HCC 115 - Borderline

by Lawrence Block

  “Yeah, I dig.”

  “I do too.”

  “The first lesson then.”

  “Oh, maybe the second and the third ones too. I’m offering a special tonight.”

  “A special price or a special lesson?”

  “Both,” Cassie smiled.

  “All right.”

  “I knew you were the night school type.”

  “You got a pad?”

  “A few blocks. We’re on our way right now.”

  “What kind of a pad?”

  “A room in a dumpy hotel. They don’t ask questions there. It’s practically a whorehouse itself. A batch of Mex girls sit in the bar downstairs and guys pick ’em up and take ’em to their rooms.”

  “Yeah. I’m hip to that scene.”

  “Sometimes you can go down there and pick up a trick yourself.”

  “After work?”

  “Yeah. Bring in a little extra bread that way. You can’t depend on it but you can take your pick—and you don’t have to share the bread with anyone.”

  Lily nodded in understanding.

  “Last week I picked up a crazy trick. Taught me something new. I tried it at Ringo’s and it went over big. The customers were so happy that Ringo gave me a bonus.”

  Lily didn’t reply.

  “Maybe we could try it tonight, eh, Lily baby?”

  Lily shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ve always wondered whether two chicks could do that together,” Cassie said.

  Her arm tightened about Lily’s shoulder.

  At the corner they turned, and Lily could see lights up ahead. Cassie’s hand dropped from shoulder to breast.

  “You got about the nicest boobs I ever saw.” Cassie was whispering hoarsely. “I was hot as hell when you peeled for Ringo. I wanted to jump you then and there.”

  Now Cassie’s fingers were pinching a nipple. Lily smiled to herself. It didn’t make any difference, she thought. The hand could have been Cassie’s or a man’s—it made no difference at all.

  It’s what the hand was doing to her, that was important, she thought. And what it was doing to her. The fingers on her nipple, the warmth of the rest of the hand between her breasts, spreading the soft flesh.

  Cassie ran her hand back and forth between the two mounds of flesh and the softness molded itself, around her hand.

  Then her fingers slipped down and under and gently lifted.

  “Nice, nice, nice,” Cassie repeated. “You’re so nice there. Wait till we get to my pad and I’ll really show you some scenes with those boobs of yours.”

  Her hand was darting in and out and around now.

  “Just wait,” Cassie was saying now, her lips close to Lily’s ear. “Just wait. I’m going to show you everything, Lily. Everything there is to know. Baby, you’ll dig it. I know you will.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you’re blonde all the way, aren’t you? Hell, don’t answer, baby. Like I saw it myself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m a redhead all the way. You like?”

  “Sure, Cassie.”

  Cassie stopped, turned Lily around. “Come on,” she said. “I’m like so crazy for it I can’t stand it. Give me a kiss, Lily.”

  “Here in the street?”

  “Nobody’s looking.”

  “Well, sure.”

  Lily reached out her arms, let the redheaded girl come close. Their mouths came together and Lily found out what it was like to kiss a girl. It was different. Cassie’s mouth was softer than any man’s mouth had been, and Cassie’s body was different in her arms. When Cassie’s little pink tongue stole between Lily’s lips, Lily was surprised to find herself responding to the embrace.

  “You feel it, don’t you?”

  “I feel it.”

  “Well, you’ll feel it even more back at my pad,” Cassie whispered into her ear. “You’ll feel it there and someplace else. You’ll feel it, and that feeling will mount and grow and spread inside you. You’ll feel all those feelings meet and join. You’ll feel it lift you up into space and speed through you until you crash through the heat barrier.”

  “I feel it now,” Lily whispered.

  “And you like it, right?”

  “So far I like it.”

  “Oh, Lily. Oh, baby. There’s a lot more, Lily, and you’ll like it, baby, you’ll love it. You’ll scream and you’ll beg for more, you’ll just love it. That’s where it’s at, baby.”

