HCC 115 - Borderline (3 page)

She paid the tab, tipped the waiter. Outside it was hotter than hell—that was the
trouble with air-conditioning; you couldn’t stand it when you were out in the open
again. She headed automatically for the Warwick, then stopped halfway there, turned
on her heel and headed off in the opposite direction. That wasn’t what she wanted.
She’d had her fill in Mexico City in the hotel on Reforma. Sit in the room, drink
Beefeater, go out for dinner, go back to the room and drink some more. No, thank you.
That was no way to find excitement.

She stayed on Carleton Boulevard until she found a cocktail lounge that looked inviting.
It was air-conditioned, it had low ceilings and dim lighting, and it looked expensive
enough to keep the riff-raff out.

She went inside. She took a table on the side, asked the waiter for Beefeater and
ice. Then she waited for something to happen.

* * *

Lily was on the road for twenty minutes before a car stopped. It was a flat, empty
stretch of road, a chunk of Route 49 halfway between Dallas and El Paso. Desert country,
dry and desolate. Her last ride had dropped her there, and she was beginning to wonder
if maybe she hadn’t made a mistake taking the last ride. The driver had dropped her
in this godforsaken middle of nowhere, said he was turning off another mile down the
road. Maybe she should have waited for a ride clear through to El Paso.

She was a small girl, just a few inches above five feet. She was seventeen. Her face
looked about two years younger than that until you saw her eyes, which looked twenty-five.
Her figure was petite but perfect. Chunky breasts pushed out the front of the short-sleeved
boy’s shirt she wore, and neatly rounded hips filled the khaki slacks. On her feet
she wore simple leather sandals that had been hand-made by a Negro leatherworker in
San Francisco’s North Beach area. The sandals were very comfortable.

North Beach, and S.F. She hadn’t started out there. She was a Denver girl who ran
away from home three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, and S.F. was a natural place
to stop running, and the Beach was a natural spot to grab for a home. She liked the
area. She spent a year there, living here now and there now, meeting people and doing
things. Her parents never found her. Maybe they didn’t look.

A year in S.F. A year that didn’t age her face a day, but that turned her eyes from
child’s eyes to woman’s eyes. A year that made her rock-hard inside. A year that taught
her many things.

Then she was hooked up with Frank, who was tight with Spider Graham. And then one
day S.F. was too hot for the Spider. Spider, thin and tight-lipped and nervous, had
robbed a liquor store with a toy gun. The rollers had a make on him and the Spider
had to run. Frank was his friend, so Frank went with him. She was Frank’s steady lay,
so she went too.

They stole plates from a Cadillac and slapped the plates on a Ford and stole the Ford.
They drove the hell out of the car, running south, skirting L.A., cutting out through
Death Valley and across Arizona. The car died somewhere in the middle of New Mexico
and they stole a Chevy off the streets of a sleeping town and pushed east again. They
parked the stolen Chevy in a lot in Dallas and the Spider dropped the parking check
down a sewer. They all laughed like hell and tried to figure out something to do in
Dallas, some way to put a few dollars together.

Spider had an idea. They had a commodity named Lily Daniels. They would trade Lily
in for money. Rather, they would rent her out, and live off the proceeds.

Frank thought it was a great idea.

Lily thought it stank. She was a few million miles from virginity but she wasn’t a
whore. She would give for a guy because she liked him, or she would give for a guy
because she was hot to go, or she would give for a guy because maybe it would be a
minor gas. She never gave for money. She didn’t have eyes for the notion.

She didn’t have any choice, either. Spider went out to pimp, and he came back with
a drunk Texan fifty years old and clumsy as hell. And slung like a bull. They put
the Texan in the room with her and she tried to tell him it was a mistake.

He ripped off her blouse, grabbed her breasts in his hands and squeezed them until
they ached.

“I paid a hundred dollars for you, dolly,” he said. “I paid the money to that nervous
kid with the skinny lips. You don’t go and tell me now it was a mistake. I don’t make
mistakes, not for no hundred dollars.”

