The Last Match Read online

  Raves For the Work of

  DAVID DODGE!

  “A rattling job of story-telling to rank with the top… thrillers of recent years… Even Dodge’s excellent earlier books have hardly prepared one for the pure virtuosity of narrative excitement which he reveals here.

  —The New York Times

  “Mr. Dodge, always a master hand at dangers and hair-raising near misses, has never put characters through a more nerve-racking ordeal…fans new and old should love it.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[A] sparkling yarn…Cleverly original, sprightly characterization, swift and deft movement, and surprise climax.”

  —Chicago Sunday Tribune

  “A first-class story of adventure, and more…Mr. Dodge writes with a conviction and a professional integrity which compel belief from the first page to the last.”

  —The Spectator

  “The tale is one of those rare tough ones in which the toughness is as convincing as it is unstinting…tight and rapid.”

  — The Chicago Sun Book Week

  “A web of intrigue, adventure and violence…A titanic struggle that builds to an exciting climax.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fine, hard-packed, hard-hitting prose.”

  —Anthony Boucher

  “Plentiful action, information, colorful backgrounds… Exciting.”

  — The Saturday Review of Literature

  “Accelerated and absorbing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Better add David Dodge to your list of household necessities.”

  —Will Cuppy

  “A thriller with more than mere thrills to recommend it.

  —New Statesman

  “[A] fine, meaty story.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Very adept weaving of uncommon stuffs and all in all your only probable complaint will be that at the end there isn’t any more. First rate.”

  —New York Herald Tribune Book Review

  A respectable looking French bank-clerk type was standing there. He wore an incongruously sporty cloth cap that had been set squarely on his head with a spirit level. “Good afternoon, monsieur,” he said politely. “Is this your name?”

  He held out some kind of an official-looking document so I could read the name on it. It was mine.

  “It might be,” I said. “Why?”

  “I have a warrant for your arrest. Interpol.”

  He put the paper carefully away in his pocket and took out a wallet with an identification card in it; picture, thumbprint and the rest. It looked genuine. So did he.

  I said, “I guess we ought to talk, huh?”

  He took off his cap before coming in. If I’d had a doormat I think he would have wiped his shoes, too. Carefully. He was that kind.

  I knew quite a bit about Interpol. The warrant, which looked legal as far as it went, was signed by a French judge, and France had about as much jurisdiction over me in Tangier as it would have had in Tokyo.

  The guy stood there holding his silly cap, politely and patiently waiting for me to come along quietly. While I was hesitating, his cap dropped from his fingers, his eyes froze and glazed, his mouth fell open. Boda had come down from the roof…

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  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-025)

  October 2006

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know

  that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and

  destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the

  publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2003, 2006 by Kendal Dodge Butler.

  Originally written by David Dodge in 1973.

  Cover painting copyright © 2006 by William George.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical

  means, including photocopying, recording or by any information

  storage and retrieval system, without the written

  permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or

  are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or

  dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 0-8439-5596-1

  ISBN-13 978-0-8439-5596-5

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo

  are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are

  selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  THE LAST MATCH

  Chapter One

  The guy who was waiting for me in my room merely wanted to blow my head off, that’s all. To teach me a lesson, as it turned out. He used a little short-barreled revolver, a thirty-two I think it was, but he didn’t know how to hold it to keep the barrel from flipping up every time he pulled the trigger. The kick of the shots lifted the bullets over my head or over my shoulder or somewhere else that wasn’t into me. He got off three of them before I could do anything about it.

  There’s something to be said for combat training even if there’s nothing at all to say for the rest of the schooling they give you in the U.S. Army. After you’ve been bounced hard enough and often enough by experts because you’re not reacting fast enough, your reflexes tend to sharpen up. And when you’re scared silly by a gun going blam, blam, blam in your face they get even sharper. Given a window to jump out of I’d have been gone with the wind like a soaring rocket. But the guy stood between me and the escape in that direction, and in the other direction I had just trapped myself by closing a hotel-room door behind me before putting on the lights so he could see to pot me. In the circumstances there wasn’t much to do except throw my room key in his face and go for his ankles before he fired number four.

  It worked. He was small, middle-aged, nothing much to handle. I took the gun away from him and sat on his chest. He began to cry.