  And they hurried to the hotel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Weaver finished the horror comic and hurled it across the room. It was the third time he had read that particular comic book and on this final reading it had not held his interest at all. He took a long shuddering breath and pressed his face down into his pillow.

  He could not sleep. It was late, past three in the morning, and he had been trying to fall asleep since well before midnight. He would close his eyes and lie in darkness, listening only to the monotonous whine of the overhead fan, and he would wait for sleep to come to him. This it refused to do. Time after time he got up, switched on the light, crawled back into his clothes. Sometimes he would re-read one of the horror comics. Other times he would scuttle down the hall to the bathroom to void his bladder. Finally he would try again to sleep, and would fail again.

  He sat up now, walked to the stack of comics, picked one up. On the cover a gorilla held a woman high overhead, one hand on her bare thigh and the other wrapped around her neck. The gorilla was standing on the edge of a chasm and he was preparing to heave the woman onto the jagged rocks below. Weaver studied the picture for a moment. He sighed, and dropped the book back onto the stack.

  The hotel room was suffocating him. He had to get out, had to go somewhere and do something before he went out of his mind. He needed something. He was not sure what he needed, did not even want to think about what it might be that his nervous system demanded. But whatever it was, he needed it.

  He stood before the mirror over the washbowl, wetted his hair and combed it. He left the hotel room, walked to a flight of stairs, descended them quickly. Some of the stairs creaked when he stepped on them. The cracking stairs had an eerie sound and he was glad to reach the first floor.

  There was a very old man behind the desk. He looked up at Weaver, caught the key that Weaver tossed to him. He looked away without speaking and Weaver went out of the door onto the street. At an all-night cafeteria he had an order of french toast and sausages with a cup of coffee. The toast was good but the sausages were greasy and he had to leave most of them on his plate. He had another cup of coffee. He put three teaspoons of sugar into each cup and filled it to the brim with cream.

  After he left the cafeteria, the two cups of coffee sloshing inside him, he was not any sleepier. El Paso was a daylight town, quiet at night, and he walked the streets alone without seeing a single person. The main street of the downtown section was dark and quiet. Only a few stores left their neon signs on at night; fewer had their windows illuminated. Weaver walked and walked and saw no one.

  He was used to the night, and to silent walks down silent streets. In Tulsa, before the killing, before the little girl who had been so foolish as to ask him the time, he had been essentially a creature of the night. A quiet man. A man who worked eight hours a day, five days a week, as a stockroom clerk in a Lincoln Drive department store. A man who earned forty-five dollars a week, week after week. Each summer they gave him two weeks off, with full pay, and he spent his vacations in Tulsa, going to movies, reading comic books, taking long walks.

  He had no friends in Tulsa. He spoke to no one at work and no one spoke to him. He was ugly, and he was not very bright, and he had no personality as far as anyone knew. He avoided people, and they were delighted to be avoided by him.

  At night, he walked. The night was as exciting as the day was drab, because the night was dark and a man could walk without being seen, could walk through dark streets like a ghost across the Scottish moors. A man like Weaver could look
through windows as women took off their clothes. If he was lucky, very lucky, he could look through windows while married men made love to their wives. Weaver had been a nobody in Tulsa, a man who had never done a thing. He had never made love to a woman, had never so much as kissed a woman. He was an orphan, with no family. A nobody.

  Now, walking through El Paso by night, he was at least a somebody for once. He knew this, and in a weird way the knowledge was comforting. He had Done Something. The Something was a horrible thing, but he had done it, and they had put his picture in the newspapers and had broadcast his name over the radio. They called him Dracula, and they called him the Cannibal Killer, but now, for the first time, they knew who he was.

  And this made him feel good, somehow. It was better to be loathed as a fiend than to be thoroughly ignored, better to be hated than not to be known at all. One act of horror had given direction to his life, had elevated him from nobody to somebody.

