Wild Town (17 page)

“Funny? Is that what you were going to say, Mac? Well, perhaps you’re right. It is funny. And now that I think of it, there’s something still funnier.”

She got up and moved toward the door. He arose, too, thinking that she was leaving. But instead she closed the door, and turned off the light.

And in the faint moonlight which drifted through the window, he saw her body arched delicately as she drew her dress off over her head. She felt her way across the room, shedding her other garments, leaving them where they fell.

The bed creaked, and she said, “All right, Mac.”

His mouth felt very dry. He licked his lips, and stammered, “Aw, no, Amy. It doesn’t make any difference, even if—”

“Even. If,” she said. “Come on.”

Well. If that was the way she wanted it, you couldn’t blame him. After all he was a man, and a man couldn’t help being like he was made. And a man expected, and had a right to expect, a woman to be better than he was.

So…

So.

Bugs still knew very little about women. But by now he knew at least enough to realize that Amy had spoken the truth. And along with the inevitable ecstasy of his union with her, there was also abysmal shame and soul-sickening terror—terror of the loss he had suffered. For, naturally, he had lost her. He knew it even before he arose from the bed, from the hateful triumph over her body.

“Amy, I want to tell you something. I—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Just get out.”

“But—but I didn’t mean it. I am in trouble; it’s got me half out of my mind. I didn’t want to tell you about it because—”

“Because you didn’t trust me. Because there’s nothing in you to trust or love or understand with. Just a lot of hatred and grudges and suspicion. N-now”—shakily she started to rise, her voice rising. “Now, you get out! Get out and don’t ever come back! Don’t ever come near me or try to—”

“Amy. If you’ll only—”

“Do you hear me?
GET OUT!
”

She advanced on him, eyes wild, small fists drawn back.

He grabbed up his clothes, and fled into the hallway.

H
e dressed out in the hall, hopping clumsily from one foot to the other, getting his shirt buttoned the wrong way, snapping a shoestring—making a botch of things generally in his haste to escape. In his mind’s eye he stood off from himself, examined the hulking, red-faced, panting and fumbling figure in the hallway. And it was as though he was staring into a fun-house mirror. He felt preposterously small and futile. He was livid with shame and embarrassment.

He hated himself, and he hated her for making him hate himself.

He dressed and was out of the house in a few minutes—minutes that seemed like hours. He stopped at the first bar he came to, tossed down five drinks in a row. And when he left he took a pint bottle with him. He went to the hotel, to his room, and began drinking.

The booze didn’t get him drunk; there wasn’t enough whiskey in Ragtown to get him drunk that night. It merely intensified his fury, increased and compressed it until it was like a great rat, trapped in a tiny corner, raging insanely for release of action.

But not tonight, he thought. Not—not any more tonight. But tomorrow night…

He would do it tomorrow night. Do something. Move decisively and irrevocably one way or another.

There was a soft rapping on his door, a familiar shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits knock. Grinning grimly, he got up and opened it, closed and locked it again as Joyce brushed past him. He moved back into the room with her, looked her up and down slowly as she turned and faced him.

“Well, Bugs?”

“Yeah?” He moved closer to her, backing her against the bed. “Yeah, Joyce?”

“Well”—she smiled nervously—“uh, nothing. I just stopped by to—to—”

“To see how I was getting along,” he nodded. “To see how I was feeling. Well, I’m plumb glad you asked, as your buddy Lou Ford would say. I’m plain tickled that you came by, and that’s a fact. Because—”

“Bugs—
don’t,
you’ve been drinking, and—”

“—because I feel pretty low-down. About as low-down as a man can get. And that don’t quite bring me down to your level, of course, but it’s close enough. I can’t crawl under the plank with you, but—”

“You rotten crazy bastard!” Her palm cracked against his face. “I’ll—I’m getting out of here!”

“Without your clothes, you mean? You go right ahead, but the clothes won’t be going. Not if you leave before I say you can. Well”—he got a grip on the front of her dress. “What’s it going to be?”

She bit her lip, forced a tremulous smile. Her hand moved coyly to his chest, twisted one of the misbuttoned buttons.

“Aw, Bugs. This isn’t any way for my Bugsy boy to act. What’s got into you, anyway, honey?”

