Cape Fear 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

  Cape Fear 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 © 1957, 1958 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1985, 1986 by John D. MacDonald

  Introduction 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 LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Simon & Schuster under the title The Executioners in 1958.

  ISBN: 978-0-8129-8414-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82664-0

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Eric Schwortz/Glasshouse

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  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.

/>   One

  SAM BOWDEN LAY ON HIS BACK under a high Saturday sun, eyes closed, right hand clasping the fading chill of half a can of beer. He was aware of the nearness of Carol. Digestion of the picnic lunch was proceeding comfortably. Jamie and Bucky were thrashing around in the brush on the small hill behind the little beach, and Sam knew it would soon be time for eleven-year-old Jamie to send six-year-old Bucky down to them to ask if it wasn’t time to go back into the water. Other years Nancy would have been racing and whooping with the younger kids.

  But this year Nancy was fourteen, and this year she had brought a guest along—a fifteen-year-old boy named Pike Foster. Nancy and Pike lay baking in the sun on the fore-deck of the Sweet Sioux III, with a portable radio turned to the odd offerings of a progressive disk jockey. The Sweet Sioux was moored a hundred feet down the curve of beach, her bow ten feet off the sand, and the music was barely audible.

  Sam Bowden lay with the sun coming red through his eyelids and tried, almost with desperation, to tell himself that all was right with his particular world. Everything was fine. This was the first expedition of the year to the island. The Bowdens would make three or four trips to it this year, the same as every year since 1950, when they had found it, the year before Bucky was born. It was a ridiculously small island twelve miles out into the lake, northwest of New Essex. It was too small to have a name. It merited a single dot on the charts and a warning of shoal waters. It had a hill and a beach and reasonably deep water just off the beach.

  Everything was under control. The marriage was of the very best variety. Everybody was healthy. He had been a partner in the law firm ever since 1948. Their house, just outside the village of Harper, thirteen miles from New Essex, was more house than he should have purchased, but he could console himself with the constantly increasing value of the ten acres of land. They had no savings to speak of, a very few shares of pale blue-chip stocks. But his hefty insurance program gave him a feeling of security.

  He raised his head and, without opening his eyes, finished off the can of beer. He told himself that there was absolutely no need to fret. No point in getting hysterical. Think of it as just another problem that could be taken care of neatly, quietly, with dispatch and efficiency.

  “Hey!” Carol said.

  “Uh?”

  “Wake up and look at me, you inert mass.”

  He rolled up onto one sharp elbow and squinted at her. “You look just fine,” he said. And she did, indeed. The pale-blue swimsuit set off her dark coloring. Her hair was black and coarse and shiny, a heritage from the remote fraction of Indian blood that had provided the inevitable name for the three boats they had owned. Her eyes were fine and dark and large. Her nose, which she despised, was high-bridged, faintly hooked. He had always liked it. Her thirty-seven years showed in the weather wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and possibly in the veins on the backs of her hands, but not at all in the long, lithe figure, nor in the round and agile legs.

  “I was not fishing,” she said firmly. “This is a serious matter. Pay attention.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “It started on Thursday when you came back from the office. You were physically present but spiritually among the missing. And yesterday the same. And today, more of it. Fifteen years of marriage, my remote friend, give a girl extrasensory equipment.”

  “That sounds provocative. The equipment looks good on you.”

  “Hush! No smart talk, Samuel. No covering up. No fencing, please, sir. I want to know. Just now you were scowling more than the sun requires. I know when something is nibbling at you.”

  “In all of New Essex I am known as Subtle Sam. Nobody knows what I’m thinking. They cannot probe my Gioconda smile. I can draw and fill an inside straight without a tremor. But you have an uncanny—”

  “Please,” she said in an entirely different voice, and he knew that he would have to tell her. He opened the ice chest and took out another can of beer. He opened it and offered it to her, but she shook her head. He took the can down by a third. “All right. But understand that I’m a natural-born worrier. Everything is so good that I’m superstitious. I want to keep this very precious apple cart of ours standing on its wheels.”

  “I can help you worry.”

  “Or maybe laugh me out of it. I hope so. A weird thing happened when I came out of the office on Thursday. But that isn’t the starting place. It starts on a certain trip overseas you might just possibly remember.”

  He knew she could remember. There had been only the one trip back in 1943 when First Lieutenant Samuel B. Bowden of the Judge Advocate General’s Department took a lengthy cruise on the old Comte de Biancamano, which was being operated by the U.S. Navy. He had embarked wearing his Pentagon pallor and had eventually ended up in New Delhi in Theater Headquarters of the C.B.I.

  “I’m not fixing to forget it, lover. You were gone a good chunk of time. A good chunk out of my life. A bad chunk, I should say.”

