The Erection Set (33 page)

“For the duration of the picture. Good choice. I wonder why he doesn't seem all that happy about it.”

“Broads on his mind maybe. He's a horny character. Right now he could have a feast.”

“Couldn't everybody?”

“I don't enjoy eating at the trough, honey,” I said. “It's better at your own dinner table.”

“Trying to tell me something?”

“Nope. You're a spoken-for woman.” I dropped my empty glass on a passing tray and waved off a refill. “When do I get to meet your flancé?”

Almost absently, she said, “He'll show up when he's ready.”

“Independent slob.”

“Yes,” she told me. “Quite.”

“Somebody ought to warn him.”

“Why don't you?”

“Let the prick watch out for himself.”

“There you go again with that dirty language.”

When I looked at her there was a far-off smile on her face that reminded me of something else and the calendar started turning over backward, dropping the years away, one by one. The seed was growing now and a leaf was sprouting from the stalk. It had a vague number on it but too distant to read.

Somebody came and took Sharon to the other side of the room while I was thinking about it and a pair of blondes filled her place with small talk I answered abstractedly until Mona Merriman came up with her usual brassy style and told them to bug off because I was all hers, and with imperial pomp introduced me to a few friends before getting me off alone.

I said, “What?”

“You weren't listening at all.”

“Sorry, doll.”

“I said, what has Lagen got on you?”

“Beats me.”

She turned me around so nobody could see her face and looked at me seriously. “They take me for a gossipy old woman, Dog, but I was a damn good reporter long before I hit the money line. He's got something and he wants you crawling.”

“Forget it, Mona.”

“Son ... I said I was a reporter. My staff passes me interesting tidbits of information.”

She was a strange broad. Suddenly there was no flabbiness in her face at all. It was all hard, questioning planes with a fire dancing out of her eyes.

“He thinks I was a big hood in Europe,” I said.

“Were you?”

“The biggest, kid.”

“And now?”

“Out.”

“Damn. For real?”

I nodded slowly.

“He can prove it?”

“No chance.”

“Baby, I could make music with you. Real typewriter music.”

“Don't. There's other music that's louder.”

“And much more staccato, I suppose?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“The crashing of cymbals?”

“The big brass drum, Mona.”

“Who's the drummer?”

“Sometimes a guy can be lucky all the time,” I said. “Let's go join the party.”

“You won't want to.”

“Why not?”

“Cross and Sheila McMillan are here. He seems quite perturbed about the entire arrangement.”

“Only he can't do anything about it, can he?”

“Not since your cousins okayed the deal.” Mona's fingers squeezed my arm. “You really put the heat on, didn't you?”

“A public service.”

“From what I hear, it was plain heat.”

“They needed it.”

“Doggie, I'd like to take you to bed with me.”

“I'm not exactly a Teddy bear, Mona.”

“You're better than a two-battery vibrator.”

“You're wild, baby. What do you do for fun?” I let out a laugh and put my arm around her shoulder.

“Mainly play with the children who would give their dingdong for a chance like you have, knowing how I'd give them paragraphs for their scrapbooks.”

“Write me out then.”

“You never even were penciled in, Doggie. Your type is alive in the wrong era.”

“Perceptive cunt, aren't you?”

“That's the nicest thing anybody's said all week. And true. Very true. Maybe that's why I like you. Now be a smart boy and get you and your little blonde out of here. The glacier has been looking this way and I can read all the signs.”

“Who?”

“Sheila McMillan. I'm an older pussy than you are a dog and I can read all the signs too.”

“What are you thinking about?” Sharon asked me.

“I'm thinking why the hell you don't put some clothes on.”

“After all those naked females tonight I'm positively decent,” she said.

“Not in a chiffon nightgown with nothing on underneath.”

“You haven't felt me yet. How do you know?”

“I can see your snatch, kid.”

“Like it?” She grinned at me deliberately.

“Love it, so scram, virgin.”

She handed me the coffee cup, spooned in the sugar and added the milk. “You resent my maidenhood?”

“Horseshit, lady. After a while it'll get tough rubbery.”

“Not according to medical statistics.”

“So it'll atrophy from disuse,” I said.

I got another of those funny smiles and she turned and sat down opposite me, making a project of crossing her legs. The nightgown split open, exposing those lovely legs and her eyes laughed too. “How many women have you had, Dog?”

“Plenty.” I took a pull on the coffee and burned my mouth.

“Virgins?”

“Numerous.”

“About how many?”

“What kind of question is that? Come on ...”

“Make a guess.”

“A dozen. I never made it a practice of fooling around with virgins. They were all accidents of nature.”

“Does it hurt?”