  He looked and was dressed like an American. I thought I might have seen him someplace before. He didn’t have the kind of face to remember. Af
ter my heart had eased back down my throat to where it belonged, I said, “What did you want to go and do that for?”

  “Mildred,” he blubbered, the tears puddling in his eyes. “Sh-she’s going to l-leave me, and I l-l-love her.”

  “Who’s Mildred?” I shook the live shells out of the revolver to put them in my pocket where they wouldn’t kill anybody.

  “Don’t you dare mock me, damn you!” He was both indignant and tearful at the same time, but more indignant than tearful.

  “No, honest. I don’t know any Mildreds.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  “All right, I’m a liar. I still don’t know any Mildreds. If I let you up, will you please tell me what it’s all about without pulling a knife?”

  He gulped. It sounded affirmative. “But you’re still a liar.”

  “I conceded that. I still don’t know any Mildreds.”

  I gave him a hand to pull him to his feet. He said automatically, “Thank you.” I said, “You’re welcome. Here’s your pistol. It isn’t loaded.”

  “Thank you,” he said again. He was a polite little murderer, I must say.

  The cops were there within a few minutes after the shooting. The hotel was one of the best in Cannes, on the Croisette, and there were always a couple of flics out in front to keep the crowds moving whenever somebody important checked in, like a movie star. Before they hauled him away I made another attempt to find out what it was all about. All I could get from him was that Mildred had said she no longer loved him and was going to leave him. It was all my fault. So he had decided to shoot me, to retain her love. Simple.

  Even simpler was the fact that I really didn’t know any Mildreds. I checked up on the guy while the cops had him—they took the pistol away, fined him and turned him loose three days later—and learned that he was registered at the hotel with his wife. MacCullin, their name was. The concierge pointed the wife out to me, a so-so number with orange hair and a figure that had seen better days.

  I did, too, know her, although not by name. We had been fellow guests at a party somewhere, Eden Roc I think it was, where everybody had had more than enough to drink. Mildred and I ended up in a garden for fun and games under the stars. Nothing serious came of it; a spell of catch-as-catch-can wrestling, heavy breathing, shared lipstick, that was it. The garden was too crowded with other wrestlers for anything more. I may have told her, I probably did tell her as anyone but a cad would tell a lady he’s been grappling with, that I would love a return bout in more sheltered circumstances, but that was the end of it. I didn’t ask if she had a husband, she didn’t volunteer the information, nobody jealous came looking for her. Now she had fingered me to him for reasons of her own I didn’t want to know about.

  When MacCullin came out of hock and returned to the hotel I got him alone and bent his ear.

  “Mac, pal,” I said. “Listen. I don’t know what’s with your wife, but there’s nothing between us. I’ve never even spoken to her. Honest.”

  “You’re a liar. She told me—”

  “Hear me and read me. I don’t care what she told you, there’s nothing in it. I give you my solemn word of honor. If that isn’t enough for you, figure it out for yourself. Would I be playing around with your wife in the same hotel where I’ve got a woman of my own? She’s mad crazy jealous of me, and if I even looked at another doll she’d cut me right off at the pockets. I’d have to go to work. You wouldn’t want that to happen to a pal, would you?”

  “You’re not living together,” he said suspiciously. “Not in your room you’re not. I looked around.”

  “She has to maintain appearances.” I gave him the old man-to-man eye. “You know how it is, an older woman and a young guy like me. Your must have seen us together; a nice looking lady, dresses well, maybe a bit on the plumpish side—”

  “I thought she was your mother.”

  “And you were going to shoot the boy of a nice lady like that? Shame on you!”

  “I wasn’t really trying to shoot you,” he said lamely. “I just wanted to scare you.”

  “You scared me. Don’t do it again, please, buddy, huh? You’re going to have to pay for the bulletholes, too, you know.”

  “I won’t do it again. I really thought she was your mother. I’m sorry.”

  We shook hands and had a drink on it in the bar. I looked at myself in the mirror over the back bar and wondered if I’d do better without a profile.

