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Kitten with a whip Page 9
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Abruptly, the two men started away from the lockers. In imison, they strode across the depot toward the
women's restroom. A teenage girl had just emerged, carrying a small suitcase. They each took her by an elbow, not roughly but firmly, and guided her over to their lookout comer. David watched them, repelled but fascinated, as if he had seen two monstrous spiders dart out of their web to seize a songbird. And now they were eating her alive but he was unable to hear the low-voiced conversation.
"Can I help you?" rang in his ear. He turned, startled, to discover that he had at last reached the ticket window.
'Tes, I . . . Just a minute." He rubbed a hand across his bewildered face, unable to remember immediately his purpose in coming here. "Oh. What's the fare to— to Chicago, say?" he managed finally. Across the depot, the detectives were examining the youngster's identification. She looked strained and frightened. Worst of all, David realized, she didn't resemole Jody Drew in the sliglitest. That meant that the police were stopping all girls of her general age. They probably expected that she would cnange her appearance. So the blonde hair was a wholly futile disguise.
"Well?" the clerk wanted to know. "Lot of people waiting. Do you want a ticket to Chicago or dont you.-^
"I guess not," David mumbled. "Sorry." He hadn't even heard the price of the ticket. He hurried away from the window, jostling through the crowd. At the door, he cast one quick anxious glance back. The detectives were still questioning the girl, unaware of his existence. He headed for his car along the sidewalk shimmering with heat mirages, walking faster and faster until he was almost running.
"What wrong?" Jody asked. "Didn't you get the ticket?"
"Police," he told her, panting. 'Watching the place." He swung into the car and rested against the steering wheel.
"No kidding?" She was more flattered than alarmed.
'Tou don't understand. I saw them stop a girl. She didn't look anything like you. That bleach job isn't going to fool anybody."
Jody peeked at herself in the mirror, eyes dancing
as she fluffed up her hair. "I guess the apes want to catch me pretty bad. Probably they don't get to chase a cute girl very often, they're hard up probably." She
figgled at some private picture in her mind. "Well, iller, what do we do now?"
"How the hell should I knowl Give me some time to think."
"Aw, don't get mad," she cooed, learning her soft torso against his arm.
He elbowed her away and desperately tried to reason. He couldn't make his brain behave. He had counted so greatly on being finally rid of the girl that this setback was crushing, depriving him temporarily of the power of thought. But he had to come up with something. By clenching his jaw until his teeth ached, by making the will to think a conscious physical effort, he forced himself to consider other avenues of escape and presently a possibiHty occurred to him. He started the engine.
"We going back home again?" Jody guessed.
"No. I'll drive you up the coast, to Oceanside. There's another bus station there. They probably won't be expecting you to turn up there, forty miles away."
"Real smoky." She patted his leg approvingly. "I knew I could count on my David. Comes to picking out men, I'm usually right."
They reached the shining waters of the harbor, the only movement a liberty boat coming ashore and a few drifting gulls. He turned north along the coast highway, through the aiicraft district, past the thousand disapproving windows of his own plant until the city ended abruptly at the mouth of Rose Canyon. Oceanside was nearly an hour's drive away, through chaparral hills and sunny little beach communities, and David found himself counting the minutes. Sixty of them and she would be gone from his life, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven . , .
"Ah, this is more like it," Jody said. "Everything a blur." That was when he saw that the speedometer needle was quivering close to eighty. David began to slow down along a straightaway that bordered the frolicking surf. This was no time to get a ticket. But the rear-view mirror reflected no pursuit. However, on the highway ahead, it puzzled him to see the other
automobiles also losing speed. The slow-down became a crawl, then a full stop.
"Must be an accident or something." He craned his neck out the wiudow. The line of cars stretched for some distance down the road, past a rise on which a service station stood, and out of sight beyond it. A few of the more irritable drivers began to honk their horns, as if that impatient braying would miraculously clear the way.
To David, it was the bus depot wait all over again. As before, the line inched forward, then halted for agonizing intervals. Without the breeze of driving, the car quickly heated up inside, an atmosphere that seemed too thick and heavy for the lungs to manage. Tody fidgeted and cussed under her breath, and David began feeling Hke banging on his own horn. After all, Oceanside—and salvation—lay only twenty minutes away, and it was a personal rebuff, a deliberate unfairness tnat the highway should be jammed bumper-to-bumper at this particular crucial time.
At last his straining to see ahead and his drumming of fingers and peevish sighs that were almost growls brought the station wagon to the crest of the little hill, and he could see what was delaying him. Half a mile distant, purposely located at a spot where it would not be discovered until the last minute, was a roadblock in operation. On each side of the highway stood an ojfficial car, red lights blinking on their roofs. Portable yellow warning signs Hke sawhorses funneled the traffic past uniformed men who scanned each automobile's occupants.
"Cops?" asked Jody soberly.
"I can't tell this far away," David said. "Might be only the border patrol." They often established surprise check points in this area to screen illegal entrants from Mexico. Yet it could just as easily be the police, searching for Tody, and the thought of risking the gamble knottea up his stomach. For that matter, there was nothing to prevent the border patrol being part of the police dragnet in addition to their immigration duties.