  “You haven’t heard me go through the Bowden symposium of side-splitting war stories for some time, but do you happen to remember my anecdote about Melbourne? It wasn’t very funny.”

  “Sort of. Let me see. You got off there and you got mixed up in something and the ship went on without you because you had to be a witness, and you never caught up with that footlocker we packed with such loving care.”

  “I was a key witness at a court-martial. A rape case.”

  “Yes, I remember that. But I don’t remember how you came to be a witness.”

  “Several of us got a hotel room and I was taken drunk on Australian ale. They make it of distilled sledgehammers. It was a June night, and cold. I decided I needed the walk back to the ship. It was two in the morning. As I was getting myself thoroughly lost, I heard a whimpering in an alley. I thought it was a puppy or a kitten. But it was a girl. She was fourteen.”

  He knew that the special half-drunken flavor of that night would never leave his memory. The great stone city with its wide, deserted streets, just a few lights burning. The sound of his heels echoing coin sounds from the empty walls. He was humming “Roll Out the Barrel.” It became nicely resonant when he was opposite the mouths of the alleys.

  He decided a puppy or a kitten could be smuggled onto the ship. And then he had stopped and stared without comprehension at the pale tumbled legs, the brute rhythm of the attacker, and heard the animal whining, heard the meaty crack of his fist against her face. With comprehension had come a high-wild anger. He had wrested the soldier away from her and, as the man had scrambled up, had struck wildly and with all his strength and had hit the hard shelf of jaw. The man had grappled with him weakly, then slid down, rolled onto his back and, to Sam’s astonishment, had begun to snore. He ran out and a few moments later hailed a Shore Patrol jeep.

  They had held him over for the court-martial. The girl was fourteen, big for her age and very plain-looking. Her father had been sick in the night, and she had been on her way to her aunt’s house to get help when the drunken soldier, Max Cady, had caught her and pulled her into the alley.

  “Didn’t they hang him?”

  “No. But it was close. He was a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant with seven years of service and over two hundred days of combat in the islands. He’d been pulled out with a bad case of jungle rot and jungle nerves and sent to a rest camp near Melbourne. It was his first trip into the city. He was drunk. She looked older, and she was out on the street at two in the morning.”

  “But even so.”

  “They gave him life at hard labor.”

  He remembered how the sergeant had looked in court. Like an animal. Sullen, vicious and dangerous. And physically powerful. Sam looked at him and knew how lucky the punch had been. Cady had looked across the court at Sam as though he would dearly enjoy killing him with his hands. Dark hair grew low on his forehead. Heavy mouth and jaw. Small brown eyes set in deep and simian sockets. Sam could tell what Cady was thinking. A nice clean non-combat lieutenant. A meddler in a pretty uni
form who’d never heard a shot fired in anger. So the pretty lieutenant should have backed right out of the alley and gone on his way and left a real soldier alone.

  “Sam, darling, are you trying to say that …” She had a frightened look on her face.

  “Now please don’t get jumpy. Don’t get nervous, baby.”

  “Did you see that man on Thursday? Did they let him out?”

  He sighed. “I never get a chance to finish anything. Yes. They let him out.”

  He had not expected Cady to come bobbing up out of ancient history. He had merely forgotten the whole affair. Too many other impressions during those overseas years had blurred the memories of Cady. He had come home in 1945 with the rank of captain. He had got along well with his colonel, a man named Bill Stetch, and after the war he had come to New Essex at Bill’s invitation and had joined the law firm.

  “Tell me about it. What is he like? How in the world did he find you?”

  “I don’t think it’s trouble. It can be handled. Anyway, when I headed for the lot on Thursday, a man I knew I’d never seen before fell in step with me. He kept grinning at me in a funny way. I thought he was crazy.”

  “Can we go in now? Can we? Is it time?” Bucky yelled shrilly, racing toward them.

  Sam looked at his watch. “You’ve been goofing off, my small, untidy friend. You could have been in five minutes ago.”

  “Hey, Jamie! It’s time.”

  “Bucky, wait a minute,” Carol said. “You don’t go out beyond that rock. You or Jamie. Understand?”

  “Nancy goes ’way out.”

  “And when you pass the life-saving tests she’s passed, you can go ’way out too,” Sam said. “Don’t gripe. And see if you can keep your head down.”

  They watched the boys go into the water. Nancy and her friend stood up. She waved at her parents. She tucked her dark hair into her cap as she walked to the stern of the Sweet Sioux. Sam looked at her and felt sad and ancient as he saw how quickly her slim figure was maturing. And, as always, he thanked private gods that Nancy took after her mother. The boys took after him. Sandy-red hair, knobbly bone structure, pale-blue eyes, freckles, over-sized teeth. It was evident that at maturity both boys would be like their father, incurably lean, shambling, stringy, tall men of physical indolence and ropy toughness. It would have been tragic if he had willed his only daughter such a fate.