. It shone on the wrinkled sheets of recent dreams and bounced off, illuminating her in soft light.

  She had hugged me with one arm because she held a package and her purse in the other. The package was the shape of a shoe box, wrapped in brown paper, tied with cord.

  “I know, I know,” she said, backing away from the light. “I’m not wearing very damn well. I’m not lasting so good. What’s it been? Six years. So I was twenty-four, right? And now I look forty.”

  “How’s Ben?”

  “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, it’s like that. I haven’t lived with him in … over three years. I threw him the hell out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Stop saying ‘Oh.’ You know, I felt a little pinch when I saw this great old boat. I really did. I didn’t know I could feel anything like that, related to Ben. I thought it was all gone. But we were happy aboard this crock. It was the only really happy time, I think. Shiny new marriage, and not a dime in the world, but a great boat to have a honeymoon aboard.” She sat in the chair in the corner by the locker, out of the light. In a different voice she said, “I should have settled for you.”

  “You figured I wouldn’t marry anybody,” I said. I sat on the bed, facing her.

  “I know, I know. What I don’t know is why I was so red hot to get married. So I married Ben Milligan. Jesus! Know what he was, really? He was a child bride. His mother spent twenty-five years picking up after him, waiting on him, telling him how great he was, and then she turned him over to me. Whine, whine, whine. He couldn’t hold a job. Nobody appreciated him. Bitch, bitch, bitch. He had like fourteen jobs in two years, and the last part of that two years, he didn’t even look. He stayed home and watched the soaps on TV. He did all that body-building stuff all the time. Muscles on muscles. When I came home from work, I was supposed to cook, or at least stop on the way home and buy pizza or hamburgers. Trav, couldn’t you tell what he was like?”

  “Sure.”

  “Couldn’t you have said something?”

  “And lose an eye?”

  “Okay, so I was in love. Thank God for no kids. I think it was him, not me. But he wouldn’t go see a doctor about it. He got very grumpy that I could say anything might be wrong with the perfect body. Look, McGee, it was all a long time ago. All forgotten. I didn’t come here to talk about my great married life. I was thinking on the way here, I don’t really know Travis McGee. But you made me feel close to you, way back. I had to find somebody I could trust. I went through an awful lot of names. I came up with you. Then I started thinking, Maybe he’s got somebody aboard with him, or somebody lives aboard, or he’s away, or he’s married. My God, it’s six years. You know? I stepped aboard and six years were gone. You look great. You know it? Absolutely great. You haven’t changed at all. It isn’t fair. Look at me!”

  It happens to people. They get up to the point of explaining the mission and can’t make it, so they go into a talking jag. She needed help. There was a thin edge of anxiety in her tone, and the words came too fast.

  So I gave her some help. “What have you got in the box?” I asked.

  She exhaled harshly. Almost a gasp. “You get right to it, don’t you? What have I got in the box? In this here box, you mean? Once you said you had a safe place for things. Do you still?”

  “Yes.”

  She came over and put the package on the bed beside where I was sitting. She grasped the cord and popped it with a swift sure motion. She
stripped the brown paper off. Meyer says whole tracts could be written about character revealed in opening a package.

  “What I’ve got in this box,” she said, “is money.”

  She lifted the lid. It was money. It was packed in tightly. Used bills, some loose, most tied into tidy bricks with string, with adding-machine tape tucked under the string. “I’ve got here ninety-four thousand two hundred dollars. Plus ten thousand for you, for keeping it until I want it.”

  “No need for that.”

  “It’s worth that to me. And I’d feel better.”

  “Can I ask any questions?”

  “Hardly any. That’s part of the fee.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Like from a bank or payroll or something? No.”

  “And if you don’t come back?”

  “I’ll be back to get it before … what’s today?”

  “Early early in the morning of May the sixteenth, a Thursday.”

  “Okay, if I don’t come get it before the fifteenth of June, or get some kind of word to you before the fifteenth of June, then I’m not coming at all. So it should go to my sister, Susie. Do you remember my maiden name?”

  “Dee. Carrie Dee.”

  “That was short for Dobrovsky. She uses the whole name. Susie … Susan Dobrovsky. You get it to her. That’s part of the fee. And not telling anybody at all about me being here. That’s the rest of the way you earn ten.”

  “Where is your sister?”

  “Oh. Sorry. She’s in Nutley, New Jersey. She’s younger. She teaches nursery school. She’s now like about the age I was when I knew you before. Twenty-three? Yes. Two months ago. She’s nice, but … dumb about things. She doesn’t know how things are yet. Wouldn’t it be nice if she didn’t have to find out? Look, will you put this in a safe place and keep it for me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She swayed, took one dizzy step, and turned around abruptly and sat down on my bed beside the box, bouncing it, spilling the bricks of money. She shook her head. “I’m dead for sleep. And I’m dirty, Trav. I’ve been in these same clothes too long. I can smell myself. These clothes, they ought to be buried. For the ten thousand, dear, could I ask for three more things?”