Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

I flipped her back. “Hey, kid! You’ve got to get up.”

“No. Please,” she whined, her eyes tight shut again.

I refilled the glass and brought it back from the bathroom. “More water?”

“No!” She sat up, calling me names.

“Get dressed. You’re coming with me. You don’t want to stay with Mosquito, do you?”

Her head lolled on her neck, to one side and then the other. “No. He’s nasty.” She spoke with childish earnestness, casting an orphaned look around the barren walls. “Where is Mosquito?”

“He’s on his way. You’ve got to get out of here.”

“Yes.” She repeated after me like a lesson she had learned: “I’ve got to get out of here.”

I gathered up her clothes from the bathroom floor and tossed them to her: sweater and skirt, shoes and stockings. But she was still far gone, unequal to the task of putting them on. I had to strip off the pajamas and dress her. Her entire body was cold to the touch. It was like dressing a doll.

Her polo coat was hanging on the bathroom door. I wrapped it around her and pulled her to her feet. She couldn’t stand alone, or didn’t choose to. Ruth had flown back to her island, leaving her vacant body for me to deal with. In one way and another I got her to the elevator and propped her in a corner while I ran it down to the lobby. I pushed back the metal door and lifted her in my arms. She was light enough.

The night clerk looked up as I passed the desk. He didn’t say a word. No doubt he had seen more remarkable couples step out of that elevator.

My car was parked at the yellow curb in front of the hotel. I unlocked the door and deposited her on the seat with her head propped in the corner against a baseball cushion. She stayed in that position for the next six hours, though she had a tendency to slide toward the floor. Every hour or so, I had to stop the car in order to lift her back into her corner. Most of the rest of the time I kept the speedometer needle between seventy-five and eighty. She slept like the dead while I drove from foggy night to dawn and through the long bright morning, heading south.

She woke up finally when I braked for the stoplight at the Santa Barbara way. The light changed suddenly, taking me by surprise, and I had to burn rubber.

Ruth was flung from her seat. I held her back from the windshield with my right arm. She opened her eyes then, and looked around and wondered where she was.

“Santa Barbara.” The light changed back to green, and I shifted gears.

She stretched and sat up straight, staring at the combed green lemon groves and the blue mountains in the near distance. “Where are we going?” she asked me, her voice still thickened by sleep.

“To see a friend of mine.”

“In San Francisco?”

“Not in San Francisco.”

“That’s good.” She yawned and stretched some more. “I don’t really want to go there after all. I had an awful dream about San Francisco. An awful little man with bushy hair took me up to his room and made me do terrible things. I don’t exactly remember what they were, though. God, I feel lousy. Was I on a jag last night?”

“A kind of one. Go to sleep again if you want to. Or how about something to eat?”

“I don’t know if I can scarf anything, but maybe I better try. God knows how long since I have.”

We were approaching the freeway, and there was a truck-stop restaurant ahead. I pulled into the service station beside it and helped her out of the car. We were a very sorry couple. She still moved like a sleepwalker, and her pallor was ghastly under the noon sun. I had three hundred and forty brand-new miles on my gauge, and I felt as if I had walked them. I needed food, sleep, shave, and shower. Most of all I needed a talk with or even a look at somebody who was happy, prosperous, and virtuous, or any one of the three.

A steak and a pint of coffee did a lot for me. The girl nibbled halfheartedly at a piece of toast that she dipped in the yolk of one of her eggs. Heroin was her food and drink and sleep. It was going to be her death if she stayed with the kick to the end. The idea bothered me.

I said that to her, in slightly different words, when we were back in the car: “I’ve known weed- and opium-smokers, coke-sniffers, hemp-chewers, laudanum drinkers, plain and fancy drunks. Guys and girls who lived on canned heat and rubbing alcohol. There are even people in the world who can’t leave arsenic alone, and other people who would sell themselves into slavery for a long cool drink of ether. But your habit is the worst habit there is.”

“A lecture,” she said, with adolescent boredom. I might have been a high-school teacher objecting to bubble-gum. “What do you know about my habits, Mr. Drag?”

“Plenty.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a private detective. I told you that before, but you’ve forgotten it.”

“Yeah, I suppose I did. Was I in San Francisco last night? I think I remember, I rode up there on a bus.”

“You were there. I don’t know how you got there.”

“What happened to my shoulder? I noticed in the rest room, it looks like somebody bit me.”

“You were bitten by a mosquito.”

I turned from the road to look at her, and our eyes met for a moment. Hers were uncomprehending.

“That isn’t funny,” she said icily.

I was angry and amused at the same time. “Hell, I didn’t bite you.” But not angry enough to remind her unnecessarily of the night she had forgotten. Even to me, Mosquito seemed unreal, the figment of a red-lit dream.

I glanced at the girl’s face, and saw that she was remembering: the shadow of the memory shaded her eyes. “It’s true,” she said, “what you said about the habit. It’s terrible. I started out trying it for kicks, with Ronnie. The first few times he gave it to me free. Now it’s the only thing that makes me feel good. In between, I feel awful. How do you think I feel now?”

“Half dead, the way you look.”

“Completely dead, and I don’t even care. I don’t even care.”

After a while she dropped off to sleep again. She slept through the heavy truck-traffic on 101 Alternate and the even heavier traffic on the boulevard. It took Main Street to wake her finally.

I found a parking place near the Hall of Justice. It was nearly two o’clock, a good time to catch Peter Colton in his office. She came along quietly enough, still walking as if the sidewalk were foam rubber, until she saw the building. Then she jerked to a stop: “You’re going to turn me in!”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, but I was lying. A couple of sidewalk loungers were drifting toward us, prepared to witness anything we cared to do. “Come along with me now, or I’ll bite your other shoulder.”

She glared at me, but she came, on stiff unwilling legs. Our short black shadows stumped up the steps together.

Colton was in his office, a big jut-nosed man in his fifties, full of quiet energy. When I opened the door, his head was bowed over papers on his desk, and he stayed in that position for a measurable time. His light brown hair, cut en brosse, gave him a bearish look that went with his disposition. I pushed the girl ahead of me into the room, and shut the door rather sharply. She moved sideways along the wall, away from me.

Colton looked up with calculated effect, his powerful nose pointed accusingly at me. “Well. The prodigal son. You look terrible.”

“That comes of living on the husks that the swine did eat.”

“A Biblical scholar yet, and I wasn’t even certain you could read.” Before I could answer, he aimed his face at the girl, who was trembling against the wall: “Who’s this, the prodigal daughter?”

“This is Ruth,” I said. “What’s your last name, Ruth?”