  He went on walking. The sky was streaked with false dawn. He walked surely now, his stride powerful, his arms swinging easily at his side. He was the Angel of Death, he thought. His life had a mission, a strange and terrifying sense of purpose.

  He thought now of that little girl in Tulsa. He realized now that he had made several significant errors in his thinking. Before, that girl had seemed to have been a dreadful mistake, an end. But she was not an end at all. She was a beginning. She was the first person he had killed.

  She would not be the last.

  And, with this re-evaluation of the girl’s role, he came also to a new understanding of his procedure from that point on. Capture was inevitable, he knew. Sooner or later he would be caught by the police, caught and beaten and killed. But until then it was not enough merely to go on living, merely to hide like a scared rabbit and wait for the inevitable closing of the net around him.

  He had to be positive in his behavior. He had to go on killing, had to seek out other girls, had to do to them as he had done to the thirteen-year-old girl in Tulsa. Fresh killings would not hurt him. The police could not beat him any more brutally for additional corpses. And death in the electric chair, when it came, would be just as painful and just as final no matter how many girls died at his hands.

  False dawn gave way to real dawn. Weaver went to another cafeteria and had another breakfast, this time a plate of scrambled eggs and an order of toast and jelly. He left the cafeteria and walked again, finally finding a store where they sold razors. He bought an old-fashioned straight razor. The salesman asked him if he wanted a leather strop as well. He told the man he already owned one.

  He walked back to the hotel. He put the razor away in a dresser drawer under some clothing. It was a sharp razor, and he liked it already. Soon, he thought, there would be blood upon the blade.

  The stack of horror comics was where he had left it. He picked up each comic, tore it in half, and dropped it into the wastebasket beneath the washbowl. He did not need the comic books anymore. He did not need to live his life through pictures and balloon dialogue. He would live an active life now.

  He went to bed and slept well.

  * * *

  Marty woke up at ten. He and Meg had called it a night around three, and as usual he could not sleep more than seven hours at a stretch. He got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, deciding that he must have a clock in his head, the way he never slept more. It was strange, because the sense of timing only worked when he was unconscious. During the day he never knew what time it was. When playing cards he lost all track, never knew whether he’d been playing for three hours or nine hours. But when he slept, somehow he always knew.

  Meg was sleeping soundly. He took hold of her shoulder, shook her gently. Her eyes remained closed.

  He showered and shaved. He came back and she was still sound asleep. He took a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote her a note, telling her that she could fix herself breakfast, that he would be back soon. He got dressed and went outside to the garage, got into the Olds and drove away.

  The sun was bright, the sky clear of clouds. Marty decided that it would be a good day to pass up seeing Betty, the bouncy waitress. He found another diner where he’d been a few times before. He sat at the counter, had ham and fried eggs sunny side up and three cups of coffee. In this diner there was no waitress, just a counterman with tattoos on both arms and a surly expression on his face. The counterman didn’t say two words to Marty in the course of the meal. Marty decided that this was fine, and much better than Betty and her big tits. He decided to eat breakfast there regularly. The food was just as good, and they let you eat it in peace.

  He smoked three Luckies, one with each cup of coffee. He left the lunch counter and drove the blue Olds to a cigar store a half mile away. The clerk looked up at him when he entered and smiled a hello. Marty waited while the clerk finished selling a pack of pipe tobacco to a man in a blue cord suit. When the man had left, Marty walked closer to the counter.

  He said, “What’s the word?”

  The clerk scratched his bald head. “A feller was around last night,” he said. “Looking for a gin rummy game. You play gin rummy, don’t you?”

  “When I can’t help it.”

  “Well, he was looking for a game. He drove up in a fishtail Cadillac with Florida plates on her.”

  “What stakes does he play?”

  “He said something about a dollar a point. Hollywood, spades double. I think that’s the way he said it. I don’t know gin rummy so I can’t be sure, but that sounds about right. It mean anything?”

  “It means an expensive game,” Marty said. “A stupid game. You get a heavy hand and you fall on a lot of money. The cards do all the work. All you need is a card memory and a head for odds and the cards do the rest.”

