“I am beginning to feel,” she said in an abrupt vicious little voice, “like the world’s prime cock-teaser. Please forgive me.”

“What for?”

“For coming on like some kind of nympho bar girl and then flying into a twitter the minute I imagine I hear you tossing a gentle pitch my way. I am sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for, I promise you.” Another swallow: Take it easy on this stuff. “Where are you bound for, then?”

“Ask me tomorrow when I get in my car. Maybe I’ll have an idea by then.”

“You really are footloose and fancy-free.”

A twisted smile, a dip of her face; her hair swung forward, half masking her. “I have a sister in Houston. I suppose I’m edging in that direction. Reluctantly.”

“No other family? No children?”

“Three kids.” She bit it off. “My husband got them.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s all right. All you’d have to do would be read the Los Angeles papers. It’s public knowledge. I’m not fit to raise my own children—the judge said so.”

“I’m sorry. Really.”

“Of course it helps when your husband’s a lawyer and the judge is a friend of his.” Her face whipped up. “Do I look as if I’d neglect my children? … Shit, never mind, how could you be expected to answer that? Look, I promised we’d talk about something else. What are you doing here? Vacation?”

“Business. Very dull, I’m afraid.”

“All the way from New York. It must be big.”

“Big for some people. For me it’s just my job.”

“What do you do? Or is that prying?”

“No, not at all. I’m a C.P.A., I’m doing an audit of a company’s books. It’s hardly a sensitive subject but I promise you it’s less interesting than dishwater.”

“Well, then. What shall we talk about? Nuclear submarines? The weather?”

“I don’t mind, really.”

“We don’t really have to talk at all. It’s such a strain sometimes, isn’t it.” She gathered her handbag and tossed off the rest of the Scotch. “Why don’t we go?” The voice was pert but she wasn’t meeting his eyes.

He walked her across the motel’s concrete apron, concentrating on his balance. She trailed along beside him with her vague involuted smile, her hips swaying from the slender stem of her waist. “The station wagon with mud all over it, that’s me. My room.”

“I’ll say goodnight then, and good luck to you.”

“No.” She turned under the porch overhang. “Do you like me? Do you like me at all?”

“Yes—I do.”

She opened the door; it hadn’t been locked. She drew him inside and pushed the door shut behind him. The only light was what slotted in through the half-closed blinds. Against it her eyes glittered, betraying a wild desperate appetite. “I want to hold you. I want you to hold me. Please hold me for a minute.…”

He reached for her and they breathed liquor on each other, and kissed; he felt the tears on her cheeks. “Oh, come on to bed,” she said, “we both seem to need it and it’s a friendly thing for two people to do, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

He awoke conscious of having dreamed. Weakness in all his fibers; a pounding dull headache, a dehydrated pain in his abdomen.

“You can open the other eye now, I’ve made some coffee.”

He sat up and took the cup. His fingers were unsteady. He looked at her for the first time. She still had a red patch on her chin from his stubble.

The coffee made a good smell but it tasted terrible. He put the cup down half-full. “Thanks.”

She was already dressed—the same blouse and leather skirt as last night. A good looking woman, he thought. Small, too thin, a little leather around the eyes; but damned good looking. In the night he’d lain drowsily between sleeps, thinking what it would be like to live with a woman who could take his mind off the TV commercials and the killers in the alleys.

She said, “I’m all packed. I thought of letting you sleep it off, but it occurred to me it would be awkward if I left and the maid came in and found you here.”

An abrupt tug in his throat; an instant’s wistful panic. “You’re going?”

“Time to hit the road. It’s a long way to Houston.” She patted her lips with a tissue, set the cup down in the saucer and stood in front of the mirror smoothing down her skirt. “Thank you for last night. I needed somebody to help me make it through to this morning.”

It occurred to him as she went out the door that she probably didn’t even remember his name.

“So long, Shirley Mackenzie.”

He wasn’t sure she heard him; the door continued to close. Clicked shut and left him very alone in the room.

“Oh, Jesus,” he croaked, and began to cry.

*  *  *

It was Saturday; he spent the half day in the Jainchill conference room and had lunch at a franchise hamburger drive-in and drove toward the center of town, down Speedway to Fourth Avenue and left down Fourth toward the tracks. The sporting goods store was where he remembered it. He went inside and said, “I’d like to buy a gun.”

On the plane he dozed with his head against the Plexiglas pane. The stewardess went down the aisle looking at passengers’ seat belts; the lights of New York made a glow in the haze over the city. They circled down in the holding pattern and landed at Kennedy. In the terminal on his way to baggage-claim he stopped at a counter to pick up a present for Carol: she had always had a tooth for bitter chocolate. He bought half a dozen Dutch bars and put them in his briefcase on top of the papers which concealed the .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and the six fifty-round boxes of ammunition.

He collected his suitcase and went out to the curb debating whether to spend the fifteen dollars on the taxi ride; in the end he took the airport limousine-bus to the East Side Terminal in Manhattan and a taxi home from there.

The apartment was stuffy although it was a cool night outside. He threw the windows open and took his briefcase into the bathroom, where no one across the street could see inside; the pane was frosted. He lowered the lid of the toilet and sat down and took the revolver out, and held it in his fist, staring at its black oily gleam.

14

He had it in his pocket when he went to work Thursday morning. He breathed shallowly in the jammed subway car but when someone caromed against him with a lurch of the car he shoved the offender away roughly: the gun was making him arrogant, he was going to have to watch that.

He rode the Shuttle across town in the same car with a Transit Patrolman who stood in the middle of the swaying car watching everybody with stony unimpressed eyes. Paul didn’t meet them. He had spent ten minutes propping up mirrors in the apartment to look at himself from every angle and make sure the gun in his trouser pocket didn’t make too obvious a bulge; he knew the cop had no way of detecting its presence but his nerves drew up to a twanging vibration and he hurried across the platform the instant the doors opened.

It was a very small gun, a compact five-shot model with a short barrel and a metal shroud over the hammer to prevent it from snagging on clothing. He had told the store clerk he wanted a little gun for his tackle-box, something that wouldn’t crowd the reels and trout-flies and wouldn’t get tangled in testlines. The clerk had tried to sell him a .22 single-shot pistol but Paul had declined it on the grounds that he wasn’t a good enough shot to feel safe with only a single bullet. He had had to reject a .22 revolver as well and that had made the clerk smile knowingly and make an under-the-breath remark about how everybody ought to have the right to carry a gun in his glove compartment and this ought to be just the thing don’t you think?