Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

“If you don’t like my working out here nights,” Annalou drifted down the counter, began to balance lemon-lime bottles on top of a Pepsi-Cola pyramid, “whyn’t you drag me before a parson, then set me up in a snug little apartment in town?”

He reached across the counter, caught her, squealing. “Right this minute! Now! Tonight!”

Annalou disentangled herself, demurely, pulling down her uniform apron over her trimly rounded figure. “Let’s not go over that again! The future Mrs. Rixey does not intend to start housekeeping on any shoestring.”

“I’ve got nearly four hundred stashed away.”

She scoffed. “You haven’t been pricing refrigerators or stoves or dishes lately. With what we could buy for four hundred,” she waved disparagingly at the meager equipment of the Outside Inn, “we might as well live here.”

“After what’s happened around gas stations the last week,” Don growled, “I don’t want you within a block of one. But we don’t need all that stuff they advertise in the magazines, just to get married. Look at gypsies. They get along with very little and everybody claims they’re the happiest people in the world.”

Annalou punched the cash register violently, and directed his attention to the No Sale card which popped up. She came around the counter with tightly compressed lips. “It just so happens, Mister Rixey, that I don’t care to sleep like any gypsy on a mangy blanket with some smelly old straw for a pillow. I want a nice box spring mattress and a thick, fluffy comforter.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “But the way things are going with Regal Radio Repairs, it’s going to take another year before I can hold out enough from the payback on that GI loan to feather our cozy little nest. Meantime, the idea of your bein’ all alone way out here, nights, with that holdup artist runnin’ wild, is enough to drive me to drink.”

She appeared to deliberate. “Given my choice I believe I’d rather spend my nights with you than with any stickup man. So the sooner you roll your half-ton hoop back to the shop and start operating on the insides of a superhet, the sooner I’ll be able to. ’By now, darling. Don’t run through any red lights...”

A few minutes later a short, stocky man shuffled out of the attendant’s shack which was the Outside Inn’s only neighbor. He was moon-faced and nearly bald, and he wore a yellow polo shirt and faded khaki pants.

“Wasn’t that the demon set-wrecker, Annalou?”

“You’re speaking of the man I love, Bill. Yep.”

“Doesn’t he ever buy any gas for that truck of his?”

“Not at gas stations,” Annalou grinned. “Don has a hate on gas stations. They attract too many holdup men.” She pointed to the stickup story.

Bill read it gravely. “Icy Eyes, my foot! That’s the trouble with these creeps. They pull a gun on some guy with bad nerves, get away with a few bucks, and the papers start buildin’ ’em up like they was Jesse James the Second.” He snorted disgustedly, flipped the page. “So pretty soon they think they’ve got to live up to their rep and then they kill somebody.”

“Hey!” Annalou peered over his shoulder. “You any good at noses?”

Bill stared owlishly at her. “I got the normal amount of same. Maybe a little less’n average. What you mean, Annalou?”

“There!” Annalou indicated a half-page advertisement of a furniture store, a contest puzzle picture in which a pair of brooding masculine eyes surmounted an incongruously thin and lugubrious nose placed above an even more ridiculous button of chubby dimpled chin. The advertisement proclaimed:

Win five hundred dollars worth of luxurious home furnishings. Test your knowledge of motion picture personalities by entering today.

“Five hundred smackers,” breathed Annalou. “What Don and I couldn’t do, if we had that!”

“Puh-lease,” Bill murmured. “Spare me the details!”

“I mean we just have to put ’em together.” She colored rosily. “The features they’ve jumbled up here, I mean. I ought to be pretty good at this. I’m terrible on names, but I hardly ever forget a face.”

Bill considered. “That might be Lou Costello’s chin. The comedian, you know.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “And those are Charles Boyer’s eyes, I’ll bet.” She paused, “But whose nose?”

“Ain’t Durante’s. Not big enough.”

“Humphrey Bogart? No.” She shook her head.

Bill clucked sympathetically. “I wouldn’t know. To me, one nose is as good as another, long’s it stays out of my business.”

She glanced up at the sound of crunching gravel. “Excuse me for mentioning it, then. But you got a customer.”

A maroon sedan rolled smoothly onto the drive-in. It had a doctor’s white cross beside the license plate. Bill hurried over to the ethyl pump.

A tall man in fawn gabardine with snap-brim to match, got out of the sedan, pointed to the windshield, asked Bill a question, strolled languidly toward the attendant’s shack. A tall, slim, leggy girl climbed out, too. She looked up at the sign:

Fill Your Insides At The Outside Inn

“What you want, Eddie?” she called.

“Coffee,” he answered, over his shoulder. “Black.”

Annalou put away the puzzle sheet, slid two cups onto saucers.

The tall girl was willowy and graceful. Like those models at the big stores in town, Annalou thought. The dress she was wearing helped the illusion along. It was something soft and fuzzy in a pink-and-gray mixture, cut way down to there in front. It had that New Look everybody was talking about. On her, Annalou decided, it wasn’t bad.

“Howya, honey-chile.” The newcomer’s voice was throaty velvet. “Hot java on tap?”

“Best in town.” Annalou gazed admiringly at the dress. Must be an exclusive. Pipe that rose-rhinestone embroidery. “Something with it?”

“Uh-uh. Make it two, though.” The girl sat sidewise on her stool, crossed her nylons. “Things kinda slow?”

Annalou set out cream and sugar. “Always quiet this time of—”

A flat report came then. It sounded like a backfire. Annalou glanced quickly at the sedan’s exhaust. The motor wasn’t running. Bill had filled the tank, gone back to the shack.

The tall girl spilled off the stool, scurried toward the car. The driver of the sedan walked swiftly out of the shack. He got about ten paces from the door when Bill stumbled out, all doubled up, holding both hands pressed tight over his abdomen.

“You — skunk!” He coughed. He leaned against the door frame, fell down, got to his hands and knees, crawled a few feet, sagged to the gravel on his face, and lay still.

The tall girl snatched at her companion’s arm. “Eddie!” she screamed. “You promised you wouldn’t!”

He didn’t break his stride, didn’t answer.

“Eddie!” She tugged at his arm. “You’ve killed him!”

He jerked open the car door, slid in. “Coming?” He kicked the starter, the motor roared.

She scrambled in beside him. The sedan leaped forward before she got the door closed.

Frozen with fear, Annalou reached for a pencil on the cash-register ledge. She scribbled a number on the edge of the puzzle.

Then she grabbed a nickel out of the cash drawer, stumbled with pounding heart across the gravel toward Bill...

Lieutenant Les Wiley waited until the flash-bulb boys were through and the starchy internes had lifted Bill’s body onto a stretcher.

“You say this girl called him Eddie, Miss Kenyon?”

Annalou shivered, moved closer to Don Rixey’s protecting shoulder. “That’s right. Twice, she called him Eddie.”

“You’d recognize him, if you saw him?”