Scratch Fever

by Collins, Max Allan

  She came over the bridge, driving his old sky-blue Dodge Charger, the one he’d had since college, and she blinked her brights. That meant the truck was coming. He pulled the Mustang across the mouth of the narrow bridge, left it in park, got out and ran to hop in Julie’s waiting car. They were half a mile away when the small bridge behind them seemed to blow up, in a huge orange ball, as though a shell had hit it.

  HE FINISHED the Manhattan and went out to her. It was chilly in the parking lot; there were no lights on out here, but the full moon provided some unreal-seeming illumination. She was standing with Ron, standing close. He pulled her away from Ron, who stood and watched them, that permanent, pouty snarl on her face.

  He told Julie about the call from Infante.

  They were talking about it when Ron noticed that kid, Jon, making a break for it, crawling away from her car toward the woods. The lez ran after the kid, dragged him back to the car, tossed him in.

  Then Ron came back and said to Julie, “You oughta let me . . .”

  “No,” Julie said. “Take him to your place and sit on him.”

  Ron shrugged. “Okay,” she said, and sauntered off to her ’57 Ford and rumbled off.

  “You’re not going to kill that boy, are you?” Harold asked Julie.

  “No.”

  “You mean Ron’ll do it for you.”

  “I need him alive at the moment. Till we find out what Logan’s up to.”

  “He’ll come here. He’s probably on his way right now.”

  “I can handle him.”

  “I don’t think so. He sounds like one man you can’t handle.”

  “We’ll put this Infante to use.”

  “He doesn’t sound like much. Some poor sappy kid. I’m afraid his partner was the smart one.”

  “He’s the dead one now.”

  “True. Very true.”

  “Well, Harold. There’s always you.”

  “I won’t kill for you, Julie.”

  “Right,” she said. She put her arm in his. “Let’s lock up and go home. We can talk about it.”

  11

  COOL CLOTH touched his face. It was soothing. Jon opened his eyes.

  And looked into Ron’s face.

  For a moment the face looked almost human: the pouty mouth, the close-set eyes, were in a sort of repose, the nastiness set aside. Then she saw that he was awake and, with just a subtle shift, the features turned ugly again.

  She stopped dabbing his face with the damp washrag; she pulled back.

  “Don’t stop,” Jon said. “Feels good.”

  “You got bunged up,” she said. Her tone was strangely apologetic. And almost a whisper. “I was cleaning off the dirt.”

  His face did hurt; even without touching it, he could feel the raw patches.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “That felt good, what you were doing.”

  She shrugged, with her shoulders and mouth both, and started touching his face again. Her touch was gentle. Which struck Jon as weird.

  “I . . . I don’t remember passing out,” he said.

  “You hit your head,” she said.

  “When?”

  “When I tossed you in back of my car, after you tried to crawl off. You hit your head on the door. You got a bump.”

  He tried to feel his head, and his hand jerked, like a dog on a leash. He glanced over and saw that the hand was cuffed to the headboard of an old brass bed. His left hand was free, however, and he touched the bump on his head; it was sore, but it wasn’t a big bump. On the side of his head, though, where she’d hit him with the gun barrel earlier, there was a real goose egg.

  “You don’t got a concussion or nothing,” she said.

  He was beginning to get his bearings. He was on his back, on the bed; his right hand was cuffed, and his left leg was, too, by the ankle. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, tending him. The room was dim: the only light on was a shaded lamp on the nightstand. This appeared to be a room in an older home. There was yellow floral wallpaper, faded, and paint was coming off the ceiling in spots, from water damage. Opposite the foot of the bed was an old dresser with mirror; on top of the dresser was a row of trophies of some sort. There was a door to the right; a window over to the left. It was an average-size bedroom. Nothing remarkable about it.

  Except maybe for the pictures. The mirror over the dresser was covered with them, pin-ups taped to it, but not of girls: Elvis Presley, James Dean, Eddie Cochran; fifties teen faves, mostly dead. Some of the pictures were faded pages clipped from old magazines, the Scotch tape yellowed and dried; others looked more recent. It was a mirror you couldn’t look into. But the faces on it looked back at you, peeking over the row of trophies.

  She yanked the cloth away from his raw face. “What are you lookin’ at?”

  “Just the pictures. On the mirror.”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Nothing. They’re fine. They’re fine.”

  Her face lost some of its nastiness, and she said, “You name’s Jon, huh?”

  “Right. And you’re Ron.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like a poem, don’t it? Jon and Ron.” She laughed.

  He found a little smile for her somewhere and forced something out of him that he hoped sounded like a laugh. God, this dyke is nuts, he thought.

  “I’m, you know . . . sorry about this,” she said. Sullenly.

  “Sorry?”

  She dragged it out of herself. “I . . . got nothing against you, really.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I used to come listen to you. Your band. You guys were good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You played too much sixties. I like fifties.”