“That isn’t the question. Not what’s got into me, but what’s about to—”

She snickered unwillingly. A strange excitement began to dance in her eyes. Still, she liked to call the shots; she’d gotten used to doing it. And she’d almost forgotten the days when things were different—painfully so—and the exquisite pleasure to be derived from that painful difference.

It was dim in her mind. Growing clearer, but not quite recognized as yet.

“Let’s not, Bugs, hmm? No, really, I mean it. I absolutely refuse, and you can’t make me! You—”

“Can’t I?” he said. His fingers dug into her flesh. “Can’t I, Joyce? Can’t—”

“B-Bugs…” A great shiver ran through her body. “Bugs! Y-you’re—you’re…Ahhhhhhh…”

…She lay sprawled on the bed, breathing in deep luxurious breaths. Exhausted, depleted, replenished. Bugs sat on the bed’s edge, smoking moodily in the darkness. Thinking that no matter how low a man went, there was always another low awaiting him. Even after this there was doubtless another one. And doubtless he would descend to it, and for as little reason as he had descended to this one, and the one immediately preceding it.

“Bugs, honey…” She found his hand, and he jerked it rudely away. “Maybe afterwards—after things are settled—we could clear out of this place. Go away somewhere together.”

“The nearest whorehouse, that’s as far as I’ll go with you. Park you there and put you to work.”

“Aw, now, Bugs. Not that I wouldn’t if it was necessary. I’d do anything for you, honey. But—”

“What makes you so sure it won’t be? Where else do you think you’re going to get any dough?”

“Huh!”
She sat up abruptly. “What the hell do you mean where…Oh”—She broke off, seeing the sardonic jeer on his face, went back to her former meekness. “It isn’t just me, Bugs. If it was just up to me, I’d never think of trying to—uh—persuade you to do anything that you didn’t want to. But—”

“Sure. Just like you haven’t been trying to.”

“But I can’t help it, honey. You know that. There’s another person involved. What I want or don’t want, doesn’t really make much difference.”

Bugs tossed his cigarette into a tray. He squared around on the bed a little, sat looking down into her face.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll say it’s that way. But now you’re going to tell me something. No more of this damned hinting and beating around the bush, get me? No more of this am-I-all-right and how-am-I-feeling stuff. You’re going to come right out and tell me what you do want. I want to hear you say it.”

“B-but—but you already know, honey. Why should I—”

“I said, I wanted to hear you say it! Spit it out. Do it and do it fast, or I’m through, so—
Shut up! Don’t threaten me or I’ll break your goddamned neck!
—so make up your mind. Say it or drop it.”

“But—”

Her head moved irritably against the pillows. She took a deep breath and held it; then, slowly let it out again in a quiet sigh of surrender.

“All right, Bugs,” she said. “All right, darling. You don’t trust me, but I’ll still—”

“Out with it!”

“I want you to kill him. I want you to kill my husband!”

…There was a kind of peace on this new level at which he found himself. Uneasy but still soothing, and peculiarly satisfying. Marvelously trouble-free compared with the black turmoil he had come through.

He had known such peace before. Experiencing it now he wondered why it must be so insistently impinged upon by the leering image of Chief Deputy Lou Ford. Because, of course, Ford was all wrong about him. The deputy had apparently dug deeply into his background, excavated the facts behind the bleak syllabus of the police record. And he’d twisted the annals of Bugs’s life into that seemingly factual but cruelly and viciously distorted case-history which he had recited to Bugs several days ago.

He
made
trouble for himself, Ford had said. He deliberately plunged himself into one scrap after another. In so doing, he bulwarked his self-pitying conviction that the whole world was against him—and it was a hell of a lot more fun, as well as a hell of a lot easier, than doing something constructive.

There was that dame he had married, for example. Yeah, sure, he was a greenhorn when it came to women, but that was no excuse. A ten-year-old boy—anyone that had sense enough to come in out of the rain—would have known that she had to be a tramp. And he, Bugs, had damned well known it, even if he wouldn’t admit it. He’d simply stuck his neck out because he liked being hit over the head.

Another example: that screwball detective Bugs had shot. Now, here was a guy who was obviously dangerous, and who obviously had a pick on him. Yet Bugs hadn’t done a damned thing to forestall the disaster which he must have foreseen. He’d just hung around waiting for the lightning to strike.

Pride? Guts? Balls! He wouldn’t kick a skunk, would he? Or lie down next to a rattlesnake? Making a damned fool of yourself didn’t take pride or guts, did it? Well, then.