  One of the curses of my formative years was an overdose of prettiness. It is mine no more, thank God, age and a receding hairline being as erosive as they are, but mention of this early failing is necessary because of what it did to my youth. As a child I was a lady-killer at the age of six. Women loved my mop of brown curls, my brown calf’s eyes with the long curly lashes they all envied me for, my cute button nose, all the rest. (The cute nose got unbuttoned in later years, but even that didn’t change things much.) With the cunning of the deceptive little bastard I was I learned to capitalize on these assets, and did so at every opportunity. My parents should have drowned me, but didn’t.

  As an adolescent I was an unmitigated young prick, like most adolescents, but a prick with charm I had cultivated since childhood. Girls were easy for me, including other guys’ girls. This led to trouble from time to time with one of the other guys, who would feel justified in trying to beat on me. I was big enough to beat back, bigger than the average, so I didn’t take as many lickings as I was entitled to. In college I began to grow up some, learn different values, but the twig had been bent and the tree was so inclined. Women, including other guys’ wives, were as easy for me as girls had been. I even developed a talent for slickering husbands out of beating on me when they should have been beating on me. I became, in short, a college-trained con man; amateur skill, but with all the qualifications to turn professional at any time. Two years of compulsory servitude in the army only deferred my eventual blossoming in the full flower of fulfillment; first, briefly, as a gigolo, later an off-and-on jailbird, in time and with experience as a hustler, bunco steerer and peddler of phony gold bricks.

  All this is less by way of mea culpa than to explain how and why things happened as they did. When I had finished my two years of army service, during which I perfected various techniques for violating the rules against fraternizing with the cooperative fräuleins of West Germany, I took my discharge there, got a passport in Frankfurt and bummed my way around Europe on the cheap while my severance pay lasted. I ended up on the French Riviera because I had heard you could sleep comfortably on the beaches there even in wintertime. (You can’t.) My cash was about finished.

  In Monte Carlo I decided to turn it back into a bankroll by investing it in le jeu de craps-game. I’d done all right with dice in the army and during the summers I worked as a roustabout for carnie shows, but a house game is not the same as bouncing the bones on a blanket. Monte Carlo’s jeu de craps-game chewed me up and spat me out, bloodless, in about half an hour. I didn’t even have cigarette money left, or bus fare to get out of town.

  That didn’t bother me much. I had tapped out before without dying of it. I was young, healthy, able-bodied. Something would turn up. I went out into the casino gardens overlooking the Mediterranean, hoping to find a long cigarette butt. (Casinos are too fast about replacing used ashtrays with clean ashtrays, I suppose for fear that a smoldering butt may burn the green felt.) A lady who had been watching the game— and me, as I was aware—followed me out.

  The shores of the south of France are littered with a flotsam of lonely women, cast up there by divorce, widowhood, dissatisfaction with the availabilities, other reasons. They are Americans or British, in large part, and they all have a fair amount of money; enough to run with the company they keep. You can see half a dozen of them around the roulette tables in any casino on an average night. Because they are both rich and lonely they are fair game for the kind of guy who is on the make for a moneyed mama. I wasn’t one of these, and I’m pretty sure the lady knew it. She may have
had some idea that I was going to blow my brains out, as in those stories you read, mostly fiction, about desperate gamblers broken on the wicked wheels of Monaco. She came over to where I was sitting on a bench looking despondent only because I was casing the ground around the bench for usable butts, my head and shoulders down.

  “You lost all your money, didn’t you?” she said.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am. Although it wasn’t much to lose.”

  “You needn’t keep your chin up for me, poor boy. I know how you must feel. Here.”

  She had opened her purse while she was talking. She took out a thick wad of mille notes—this was in the days of the old franc, when French money had big figures on it although not much more buying power than it has today—and shoved it at me. “Take it. I won it this afternoon.”

  “You can lose it just as easy tomorrow afternoon, ma’am. Thanks all the same.”

  “Take it,” she insisted. “Only promise me you won’t gamble with it.”

  I couldn’t read her at all. Here’s this dame, middle-aged, not good-looking, not bad-looking, a motherly type, well dressed, obviously in the bucks, pushing money at me she’d won gambling but didn’t want me to gamble with. I said, “Lady, thanks very much. I appreciate your offer, but I can’t take your money. Even if I did, I’d gamble with it.”

  “Don’t talk back to me, boy,” she said. “I’m old enough to be your mother.” And damned if she didn’t drop the wad of bills in my lap and start back toward the casino.