Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

Her lips pursed slightly. “Why did you come here?”

“I had nowhere else to go.”

“Are you in trouble with the police?”

“Yeah. But trite as it sounds, I happen to be innocent.”

“How did you get shot?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I looked up at her, but her eyes were cast downward at my arm. “You’re entitled to know what I’m involving you in just by being here now,” I said. “All right, it’s this way-” and I told her all of it, about the Burong Chabak and about Van Rijk and Dinessen and Marla King and Tiong, and what had happened on this long, long night.

She listened without interruption, her fingers busy with the alcohol-soaked cotton. When I had finished speaking, she said, “That’s a fantastic story.”

“The truth isn’t always simple.”

“I suppose not.”

“I’m not lying to you, Tina.”

“I think I believe that, God knows why.” She paused, as if she wanted to say something else, and then moved away to enter the kitchenette. She came back with a clean dishtowel. “I’m going to put iodine on your arm,” she said. “You’d better bite onto this.”

I put the towel between my teeth and bit down on it, and the iodine set fire to my entire right side, bright and hot and lingering in my armpit. But the pain wasn’t all that bad; I had lived with agony too many consecutive hours.

Tina put gauze pads over the puckered wounds and unrolled adhesive tape tightly over them. When the arm was bandaged she poured alcohol on a fresh cotton ball and went to work on the pulpy spot over my temple. She asked then, “What are you going to do?”

“That depends on you.”

“I… won’t turn you out.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

She sighed softly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m going to try to get out of Singapore. I don’t have another choice.”

“But where will you go?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Do you have money?”

“A few dollars.”

“I… don’t have much myself, but I can let you have about a hundred or so if it will help.”

“It’s nowhere near what I really need,” I said. “Keep your money, little girl.”

“But how will you get off the island?”

“I don’t know yet; there are ways.” The fever was spreading hot and enervating through my body now, and my eyelids seemed to be fluttering up and down like window shades over distorted glass. Tina finished putting a bandage on my temple, took the towel from where I had put it on the table, and wiped some of the sweat off my forehead. Then she stroked my hair, and her fingers were cool, cool.

“Dan,” she said, and there was alarm in her voice. “Dan, you’ve got to get to bed. You… you look awful.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you stand up all right?”

“Think so.”

“I’ll help you into the bedroom.”

“Can sleep on the settee, once I’m rid of these clothes…”

“No, you’ll sleep in the bed.”

I got up on my feet, leaning against her momentarily, the softness of her, the firmness of her. The trembling worsened, spreading to every extremity of my body now, and my knees felt strange and uncontrollable. The room seemed to shimmer slightly, in distortion.

“The bathroom first,” I said, “I have to get out of these clothes

… the blood…”

I took two steps away from Tina, and the room dissolved slowly, curiously, into an oscillating grayness, into a netherworld of shadow images like shapes seen through a dense fog. Tina’s voice clutched at me, fading, fading, something dropped into a deep well, and the grayness began to spin, I began to spin, spinning and falling and jarring impact and the void.

… rushing, rushing, the strip rushes up, the wheels touch and bounce and touch again, we’re almost down but we hit something, the Dakota begins to roll, I can’t hold it, oh God, oh God, the world tilts crazily, lights spin and spin and spin, there is an impact, no, no, Pete screams, he screams, there is the stench of high octane fuel, no, I feel myself being lifted, lifted, no, blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming…

Wake up, wake up.

I’m awake. Or am I? Reality and illusion commingled, and I can’t separate them. I don’t know where I am. Yielding softness beneath me, the faint creak of springs-bed? Yes, bed, but a bed should be warm and I’m cold, cold, so cold. And trembling. My whole being vibrates, muscles spasm, appendages jerk like an epileptic in a clonic seizure. Sounds fumble incoherently from my throat. Cold, cold, trembling, cold.

A blanket floats out of nowhere and covers me. A second materializes from the darkness. I pull them tight around me, so cold, but the trembling does not stop. A voice shimmers into the half-reality. “Dan,” it says. “Dan.”

Female voice, Tina’s voice. “Tina,” I hear myself say. “I’m so cold.”

“… no more blankets…”

“So cold,” I say, “so cold.”

Springs creak louder, movement beside me, hands touching me, warm hands, oh warm hands, and warm flesh too, stretching out, fitting to me, warming me, the hands stroking my neck and shoulders, holding me, and Tina’s voice whispering words I can’t quite understand. I clutch the warmth. Soft flesh, naked flesh. I hold it, I pull it to me, I cover myself with it. Warmth, warmth. A breast, a thigh, a hip, a spinal ridge. Tina. Warm body warming cold body, easing the trembling, soft Tina.

“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep, Dan.”

“Sleep…”

Cold gone, trembling gone, warm flesh, warm Tina, warm…

… and silent black.

I opened my eyes.

Morning. Or afternoon. Sunlight filtered through louvered shutters on a window across the room. Room. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, and then it passed and I realized I was in bed-a big double bed in a small bedroom. The sheets above and beneath my body were twisted and sodden. A pair of blankets were bunched at the foot of the bed and half-draped onto the floor, where I apparently had kicked them.

I lay quietly, not moving. There was a curious odor in my nostrils, and after a time I managed to decipher it as three parts sour fever-sweat and one part sandalwood perfume. My thoughts seemed to be clear now, and I could remember the events of the previous night-and remember, too, the dreams and the half-dream with Tina that seemed to have been reality after all.

Weakness made my body ache faintly, but it was the weakness of a broken fever rather than that of debilitation. I wondered if the sleep had done it, or if Tina had fed me some kind of antibiotic. My right arm throbbed distantly, like a vague but annoying toothache-the same sort of throbbing that plagued my temples. I lifted the arm a few inches off the bedclothes, flexing the fingers gingerly; in spite of a cramped stiffness throughout the limb, the musculature was unparalyzed and functioning sufficiently to allow me limited use of it.

I leaned my weight on my left side and raised myself slowly into a sitting position. A thin wave of gray-black dots washed dizzyingly in back of my eyes-and vanished; nausea spread through my stomach-and vanished. I got my legs around and onto the floor, held a breath, and launched myself into an upright position, hanging onto the headboard of the bed for support. I stood there like that, breathing rapidly now, dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts-and the bedroom door opened and Tina looked in.

She said, “Dan, be careful!”

“I’m all right,” I told her. My voice sounded thick and hoarse. “I just need a minute to get my bearings.”

“You’d better let me help you-”