On the Run: A Novel

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

In his dreams there was light and color, remembered faces and old accusations, and in his dreams his voice seemed to go on and on, explaining, justifying himself to skeptics.

But he would come out of the dreams, out of a remembered litheness, back into a body ninety-two years old, to the hush of a house of illness. He knew his impatience was irrational. The body had always healed itself in time. Sickness had always been temporary. But this business of dying seemed to involve so much waiting.

He envied the other old ones, dying all over the world, envied them for their blurred minds which made brief and glancing contacts with reality. But he in turn could be envied, he knew. There was no pain. The lower spine was gone, the legs dead. And there was the money, of course. Money kept you from dying among charitable strangers. Money was a deodorant, keeping you sweet and sanitary and inoffensive despite the mess of helplessness. But how the clear mind roamed all dimensions of the mortal trap, deploring past acts, dreading blackness, whining about truth.

He looked at the angle of the mid-summer sun, then turned his head and looked at his gold watch in its small wire stand on the table beside the bed. Ten minutes after three, and a time of dreaming which had not been wasted because, for a little while, he had visited the summertime of 1884, bringing the little blue sloop back across Caydo Lake in a squall, the year it was new, his mother on the dock anxiously awaiting him, taking the line he threw her as the sail came rattling down. Dreams are the time machines, and this one would give him a lot of new things to remember about his fourteenth summer.

He reached his right hand down to the frame of the bed and found the button which began the soft humming, the slow raising of the head of the bed. He was glad he had ordered them to move him into the small library off the living room of the old house. The master bedroom had been too traditional a room to die in. He had tried the living room next, but it was the house in which he had been born, and too many caskets populated his memories of that room, too many candles and waxy faces, too often the ripe sweet smell of the flowers. A sardonic amusement sufficed for a time to offset this awareness, but in May he had decided to be moved into the library, had them take the old desk out, place the bed where he could see, when sufficiently elevated, the red maples and a part of the neglected garden, and a segment of iron fence and stone wall.

Paula Lettinger came in, almost without sound. She went to the foot of the bed and looked at him with a mocking severity.

You have a bell, you know, she said.

Young woman, when I need your attentions, I shall be happy to summon you.

She came to him, touched his pulse, touched his forehead, shifted the pillows slightly. She was a dark-haired woman in her late twenties, with heavy black brows, a long firm body, high strong youthful breasts. Her skin had an ivory clarity, and her face had flat planes, prominent cheekbones under the eyes deeply set. He knew that the look of her was a remote heritage, remembering that her paternal grandmother had Onandaga Indian blood, had been a rebellious girl, a victim of gossip, had married the Lettinger who had failed in the livery stable business, had borne him three sons, had died of influenza in 1918, along with Lettinger and one of the boys.

She wore slacks and a sleeveless yellow blouse. He had insisted she give up the white garments of her trade, sensing that in so doing, she would also relinquish some of that professional impersonal bustling of the trained nurse.

He saw the new touch of color on her nose and cheeks, and across her forehead. Was it pleasant in the sun?

She was startled for a moment. You’re a sly old one. Yes it was. I sat at that old cement table and wrote letters. In shorts and a halter, if you need all the details. And the Ormand boy climbed a tree and stared over the fence at me.

His taste is admirable and his manners are foul. Did you write to your husband?

She had moved to the foot of the bed. I wish you wouldn’t call him my husband. The marriage was annulled.

All right. The man who was once your husband.

She sighed. I wrote to him. My God, how you bully me!

How do you feel about it, now that you’ve written?

A sense of relief, I guess. But I’d hate to admit you might be right.

Everybody must be given a chance, and another, and another, as many as the heart can endure, Paula.

Jud doesn’t deserve another chance.

Who are you to judge? Five years in prison can change a man. If he wants to see you when he gets out next week, he should have the right to know where you are, the right to come and explain or apologize—the right to know there is somebody in the world who has a little less than absolute hate for him. The thing I most bitterly regret in my life is my righteousness, my dear.

She sighed and shrugged. If he comes here, I’ll talk to him. It won’t change anything. But I guess he should have that chance anyway. At least now you’ll stop hounding me. Jane has made some divine chicken broth.

Not right now.

It will have to be right now. A man has come to see you. If you don’t have the broth, he’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Probably some pest.

Oh, I know he’s a pest. And he’s cost you a great deal of money in the past year. Chasing wild geese.

Fergasson!

The broth is delicious.

But my dear girl, if he comes here rather than sending written reports, it means he has something impor …

A very delicate flavor.

It is wicked and unprofessional for you to agitate a sick old man.

As soon as you start on the broth, I’ll phone him.

It astounds me that you should call me a bully, Miss Lettinger. Bring the broth. Please do.

She came back to his bedside after phoning Fergasson at the Bolton Inn. Fergasson would be out at four o’clock. He sipped the broth slowly. It seemed to have no taste, only heat and wetness. He told Paula about the little blue sloop and the faraway summer.

And I found a dog I had forgotten, he said. Bismarck. His namesake was alive then, settling affairs with blood and iron. The dog looked savage. He had a basso bark, but blue jays used to chase him, and he’d hide under the stable.

Back to the beginnings, she said in a gentle voice. She sat on the deep window seat, outlined against the sunshine. That’s what I was trying to do, coming back here.

I thank God you did, my dear. I can hear them when you go into the village, all their sour little mouths flapping. See her? That’s Paula Lettinger. Came back here and got a job nursing old Tom Brower, and him dying of every disease known to man and taking his sweet time about it, her shut up in that gloomy old pile of rock Tom’s daddy built out of the money that came from overcharging the Union Army for uniforms. Just old Tom there and old Jane Weese been housekeeping for him for thirty years, and feeble old Davie Wintergreen, lives out in the back and does the yard work. Hear tell she’s got a husband locked up in jail due out soon.

Don’t, Tom. Please don’t.

Paula, my dear, the vulgar and ignorant of this area have spent an appreciable percentage of their empty lives discussing the intimate affairs of the Brower family, and God knows we’ve given them enough material over the years. And this … final mission of mine, which certainly they have heard about and distorted to suit their temper, must be giving them a splendid finale.

They heard the door chime. She got up quickly and went through to the front hallway and let Adam Fergasson in. He was a slender and muted little man, with a smile of servility contradicted by such a flavor of self-importance that he seemed the image of the clerical public servant the world over.

But when young Randolph Ward, Tom Brower’s attorney, had been directed to contact the best investigation firm in the country and ask them to assign their best man to Brower’s mission, Adam Fergasson had appeared to be interviewed.

The mission could be simply stated, though the clues were vague: Find my two grandsons. Find them before I die.

Fergasson had nodded, made notes, asked only the most pertinent of questions, and had gone away.

Now he came into the library in his dark suit, murmuring his hope that Mr. Brower was having a good day, taking a straight chair at Brower’s right, looking pointedly at Paula Lettinger.

Miss Lettinger will stay with us, Mr. Fergasson, the old man said.

Very well, Fergasson said. He took a dark notebook from an inside pocket. A little gleam of pride was evident as he said, I have located Sidney Shanley. He is going by the name of Sid Wells. He is working as a used car salesman in Houston, Texas. He does not stay in one place very long.

Are you absolutely certain?

"I am positive, Mr. Brower. But … approaching