Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“Hot pants,” he said.

She shook her head.

He ran his hand over her rump again, and she shuddered.

“They are.”

“Yes,” she said.

“So you’re what Converse is married to.”

She shrugged.

“Far fucking out.”

He began to seem more like a man to her; out of habit or duty she felt some tenderness.

“We could work this out a little,” he said.

“Yeah,” Marge said, “I’m for that.”

“But we have problems, don’t we?”

“I’m sorry about that. I’ll go to the bank.”

He stared at her for a moment and nodded. “Where is it?”

“A couple of blocks.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

She went down to the yard to take Janey off the horse; it was not easily done. In the end she had to hold Janey’s shoulders down to make her stop bouncing.

“We’re going for a ride, Janey.”

She had to say it several times before Janey was aware of her, and in the end she lifted the child from the red plastic saddle. Janey did not complain.

Washing Janey’s face, she saw herself in the bathroom mirror, displaying a wan, fatuous smile. Madness.

She ran a damp towel across Janey’s small face, pasting locks of wet brown hair to the temples. With every second, the thing that had passed between her and the cold-eyed man became more remote and impossible, a fantasy, a delusion. Dilaudid.

When Janey was presentable, they went into the living room; he was gone. She passed into Janey’s bedroom, opened the back door, and saw that he was in the yard try ing to look over the picket fence that separated her patch of lawn from the landlord’s. As soon as she turned back toward the living room, she heard him running up the back steps — and turning again saw him charge through the door at her, straight from her last night’s dreams. His eyes were empty.

Marge’s first impulse was to run toward Janey, but before she could move she found herself flung backward through the living-room door and she did not realize how hard he had struck her until she collided with the living-room table and the warm coffee and cassis ran over her trouser leg.

He stood over her in an animal crouch, staring at the hall doorway. Someone was climbing the hallway steps — a heavy unhurried step.

“Tell them wait a minute,” Hicks said. “Don’t you open that door.”

Still crouching, he ran back into Janey’s bedroom. Just before the door closed behind him, Marge caught sight, over his bent shoulders, of a blond young man in the back doorway. The young man’s arms opened as Hicks ran toward him.

Noises she could not understand came from the bed room — soft scuffling, a few light thumps, what sounded like clothes hangers falling in the closet, finally a low groan.

There was a firm polite knock at the hallway door.

Marge clung to Janey and stared at the blank door in horror. The knock sounded again.

“Just a minute,” Marge said.

The blond young man from the back door stepped into the living room; his nose was running grossly and copiously. Hicks was behind him lifting his shirttails as though he were trying to undress him. The youth knelt down on the floor; Hicks was crouched above him, feeling him up. As if in a magic act, he produced a length of taped chain from the young man’s person. Swinging the chain, he drew himself up — he was pointing at her, mouthing words.

Marge drew back, enfolding Janey in her arms and just as she was shaking her head to indicate her utter confusion, her incomprehension, her inability to cooperate in any manner, the hall door opened silently and a bearded man stood in the doorway. He looked down at Marge in mild surprise.

Instead of coming in, the bearded man took a quick step backward. A whirling gray shape rushed past Marge’s face and something curled itself around the bearded man’s head. Hicks dived for the doorway. He and the bearded man lurched into the apartment, panting.

“O.K., O.K.,” a voice that was not Ray’s was saying. “O.K., for Christ’s sake.” It was the bearded man. Hicks was holding a pistol against his ear.

“I’ll kill you quick,” Hicks told the bearded man. He pulled the chain from around the man’s shoulders and swung it so that it wrapped around his left forearm. The bearded man’s mustache was bloody.

Marge stood up and carried Janey to the bedroom. They were both crying now.

“It’s all right,” Marge said. The terror in Janey’s eyes was so total that Marge could not bear to look at it. “It’s all right, sweetie. You wait on the back steps. Will you? Please, Janey?” Janey went to the back steps, sat on the topmost step and wept.

In the living room, Hicks was repeatedly kicking the blond young man. The bearded man, his hands apparently handcuffed behind him, watched with something like embarrassment.

“I don’t blame you for doing that,” he told Hicks after a while.

“I’m glad you understand,” Hicks said. He left off kicking the youth and started going through the bearded man’s pockets. The first thing he removed was a gold-colored badge set in a shiny plastic wallet. The badge was lettered “Special Investigator.” Hicks looked at it and threw it on the floor.

“I’m a police buff,” the man said.

Hicks regarded him in a way that was not altogether unfriendly.

“I gotta know,” he said. “Was it you I talked to on the phone last night?”

“Let’s not spoil it.”

The blond man was standing up slowly. Hicks walked over to him and clapped him on the back.

“Say hello, Broadway Joe.” He flicked the youth’s hanging shirttail. “Blow your nose.” Suddenly he kicked the youth in the shin. “Where’s your blade today?”

“Fuck you,” Broadway Joe said.

Hicks shrugged.

“You guys are something else. Did you really think I’d lay my good down and go queer-stomping?”

“It has happened,” the bearded man said.

Hicks turned to Marge, who had backed up in the bed room doorway.

“You know these guys?”

Marge shook her head.

“We’re Federal Agents, lady,” the blond kid said. “You’re in plenty of trouble.”

Marge looked at him for only a moment.

“Are they?” she asked Hicks.

“They’re take-off artists,” Hicks said. “That’s who they are.”

The bearded man carried a loaded Walther automatic with a spare clip; Walthers had become the counterculture’s weapon of choice. His pockets contained a billfold with a dozen credit cards in different names, a key ring with a great many keys on it, a Mexican switchblade and chain manacle known to the police as a “come along.” Hicks used it to secure Broadway Joe’s hands to the drainage pipe of the kitchen sink. Broadway Joe’s pockets had only his works — a dropper and a spike, still in its little box, straight from the doctor’s sample bag.

The bearded man, his hands cuffed behind him, was following Hicks about the apartment like a salesman.

“You’re not some asshole,” he told Hicks. “Don’t involve yourself in a disaster.”

Hicks took him by the cuffs and began to pull him back ward toward the bathroom. The man shifted his footing to keep his balance.

“Hicks, listen to me. There’s no deal. It’s just us. Always was.”

Hicks propped him up against the bathroom door and let him talk. The man was smiling as though he were pleased with the elegant simplicity of what he had to say, but slightly impatient with his listener’s obtuseness.

“It was just her and her husband.”

Marge looked at him in wonder.

“Her and her husband, a couple of squares. A couple of idiots for Christ’s sake. Nobody would pay them. Would you?”

Hicks pushed the man against the bathroom door so that it swung open behind him and he landed sprawled against the toilet.