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“Ten pops?”
“Make it fifteen.”
“Cost you ten apiece,” she said with no show of emotion. “A hundred and fifty.”
Floyd counted it off in twenties and tens, squared up the sheaf and put the rest back in the paper bag. He handed the bag to Mitch. The woman reached for the money but Floyd drew back. “Where’s the stuff?”
“I’ll get it to you.”
“No,” Floyd said.
“You don’t trust me?” She smiled a little. “Look, my mother didn’t raise any stupid kids. I’m not going to walk into a place like this with that much junk in my handbag.”
“Then get it.”
The woman pinched her lower lip between two fingers. Her studious gaze shifted from Floyd to Mitch; several beats went by before she said, “You’re not users, either one of you. How do I know you’re not cops?”
“We’re not cops,” Floyd said dryly.
Uncertainty quivered, in her eyes; finally Floyd smiled and shook his head and said, “Use your head. Did I turn you in last time?”
“All right, all right. It’s outside in the car. Follow me out in a minute.”
When she left the bathroom Floyd made no move to follow her. The door squeaked shut and Mitch said immediately, “I didn’t know your brother had a habit that big. How long can he last like that?”
“How should I know?”
“Don’t you care at all?”
Floyd just looked at him. There was no reading his face. Mitch said, “Why in hell don’t you send him in for a cure?”
“He’s had the cure twice,” Floyd muttered, and turned, his mind on something else. He washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a paper towel. “All right,” he said, and went out.
Mitch paid for the beers on the way out. They found the dumpy woman waiting in a dusty new station wagon. She had the engine ru
The station wagon backed out and swung around into the street before she turned the lights on. It fishtailed away with a scudding of back tires chattering for traction. Floyd coughed and batted dust away. “That’s what happens when you give petty authority to scum like that. Let’s go.”
Mitch got in the car and started it up and they drove through the raw, neon-lighted streets without talk. He was thinking there were a lot of things about Floyd that didn’t make sense. Floyd’s junkie brother couldn’t play the bass fiddle for sour apples—if Floyd had had a good bass man he could have put together a good band a long time ago. Georgie had a $150-a-week habit: he was nothing but a liability. Yet Mitch had just seen Floyd take stupid risks for Georgie’s sake. Floyd was not a stupid man. It didn’t quite add up. Brotherly love did not fit into Floyd’s image.
They reached the freeway interchange and turned southeast on the superhighway. Floyd checked his watch and said, “Pull over to the shoulder when you get a chance.”
“What for?”
“Yours not to reason why, Mitch.”
He rolled the Pontiac off the roadway and crunched to a stop. “Well?”
“Just wait until I tell you to go. I want to see something. Leave the lights on.”
Mitch curbed his tongue and settled back, fished out a cigarette and punched the dashboard lighter. The lights of cars passed them at speed. There was nothing much to look at—tall gooseneck highway lights, a few truck stops clustered around the interchange half a mile ahead, scrubby desert crowding the road shoulders, the Rincon Mountains vague in the falling night. The day’s heat was dissipating fast.
Floyd sat twisted around, squinting through the back window. Mitch made a face and pressed the red lighter to his cigarette. Floyd was looking at his watch again and Mitch started to say something but Floyd cut him off: “Shut up. It’s just about time.”
“Time for what, for Christ’s sake?”
There was no response. Mitch drew smoke deep into his lungs and frowned. He had had enough; it was definitely time to quit. He didn’t like Floyd and what was the point of hanging onto a job that offered no work and no pay? He would pack his things as soon as they got back to the motel. It wouldn’t be wise to mention it to the others, particularly to Floyd; no, he would just pack and go.
Floyd stiffened. Mitch followed the direction of his glance and saw a red sports car come up fast from behind, passing under the street light; it swept past and droned away in the beams of Mitch’s headlights. He had a glimpse of a vivid, pretty girl at the wheel.
Floyd said, “We can go now.”
“Who was that?”
“Her name, my learned friend, is Terry Co
“Girl friend of yours?”
“We’ve never met,” Floyd said.
“Then what is it?”
“Contain your impatience, there’s a good boy. Let’s get home.”
Intent on his own plans to break away, Mitch didn’t press it. He flipped the cigarette out the vent window and angled the car back onto the freeway. Within a few minutes they turned off and rolled into the gravel parking yard of a truckers’ café. There were a few dead letters in the neon Modern Motel sign. When they had lost the last nightclub gig they had sought the cheapest rooms available, and here they were.
Floyd picked up the sack of liquor-store money and the packet of dope—twin handfuls of evidential explosive—and they went around the side of the café to the outside staircase that hung uneasily to the flimsy side of the building. Through the kitchen’s back door Mitch could see a fat Mexican woman in an apron slapping corn tortillas from arm to arm. The place was flyblown and filthy. The stairs creaked when Mitch put his weight on them.
The upstairs door let them into a long narrow hall, seamy and waterstained, lit by one yellow forty-watt bulb. Mitch stopped at the door to his room and said vaguely, “I’ll see you,” and watched Floyd go on toward his brother’s room; Floyd said over his shoulder:
“We’ll get something to eat in a little while.”
“Sure.” Mitch went inside and shut the door behind him. He looked around the tiny room without expression. It smelled of cheap disinfectant and the washbasin and cracked toilet-bowl had yellow stains from the dripping erosion of years. The room had one plain kitchen chair with chipped offwhite paint and a sagging bed redolent of hasty sex, loveless furtive perversions, tired-eyed whores. Once when he was seventeen he had spent part of a night with a high school girl in a room like this. It had been awkward and frantic and unhappy.
He heaved his suitcase onto the bed and threw his meager belongings into it. After that he sat down in the chair and smoked; he would wait and leave after the others were all asleep.
He could see himself in the corner-cracked mirror over the basin. It surprised him how boyish he still looked—the youthful broad face still not far beyond a careless ease of smiling. It was hard to understand how he had possibly come to this dreary place in his life. He had always had the best of his world: he was athletic, smart, attractive to girls, the son of decent middle-class parents from an ordinary suburban town. He was no hippie, no rebel. But in his pleasant youth he had never been tested. His splendid health and brain and surroundings had let him assume that things would always come easily.
His sophomore college year had ambushed him—a few too many beer parties and rehearsals and band gigs at fraternity houses, and he had walked into the physics final exam knowing with sudden hollow fear that he was not going to pass. And the tough old Lit professor had failed him for spelling mistakes. Flunked two courses out of five—that had put him out.