The Drowner by John D. MacDonald

picking up the slack that would go to someone else otherwise, and at the same time helping Sam out of a hole with more alacrity than might have happened otherwise.
    In its simplest sense, Sam’s tax problem meant he was going to have to unload asset values. And Gus Gable was going to be right there to pick them up. With a little help.
    And when it was over, Gus Gable was going to have a fat piece of money tucked away, and life was going to change. He was forty-two years old, and he knew he had waited long enough. It would be legal money, his beyond the shadow of a doubt. He found it difficult to think beyond the actual fact of the money. The images beyond the money were vague. They were like the color plates in magazine advertisements. Gus Gable, at the flying bridge of his custom Rybovitch, bringing a record tuna back to the dock at Cat Cay. Gus Gable at the wheel of his white XK-Jag. Gus Gable in Rome. And, undefined but inevitable, was the Golden Girl—beside him on the flying bridge, beside him in the car, beside him at the sidewalk cafe—merry and laughing and dear. Six months of work alternating with six months of play for the rest of his life.
    He found it mildly incongruous at times, a dream that could not happen. He was forty-two, and his dark hair was thin, and his belly was soft, and his brown eyes were weak behind the astigmatic lenses. He had an office pallor, a J. C. Penney wardrobe, a voice husked by twenty cheap cigars a day, a stomach made delicate by too many years of fried foods, a shabby furnished apartment with indifferent maid service, a three-year-old Chevy which he drove badly, and no hobbies at all. For the past few years he had been grossing about seventy thousand, putting forty back into salaries and overhead, and, after taxes and living expenses, investing between fifteen and eighteen thousand a year in blue chip securities. On an average of once a month he would drive over to Tampa on a Saturday, register at a place where he was known as Robert Warren, phone the right number and be sent a blonde whore on an overnight basis, receiving always a clean, reasonably attractive and competent one, a service to be expected by a steady customer who paid well, caused no trouble and did not demand anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes he would get the same one several times running, but he never requested one by name. They were not the Golden Girl. They were just mild, rather dull-minded women who talked aimlessly about their daytime jobs, their kids in school, the men who ran out on them. In the beginning, when he had first started to use the number, they had sent some who were too young or too skinny or who drank too much, and one who was a hysterical amateur, but he had complained each time and so, for the past four years none had been really unsuitable. He would keep them until midmorning on Sunday, and then nap until late afternoon when he checked out and drove back home.
    But the money was going to change it all, somehow. Change pallor to bronze, flatten the belly, improve his reflexes, enable him to find the Golden Girl and, having found her, make her love him for his own sake, with the money just an incidental thing they could both enjoy. And he would know how to talk to her and make her laugh. And everybody would see her with him and envy him.
    He wiped his face again and cleaned his glasses. He opened his brief case and took out the summary sheets on a pending hearing, but the figures and ratios made no sense to him. As he was putting them away the phone rang, and he lunged across the bed and caught it before the second ring. , “Gus?”
    “Right here, Clarence. Ready and waiting.”
    “It just came downstairs. To round it off, two hundred and thirty-one thousand three hundred. Sixty days’ grace. The formal notification goes out Monday. Make you happy?”
    “Clarence, old friend, I will say gratified. It will squeeze Sam badly, but I think it is eminently fair all around. His acceptance