  “Uh, well, there’s lots of requests for sixties stuff these days. But I like fifties music myself.”

  She smiled; the sullenness was gone. “I know. I heard you do ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’.’ Anybody that can do Jerry Lee that good is okay by me.”

  “I’m . . . glad you liked it.”

  “Look, I know I probably made a . . . bad impression that time, few months ago, when I got on your case for being with Darlene. I know it’s not your fault. Darlene, she’s always hitting on people.”

  He tried to think of something to say to that, but couldn’t. He was trying to stay low key and calm, trying not to scream at her. She seemed relatively calm herself at the moment, and he had a feeling that keeping her that way might be to his benefit.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked suddenly.

  “I . . . hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Well, are you?” Nastier.

  “Sure. Sure. If it . . . wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Naw! Not at all. How ’bout a ham sandwich and a beer?”

  “That’d be . . . great.”

  “No problem,” she said, smiling, rising. She sauntered over toward the door and out.

  What a fucking fruitcake! he thought, and began to take toll of his situation. He took a look at the headboard of the bed. He was cuffed to one of its brass posts; there didn’t seem to be any way to slide the cuff off the thing. And he certainly couldn’t pull his wrist through the cuff.

  He was able to get into a sitting position, but he could stay that way only by supporting himself with his free hand. It allowed him to see that his ankle (his shoes were off; he could see them over on the floor, by the dresser) was cuffed to the brass end rail of the bed.

  For having an arm and a leg free, he was pretty goddamn helpless.

  If he didn’t feel so weak, he could try to overpower her; maybe knock her out with a punch when she got close, or kick her in the head or something. But then what?

  Then she was there with the sandwich and beer, a Coors.

  She’d taken off the leather jacket; she was in T-shirt and jeans now, her smallish breasts poking at her T-shirt in a reminder that she was female.

  She handed him the sandwich and a paper napkin and said, “I put hot mustard on it.”

  “I like hot mustard
.”

  “You got beer to wash it down with.” She put the beer on the nightstand, since he didn’t have a hand handy to take it.

  He ate the sandwich. He was starving. He didn’t realize it till he got the food in front of him, but he was starving.

  She was smiling as she watched him eat. And not at all in a sinister way. The dimness of the room, with its single source of light, threw shadows on her and everything else, but the effect was softening.

  When he was finished, she said, “Use another beer to wash that down better?”

  “Uh. Sure. That’d be great.”

  This time she left the door open as she went, and he could see her going out into the hall and taking a right down some stairs; he could hear her feet on the stairs, and then again, a couple minutes later, coming back up.

  She gave him a second Coors; she’d brought a beer for herself, too, but in a glass. She had an empty coffee can under her arm and set it on the floor by the bed.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “You can’t buy beer, you can only rent it,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Can you reach it there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “With your hand, stupid.”

  He reached over with his left hand and could feel the lip of the can.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed again.

  “How old are you?” she asked him.

  “Twenty-one,” he said.

  “How old you think I am?”

  Thirty.

  “Twenty,” he said.

  “Twenty-five,” she grinned, with a slight foam mustache.

  Thirty.

  “Fooled me,” Jon said.

  “I live right,” she explained.

  “Uh, Ron?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why am I here?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Well. You did bring me here.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Well, why’d you do it? Why am I tied up like this?”

  “That’s between you and Julie.”

  “Julie.”

  “Yeah. I’m only doing this ’cause she asked me to. I don’t get no pleasure out of it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Fuck, no. You’re a nice kid. You sing good. I like you.”

  “You do.”

  She smiled again—a real smile, with some gums showing, and disarming, in a weird fucking way. “Yeah. I don’t always like guys, you know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Nope. But I don’t always like girls, either.” She touched his leg.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You thought I was queer, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Oh. I don’t know.”

  “I like girls. I like guys, too, sometimes. I don’t know. Sometimes, it’s . . . well, it’s easier for me with girls.”

  “Is it easy with Julie?”

  He’d crossed some line he shouldn’t have. She pulled her hand away from his leg, and the nasty look returned. “Don’t get cute, prick,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “You just better stay on my good side.”

  “Hey, I’m not here because I asked to be, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know. You got a better temper about it than I would, I guess.”

  “Do you work for Julie?”

  “I do stuff for her. I’m kind of a night watchman at the Paddlewheel. Most of Gulf Port is all-night places, but Julie closes up at two. So I keep an eye on the place most nights.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “No. Tonight I’m keeping an eye on you.”

  “I see.”

  “If Julie wants me to sit on you, she’s got her reasons. It’s between the two of you. I got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “How much do you know about her?”

  Ron smiled. “I know her pretty well.”

  “She tried to kill me once. With a shotgun.”

  “Sure,” she said, sipping her glass of Coors.

  “We were in on a bank job together, and she tried to kill my partner and me.”

  “You? A bank robber? Don’t make me choke.”

