Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

Tyres squealed, taking a distant corner.

‘Aw, loosen up,’ I said quickly. ‘Sharp was scared. He brought the dog back to where he got him. He must have thought the house was empty. The chloroform idea wasn’t so good, but the little guy was all rattled.’

They didn’t make a sound, either of them. They just stared at me.

‘OK,’ I said, and stepped over to the corner of the room. ‘I think you’re on the lam. If whoever’s coming isn’t law, I’ll start shooting. Don’t ever think I won’t.’

The woman said very calmly, ‘Suit yourself.’

Then a car rushed along the block and ground to a harsh stop before the house. Two big bruisers in plain-clothes tumbled out and slammed through the gate, up the steps.

The door swung wide and the two dicks charged in with drawn guns.

They stopped dead, stared at what lay on the floor. Their guns jerked at Jerry and me. The one who covered me was a big red-faced man in a baggy grey suit.

‘Reach — and reach empty!’ he yelled in a large tough voice.

I reached, but held on to my Luger. ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘A dog killed him, not a gun. I’m a private dick. I’m on a case here.’

‘Yeah?’ He closed in on me heavily, bored his gun into my stomach. ‘Maybe so, bud. We’ll know all that later on.’

He reached up and jerked my gun loose from my hand, sniffed at it, leaning his gun into me.

‘Fired, huh? Sweet! Turn around.’

‘Listen—’

‘Turn around, bud.’

I turned slowly. Even as I turned he was dropping his gun into a side-pocket and reaching for his hip.

That should have warned me, but it didn’t. I may have heard the swish of the blackjack. Certainly I must have felt it. There was a sudden pool of darkness at my feet. I dived into it.

When I came to the room was full of smoke. The smoke hung in the air, in thin lines straight up and down, like a bead curtain. I had never seen the room before.

I lay a little while thinking, then I opened my mouth and yelled, ‘Fire!’ at the top of my lungs.

Then I fell back on the bed and started laughing. I didn’t like the sound I made laughing. It had a goofy ring, even to me.

Steps ran along somewhere and a key turned in the door and the door opened. A man in a short white coat looked in at me, hard-eyed. I turned my head a little and said, ‘Don’t count that one, Jack. It slipped out.’

He scowled sharply. He had a hard small face, beady eyes. I didn’t know him.

‘Maybe you want some more strait-jacket,’ he sneered.

‘I’m fine, Jack,’ I said. ‘Just fine. I’m going to have me a short nap now.’

‘Better be just that,’ he snarled.

The door shut, the key turned, the steps went away.

I lay still and looked at the smoke. I knew now that there wasn’t any smoke there really. It must have been night because a porcelain bowl hanging from the ceiling on three chains had light behind it.

I took hold of the corner of the rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my face. I sat up, put my feet down on the floor. They were bare. I was wearing canton flannel pyjamas. There was no feeling in my feet when I put them down. After a while they began to tingle and then got full of pins and needles.

Then I could feel the floor. I took hold of the side of the bed and stood up and walked.

A voice that was probably my own was saying to me, ‘You have the DTs... you have the DTs... you have the DTs...’

I saw a bottle of whisky on a small white table between the two windows. I started towards it. It was a Johnny Walker bottle, half full. I got it up, took a long drink from the neck. I put the bottle down again.

The whisky had a funny taste. While I was realising that it had a funny taste I saw a washbowl in the corner. I just made it to the washbowl before I vomited.

I got back to the bed and lay there. The vomiting had made me very weak, but the room seemed a little more real, a little less fantastic. I could see bars on the two windows, a heavy wooden chair, no other furniture but the white table with the doped whisky on it. There was a cupboard door, shut, probably locked.

The bed was a hospital bed and there were two leather straps attached to the sides, about where a man’s wrists would be. I knew I was in some kind of a prison ward.

My left arm suddenly began to feel sore. I rolled up the loose sleeve, looked at half a dozen pin-pricks on the upper arm, and a black and blue circle around each one.

I had been shot so full of dope to keep me quiet that I was having the French fits coming out of it. That accounted for the smoke. The doped whisky was probably part of somebody else’s cure.

I got up again and walked, kept on walking. After a while I drank a little water from the tap, kept it down, drank more. Half an hour or more of that and I was ready to talk to somebody.

The closet door was locked and the chair was too heavy for me. I stripped the bed, slid the mattress to one side. There was a mesh spring underneath, fastened at the top and bottom by heavy coil springs about nine inches long. It took me half an hour and much misery to work one of these loose.

I rested a little and drank a little more cold water and went over to the hinge side of the door.

I yelled ‘Fire!’ at the top of my voice, several times.

I waited, but not long. Steps ran along the hallway outside. The key jabbed into the door, the lock clicked. The hard-eyed little man in the short white coat dodged in furiously, his eyes on the bed.

I laid the coil spring on the angle of his jaw, then on the back of his head as he went down. I got him by the throat. He struggled a good deal. I used a knee on his face. It hurt my knee.

He didn’t say how his face felt. I got a blackjack out of his right hip pocket and reversed the key in the door and locked it from the inside. There were other keys on the ring. One of them unlocked my closet. I looked in at my clothes.

I put them on slowly, with fumbling fingers. I yawned a great deal. The man on the floor didn’t move.

I locked him in and left him.

From a wide silent hallway, with a parquetry floor and a narrow carpet down its middle, flat white oak banisters swept down in long curves to the entrance hall. There were closed doors, big, heavy, old-fashioned. No sound behind them. I went down the carpet runner, walking on the balls of my feet.

There were stained glass inner doors to a vestibule from which the front door opened. A telephone rang as I got that far. A man’s voice answered it, from behind a half-open door through which light came out into the dim hall.

I went back, sneaked a glance, saw a man at a desk, talking into the phone. I waited until he hung up. Then I went in.

He had a pale, bony, high-crowned head, across which a thin wave of brown hair curled and was plastered to his skull. He had a long, pale, joyless face. His eyes jumped at me. His hand jumped towards a button on his desk.

I grinned, growled at him, ‘Don’t. I’m a desperate man, warden.’ I showed him the blackjack.

His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. His long pale hands made gestures like sick butterflies over the top of his desk. One of them began to drift towards a side drawer of the desk.

He worked his tongue loose. ‘You’ve been a very sick man, sir. A very sick man. I wouldn’t advise—’

I flicked the blackjack at his wandering hand. It drew into itself like a slug on a hot stone. I said, ‘Not sick, warden, just doped within an inch of my reason. Out is what I want, and some clean whisky. Give.’

He made vague motions with his fingers. ‘I’m Doctor Sundstrand,’ he said. ‘This is a private hospital — not a jail.’

‘Whisky,’ I croaked. ‘I get all the rest. Private funny house. A lovely racket. Whisky.’