Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

‘Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.’

Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odour originated in me. ‘You let him hire you?’

‘It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You ask me to believe you?’

‘I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.’ I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.

‘My daughter is aware of the danger,’ he said. ‘She warned me of it.’

‘She must have told you where she was going.’

‘No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.’

‘You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.’

He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars. The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel.

For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was a light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.

‘Who is it?’ Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.

‘You know me, Donny.’

The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his headland the light from the living-room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.

‘Anybody with you?’

Sounds of movement in the living-room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.

‘I’m getting out of here,’ she said, ‘and you’re not going to stop me.’

‘I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?’

Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: ‘She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—’

‘Shut up, stupid.’ Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back.

‘What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.’

‘When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit, she made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.’

‘What did she write in the note?’

He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.

She said: ‘Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.’

‘I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,’ the anguished voice said behind me. ‘You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.’

‘I care,’ she said. ‘I care what happens to me.’ Her hazel eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. ‘I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.’

‘It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.’

‘How do you know so much?’

‘I talked to Angel.’

‘Is he here?’ Panic whined in her voice.

‘No. I came alone.’

‘You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.’

‘I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.’

‘Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.’

His sneakered feet made soft indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily.

‘You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.’

‘What kind of a case?’

‘A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.’

‘Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name.’ There were sudden tears in her eyes. ‘I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.’

‘You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down the gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.’

Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.

‘This is the turning-point,’ I said. ‘You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost mined yourself, playing footsie with the evillest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.’

‘A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?’

‘I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.’

Ella made a decision. I could tell a mile away what she was going to do. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny:

‘Let me see that note.’

He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.

‘What could I do?’ the girl said. ‘I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border, the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realised he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it had to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.’

Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. ‘Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.’

She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draught swept the living-room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backwards through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.

I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-coloured sports shoe stepping on Donny’s labouring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.

I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.