Ford had had a lot more to say, but it was all in the same vein. He liked being in jams. He’d rather have things go bad than good.

Which, of course, was screwy on the face of it, Bugs thought angrily. Anyone could see that it was. It had just been some more of Ford’s whipcracking, pouring in on him because he knew he had to take it. The guy couldn’t open his mouth without needling someone. And when that someone was really under his thumb…

Bugs finished his shift. He went to bed, slightly hungover from the booze he had drunk, grasping at that strange, uneasy peace which kept slipping away from him. He started to doze, and a disturbing thought pushed into his mind. Clung there stubbornly, forcing him back into wakefulness:

Bugs squirmed irritably and flopped over on his back. He lay scowling, eyes squinted, staring up at the ceiling.

Suppose there had been no woman in Dudley’s bathroom. Suppose Dudley hadn’t gone out the window. Wasn’t it still pretty likely that he’d have gotten into trouble? In fact, wasn’t it virtually inevitable that he would have?

And hadn’t he known that he would at the time he went to the room?

Well?

Well…Of course not! It was easy to second guess on a deal, to see where you’d goofed after you’d done it. If he’d known it was going to land him in a scrape, why—

He rolled over on his side again. He burrowed his head into the pillow, closed his eyes firmly, and kept them closed. At last, he slept, and when he awakened, it was night.
The
night.

M
ike Hanlon was in the bathroom when Bugs arrived at his suite. Braced against the sink, he finished washing his hands, then sank back down into his wheelchair and rolled himself out into the living-room.

“Well, Bugs”—his shrewd old eyes swept over Bugs’s face. “We get our tour at last, huh? I was beginning to think you’d forgot all about me.”

“No. No, I hadn’t forgotten.” Bugs looked away from him. “I—well, I just kept putting it off, and—”

“Sure, I understand. Well, I’ll be with you in a minute or two. Help yourself to a drink while you’re waiting.”

Bugs decided he could use a drink. He poured a stiff shot from a nearby carafe, and took it into the bathroom. He added ice water to it, gulped it with a shudder. As he bent over to draw another glass, his head bumped lightly against the medicine cabinet and its mirrored door swung open.

Sipping the water, he stared absently at the crowded shelves of nostrums. One bottle was sitting right on the edge of its shelf, in danger of falling off. He pushed it back inside, then, frowning unconsciously, continued to stare at it for a moment longer.

It was almost empty. The liquid in the bottom was a clear white, and had an oily look about it. Bugs couldn’t say why it interested him, subtly disturbed him. Any number of medicines were a clear white, and oily looking. But still…

He was reaching for it, starting to turn it around to examine the label. But Hanlon called to him at that moment, so he closed the door and went back into the living-room.

He wheeled the invalid out into the hall. Unlocking the door of the elevator he had appropriated, he switched on the light and wheeled him inside.

“I see you haven’t forgotten my preference for lighted elevators,” Hanlon grinned. “Not that I’d ever be worried, of course, about you being careless.”

“Yeah.” Bugs closed the door, turning his back to him. “Where’d you like to start, Mr. Hanlon?”

“We-el…how about the roof?”

Bugs nodded silently. He was calm enough, not afraid to speak. But the words somehow would not form themselves; and something whispered that it was best to leave them unformed. As much as possible, Hanlon should do the talking.

They reached the roof. Bugs wheeled him out of the car and across the tiled floor to the guard-wall, and they looked out over the oil fields.

Bugs didn’t think. There was plenty of time. Nothing needed to be done or decided now. In this moment all there was was this: he and the old man, and the night, and the blazing, thundering jungle of steel.

Flame licked the sky from a thousand flambeaux. The huge torches—set up to consume excess gas—were everywhere, barely burning at one moment, then suddenly ripping the darkness with a fifty-foot spear of flame.

“…still smell like rotten eggs to you, Bugs?”

“Huh? No, I guess it doesn’t. Got to where I kind of like it.”

“Thought you would,” Hanlon murmured. “I mean, how can you dislike a thing like that? Anything that comes from the oil. Because…well, maybe people got hurt the way I went after it. But damned little, relatively. And most of ’em profited in the long run. Y’know—” he laughed a little sadly. “It’ll sound funny to you, but that was originally what attracted me to the business. You could help yourself in it—get rich maybe—without hurting other people. You didn’t have to squeeze ’em. You didn’t have to push them down to push yourself up. All you had to do was find the oil, and everyone was better off, and no one was hurt…unless it was you.”

