Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“Is your girl friend with you?” Mrs. Smith had a note in her voice which I couldn’t quite place. I wondered if she was jealous of the girl.

Apparently Davy caught the note. “Is there something the matter?”

“This man seems to think so. He says your girl friend is missing.”

“How can she be missing? She’s right here.” His voice was flat, as though he was guarding his feelings. “Her father sent you, no doubt,” he said to me.

“That’s right.”

“Go back and tell him this is the twentieth century, second half. Maybe there was a time when a chick’s old man could get away with locking her up in her room. The day’s long past. Tell old man Sebastian that.”

“He isn’t an old man. But he’s aged in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Good. I hope he dies. And so does Sandy.”

“May I talk to her?”

“I’ll give you exactly one minute.” To Mrs. Smith he said: “Please go away for a minute.”

He spoke to both of us with a certain authority, but it was a slightly manic authority. The woman seemed to feel this. She moved away across the court without an argument or a backward glance, as if she was deliberately humoring him. As she sat down by the pool I wondered again in exactly what capacity she employed him.

Blocking the doorway with his body, he turned and called to the girl: “Sandy? Come here a minute.”

She came to the doorway wearing dark glasses which robbed her face of meaning. Like Davy, she had on a black sweatshirt. Her body thrust itself forward and leaned on Davy’s with the kind of heartbroken lewdness that only very young girls are capable of. Her face was set and pale, and her mouth hardly moved when she spoke.

“I don’t know you, do I?”

“Your mother sent me.”

“To drag me back home again?”

“Your parents are naturally interested in your plans. If any.”

“Tell them they’ll find out soon enough.” She didn’t sound angry in the usual sense. Her voice was dull and even. Behind the dark glasses she seemed to be looking at Davy instead of me.

There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn’t be, arson committed by children playing with matches.

I didn’t know how to talk to them. “Your mother’s pretty sick about this, Miss Sebastian.”

“She’ll be sicker.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is. I guarantee that she’ll be sicker.”

Davy shook his head at her. “Don’t say anything more. Anyway his minute is up.” He made an elaborate show of checking his wrist watch, and I caught a glimpse of what went on in his head: large plans and intricate hostilities and a complicated schedule which didn’t always jibe with reality. “You’ve had your minute. Good-bye.”

“Hello again. I need another minute, or maybe two.” I wasn’t deliberately crossing the boy, but I wasn’t avoiding it, either. It was important to know how wild he really was. “Do me a favor, Miss Sebastian. Take off your glasses so I can see you.”

She reached for her glasses with both hands, and lifted them from her face. Her eyes were hot and lost.

“Put them back on,” Davy said.

She obeyed him.

“You take orders from me, bird. From nobody else.” He turned on me. “As for you, I want you to be out of sight in one minute. That’s an order.”

“You’re not old enough to be giving orders to anybody. When I leave, Miss Sebastian goes along.”

“You think so?” He pushed her inside and shut the door. “She’s never going back to that dungeon.”

“It’s better than shacking up with a psycho.”

“I’m not a psycho!”

To prove it he swung his right fist at my head. I leaned back and let it go by. But his left followed very quickly, catching me on the side of the neck. I staggered backward into the garden, balancing the wobbling sky on my chin. My heel caught on the edge of the concrete deck around the pool. The back of my head rapped the concrete.

Davy came between me and the sky. I rolled sideways. He kicked me twice in the back. I got up somehow and closed with him. It was like trying to wrestle with a bear. He lifted me clear off my feet.

Mrs. Smith said: “Stop it!” She spoke as if he really was some half-tamed animal. “Do you want to go back to jail?”

He paused, still holding me in a bear hug that inhibited my breathing. The redheaded woman went to a tap and started a hose running. She turned it full on Davy. Some of the water splashed on me.

“Drop him.”

Davy dropped me. The woman kept the hose on him, aiming at the middle of his body. He didn’t try to take it away from her. He was watching me. I was watching a Jerusalem cricket which was crawling across the deck through the spilled water, like a tiny clumsy travesty of a man.

The woman spoke to me over her shoulder: “You better get the hell out of here, troublemaker.”

She was adding insult to injury, but I went. Not very far: around the corner where my car was parked. I drove around the block and parked it again on the slanting street above the Laurel Apartments. I couldn’t see the inner court or the doors that opened onto it. But the entrance to the garage was clearly visible.

I sat and watched it for half an hour. My hot and wounded feelings gradually simmered down. The kick-bruise in my back went right on hurting.

I hadn’t expected to be taken. The fact that I had been meant I was getting old, or else that Davy was pretty tough. It didn’t take me half an hour to decide that both of these things were probably true.

The name of the street I was parked on was Los Baños Street. It was a fairly good street, with new ranch houses sitting on pads cut one above another in the hillside. Each house was carefully different. The one across the street from me, for example, the one with the closed drapes, had a ten- foot slab of volcanic rock set into the front. The car in the driveway was a new Cougar.

A man in a soft leather jacket came out of the house, opened the trunk of the car, and got out a small flat disk which interested me. It looked like a roll of recording tape. The man noticed my interest in it and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

Then he decided to make something more of it. He crossed the street to my side, walking with swaggering authority. He was a large heavy man with a freckled bald head. In his big slack smiling face the sharp hard eyes came as a bit of a shock, like gravel in custard.

“You live around here, my friend?” he said to me.

“I’m just reconnoitering. You call it living around here?”

“We don’t like strangers snooping. So how would you like to move along?”

I didn’t want to attract attention. I moved along. With me I took the license number of the Cougar and the number of the house, 702 Los Baños Street.

I have a good sense of timing, or timing has a good sense of me. My car had just begun to move when a light-green compact backed out of the garage of the Laurel Apartments. As it turned downhill toward the coastal highway, I could see that Sandy was driving and Davy was with her in the front seat. I followed them. They turned right on the highway, went through a yellow light at the foot of Sunset, and left me gritting my teeth behind a red light.

I drove all the way to Malibu trying to pick them up again, but I had no luck. I went back to the Laurel Apartments on Elder Street.

THE CARD ON THE DOOR of Apartment One said: “Mrs. Laurel Smith.” She opened the door on a chain and growled at me:

“You drove him away. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“You mean they’re gone for good?”

“I’m not talking to you.”