“Please—”

He slapped her face. He hit her in the stomach, and her hands went out for his face,
to claw him. He brushed her hands away casually, hit her on the top of the head.

She started to fall, and he kicked her in the breast. He was wearing heavy boots and
the pain was unbelievable. She thought she was going to die. “You want more, dolly?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

She took off her clothes and got on the bed. He took her with no preliminaries; evidently
the beating had aroused him if not her. He plunged into her, and he was far too large
and hurt her far too much. And it all lasted far too long. When it was over she was
horribly sore, and sick to her stomach.

He left the bed, sat down in a chair. She reached for her clothes and he said, “Not
yet, dolly.”

She didn’t understand.

“I paid that skinny fellow a hundred dollars,” he said. “I got something more coming
for my hundred dollars. The last was pleasant, but I got more coming.”

“What?”

He told her, explicitly.

She stood in front of him, her eyes wide. “He told you I’d do that? Spider said I’d
do it?”

“Said you loved to do it,” the Texan said. “Me, I don’t care whether you love it or
not. You just do it or I’ll beat you half dead.”

He would, she thought dully. He would kill her. She did not want to be beaten. She
still ached badly and she did not want any more pain.

She sank to her knees before him. He stroked her hair, like a father patting his daughter
on the head, and he told her she was a sweet little dolly. And she did everything
he wanted her to do.

Afterward, she looked for Spider and Frank. She couldn’t find them and they did not
come back to the room. They had left Dallas, as far as she could tell, and they probably
would not be back. Hell, they definitely would not be back. And she didn’t have a
penny.

That was two days ago. She’d managed to eat, managed to talk people into buying food
for her. And now she was on the road to El Paso, halfway there on Route 49. She didn’t
know why she was going to El Paso. But from El Paso she could go to Mexico and she
knew people in Mexico, people who’d been her friends in S.F.

She stood on the road for twenty minutes before the car stopped.

The car was a big Buick, air-conditioned, with power windows and power doors and power
brakes and power steering and power everything. The driver was a dark man in a business
suit. He had deep eyes and thinning hair. She guessed his age at forty-five.

He leaned across the seat and pressed a button. The window went down and he looked
through it at Lily. He asked her where she was headed. She told him she was going
to El Paso.

“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll run you there.”

She sat beside him and he pulled away again, his foot heavy on the accelerator. She
pressed the button to close the window because the car was air-conditioned. It was
a pleasure to get out of the heat, she thought. And the Buick was a fast car. They
would be in El Paso in no time at all.

They drove two miles in silence. Then he asked her her name, and where she was going.
She made up a name to tell him and said she was visiting relatives. He asked her how
come she was hitchhiking and she told him she wanted to save money.

“Spend all your money on pretty clothes?”

She was wearing khakis and a shirt that was dirty now. She had no suitcase.

“I didn’t have any money,” she said.

“I see.”

Two miles further on down the road he dropped a hand to her thigh. She looked down
at the hand. It looked like a separate entity, a living creature poised on her thigh.
He moved the hand higher, along the inside of her thigh, and she sighed.

“Pull over,” she said.

“You mad, honey? I just—”

“Pull over.” she said, tired now. “I want a ride to El Paso. You want a ride too,
I guess. I guess we’ll both have one.”

He pulled the car off the road and killed the ignition. They went from the front seat
to the back seat, and he opened her shirt and took off her pants. She was still a
little sore from the man in the hotel room but it wasn’t too bad.

When it was over he was breathing hard, his face covered with sweat. It seemed odd
to her that a man could sweat so much in an air-conditioned car. He was exhausted,
and wordless, while she herself was completely unmoved. It was as though he had not
touched her at all. He had used her body, had enjoyed the outer shell, but he had
not come close to the person who was Lily Daniels.

“You’re a real woman,” he told her. “I hope you don’t think I would have forced you
or anything. I’d of driven you to Paso anyway, even if you didn’t want to do anything.”

“I know,” she said.