“Yeah? Yes, sir?” Bugs said.

“Yes. Because there’s one thing a man needs damned bad if he hits it rich, and it’s the one thing he can’t buy. He can’t buy someone he can trust. If he could…do you think he could, Bugs? Do you think if I bought a man—offered any price he named within reason—that he’d stay bought?”

He waited, looking up into Bugs’s face. Bugs shrugged silently, indifferently. But his heart quickened its beat.

“Well,” Hanlon sighed. “Well, that’s that, I guess.”

They remained at the guard-wall for a few minutes longer. Then Hanlon peered around in the darkness, gestured toward a shadowy mass a dozen or so feet away. “That’s where the remodeling is going on, isn’t it? The terrace extension? Well, let’s go over and have a look at it.”

Bugs pulled the chair back from the wall and wheeled him down the tiles. They reached the array of building materials and tools, and Bugs paused to let him look around. He waited a minute or two, then started to resume pushing. The old man stopped him quickly.

“Nothing to see over there, I guess. Just more brick and lumber.”

“Whatever you say,” Bugs said.

“Let’s see, now. I wonder if you could squeeze me through this stuff, and out to the terrace. Ought to be a good view from there.”

“Well, yeah, I guess there is. But…”

He stared down at Hanlon, eyes blank and dull. He seemed to stand there for hours, hesitating, yet it was not even a split second. For there was no decision to reach, nothing to make up his mind about. That had all been done right in the beginning.

“Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll see how it looks.”

He moved a wheelbarrow out of the way and went down a narrow aisle between some cement sacks and a long mixing-trough. At the terrace doors, he pushed two stacked saw-horses aside and pulled them open. He took a cautious step or two forward, came to an abrupt stop.

Ahead of him, there was a breach in the guard-rail: an open door into emptiness. On the left, where the terrace was being extended, the rail had been completely removed.

A man would have to be damned careful out here. And even then, in the deceptive darkness, it would be easy to…

Bugs hesitated, deliberating. Then, he went back through the doors and returned to Hanlon.

“Guess we better not,” he said. “Too dangerous.”

“
Dangerous!
But—”

“Yeah. You might wind up down in the street. I’ll just block those doors again, and—”

“Bugs!” Hanlon cut him off sharply. “Bugs, I want to go out there, and I know that you—I mean, there isn’t a thing for you to worry about. I’ll take the responsibility. Everyone knows that I like to have my own way, and—and—”

He looked up at Bugs with a kind of wheedling eagerness. He waited. The eagerness fading, giving way to something else; and then he laughed nervously, and shifted his gaze. “This damned robe”—he plucked it from his lap. “Don’t need it any more than—ha, ha—that gun I had with me last time. Should’ve left if back in my suite with the gun. I—Okay, Bugs. Well?”

“Well?” Bugs said. “Look, Mr. Hanlon, I guess we’d better be shoving off. I’ve got work to do, and—”

“Wait!” The old man gripped the wheels of his chair, holding them motionless. “What’s the matter? I told you it’d be all right, didn’t I? I showed you. You won’t be taking any risk at all, and…”

His voice trailed off into silence, and one hand went up to his face, rubbed it shakily; and he heaved a tired and wondering sigh.

“Bugs,” he quavered. “I-I don’t know how to say it. I…I was right, wasn’t I, Bugs? Right and all wrong. You can’t buy a man, and you don’t have to. All you have to do is—” His voice broke. He sighed again and went on. “You’ll stay here in Ragtown, won’t you, Bugs? Stay with the hotel? I’m not trying to buy you, but you’re capable of something a lot better than a house-dick’s job. And—”

Bugs shook his head in honest bewilderment. For consciously he could not understand. Briefly, his path had run parallel to an abyss of evil; but now it was aeons behind him. It was a bad all-but-forgotten dream, rather than a one-time reality.

“I’m sorry Bugs,” Hanlon said apologetically. “I should have known you wouldn’t do it. You couldn’t. You couldn’t commit a cold-blooded murder.”

“Told you so myself”—Lou Ford’s voice drifted out of the darkness. “Too bad I can’t say the same for you, Mis-ter Hanlon.”