Miss Shumway Waves a Wand

by James Hadley Chase

Some men like strong-minded women. They say they know just where they are with them. Me . . I give them away with a box of crackerjacks. The trouble with a girl who knows her own mind is she’s one jump ahead of you all the time. If you want to fox her into anything, you’ve got to do a double jump, and like as not you end up by buying yourself a truss. Anyway, I sold her in the end. That’s all that matters. I got her to see that for a couple of days’ work, she’d save herself a stretch in jail and maybe make herself a load of jack. Why bother with details? It’s action that counts. I had a lot to think about and a lot to do, but that’s not your worry. All you want to know is how it worked out, not how I did it. Briefly then, the four of us agreed to put up at the hotel. It was as good a place as any, and until we had worked out the details of our campaign, it was no use us floating around the countryside like peas on a knife. We got ourselves rooms and we settled down. As soon as I was alone, I put a call through to Maddox. When I told him that I’d found the girl, I thought he was going to have a stroke. It seemed he hadn’t got his story fixed and he wasn’t nearly ready for me to bring her in. Then again, he was dead set on her being kidnapped by bandits because he’d worked out a swell story how she had been carried off from her hotel by thirty desperadoes.

I told him what I had in mind and that slackened the pressure on his arteries. I kept talking and I could hear his blood pressure going down. After a while, he said I was smart and finally he ended up by wanting to kiss me.

The set-up was this. I’d take the girl to Pepoztlan and get the snake-bite angle fixed. That alone would make a swell story. On her way back from Pepoztlan, Myra would be snatched by a bunch of greasers. I knew a little greaser who lived in the hills and who would be glad to do the job for a couple of hundred bucks. I’d take a few photos and then pull a rescue stunt.

The rest was plain sailing. The whole business was to be completed within a week. Maddox thought it was a swell idea. The snake-bite business excited him and he talked about buying himself in. I didn’t discourage him, but I made up my mind that if any money was to be made out of thin I was going to be the guy to cash in. I got him to let me spend anything within reason—my reason and not his—and then I hung up. That was that part fixed up.

Then I put a call through to Paul Juden and wised him up on the deal. I told him where to send my bag, demanded some money, and asked him how he was making out with the nurse. He said he’d do everything I wanted and the nurse business was just a gag. He knew I knew his wife.

When I’d done all that, I thought I’d go along and have a talk with Myra. I wanted to know more about this girl. I wanted to take the corners off our friendship and find out just how strong her mind was. So I went along to her room, and put my head round the door. She wasn’t there.

I found her messing around the Cadillac under the shade of a banana tree. She looked over her shoulder when she heard me coming and then lowered the hood of the car.

“Come on,” I said. “See those mountains? Well, let’s go out and look at ’em. I want to stand in the open with the wind against my face and feel that I’m somebody.”

She gave me an old-fashioned look, but something must have caught at her imagination because she got into the car without a word. I sat by her side and we jolted gently over the cobbles, through the square on to the main road that led out of Orizaba.

We didn’t say anything until we reached the mountain road and when we began to climb, with a sheer drop down into the valley whizzing past our off-wheels, she said suddenly, “We could go on and on like this and we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. And when we’re tired of each other we could say good-bye and both of us would have still less to worry about.”