Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

I knew that she was ready to kill me, and I had to act now. I tensed my muscles to overturn the table.

Before I moved Hector Land spoke behind me, from the other end of the room. His voice boomed under the low ceiling: “It was you that killed Bessie.”

Mary’s eyes shifted from my face. I heard three heavy footsteps drag across the floor behind me. I watched her gun. The muscles moved in her slender wrist and it was deflected from my heart.

There was an explosion behind me, and her gun fell to the table. With one hand clenched on the edge of the table she held herself upright. The other hand was at her breast. A little blood leaked between her fingers and sparkled on them like rubies.

She said: “My breast is a nasty mess. You liked it for a little while, didn’t you, Sam? You thought my breasts were beautiful.”

She was about to say more, but she coughed, and her voice bubbled in her throat. Bright streams of blood spilled from the corners of her mouth, and for a moment I had the illusion that she was grinning a shining red grin which stretched from side to side of her face.

“It’s just as well this way,” she said thickly. “I didn’t want to kill you.”

Her eyes were black with pain and stared at me so intently that I didn’t know she was dead till her body went loose. Her fair head, her mouth and breast, her fine weaving hips, her evil brain perched like an obscene bird on the edge of madness, fell to the floor like a sack. A sack of food for worms.

I picked up her gun from the table and turned to face Hector Land. He squeezed the gun in his hand three times rapidly, so hard that the muscles in his forearm writhed like a black snake. No fire came out of the muzzle.

“A Colt .45 clip holds seven rounds, Hector. You’ve used the seventh shot.”

He looked down at the gun in his hand as if unable to understand that a thing which had killed one could fail to kill another.

“You should be glad that you didn’t kill me. You’ll be better off if you’ll come with me, back to San Diego. You’ve killed two enemies of the country, you turned against them of your own free will, and that may help you. If they put you in front of a firing squad it’s a clean death, cleaner than the life you’ve led. A clean death is better than being hunted like a rat.”

“Give me that gun. I got a use for that gun.” He moved into the circle of lamplight, and I saw that there was death in his face. His skin was bluish and transparent, as if all his blood had run out. His eyes looked ready to die, lost and heavy with the sorrow and shame of his life.

“If you move again, I’ll give it to you in the breastbone.”

“A gun never stopped me yet.”

He came across the rest of the room, swift and tremendous like a black waterspout. I pressed the trigger and saw a round spreading splash on his shoulder where the bullet struck. He paused and came on, so tall and wide that he seemed to blot out the walls and ceiling like a shadow cast from a low lamp.

I fired again, but he kicked the gun out of my hand and the bullet flew up between us into the ceiling. His eyes were unfocused and blinking as if the flash had seared his eyeballs, but his hands found me and closed on my neck. I hit him with my left and the pain gushed up to my elbow. A flap of scar tissue came loose over his eye. I hit him again and again, but his head rolled with the punches and his fingers closed tighter on my breathing. I kneed him in the groin. He gasped but didn’t let go.

The blood was pounding in my head and face, my lungs were sucking for air and not getting any, my eyes seemed to be expanding in their sockets. Somewhere near a dark waterfall was roaring, flooding the fields of my consciousness with night, rolling my bones down in its torrent with all the bones of the dead. My tongue forced open my clenched teeth, my knees became pitiable and remote like disasters in another country. I rushed down the dark waterfall.

But the iron collar was gone from my neck and it was only the floor I fell to. I drew a whistling breath, and another, and another. The waterfall ran into a subterranean channel and its echoes faded.

When I sat up Hector Land had found the gun and stood up with it in his hand. He said:

“You shouldn’t try to fight me. I been in the ring.”

He opened his mouth, set the muzzle of the revolver between his gleaming teeth, and fired. His brains spat on the wall behind him. They were no darker than a white man’s. His body fell like a dark tower. The ruin was finished and the cycle was complete.

When the thunder of the final explosion ceased, the low room became very still. I had a feeling that I was in a cell hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth, weighed on by mountains. With something like panic scurrying in my nerves, I got to my feet and found the door.

There was a chilly dawn light in the sky. A withered grey mist hung on the forsaken mountains. The earth looked tired and unlovely, spent by its gross passions. I knew it would look that way to me for a long time wherever I was. I wanted to get to sea again.