Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“It does. I wanted to know exactly what I was being offered a piece of. Now that I know, I don’t want it.”

He looked at me incredulously. “You don’t seriously mean that you want to die?”

“I expect to outlive you,” I said. “You’re a little too smart to have me bumped before you recover you thousand-dollar bills. That money really worries you, doesn’t it?”

“The money means nothing to me. Look, Mr. Archer, I am prepared to double the amount.” He brought a gold-cornered wallet out of an inside pocket and dealt ten bills onto the table. “But twenty thousand is my absolute limit.”

“Put your money away. I don’t want it.”

“I warn you,” he said more sharply, “your bargaining position is weak. One reaches a point of diminishing returns, where it would be cheaper and more convenient to have you killed.”

I looked at Melliotes. His glowing eyes were on Kilbourne. He hefted the gun in his hand, and asked a question with his knitted black eyebrows.

“No,” Kilbourne said to him. “What is it that you want, if not money, Mr. Archer? Women perhaps, or power, or security? I could find a place in my organization for a man that I can trust. I wouldn’t waste my words on you, frankly, if I didn’t happen to like you.”

“You can’t trust me,” I said, though the fear of death had dried my lips and tightened the muscles of my throat.

“That’s precisely what I like about you. You have a certain stubborn honesty—”

“I don’t like you,” I said. Or maybe I croaked it.

Kilbourne’s face was expressionless, but his white fingers plucked petulantly at each other. “Melliotes. We’ll give Mr. Archer a little longer to make up his mind. Do you have your pacifier?”

The man in the linen suit stood up in eager haste. His brown hand flicked into a pocket and came out dangling a polished leather thing like an elongated pear. It moved in the air too fast for me to avoid it.

I was walking in the gravel bed of a dry river. Gravel-voiced parrots cawed and flew in the stiff painted air. A girl went by me on silent feet, her golden hair blown out behind by her movement. I stumbled after her on my knees and she looked back and laughed. She had Mavis’s face, but her laugh cawed like the parrots. She entered a dark cave in the bank of the dry river. I followed her gleaming hair into the darkness.

When she turned for a second laughing look, her face was Gretchen Keck’s, and her mouth was stained with blood. We were in a hotel corridor as interminable as time. Little puffs of dust rose from her feet as she moved. The dust stank of death in my nostrils.

I picked my way after her through the debris that littered the threadbare carpet. Old photographs and newspaper clippings and black-edged funeral announcements, used condoms and love letters tied with pink ribbon, ashes and cigarette butts brown and white, empty whisky bottles, dried sickness and dried blood, cold half-eaten meals on greasy plates. Behind the numbered doors there were shrieks and groans and giggles, and howls of ecstasy and howls of pain. I looked straight ahead, hoping none of the doors would open.

The girl paused at the final door and turned again: it was Cathy Slocum, beckoning me. I followed her into the jasmine-scented room. The woman lay on the bed under a black police tarp. I drew it back from her face and saw the foam.

Someone fumbled at the door behind me. I crossed the room to the casement window and flung it open. The doorlatch clicked. I looked back over my shoulder at the charred featureless face. I said I didn’t do it. The calcined man walked towards me, his footsteps soft as ashes. I leaned far out of the window and looked down: far down in the street, the cars marched in antlike procession. I let myself go, fell into wakefulness.

The blood was pounding in my brain like heavy surf on a deserted beach. I was lying on my back on something neither hard nor soft. I raised my head, and a lightning flash of pain blazed in my eyeballs. I tried to move my hands; they wouldn’t move. My fingers were in contact with something coarse and damp and insentient. I lay still for a while, hoping the coarse numb surface wasn’t my own skin. Cold sweat tickled the sides of my face.

There was yellow light in the room, which came from a high wire-netted window in the canvas-covered wall. I looked down at my immobilized arms and saw that they were bound in a brown canvas straitjacket. My legs were free; not even trousers covered them, but I still had my shoes on. I drew them up and rocked myself to a sitting position on the edge of the cot. A bolt snapped back, and I stood up facing the leather-padded door as it swung open.

Melliotes came into the room. A tiny gray-haired woman loitered behind him. He was wearing white duck trousers and a white Mediterranean smile. Black curling hair like persian lamb covered his naked torso from collarbone to navel. The insteps of his bare feet had a growth of thick black fur.

“Well, well. Good morning again. I hope you enjoyed your rest.” His grimace parodied the genial host.

“Your accommodations are lousy. Take this off.” I was ashamed of my voice, which came out thin and dry.

“It wouldn’t be very modest to take it off.” He looked down at the little woman. “He should have something on in the presence of ladies. Isn’t that right, Miss Macon?”

She wore a white nurse’s uniform. The top of her gray cropped head came just above his waist. Her owlish eyes smiled up into his glowing black ones, and she giggled.

I aimed my head at the hairy abdomen, and rushed him. His feet skipped lightly aside like a matador’s. His knee caught the side of my head and caromed me against the padded wall. I sat down on the floor and got up again. The little woman giggled:

“He’s violent, doctor. Acts like a mental all right, don’t he?”

“We know how to deal with him, Miss Macon.” To me he said: “We know how to deal with you.”

I said: “Take this off.” When I closed my mouth, my back teeth ground together of their own accord.

“I don’t see how I can. You’re in a disturbed condition. It’s my responsibility to keep you out of mischief for a while, until you grow calmer.”

She leaned against his thigh, twisting her miniature hand in his canvas belt and looking up admiringly at the source of such fine talk.

“I’ve killed one man,” I said. “I think you’ll be the second.”

“Listen to him,” she simpered. “He’s homicidal all right.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Melliotes said. “I think a hydro treatment would do him a world of good. Shall we give him one, Miss Macon?”

“Let’s.”

“We’ll give you a hydro treatment,” he said between the smile.

I stood where I was, my back against the wall.

He took a bunch of keys from the keyhole and struck me with them sharply across the face.

“You’ll be the second,” I said.

He swung the keys again. I lost the beat of time in their harsh jangling. The lightning blazed ferociously in my head. A drop of blood crawled down my face, leaving a wet snail track.

“Come along,” he said, “while you can see to come along.”

I went along. To a room like a burial vault, white-tiled, windowless and cold. The morning light fell through a skylight in the twelve-foot ceiling and gleamed on a row of chromium faucets and nozzles along one wall. He held me by the shoulders while the woman unbuckled the straps across my back. I tried to bite his hands. He jangled the keys.

He pulled the jacket off me and tossed it to the woman. She caught it, rolled it up and stood against the door with the bundle clasped in her arms. There was a gleeful little waiting smile on her face, the smile of a baby that had not been born.