  “She took the money. Where do you think she got the money for the Paddlewheel, you dumb cunt? Then I saw her at the Barn, tonight, and she figures I’ll tell my partner about her, and she’s afraid he’ll come after her.”

  That stopped Ron. For some reason—Jon’s near-hysteria, perhaps—it had rung true to her.

  “What’ll he do, this guy?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Now that she’s kidnapped me, I don’t know what he’s liable to do.”

  “Kidnapped. Who’s kidnapped?”

  “I’m handcuffed to the goddamn bed, lady. What the fuck do you think this is?”

  Ron got up, walked around.

  “Julie said sit on you,” she said. “I’m doing what she asked me to and that’s all.”

  “I heard you. And I heard you say back at that parking lot you’d as soon kill me as look at me.”

  Ron turned and looked at him, and there was an expression on her face that could only be described as a mixture of pain and embarrassment. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the washrag from the nightstand and touched a couple places on his face again. Then she put the washrag down and said, “That was just bullshit.”

  “Was it.”

  “I’m sorry about your face getting bunged up, and your head. I hit you with the gun pretty hard. I . . .”

  She lowered her head.

  “I show off sometimes,” she said. “When somebody like Darlene’s around . . . or somebody like Julie, especially Julie . . . I show off. I get tough. Act tough. Talk tough. Overdo it. Don’t ask me why.”

  Why is she telling me this? Jon wondered.

  “She’s going to ask you to kill me,” Jon said.

  “Naw. It’ll never happen.”

  “You’ve done things for her before.”

  “I roughed some people up for her before. Big deal.”

  “You kidnapped me tonight for her.”

  “Kidnapped! Nobody’s been kidnapped.”

  “Ron. Let me go, before you get in this any deeper.”

  “Yeah, and you’d go to the cops.”

  “I can’t go to the cops.”

  “Why, ’cause you’re a bank robber? You’re funny.”

  “Ron, Julie’s going to call your bluff. She’s going to ask you to kill me. Are you up to that?”

  Ron thought about that.

  “I’m tired of talkin’,” she said, rising. “You get some sleep.”

  She switched off the lamp and left the room.

  For about an hour, Jon worked at the cuffs, tried to see if the headboard of the bed could be unscrewed or otherwise come loose from the bed itself.

  Then sun was coming in the window, and Ron was coming in the door. She was still wearing jeans and T-shirt and had a plate of eggs and ham in one hand and orange juice in the other.

  “Did you sleep?” she asked.

  “I guess,” Jon said, not sure.

  “If I give you this stuff, will you be good?”

  “I won’t try anything,” he said.

  “All right,” she said, and gave him the food. She stood over by the dresser and leaned against it while he ate. She fingered one of the trophies on the dresser.

  “This was my brother’s room,” she said. Out of nowhere.

  “Really? Where is he now?”

  “Dead.”

  “Uh. I’m sorry.”

  “Stock car accident. That’s what the trophies are.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “He was about your age when he cracked up.”

  “Really? When was this?”

  “Fifteen years ago, June.”

  “You must’ve loved him.”

  “Yeah. I thought a lot of him. He wa
s what kept this place going.”

  “Oh?”

  “I had three little sisters. My mom and dad drank, and Billy . . . my brother . . . he was tough. If Dad tried to hit one of us, he’d belt him. From about thirteen on he could beat the crap outa my old man.”

  “No kidding.”

  “When Billy got killed, I . . . kind of took over. Stepped in. Otherwise my old man would’ve started in on us again. Boy, did it shock the shit out of him.”

  “What did?”

  She laughed. “When he found out his little girl could beat the crap out of him too. He only stuck around about a year after that.”

  “Where’s the rest of the family now?”

  “Mom’s dead. Bad liver. The girls are all married. One of ’em just this last summer. Too young: sixteen. I didn’t raise her right, maybe. Pregnant. Oh well. Maybe she’ll be happy.”

  In the distance, bells were sounding.

  “It’s Sunday,” she said. “I’m gonna be gone a while. Think you can get along without me?”

  “Do I have a choice? Where are you going?”

  “Mass, stupid,” she said.

  She went out, shutting the door this time.

  “Light a candle for me,” Jon said.

  James Dean and company stared at him while he struggled with the cuffs and the headboard. About fifteen minutes later, he heard her go out; he wondered what she looked like dressed for church. Then he got back to his struggling. And got nowhere. He fell asleep after a while.

  He woke and it was dark in the room. It wasn’t night: the shades were drawn. A little light crawled in under the shade and from around the edges, but the nightstand lamp was off, and there was no other light in the room.

  She was standing near the bed. She wasn’t wearing anything. Her body wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad; she had a square-ish frame with modest breasts, but there was no fat on her. It was a supple, vaguely muscular body. She had a tattoo of a black rose near her right hipbone, just above her pubic thatch. Her pouty face didn’t look pretty, exactly, but she wasn’t ugly.

  He didn’t say anything as she undid his pants.