Lawrence Block - No Score

She was writhing on the bed, making noises like cats fighting under a full moon. “Oh, I almost made it,” she said. “Oh, I’ll make it this time, somebody, help, please, somebody, I’ll make it this time.”

Keegan started for her. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

“My turn,” I said.

“Oh,” he lied, “I forgot about you.”

“Sure you did.”

“Easy, now. If you want to stand arguing, someone’ll take your turn. That what you want?”

“You know something, Keegan? I never realized it before, but you know what you are?”

“Lad—”

“You’re a son of a bitch, Keegan.”

“Easy, now,” Keegan said.

“Please,” Cherry said. “Please please please please—”

“Open up in there,” a voice said.

“Please please please—”

“Open that door.”

The room went silent again. I had shouldered Keegan aside and was on my way to the girl. Someone grabbed my arm. I shook the hand off.

They kicked the door in. Four cops the size of the Green Bay Packers. One of them went around waving a badge and a gun at everybody, and the other three pulled me off Cherry.

I bit one of them in the leg and hit one of them in the face and kicked one of them in the family jewels. If there had just been the three of them I think I would have taken them. I really mean it. But the fourth one managed to get behind me and hit me over the head with the butt of his gun.

“Oh, you rats,” I heard Cherry howling. “I almost made it. Another minute and I would of made it, you rats. I’ll never let you dirty cop rats screw me again. Never, damn you. Oh, I almost made it—”

The gun butt popped me again. The lights went out and so did I.

You know, I can understand how people can become paranoid. It isn’t that hard to figure out. When things have been going wrong in one particular way over and over again, it’s natural to figure that there’s a conspiracy against you.

Take me, for instance. (Take me! I’m yours!) No, seriously. Here I was, for Pete’s sake, with just one flung I really wanted to do, and I was being turned at every thwart. I was playing the goddamned Doris Day part in one of those movies where the big question is whether or not Doris can keep her legs together until the end of the film, and the big answer is always yes.

You already know about Francine — remember? to hook your attention? the gun going off — and here I was the last man in line at an orgy and the cops came in just when my number came up.

Why shouldn’t I be paranoid? Obviously those cops were just waiting in the hallway for it to be my turn. Obviously someone had switched decks of cards, so that I wound up cutting a deck where every card was the fucking four of clubs. Obviously there was a hole in the wall, or a two-way mirror, and good old Gregor was out there taking pictures and old Haskell was watching and beating off in the name of sociological research, and the Head was laughing, and the basketball coach was saying that a winner never quits and a quitter never wins, and Cherry was taking off her red wig and revealing herself as Aileen, being faithful to Gregor in her peculiar way, and Calvin was saying Rowrbazzle, which means Up your ass in Siamese, and my parents weren’t really dead, they were just trying to escape from their boring mess of a kid.

I couldn’t have been unconscious for very long, because the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a pair of baggy pants. I watched as the pants were pulled up past my face and onto Flickinger, to whom they belonged. I was lying on the floor next to the bed, and Flickinger was sitting on it, and pulling his pants on.

I stayed where I was. There were conversations going on, but my head was buzzing and I was sort of listening through the conversations without hearing them, the way you do when you watch an Italian movie. All I knew was that there were four cops in the room, along with the five guys from the crew. I didn’t see or hear Cherry.

I guess I must have realized sort of vaguely that nobody was paying attention to me, and that this was Just As Well. So I was very careful to stay where I was, and I closed my eyes again, and I found out that with my eyes shut my ears worked again, and I listened to what they were saying.

A voice I didn’t know, a coppish voice, was saying, “Boy, your ass is grass. You’re gone be in jail so long you’ll be able to homestead your cell. I just hope you like what you got off of that little girl tonight, because you won’t get anything else off anybody else for the next twenty years. Indiana don’t care about statutory rape, now. Indiana don’t care for that at all.”

“She did act like a statue at first,” Flick said. “But she was no statue toward the end there. Without you jokers were kicking the door in, she was humping like a camel.”

“Now I told you about your rights,” the cop said. Or maybe it was another cop. If you’ve heard one cop, you’ve heard them all. “And about your rights to an attorney, and how statements made voluntarily may be introduced as evidence in criminal prosecutions against you. You recollect I gave you that warning.”

“Cut the shit,” Flick said.

“Because you’re just digging your grave with your tongue, boy, and I want to make sure you know what you’re about.”

“Something about raping a statue,” Keegan said.

He sounded as unconcerned as Flickinger, and I couldn’t understand it. Neither could the cops. The guys were drunk, but it didn’t seem possible that they were drunk enough to be this way.

Solly said, “That was no statue, that was my wife.”

“Not funny, boy. That young lady was under the age of consent.”

“That was no young lady,” Lester put in. “That was my statue.”

“What’s the age of consent here anyway?”

“Eighteen, same as most everywhere else.”

“And you mean to say that girl was seventeen?”

“No, sir,” the cop said. He sounded very Jack Webbish. “I mean to say she was fifteen.”

“Well, I declare,” Lester said. “Why, the little liar swore up and down she was thirty-five.”

The room rocked with laughter. I didn’t laugh, and neither did the cops. They made threatening sounds and talked about going on down to the station house. Jimmy Joe hummed Dum Da Dum Dum and got a laugh. Flickinger stood up, stepped over me, and started rasping away in his No More Of This Nonsense voice. He saved it for special occasions, and it was very impressive. He told the cops that they could cut out this shit about warning us of our rights, because the same rights meant that they couldn’t kick the door in without a warrant, and since we were in a private room with a closed and locked door, they had no case, and—

“We had a warrant,” the cop said.

“Huh?”

“Naming you six men.” He read our names. “That’s you folks, isn’t it?” Flickinger allowed that it was us, all right. I was relieved, for no particular reason, when he read my name as Chip Harrison. When he was going down the list I had the weirdest idea that he was going to read off Leigh Harvey Harrison , and that was all I needed.

“And charging you six men with fraud, attempted fraud, soliciting without a license, several counts of trespass and criminal trespass, and miscellaneous violations of the following civic ordinances—” and he read off a batch of numbers.

“Now just a minute,” Flick said. He still didn’t seem at all worried; and I decided he was crazy. I didn’t know what any of those numbers were supposed to mean, but it sounded as though they had enough against us to put us away for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the worst part of all was that this had happened before I could get to Cherry. Whatever jail they put me in, the odds were good that there wouldn’t be any women in it, which meant I’d be a male virgin until I was too old to be interested.