Redheads Die Quickly Read online

  Your everlasting Jim.

  P.S. I’ll be seeing you. Think of my love. J. R.

  Half an hour later, driving the Ford fast, Caffery had already made the turn off U.S. 19 on the Gainesville road. Helen was beside him, making with her usual wit.

  “I wish we could watch TV, now.”

  “Shut up!”

  Caffery didn’t know what he would do with Helen. He certainly didn’t want to take her to Miami with him. He thought maybe it would be good if he dumped her down the well.

  Caffery was nearly out of his head. He thought of Ritchie’s ghost, which was not pleasant. Aside from that, there were hundreds of worries. Suppose the place had been plowed under? Suppose somebody’d built a damned subdivision out there, or something; they were building them every damned place. Suppose Ritchie lied? He could have. How could he trust a babe—any babe? Of course, Helen was different—now. She could be trusted to do anything you asked of her. Anything at all, except make sense.

  “I wish—” Helen said.

  She didn’t finish and he didn’t bother admonishing her, because he saw the farmhouse. It was just as Ritchie had said. He drove out behind it, and came up to the cane brake. He drove the car straight through the brake, and saw that the swampy ground Ritchie had mentioned was dried up. He kept driving, his palms sweating, on through the cypress woods, until he saw the knoll.

  Caffery was making weird little noises in his throat now. He could no longer contain himself.

  At first he thought there was no well. But it was there. The old boards were hidden in drying grass, under the hot afternoon sun.

  He climbed out of the car.

  “You wait here for me,” he told Helen. “Wait in the car.”

  She stared at him. He gave up explaining.

  She watched him run off through the grass.

  He reached the well. He was frantic now. He tore at the old boards with his fingers, cracking nails till they bled. Finally he’d cleared away some of the debris and knelt staring down into the well. He was shaking and soaked with sweat. Sunlight streamed down there and he saw water, and was sick—then his heart rocked.

  “He didn’t lie!”

  There was a rope, fastened to the side of the well, just within reach. On the other end of the rope, far down there, hanging against the stone, was the valise.

  Caffery grabbed the rope and started to haul, and that was all there was for Caffery. In the moment of white flash before thunder he did not hear, and the roar and the flying rocks and dirt, he recalled Ritchie’s tricks with high explosive, and how Ritchie had been able to perform stunts no other man could. The sudden revelation in the wording of Ritchie’s last letter.

  Then Caffery was gone in minute flying bits, among a thunderous blast that lifted heavily toward the skies, and slowly died away in falling rains of water and sand and mud and stone and broken beams, and thousands upon thousands of floating chips of green paper with numbers on them, and faces of presidents, and the like.

  And bits of Caffery.

  Somebody heard the noise and notified the sheriff. The sheriff found Helen still waiting in the car, sitting quite prim, with her hands folded. He tried to make her talk.

  “Can we watch TV now?” she said. “Can we, please?”