He couldn't chance it. He held back the station wagon
until there was clearance in front of him and the driver behind him was tooting for him to for God's sake get moving. Then he swung the car across the southbound lanes in a U-turn that brought him into the filling station.
"What are you doing, David?"
"What do you thiiik? They never just check one highway. They block them all at the same time."
The station attendant, a lanky young fellow with a crewcut and a grin, leaned down to peer inquiringly through the car window. "Fill it up," David said. He didn't need the gas but a pause at the service station might make their flight less obvious, in case anyone had noticed their hasty retreat. And he needed a moment's respite; his hands were too sHppery with fear to grip the steering wheel and the knot in his belly was ready to bend him double. Without a word to the girl, he stumbled around to the rear of the boxhke buildiug, its painted steel walls a furnace to the touch.
In the tainted gloom of the men's room, he turned on die cold water and began splashing it on his face. *T didn't get caught," he whispered. "I didn't get caught.'' And it no longer seemed out of the ordinary that David Patton should be thinking like that. Gradually, his belly loosened and untied, making him grateful that he wasn't going to be nauseated twice in the same day. He stood up straight and the grimy warped mirror showed him a stranger every bit as grimy, every bit as warped. He turned away from it.
Outside, where the sun burned down on the softening blacktop, he couldn't see Jody anywhere around. The young station attendant had disappeared, too. David checked his car. The tank had been replenished and capped and the pump meter registered $1.25.
He looked around, bewildered. Later, he realized that his first reaction should have been a sense of freedom, of escape. But at the time, that spUt second of aloneness, he felt only that his companion was missing, that he must find her. He was growing used to her.
When he heard her laugh throatily, he hurried iato the station. Jody was leaning over a road map spread out on t
he table, pretending to study it but actually breath-
ing gently on the young man s cheek. And he, by her side, was tracing the most convenient route to Las Vegas and letting his eyes wander over the front of her dress.
At David's first clanging footstep on the steel floor, the boy straightened and, although red-faced, assumed a brisk air of efficiency. "All set, sir. That'll be a buck and a quarter for the gas. Your oil's okay." He folded up the map and offerea it to Jody. "You can take this along if you like."
"Hey, thank you," she murmured. As she took the map, her fingertips lingered on the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger. "So sweet of you."
"Nothing." He hcked his lips and his gaze stuck with her as she swayed out to the car. He scarcely noticed the money that David gave him.
David didn't speak to the girl until he found a gap in the southbound traffic and they were heading back toward San Diego. "You know, it'd be ludicrous if it wasn't so damn idiotic."
"What do you mean?"
"That show you were putting on back there. Did you want to make sure he'd remember you, or were you just keeping in practice?"
Jody giggled and scooched down in the seat, playing the bad little girl. "Jealous," she said.
'Look, I can turn around right now if you say the word, ril be glad to give you to him. For keeps."
"That kid!" She let out a scornful laugh. "I was just wigghng around to see how stupid he was. That's the joke. He's back there now thinking how that girl really went for him. He'll work it all up into a big sexy daydream, never knowing it's a big fat lie. See, that's the joke. Hell, David, he had pimples on the back of his neck."
He said softly. ''You're pretty maUcious, aren't you?"
"What you got against fun?" She grinned up at him, fanned his face with the roadmap. "Even so, I still like you best. All my Hfe I'll think about you once in a while. I mean, you flounder around a lot but still you make me blow land of warm for you."
S8 KITTEN WITH A WHIP
'Torget it."
"Okay. Where you take me now, David?* "Home.'' The word tasted bitter in his mouth, something to be spit out. "Isn't that where everybody goes when there's no other place left?"
Chapter Ten
As THEY SPED SOUTH, David was so preoccupied with grappling with his personal dilemma that he didn't notice the girl lapse gradually into a strained and morose silence. Too, their moods tended to coincide in the situation that had been thrust upon them. They had driven north full of anticipation, they had been thwarted, and now they were retreating through the same sunburned scenery they had viewed only minutes before. It was monotonous, it reeked of failure, it danced jeeringly in the heat.
He thought, What if I simply stopped the car and shoved her out on the side of the road and drove away? Only trouble with that, it wouldn't work. The police or the sheriff would pick her up and she'd drag me into it out of spite. No, when I get rid of her, she's got to he in a fairly good state of mind about me so she won't feel any immediate inclination to shoot off her mouth about me. And most important of all, when I dump her, it's got to be some place where she's in no danger of being caught right away.
And where might that be? The law people were old hands at setting up those roadblocks where there's no country lane or herd trail way of bypassing them. The coast highway was corked tight, so there was no doubt that the inland route was too—and the same went for the two highways east, and they'd be watching the border gates into Mexico . . .
His train of thought was broken by a movement from Jody. Her narrow hand shot out and tuiTied on the radio. Before it even had time to warm up, she struck like a snake again, turning it off. Then David began to note how jittery she was, slumped beside him on the seat, her fingernails clenched into the nalms of her hands, her pointed little face sullen with discontent.
"What's the trouble now?'' When she didn't answer, he shrugged.
