Killers from the Keys by Brett Halliday Page B

body and took unholy possession of him. He would see her again tonight. For two nights he had stubbornly remained closeted in his cabin, denying the newly-discovered demands of the flesh, drinking sufficient whiskey, hour after hour, to blur the insistent knowledge within him that this was for him: that he, Steven Shephard, after thirty years of carefully-regulated, according-to-the-book, safe-and-sane and socially-correct sexual attitudes, had thrown all this aside and succumbed (happily, by God, and with a youthful fervor that Emily had never known he possessed) to the allure of quivering young flesh that nakedly and unashamedly sought lust for the sheer sake of lust, that traded sweat and torment and passion for sexual release and for nothing else, that knew no other reason for living and sought no other reason.
    Shephard heard a scraping sound outside the window and jerked his head up angrily to glare at the, now, opaque glass. That would be Peterson, the motel manager. He was always snooping at the windows. As soon as darkness came, he began his stealthy rounds. Normally, Shephard didn’t mind being spied upon. Alone in the cabin, he had little to hide from Peterson’s pruriently peering eyes. But now, with his heart pounding and with the clear image of Sloe Burn’s lasciviously nubile body searing across his mind, he felt ashamed and trapped, as though the man outside his window had discovered him committing an unmanly and erotic act on his own body.
    He stood up and squared his shoulders, walked a trifle unsteadily to the door and jerked it open. The afterglow of twilight lingered in the sky and, as he had suspected, Peterson rounded the corner of his cabin from the windowed side, and shuffled toward him.
    The motel manager was a small, gnomelike man, with a bushy-haired head that was too large for the rest of him, and wizened features and humid eyes that refused to meet another man’s gaze directly. He always held his over-sized head cocked slightly on one side which gave him a sly look of cunning.
    He said, “Evening, Mr. Tucker,” Coming to an uneasy halt a couple of feet from the figure in the open doorway. “Everything okay?”
    Shephard said, “You ought to know, Peterson. Couldn’t you tell by peeking in my window?”
    “Now see here now,” protested Peterson with a righteous whine in his voice. “You have absolutely no right to make a statement like that, Mr. Tucker. It’s untrue and uncalled-for and downright libelous. I’m making my evening rounds, as usual, to see everything’s quiet and shipshape. Is it my fault if you leave your shade up so’s anyone can see in your room?”
    “You know as well as I do that the shade is broken and won’t come down. I complained about it the first day I was here.”
    “Well, now, I don’t recollect that, Mr. Tucker. I sure don’t. I’ll have a man around to tend to it first thing in the morning.”
    “That’s what you promised me a week ago.”
    “Slipped my mind, I guess.” Peterson shook his head and rubbed his jaw reflectively. “So many little things breaking down all the time here. I keep telling the owners and telling them we got to keep things in better shape if we want to attract the right sort of people, but they’re so tight they hate to spend a nickel on maintenance. Aside from the window shade, you’re cozy and comfortable, huh? Hardly even go out at all, do you?”
    His voice had an intimate sort of buddy-buddy quality to it that hinted he was aware of all Shephard’s secrets; it offered soothing assurance that the guest in No. 3 had nothing to fear from him,… and it discreetly invited further confidences any time Shephard felt the need for human companionship.
    Shephard said, “I’m comfortable enough,” and stepped back surlily to close the door in Peterson’s face. The interior of the cabin was quite dim by this time, and he pressed the wall switch to light the room with a yellowish glow from the low-wattage bulb in the