“But you wanted it too,” he said. “You had yourself a fine time. I could tell, all
right. I know when a woman likes it.”

If he wanted to think so, that was fine with her. She put her clothes on, combed her
hair back. They returned to the front seat and he started the motor, headed for El
Paso again. He drove very fast this time. She watched the speedometer and it passed
a hundred frequently.

She saw the tan road rushing toward them in a never-ending stream, everything blurred
from the great speed at which they were traveling.

But it was as if they weren’t traveling—so fast was the speed. It was if they were
soaring through space somewhere.

Then they would hit a bump, or a rut in the road, and the car would rock slightly
and she would be brought back to the reality that they were on the ground and not
in the air—on the ground and traveling a hundred miles an hour.

She looked out the side window but the poles and cacti passed by the window so fast
that she could not even tell they were there. Only when she looked hundreds of yards
past the road could she see anything clearly—and then her pupils had to jerk rapidly
across her eyes to see even that.

She turned her head and glanced out the rear window but she could see nothing but
a mad swirl of dust.

It was far to El Paso, that she knew although she didn’t know just how far it was.
Yet suddenly they were passing an occasional home and he let up on the gas. It seemed
like they weren’t even moving now and she glanced down at the speedometer. They were
going sixty!

Then as they began to reach the outskirts of El Paso he let up on the gas even more
and the speedometer dropped to forty.

In El Paso, at a traffic light, he took two ten-dollar bills from his wallet and handed
them to her. He was shy about it, telling her he wanted her to have a good meal and
buy a pretty dress. She thanked him and got out of the car.

El Paso, she said to herself. Now what?

Just what could she do here?

She didn’t know.

Yet she had gotten this far without ever knowing what she was going to do from one
minute to the next.

Somehow she’d gotten this far all right. All right, once she had gotten away from
Frank and Spider. Or they had gotten away from her.

Whichever way it was didn’t matter. Just the fact that she was no longer with them
was all that mattered.

No matter what happened to her now—it couldn’t be worse than what had happened to
her in that hotel room. Worse than that Texan had done to her.

She could still feel the pain.

In spite of the comfortable car ride.

In spite of the cool air-conditioning.

In spite of the two days that had passed, and the hundreds of miles she’d put between
herself and that room. In spite of it all, the pain was still there.

Aching.

Throbbing.

Her thigh muscles so sore, she had trouble walking.

And inside of her—the pain extended deep inside her, and the tiny finger-edges of
it extended themselves to all parts of her body.

She had to get out of El Paso, and into Mexico. But first she had to get washed and
rested, and get some food in her empty stomach.

But how?

Then she slowly remembered the bills she held in her hand.

She looked at them.

Twenty dollars, twenty dollars, twenty dollars, her mind repeated and she smiled to
herself.

The hotel where Weaver was staying was a far cry from the Warwick. This one was called
Cappy’s Hotel, and it was on Hinesdale at the corner of Eighteenth. A skid row dump,
no air-conditioning and plenty of insects. There was a fan that hung from the ceiling.
Weaver lay on his back on a sagging army cot and the fan blew hot air at him. He was
lying in a pool formed of his own sweat. The sweat had been caused half by the heat
and half by his fear. Weaver was afraid.

His full name was Michael Patrick Weaver. His friends might have called him Mike or
Mickey or Mick or M.P. It was a moot point, for Weaver had no friends. He was short
and wiry and ugly, with a little pimple of a nose and no chin at all. His eyes were
pig eyes, beady pig eyes, and his forehead was low enough to justify Lombroso’s theories
about the physiology of the criminal type. His hair was black and coarse with no curl
to it. He wore it combed down across his forehead, an unconscious imitation of Hitler,
and this only lowered his forehead that much more. His teeth were bad. They were yellow,
pocked with cavities, and two of the incisors were chipped. He was ugly from top to
bottom, and his fear made him even uglier.

They were going to kill him. He thought about this, and shivered. They were going
to catch him, first, and then they were going to cart him back to Tulsa. Then the
police would give him a beating.