  The clerk didn’t say anything. Marty took out a cigarette, lit it. He said, “Maybe the guy’s a card mechanic. Maybe he’s hustling, looking for a mark.”

  “You mean a cheater?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It don’t appear so,” the clerk said. “He came in here an’ left a string of horse bets. Left two hundred dollars, with me, maybe a bit more.”

  “What did he play?”

  “Long shots, mostly. Played ’em on the nose.”

  “Then he’s not a crook,” Marty said. “He’s too stupid to be a crook. He’s got too much money and he’s looking for ways to lose it. A Miami Beach boyo heading across the country in his Cad and looking for action on the way. I don’t want to play him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He could get lucky and beat me. Gin is mostly luck, especially the rules he plays by. I don’t like the game enough to play. I’ll pass it up.”

  “Suit yourself,” the clerk said. “You want any action?”

  Marty took a five dollar bill from his wallet, passed it to the clerk. “Three and five in the double,” he said. “That’s all.”

  He left the cigar store. Marty wasn’t a horse player. It didn’t make sense to him. The books took a twenty percent cut and what was left wasn’t worth it. But he liked to bet the daily double. All it cost him was five dollars, and when it ever came in it was like winning a lottery. The payoff was big enough to make it worthwhile.

  He drove back to his house, slowly. He stopped on the way at a gas station and filled the tank with hi-test. He had the Mex kid check the oil and water and put air in the tires. He tipped the kid a dollar and headed home again.

  Meg, he thought. That was a broad, that was the right kind of broad. Eyes open, brain working right. And good in bed, so good, giving as good as she got, meeting him halfway, needing him just as he needed her. Meg was fine. He was glad he had picked her up.

  In front of him, a traffic light turned red. He double-clutched the car, down-shifted to second, eased the brake on. While he waited for the light to turn green again he thought some more about Meg. She said she wanted excitement. She wanted to let go of everything, that was the way she put it.

  Well, fine. He could use a little of the same, a
little letting go of everything. About a week, say. A week or so of dissipation, a week of hard hot lust and hard drinking and hard living, a week of hell on wheels. You could get all tied up, just living the same life every day. You could be building a box around yourself without realizing it, and all at once you were in the box and somebody was puttying up the air holes and pretty soon you couldn’t breathe anymore. When that started to happen you had to kick like hell until the box fell apart.

  Excitement—that was her word, that was what she wanted. He had told her that Juarez was a good place for it, which was true enough. It was a perfect place. There were a hundred different kinds of sex, a dozen places to gamble, a million ways to get high. The cops let you alone. You got high and got drunk and got picked and got laid, and when you were done you crawled across the border and everything was sane again. That was the way to do it. When the light changed he dropped into first, let out the clutch, shot across the intersection. He drove straight home and left the car outside, at the curb. Then he walked to the front door and unlocked it with his key.

  He hoped Meg was up. He wanted to talk with her.

  * * *

  That morning, Lily let Cassie pay for breakfast. They ate in Juarez at a bar that served tacos and chili. Lily ate a big plate of chili and a pair of chicken tacos and drank a bottle of orange soda. Cassie picked up the tab. She still didn’t know about Lily’s twelve dollars, and Lily saw no reason to clue her in. The less money she spent, the more she would wind up with. That much was elementary.

  “Look,” she said to Cassie, “I gotta get back to Paso. I left some stuff in the hotel. I want to get it.”

  “I’ll come along.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You sick of me, baby? I thought you had a good time last night.”

  “It was okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  Lily looked at the redhead. “I got kicks,” she said. “I dug what we were doing.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “But I have eyes to be alone.” She thought for a moment, closing her eyes to concentrate. “I’m an introvert type,” she went on. “I have to be alone some of the time or I get bugged. It’s nothing against you, it’s the way I swing, the way I move. I can’t be around people too long or it gets to me and I flip a little.”