The Deep Blue Good-By Read Online Free PDF

persistent little man up there in Jacksonville, and give him a heady desire to have a chat with Ambrose A. Allen, transient.
    But first he would have to find him.
    I wondered if I would find him first.
    I visited the Bayway Hotel. It was a mainland hotel, small, quiet and luxurious in an understated way. The little lobby was like the living room in a private home. A pale clerk listened to my question and drifted off into the shadows and was gone a long time. He came back and said that A. A. Allen had stayed with them for five days last March and had left no forwarding address.
    He had given his address when registering as General Delivery, Candle Key. He had been in 301, one of their smallest suites, We smiled at each other. He smothered a yawn with a dainty fist and I walked out of his shado"y coolness into the damp noisy heat of the Miami afternoon.
    The next question was multiple choice. I did :not want to get too close to Junior Allen too soon.
    when you stalk game it is nice to know what it eats and where it drinks and where it beds down, Page 15

    and if it has any particularly nasty habits, like circling back and pursuing the pursuer. I did not know all the questions I wanted to ask, but I knew where to look for answers. Cathy, her sister, Mrs. Atkinson, and perhaps some people out in Kansas. And it might be interesting to locate somebody who had served with Sergeant David Berry in that long ago war. Apparently the Sergeant had found himself a profitable war. It was past four o'clock, and, I kept thinking of questions I wanted to ask Cathy, so I headed on back toward my barge. I parked Miss Agnes handy to home, because I would need her that evening to go see Cathy Kerr.
    I stripped to swim trunks and did a full hour of topsides work on the Busted Flush, taking out a rotted section of canvas on the port side of the sun deck, replacing it with the nylon I'd had made to order, lacing the brass grommets to the railing and to the little deck cleats, while the sun blasted me and the sweat rolled off.
    One more section to go and I will have worked my way all around the damned thing, and then I am going to cover the whole sun deck area with that vinyl which is a clever imitation of teak decking. Maybe, after years of effort I will get it to the point where a mere forty hours a week will keep it in trim.
    I acquired it in a private poker session in Palm Beach, a continuous thirty hours of intensive effort. At the end of ten hours I had been down to just what I had on the table, about twelve hundred. In a stud hand I stayed with deuces backed, deuce of clubs down, deuce of hearts up.
    My next three cards were the three, seven and ten of hearts. There were three of us left in the pot. By then they knew how I played, knew I had to be paired, or have an ace or king in the hole.
    I was looking at a pair of eights, and the other player had paired on the last card. Fours. Fours checked to the eights and I was in the middle, and bet the pot limit, six hundred. Pair of eights sat there and thought too long. He decided I wasn't trying to buy one, because it would have been too clumsy and risky in view of my financial status.
    He decided I was trying to look as if I was buying one, to get the big play against a flush, anchored by either the ace or king of hearts in the hole. Fortunately neither of those cards had showed up in that hand.
    He folded. Pair of fours was actually two pair. He came to the same reluctant conclusion. I pulled the pot in, collapsed my winning hand and tossed it to the dealer, but that hole nst my finger and card somehow caught again Ripped over. The black deuce. And I knew that would remember that from then on they w price for d they would pay my busted flush an MY good hands. And they did, for twenty more hours, and there were many many good hands, and there was a great weight of oldtime money in that little group. In the last few hours I loaned the big loser ten thousand against that houseboat, and when it was