James Chase - What's Better Than Money

I had been playing the piano in Rusty’s bar for four months or so when I met Rima Marshall.

She came into the bar one wild night with the rain pounding down on the tin roof and thunder rumbling in the distance.

There were only two customers at the bar, both drunks. There was Rusty behind the bar, aimlessly polishing glasses. Across the way in a booth, Sam the negro waiter, was reading a racing sheet. There was me at the piano.

I was playing a nocturne by Chopin. My back was turned to the entrance. I didn’t see or hear her come in.

Later, Rusty told me she had come in out of the drowning rain around twenty minutes to nine. She was soaking wet, and she sat down in one of the booths to my right and behind me.

Rusty didn’t like having lone women in his bar. Usually he chased them out, but as the bar was practically empty and it was raining fit to drown a duck, he let her be.

She ordered a coke, and then lighting a cigarette, she rested her elbows on the table and stared broodingly at the two drunks at the bar.

After she had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, things began to happen.

All of a sudden the bar door crashed open and a man came in. He took four plunging steps into the bar, the way a man walks on a rolling ship, and then came to an abrupt standstill.

It was then Rima began to scream, and it was then I became aware of her and the man who had entered.

Her scream made me jerk around to stare at her.

I’ll always remember my first sight of her. She was around eighteen years of age. Her hair was the colour of polished silver and her wide, large eyes were cobalt blue. She had on a scarlet light-weight sweater that set off her breasts and a pair of black, tight-fitting slacks. There was a grubby unkempt look about her as if she had been living rough. On a chair by her side lay a plastic mac that had a rip in the sleeve and looked on its last legs.

In repose she would have been pretty the way so many girls her age are pretty who clutter up the sidewalks of Hollywood, hunting for film work, but she wasn’t in repose right at that moment.

The terror on her face was ugly to see. Her wide open mouth as it formed her continuous scream was an ugly hole in her face. She was pressing her body against the wall like an animal trying to get back into its burrow, and from her finger nails came a nerve jarring sound of scratching as she clawed at the panelling in a futile, panic-stricken quest for escape.

The man who had come in looked like something straight out of a nightmare. He was around twenty-four, small, fine-boned with a thin, pointed face that was as white as cold mutton fat. His black hair was long and plastered to his head by the rain. It hung down either side of his face in limp strands. It was his eyes that gave him his nightmare appearance. The pupils were enormous, nearly filling the entire iris, and for a moment I got the impression that he was blind. But he wasn’t blind. He was looking at the screaming girl, and there was an expression on his face that had me scared.

He had on a shabby blue suit, a dirty shirt and a black tie that looked like a shoe string. His clothes were soaking wet, and from the cuffs of his trousers water dripped, forming two little puddles on the floor.

For about three or four seconds, he stood motionless, looking at Rima, then out of his thin, vicious mouth came a steady hissing sound.

Rusty, the two drunks and I stared at him. His right hand groped into his hip pocket. He pulled a wicked looking flick-knife. It had a long pointed blade that glittered in the light. Holding the knife, its blade pointing at the screaming girl, he began to move forward, the way a spider moves, quickly, slightly crabwise and the hissing grew in sound.

‘Hey, you!’ Rusty bawled. ‘Drop it!’

But he was careful to stay right where he was behind the bar. The two drunks didn’t move. They sat on the bar stools and watched, their mouths hanging open.

Sam, his face suddenly grey with fear, slid under the table and out of sight.

That left me.

A hay head with a knife is about the most dangerous thing anyone can tackle, but I couldn’t sit there and watch him stab the girl, and I knew that was what he was going to do.

I kicked my chair away and started for him.

Rima had stopped screaming. She pushed the table sideways so it blocked the entrance to the booth.

She held onto the table, staring with blind terror at the man as he came at her.

All this took less than five seconds.

I reached him as he reached the booth.

He seemed completely unaware of me. His concentration on the girl was terrifying.

The knife flashed as I hit him.

It was a wild panicky punch, but there was plenty of weight behind it. It landed on the side of his head and sent him reeling, but it was a fraction late.

The knife slashed her arm. I saw the sleeve of her sweater turn dark, and she slumped back against the wall, then slid down out of sight behind the table.

This I saw out of the corner of my eye. I was watching him all the time. He staggered back until he had got his balance then he came forward again, not looking at me, his owl-like eyes on the booth.

As he reached the table, I set myself and really belted him. My fist connected with the side of his jaw.

The impact lifted him clean off his feet and sent him sprawling on the floor.

He lay on his back, stunned, but he still held onto the blood-stained knife. I jumped forward and stamped on his wrist. I had to stamp twice before he released his grip. I grabbed the knife and threw it across the room.

Hissing like a snake, he bounced to his feet and came at me in a horrible, purposeful rush. He was all over me before I could punch him away. His finger nails raked my face and his teeth snapped at my throat.

Somehow I flung him off, then as he came at me again, I hung one on the point of his chin that sent a jarring pain up my arm and practically tore his head off his shoulders.

He went skittling across the bar, his arms flung wide, to land up against the wall, upsetting a table and smashing a number of glasses.

He lay there, his chin pointing towards the ceiling, his breathing rasping and quick.

As I pulled the table out of the booth, I heard Rusty yelling into the telephone for the police.

Rima was bleeding. She sat huddled up on the floor, blood making a pool by her side, her face chalk-white, her big eyes staring at me.

I must have looked a pretty sight. The hay head’s finger nails had ripped four furrows down the side of my face and I was bleeding nearly as badly as she was.

‘Are you badly hurt?’ I asked, squatting at her side.

She shook her head.

‘I’m all right.’

Her voice was surprisingly steady, and there was no longer that ugly look of terror on her face. She was looking past me at the hay head as he lay unconscious against the wall. She looked at him the way you would look at a hairy-legged spider that suddenly appears at the foot of your bed.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ I said. ‘He’ll be quiet for hours. Can you stand?’

‘You are bleeding…’

‘And don’t worry about me…’

I offered her my hand. Hers was cold as she put it into mine. I got her to her feet and she leaned against me.

Then the bar door kicked open and a couple of patrolmen stormed in.

They looked at me, bleeding onto the floor and Rima leaning against me, her sweater sleeve blood soaked, and one of them pulled his club and started across towards me.

‘Hey! He’s the guy you want.’ I said.