Scott O’Hara - Five-Star Fugitive [= Border Town Girl]

And Lane Sanson, the man of the hour, spends the next five years breaking Sandy’s heart. This was the last year of income from the book. Where did it go, that integrity they yaked about? Diluted over a thousand bar tops, spread in sweet-talk to half-a-hundred women.

Sooner or later you hit bottom. The inevitable bottom. Three weeks ago he got the papers in Mexico City. He signed them. Good-by, Sandy. There was a party that night. What a party! It lasted four days.

When the hangover was gone he had written the letters. Ten of them. Eight had answered and of the eight, seven had said, “So sorry, pal.” The eighth had said, “Come on up for a try. Leg man. Guild rates.”

He had driven out of Mexico City in the convertible that was beginning to be a shambling relic of the big money year. Six hundred miles of Mexican sun with the top down had put a false look of health on top of the pale dissipation green of the two years in Mexico City — two years with nothing to show for it but fifty pages of manuscript so foul that on that last cool night he’d used it to get the fire burning in the apartment out Chapultepec way.

Yes, he had driven right up to the border full of false courage and when he had seen the bridge across the Rio Grande, the bottom had fallen out. On this side of the bridge a man could drift along. Over on that side he had to produce. And Lane Sanson was grievously afraid that, at thirty-four, his producing days were over for keeps.

One bridge to cross, and he couldn’t make it. He’d parked the car, wolfed enchildas for a base, and embarked on a mescal project.

So far he had arrived at one great truth. Up to the age of twenty-eight everything he had done had turned out right. And then the gods had switched the dice. How long can a man go on alienating his friends, forgetting his skills, fouling up his marriage.

The loss of Sandy was a pain that rattled around in his heart. Sandy of the gamin smile, the eyes that could go solemn on you. Sunday mornings with Sandy, Sandy whom he had struck, hearing her emit a low soft note of pain that stung his drunken heart because it was the same soft sound that she made when ecstasy was too much to bear silently.

He doubled his fist and struck the edge of the bar. Damn a man who rolls endlessly down a bottomless slope and cannot save himself.

An Indio girl moved close beside him. She had a flat broad brown face, obsidianblack expressionless eyes and a wide, mechanical, inviting smile.

“Por favor, buy Felicia a dreenk, señor,” she wheedled.

She wore a cheap cotton dress, pale blue plaid, too small for her, and pulled to a dangerous tightness. Her feet were bare and broad.

“Your ancestors were kings,” he said, his words slurred. “They had a great civilization.”

“Just wan leetle dreenk for Felicia?”

“They sacrificed young girls to the sun god, Felicia. At dawn from the top of mighty pyramids.”

“Here the tequila ees good. I like.”

He pushed two pesos across the bar top. The bartender filled a small glass for Felicia. “Muchas gracias,” she said.

“Salud,” said Sanson. He touched her glass with his glass of mescal and they drank.

“Wan more now?” Felicia said.

“No more now, darling.”

There was a thin flare of contempt far back in the depths of the shining eyes. “You buy Felicia more, Felicia make you happy.”

“That is the terrible goal of mankind. To be happy. I wonder if it is a good thing. This pursuit of happiness. What do you think, Felicia?”

“No unnerstand.” Her shining black hair had been frizzed into a cheap permanent.

“Happiness?” he said, “I no unnerstand either.”

“Wat your name? How called you?”

“Lane.”

She repeated it twice. He bought her another tequila. It disappeared like magic. Her eyes had a brighter glow.

“I luff Lane. Lane luff Felicia. Good?”

“That, my dear, is the ultimate simplification.”

“No big words. Too much big word. No unnerstand. We go now?”

“Where do we go?”

“Other cantina. How you say? Mas barrato.”

“Cheaper.”

“Ah, si! Cheepair!”

He shoved the change from the bar top into his pocket. It no longer mattered what he did or why, where he went or for what. He staggered heavily when he got away from the support of the bar. She grabbed him with a strength quite astonishing and steadied him. A group of Mexicans looked at him and chortled. Sanson was perfectly certain that disaster lay ahead. With luck, all they would do was roll him for what cash he had. Somehow, it didn’t matter.

The cantina lights revolved sickeningly and he struck the side of his face against the door jamb. She pulled him erect and steered him out into the furnace air of the night. She held his arm clasped against her and he felt the roil and writhe of her muscles under the taut brown hide as she struggled with him, trying to steer him down the sidewalk.

“Not far. Not long way,” she panted.

They came to the dark mouth of a narrow fetid alley, full of the stink of decay. She looked behind them and then shoved him hard into the alley. He stumbled and fell heavily on one elbow and his hip. He smiled almost casually. It was coming a lot sooner than he expected. If his luck was good, his throat would be slit. That was something Lane Sanson had thought of doing for himself, standing, looking into his own bathroom mirror.

He was yanked to his feet and slammed against the adobe wall, hard. Felicia stood out on the sidewalk looking in the other direction. He could make out the wavering figures of two men.

“Where is it?” a man demanded in whispering, metallic English.

“Hip pocket,” Lane said.

“Hands high.” He obeyed. His wallet was taken out of his hip pocket. A pencil flashlight flicked on, pointed at the sheaf of bills. Suddenly the wallet was slapped hard against his mouth. He felt the blood run between his teeth.

“This is just money. Where is the package?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sanson said with drunken dignity.

“You are the one. We know you are the one. No one else has come. Please don’t try to play games.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Sanson said querulously.

There was a sudden pin-prick pain against his belly. The light flicked on again, just long enough for him to see the six-inch length of steel gleam.

“Now you stop talking foolish, my friend, or I swear I’ll spill your blood around your shoes.”

“I would consider that a great favor,” Sanson said huskily.

Then the two men talked to each other in rattling Spanish so fast that Sanson could only catch a word here and there.

“You talk,” the man said. The knife pain was stronger, deeper. Sanson involuntarily sucked his stomach away from the point of the blade.

The anger was a long time in coming, but suddenly it throbbed behind his eyes. “I haven’t the faintest damn idea what you want. I’m a newspaperman on my way to Houston. I don’t know anything about any package. Now take that knife out of me or I’ll feed it to you.”

“Big talk. Big talk,” the man muttered, but he seemed a little less positive. Again they talked together. The wallet was shoved back into the side pocket of Sanson’s jacket. His car keys were taken out. He caught the words “auto” and “azul”. So they had watched him long enough to know that his car was the blue one parked in the zocolo.

“And there isn’t any package in,” Sanson started. He heard the faint swish and the adobe wall behind him seemed to explode and drive the side of his head off into the hot night sky. There was no sensation of falling. Just an explosive boiling blackness...