James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

“Uh-huh.”

“And they found him a little Shetland pony and let him ride it, and he loved it. He wasn’t afraid at all.” She laughed. “In fact, we could barely drag him home.” She paused. “You’re probably not in the mood for this, are you? I’m sorry, hon. Maybe you should do something to take your mind off things. Is there a good movie on?”

“I guess I could check.”

“Something light, that’s what you need.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll go get the newspaper and see what’s on.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too, sweetheart,” I said.

I spent the rest of the afternoon going through my various savings accounts and investments. I had no idea what the creep would want to leave us alone. We could always threaten him with going to the police, though he might rightly point out that if we really wanted to do that, we would already have done it.

I settled in the five-thousand-dollar range. That was the maximum cash I had to play with. And even then I’d have to borrow a little from one of the mutual funds we had earmarked for the kids and college.

Five thousand dollars. To me, it sounded like an enormous amount of money, probably because I knew how hard I’d had to work to get it.

But would it be enough for our friend the vampire?

Neil was there just at dark. He parked in the drive and came in. Meaning he wanted to talk.

We went in the kitchen. I made us a couple of highballs, and we sat there and discussed finances.

“I came up with six thousand,” he said.

“I’ve got five.”

“That’s eleven grand,” he said. “It’s got to be more cash than this creep has ever seen.”

“What if he takes it and comes back for more?”

“We make it absolutely clear,” Neil said, “that there is no more. That this is it. Period.”

“And if not?”

Neil nodded. “I’ve thought this through. You know the kind of lowlife were dealing with? A, he’s a burglar, which means, these days, that he’s a junkie. B, if he’s a junkie, then that means he’s very susceptible to AIDS. So between being a burglar and shooting up, this guy is probably going to have a very short lifespan.”

“I guess I’d agree.”

“Even if he wants to make our life miserable, he probably won’t live long enough to do it. So I think we’ll be making just the one payment. We’ll buy enough time to let nature take its course — his nature.”

“What if he wants more than the eleven grand?”

“He won’t. His eyes’ll pop out when he sees this.”

I looked at the kitchen clock. It was going on nine now.

“I guess we could drive over there.”

“It may be a long night,” Neil said.

“I know.”

“But I guess we don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, do we?”

As we’d done the last time we’d been here, we split up the duties. I took the backyard, Neil the apartment door. We’d waited until midnight. The rap music had died by now. Babies cried and mothers screamed; couples fought. TV screens flickered in dark windows.

I went up the fire escape slowly and carefully We’d talked about bringing guns, then decided against it. We weren’t exactly marksmen, and if a cop stopped us for some reason, we could be arrested for carrying unlicensed firearms. All I carried was a flashlight in my back pocket.

As I grabbed the rungs of the ladder, powdery rust dusted my hands. I was chilly with sweat. My bowels felt sick. I was scared. I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted him to say yes, he’d take the money, and then that would be the end of it.

The stucco veranda was filled with discarded toys — a tricycle, innumerable games, a space helmet, a Wiffle bat and ball. The floor was crunchy with dried animal feces. At least, I hoped the feces belonged to animals and not human children.

The door between veranda and apartment was open. Fingers of moonlight revealed an overstuffed couch and chair and a floor covered with the debris of fast food, McDonald’s sacks, Pizza Hut wrappers and cardboards, Arby’s wrappers, and what seemed to be five or six dozen empty beer cans. Far toward the hall that led to the front door, I saw l our red eyes watching me, a pair of curious rats.

I stood still and listened. Nothing. No sign of life. I went inside. Tiptoeing.

I went to the front door and let Neil in. There in the murky light of the hallway, he made a face. The smell was pretty bad.

Over the next ten minutes, we searched the apartment. And found nobody.

“We could wait here for him,” I said.

“No way.”

“The smell?”

“The smell, the rats. God. Don’t you just feel unclean?”

“Yeah, guess I do.”

“There’s an empty garage about halfway down the alley. We’d have a good view of the back of this building.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“Sounds better than this place, anyway.”

This time, we both went out the front door and down the stairway. Now the smells were getting to me as they’d earlier gotten to Neil. Unclean. He was right.

We got in Neil’s Buick, drove down the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house, backed up to the dark garage, and whipped inside.

“There’s a sack in back,” Neil said. “It’s on your side.”

“A sack?”

“Brewskis. Quart for you, quart for me.”

“That’s how my old man used to drink them,” I said. I was the only blue-collar member of the poker club. “Get off work at the plant and stop by and pick up two quart bottles of Hamms. Never missed.”

“Sometimes I wish I would’ve been born into the working class,” Neil said.

I was the blue-collar guy, and Neil was the dreamer, always inventing alternative realities for himself.

“No, you don’t,” I said, leaning over the seat and picking up the sack damp from the quart bottles. “You had a damned nice life in Boston.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t learn anything. You know I was eighteen before I learned about cunnilingus?”

“Talk about cultural deprivation,” I said.

“Well, every girl I went out with probably looks back on me as a pretty lame lover. They went down on me, but I never went down on them. How old were you when you learned about cunnilingus?”

“Maybe thirteen.”

“See?”

“I learned about it, but I didn’t do anything about it.”

“I was twenty years old before I lost my cherry,” Neil said.

“I was seventeen.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit what? I was seventeen.”

“In sociology, they always taught us that blue-collar kids lost their virginity a lot earlier than white-collar kids.”

“That’s the trouble with sociology. It tries to particularize from generalities.”

“Huh?” He grinned. “Yeah, I always thought sociology was full of shit, too, actually. But you were really seventeen?”

“I was really seventeen.”

I wish I could tell you that I knew what it was right away, the missile that hit the windshield and shattered and starred it, and then kept right on tearing through the car until the back window was also shattered and starred.

But all I knew was that Neil was screaming and I was screaming and my quart bottle of Miller’s was spilling all over my crotch as I tried to hunch down behind the dashboard. It was a tight fit because Neil was trying to hunch down behind the steering wheel.

The second time, I knew what was going on: somebody was shooting at us. Given the trajectory of the bullet, he had to be right in front of us, probably behind the two Dumpsters that sat on the other side of the alley.

“Can you keep down and drive this son of a bitch at the same time?”

“I can try,” Neil said.