What of Terry Conniston?

“What am I supposed to do, then—forgive him?”

“I don’t suppose you ever could. But maybe you’re hurting yourself more than you’re hurting him. That kind of hate sort of festers inside you—it can eat you away like some kind of acid, you know? It’s not going to do you any good.”

“You sound like a schoolteacher,” she said sarcastically. “‘This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.’”

“Couldn’t you just make some kind of truce with him and go your own separate way?”

“I mean to. But first I—look, I don’t want to talk about it any more, all right?”

“If you say so. Only—well, a little while ago you and I made love and I kind of got the feeling it meant something to both of us. Didn’t it?”

Her answer was a long time coming. “Yes. It did, Mitch.”

“Then if you’re going to fill yourself full of hate, how much room’s left in you for—?” He left it unfinished, unsaid; he rolled his head to the side and looked straight at her.

Watching him, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She groped for his hand but he pulled away and got off the bed. His face hardened and he said, “I told you I was stupid. This is all ridiculous. I’m the guy that kidnaped you, remember? Shit, we’d make a great couple—a rich beautiful Ivy League debutante and a crummy flat-busted guitar player with a twenty-to-life rap hanging over my head. Sure—sure.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that, Mitch. I wouldn’t press any charges against you, you know that.”

“You wouldn’t have to. Your old man will be glad to take care of that little item.”

She didn’t have any ready answer for that. He turned away, feeling blue and bleak, and went into the bathroom. His drawers and socks were still wet but he put them on. The shirt was damp but he put that on too, and came out of the bathroom ramming his shirttails into his trousers. “Listen, it’s a fu

“I love it,” she said. She appeared to have joined in an unspoken agreement not to reopen the previous discussion. When she got to her feet she held the towel against her, picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom, and by shutting the door against him seemed to be shutting him out of her intimate life just as surely as she had opened it to him a short while before. And so when she reappeared in her dress he made his face a blank mask and said, “Okay, we’re just two people who happened to meet one night in the desert. We’ll leave it like that.”

She surprised him: she said, “I won’t leave it like that even if you will. Mitch, I thought I came on this crazy thing because I wanted revenge on my father, and it’s true, I did—I still do. But that wasn’t all. A little while ago I came out of the shower and saw you lying there and I knew I’d really come with you because I just wanted to be with you. If I’d let you leave me along the road somewhere I’d never have seen you again, and I didn’t want to lose you. Maybe it’s just a delirious reaction to this whole weird thing we’ve been through—maybe it’s something I’ll get over when I wake up one morning and the nightmare’s over. But I want to have a chance to find out. If that’s the way it turns out I won’t be scared to say so—let’s keep it clean and honest between us, can we?”

“We can try,” he said, and began to turn toward the door. Suddenly he went rigid. “My God. What time is it?” He looked at his watch and his face fell. “Jesus, you know how long we’ve been here? It’s almost eight o’clock. That damned farmacia’s bound to be closed by now—they pull in the sidewalks at sunset in these towns, don’t they?”

“We’ll find him in the morning, then,” she said, practical and unruffled. She had remarkable resilience—perhaps all women did, but he wasn’t experienced enough to tell. She said, “Anyhow we’re in no condition to face up to Floyd tonight. We need a good solid meal and a long night’s sleep, and time to think out what we’re going to do. My brain’s too fuzzy for that right now and I imagine yours is too.”

“I guess,” he said, and put his head down, thinking. “Matter of fact, I have got one or two ideas, but I don’t want you to get caught in the middle. You’ve been through enough.”

“If you’re leading up to a suggestion that I ought to go home, forget it, Mitch.”

“Look, Floyd’s on the run from big trouble. Now what do you think he’d do to anybody who got in his way?”

“I know. But even a train stops, Mitch—something’s bound to fracture that superman complex of his. We can do it.”

“I’m glad you’re so sure of that.”

“We can do it,” she said again, firmly, and followed him to the door; but then she said in a different voice, “Why’s he like that, anyway?”

“Floyd? He was born a son of a bitch. He doesn’t need reasons.” He held the door for her and then walked over to the adjacent room and knocked. There was no reply; the lights were on and through the window he could see the room was empty, the bed undisturbed, the bathroom door wide open and the bathroom light switched off.

“She’s not here,” he said, suddenly cold. His glance whipped around the swimming pool but it was deserted.

Terry said, “She probably only went somewhere to eat.”

“And not tell us first? What if she went to Floyd?” He was shaking; he gri

Terry said, “The car’s still here. She hasn’t gone far. Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mitch—Billie Jean isn’t a threat to us. She’s in just as much trouble as you and Floyd are. She won’t go ru

“I wasn’t worried about that. But what if she decided to join up with Floyd? If she tells him we’re looking for him, he’ll be waiting for us. He’d just as soon kill us as step on an ant—and down here there wouldn’t even be any questions asked. They kill you around here for your shoes and wristwatch. It happens all the time. A couple of gringo tourists found dead in some alley—who’d bother?”

Terry said, “Let’s go have di

“I don’t know,” he said, but he went with her.

C H A P T E R Sixteen

It wasn’t all that long after dark but Caborca at night was like Barstow at three o’clock in the morning. That was the morose judgment of Charley Bass as he moved machine-like through the streets, his heavy shoes thudding, empty-eyed in a wilted shirt. Charley Bass was a jaded Yankee slicker with a tired masculine appearance, thin hair combed carefully over the pink scalp, square chin tucked close to his chest on the short wide neck and powerful shoulders of a thick frame that had played collegiate football fifteen years ago and hadn’t yet begun to fatten up too badly.

A bum staggered near with his palm outstretched. Charley Bass gave him a synthetic capped-teeth smile and pressed a coin into his palm and the bum breathed profuse thanks over him in a wash of beer-breath. All along the street there were girls leaning against the walls in dark doorways and Charley Bass gave them each his practiced appraisal before he moved on. Most of them, when you got up close, were fat and filthy; one was a boozy raddled old whore who poked her anxious face forward above her ropy neck and spat on the ground when Charley Bass went by shaking his head no. He felt hard-up horny but not so hard-up he wanted to risk a dose of crabs or native siflis.

He turned a corner and saw the sputtering fizzy neon of beer signs around the plaza a block away; he went that way, past a weathered fence. Tomcats yelled passionately somewhere in the darkness nearby and one cat streaked slyly across the dark top of the fence, stopped midway and stood arched on its claws. Charley Bass picked up a stone and hurled it at the cat. There was a yowl and the cat disappeared. He went on, tasting the sour flavor of bile, remembering in an unhappy rush of images the golden-thighed Hollywood girls with no last names, the series of middle-aged nymphomaniacs, last month’s sticky affair with that banal woman in Barstow. Somehow he never seemed to attract the kind of woman he wanted to attract.