They passed a dense stand of sagebrush and juniper that overhung a white clay blufiF. Tody squirmed around to look back at it until it was out or sight. A moment later she said in a low expressionless voice, almost as if she were communing with an invisible third party, "They took me down into a canyon. I went for a ride with them, a couple of marines, and they took me down into a canyon. It was right after my twelfth birthday. They kept me there all afternoon."
David winced inside, caught oflF-guard. He wanted nothing more than to believe her, to feel sorry that she hadn't gotten the breaks. But he'd learned his lesson. He said, "What kind of sympathy play is this?"
"Oh God," she moaned. "Shut up." She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, mufHing her voice. "There was once, a couple years back, that I thought for once in my Hfe everytning was going to sort out beautiful and nice. Out on Point Loma, you know? Where there's this big parking place all around that funny httle old-fashioned lighthouse, and you can hear the ocean way down below and you look out and there's all the lights of the city spread out for miles. And there's other people in their cars too, looking out at it, and it makes you want to whisper. I never felt so wonderful before or since." She stopped talking.
A mile later, David couldn't hold in his curiosity any longer. "Well, what happened?"
Her hands dropped away from her face and she glared at him. "What always happens? It turned out to be a miserable lie, that's what! A cheap and dirty lie."
I could tell you, he thought, that it doesn't always happen. You're talking about the same Point Loma where, not too many years before your time, Virginia and I used to go to neck. After a movie, after a dance . . . and we held long serious discussions that we thought were settling our future and the world's future too. We can look back and laugh now, even at our pompous young views of morality. We never did anything but neck until two nights before our wedding when the same excitement took over the both of us and, not saying a word.
we found a more secluded spot and made love on the back seat of the old car I drove then. We were clumsy, faltering and tender—and all these affectionate years later it's still our private little joke about what a loose woman I married. Ifs easy to smile over things that are so far from the truth. I guess we were both pretty staid people— my only experience was a couple of fiy-by-night things in the army. But we never thought of ourselves as dull or naive. Maybe if Vd gotten around more as a young man Yd never have blundered into today s trouble.
But that's a lousy price to pay.
He glanced over at Jody's set withdrawn face and wondered at the complex structure of circumstances and genes that made her different from Virginia. Certainly Virginia at that age had been just as healthy a girl, yet the idea of a promiscuous or untruthful Virginia was unthinkable. Later, as a wife, she had confessed to having been burningly curious about sex, but not until on the very brink of their marriage had she been able to overcome her secret fear that he would desert her, run away to sea or something equally fantastic. Perhaps she had sensed the flaw in his character—a hidden capacity for the cavalier gesture, a secret longing to break the rules—that he had never come upon the peiSect opportunity to display until eight years later. Eight years later—yesterday.
'What are you going this way for?" demanded Jody crossly.
Automatically, he had turned east on the freeway that was the shortest route home, bypassing the city. "I don't get you."
"You aren't going through downtown."
"Of course not. This way's faster."
Jody hammered her fist on her knee. "But I want to go through downtown! I want you to nm an errand."
^Well, maybe if you'd explain what you're talking about . . ."
"You got eyes, haven't you?" Her voice had turned raspy, like a distant shriek. "I need a fix!"
He knew instantly what she meant. Subconsciously, he decided, he must have expected and dreaded this moment ever since her vitahty had begun to run down.
No usQ reminding her that only an hour or so ago she had emphatically denied having any narcotic habits. Truth to Jody was a pet creature or the
moment. He feigned ignorance. "We'll get something to eat at home. You'll feel better then."
"God damn it, who wants to eat!" she yelled at him. "If I don't get a hft, I'll fall apart. You got to get it for me, understand?"
He spoke reasonably to her although his foot was pressing compulsively harder on the accelerator. "Now look here, Jody. I've done everything I could to help you but there are some things I can't do and won't do. And one of them is to get narcotics for you."
"Look here yourself. You're not trying to help me. I'm making you help me. You're going to take the next tumoflF into town and go down Market Street and turn where I say. There's this rinky httle drugstore. Put a dime in the jukebox when you go in. Play either the first or the last record. The druggist's name is Nicky and it'll only cost you about five dollars if you tell him who it's for. Otherwise, I'm going to grab the wheel and we'll both wind up in the ditch."
He caught a glimpse of her intent fierce face and, to his surprise, he laughed aloud. "Grow up. Play the jukebox—what kind of cloak and dagger stuff is that?"
"I'm warning you—"
"Sure, you are—and I'm paying no attention. Go ahead and grab the wheel, get us all cut up. Wreck me or wreck my life, if that's what you want. I've gone along with you so far because of that very reason. Because, I guess, I'm afraid of you. But I'm afraid of this other thing more. I'm not going to get mixed up with dope."
She was silent for a moment and he was braced for her to lunge at him and try to smash up the car. But when she spoke, it was in a childish wheedUng tone. "You make it sound like murder or something. David, honey, it's not that bad. All I need is a couple of bennies and I'll be going great again."
"Bennies?" The term was new to him.
"Benzedrine tablets. They give me a jolt. Lots of people take them. They're hke medicine. I only take