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

The tall girl was restless. She had dark eyes with a hard flickering light in them, like black opals. Her mouth was wide and soft and sullen. It was ten o’clock at night in Baker, Texas. Her third-floor room in the Sage House had the hot breathlessness of the bakery she had once worked in, back when she was fourteen and had looked eighteen.

Five days in this hole. And it could be five more.

A half-block away a barn dance was in progress. She could hear the tiny whine of the music, the resounding stomping of boots. Somebody yelled shrilly, “Eeee-yah-hooo!”

“Damn silly cowhands,” she muttered. She threw the movie magazine away, sat up and tapped a cigarette on a long thumbnail the color of blood. As she lighted it a heavy strand of hair swung forward. The hair was the color of wheat, so expensively and expertly dyed that it looked natural. As she sucked the smoke into her lungs, she threw the strand of hair back with a quick movement of her head.

She looked with distaste at the room. Brown and green grass rug. Wicker furniture. Metal bed painted a liverish green. The mattress sagged toward the middle from all directions. Her two suitcases were on stands by the far wall, the lids open. A stocking dangled out of one, almost to the floor.

“You’re letting it get you, kid,” she said softly.

In her bare feet she padded over to the biggest suitcase, took the last pint out from under the rumpled clothes. She broke her fingernail on the plastic covering and cursed bitterly. She tossed the covering into the tin wastebasket by the bureau, poured three inches of the rye into the heavy tumbler which stood on the bureau.

She stood in front of the bureau staring down into the glass, hating the loneliness, the fear, the tension. The heavy rope of hair swung forward again. She stood in an ugly way, feet spread, shoulders slumped forward.

“How, kid,” she whispered. She tossed off the tepid liquor, gagged slightly on it, poured some more in the glass and left it on the bureau top.

She went into the bathroom. The big old tub stood on feet cast to resemble claws. She put the plug in and started the water running. The pipes were so clogged that the water came out in a thin stream. She went back to get her glass, and went to the front window. Starlight glinted off the Rio Grande. Across the way she could see the lights of small, dirty, turbulent Piedras Chicas.

A faint night breeze swayed the dusty curtains and cooled her. She looked hard at the distant lights as though trying to see down into the streets, to see the man who would bring the package across the river.

While the tub was filling with tepid water, she sprawled on the bed, finished the second drink, yawned and closed her eyes.

A flabby moon-faced middle-aged man came quietly down the hall. He wore a sports shirt loudly decorated with rodeo scenes. He listened outside her door, then slipped a paper-thin strip of tool steel out of his trouser pocket. He slid it along the jam, his small pink mouth pursed in concentration.

When it touched the latch, he pressed down hard, pulling slightly toward himself. There was a thin grating sound. He turned the knob slowly and pulled the door open a crack. He looked in, then looked up and down the hall.

He stepped lightly into the room and shut the door silently behind him. He drifted, soundless as smoke, across the room, stopped, looked at her cautiously.

For a long time he studied her. He wore an expression seen on the face of any person who intends to perform a difficult act with practised confidence. He slipped his shirt off and threw it behind him. Rubbery muscles moved underneath the flaccid white skin. In two quick steps he reached her. She heaved up as his stubby white thumbs dug into the pressure points at the base of her throat. Her eyes rolled back into her head so that only two narrow slits of white showed.

Shaymen watched her for a moment and then began an expert search of the room. He slit the linings of the two suitcases, wrenched the high heels from five pair of shoes, looked under the rugs, in the backs of the two pictures. He found it in a leg of the metal bed. The roller wheel had been pulled out of the leg and what he wanted had been shoved up inside the hollow metal, the roller wheel replaced.

He slipped off the rubber band and the oil cloth. The tightly rolled bills expanded. Shaymen riffled the corners with his thumb. Hundreds, five hundreds and thousands. He frowned. He didn’t like the thousands. They called for a fencing operation and a discount. The recent activities of the Bureau of Internal Revenue had made the discount a big one.

He tucked the roll into his pocket, put the shirt back on, looked at the girl. There was a swift sensation of regret in his mind, gone almost as soon as it arrived. He left the room after making certain that the hallway was empty. On his way down the stairs he nibbled the thin coating of glass cement from his finger tips. It had an acid taste. He spat out the hard flakes with small soft explosive sounds. It was always better than gloves. Didn’t arouse suspicion. Didn’t smother the cleverness of the hands.

In the lobby he bought a pack of cigarettes from the girl who was just closing the counter for the night. He smiled inside himself as he saw her staring at the shirt. It was so flamboyant that no one looked beyond it to the negative face.

Out on the sidewalk which still gave off the remembered heat of the sun, he took a deep drag on his cigarette and walked west. The tourist court was a quarter mile beyond the city limits. Travelers sat out in the lawn chairs escaping the heat. They talked and laughed softly. Shaymen accepted the invitation to sit with them and have a cold beer. He was sleepy. He yawned a great deal.

Lane Sanson supported himself precariously against the bar in one of the cheaper cantinas of Piedras Chicas. A wandering mariachi with guitar was singing in a hard nasal voice. His income depended on his nuisance value. A peso would keep that nerve-twanging voice at a safe distance.

Lane Sanson cupped his big hand around the small glass of mescal on the bar in front of him. The solution of all eternal mysteries was on the tip of his mind, ready to be jolted off with this drink, or the next, or the next.

An absent smile touched his big, hard-lipped mouth and he thought, “You better start finding some answers quick, Sanson. A lot of good answers.”

That was the trouble with the world. No answers. All questions. How did Sandy put it that night she left for good? “Lane, you’ve spent six years feeling sorry for yourself. Frankly, you’ve turned into a bore.” Her bright eyes had crackled with angry flame.

“So?” he had said, as insolently as he could manage.

“Good-by, Lane.” Just like that. Clunk. Gone.

Oh, that Lane Sanson, he’s going places. Yessiree. That’s what they said, isn’t it? A hell of a good reporter, that Sanson. You’ve read his book? Battalion Front, it was called. Remember the reviews. “This one has guts.” “A war book with integrity.” The magazine serial rights brought in forty thousand and the book club edition added fifty to that and the movies had donated a neat sixty-two five.

If the agent hadn’t been on the ball, taxes would have creamed him. But the movie deal spread the take over five years and the book and magazine take were prorated backward over the previous three tax years.

One day you’re a member of the working press. A day later you’re a cocktail party lion.