“How the hell would I know!”

“Well, did they scream?”

I burned my mouth again and put the coffee down for a cigarette. “They all scream when I'm laying them.” I thought that would shut her up but it didn't.

“I mean the first time.”

Even the cigarette burned. I took another drag and stamped it out. “No,” I said. “When I found out they hadn't been hit I went classical. They loved every damn second of it and screamed for more. I know all the tricks, all the techniques, all the little nuances from foreplay to afterlove and I'll be damned if I'm going to set you up for somebody else.”

“I know some tricks too.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard you telling Raul about them when I first saw you.”

“Jealous?”

“Nope. I even appreciate your attitude. Like total understanding. Why don't you let your boy bust it for you and be done with it?”

“Because he may be dead.” The way she said it was so simple I should have known.

“Serviceman?”

“Yes.”

“Overseas?”

Sharon nodded and sipped at her coffee.

“When did you see him last?”

“The day he left. It was the day we became engaged. There wasn't time to do anything else so he gave me this.” She held up her hand with the cheap little ring on it.

I said, “I'm sorry, kid.”

“That's all right.”

“Love him?”

“I've always loved him.”

“Get letters?”

“No.”

“How long do you expect to wait?”

“Until I'm sure he's dead.”

“Meanwhile?”

“I play my own tricks. And techniques. And nuances.”

I pushed out of my chair. “He doesn't have much more time,” I told her.

“Yes, I know.”

Thunder rumbled outside the window and I walked to the French doors and looked down at the big-bellied city that squatted underneath me. Headlights of the cars probed through the darkness, their horns demanding pathways and tiny dark things scuttled across between traffic lights whose WALK and DON'T WALK became another commandment to the mice caught in the concrete maze of the city.

“When does the picture move out to Linton?” I asked her.

“The crew will be looking for location sites the end of the week.”

“You coming out?”

“I have to go.”

“The old house on Mondo Beach ...”

“Yes?”

“I'll be there.”

“Dog ...”

I turned around and she was standing there in front of the chair with the nightgown in a puddle around her feet. She was a naked picture of beauty that made everything inside me tingle for a short second before it went sour. In the dim light she looked slippery and wet again, all gorgeous thighs and bushy-haired belly surmounted by high-aiming breasts, but I could see her teeth and I couldn't tell if it was a smile or a laugh and I thought it was a laugh. I grabbed my coat and hat, grinned back a little bit and headed for the door.

 

 

It was raining out again. The night blanket of dark and haze cut all the buildings off like a soft, cheesy knife, muting the roar of the city lion to an angry growl punctuated by the irritated snarls of taxi horns at intersections where the red hadn't quite changed to green. On the avenues, cars drifted by nearly empty buses, reluctant to get to their destinations, and what few people walked the streets huddled under the canopies of umbrellas or just walked, heads lowered, not caring where they went.

It's a funny city, I thought. It only went in two directions, up and down and across. Somebody had laid it out like a grid on a tactical map and there it was. It didn't go in circles like London; it didn't ramble and squeeze and evacuate its bowels like Rome and Paris and Madrid ... it was just there going north, south, east and west unless you got to where they forgot directions and called it the Village, or Brooklyn, then it was something else. But when you said the City, it meant Manhattan, the head of the world octopus that was all computers and vaults and money and the big rich and the little poor and the idiots trying to make the poor rich and the rich poor to pocket the votes and not once did they know that you can't do either one. You were either rich or poor, so enjoy it, citizens, and squawk your fucking heads off if you feel like it, only remember, it won't do you any good at all. The poor try to take, the rich intend to keep and anybody who gets rich is going to damn well keep it because only idiots stay poor anyway. Like the alive stay alive and the dead stay dead.

And it's funny to be dead. Civilization was nourished on the dead. Cultures and religions and even governments flourished on the dead. But all the dead do is smell. It's the alive who can hurt you. But sometimes the dead smell in advance.

And that was a smell familiar to me. It was behind about a hundred yards and holding. In another few blocks it would come closer.

I had spotted him when I left Sharon's and wondered what had happened to all that jungle knowledge I had supposed them to have. Hell, it was a setup, a plain simple setup all the way. I had laid on three alternates if they had spotted the first one and they had gone for the initial track. All my fancy prearranged signals on the alternates reported all clear so I didn't have to sweat out being flanked.

There was only one guy back there.

In a way, he was like me, but not quite. He didn't know the city. To him they were all the same. Not to me, though. The bricks and concrete were another world and I led him through the maze to the hole in the wall and when he reached it I was waiting for him.

He was almost as fast and almost as wary, but that little edge is what makes the difference between living and dying. The gun was in his fist, but I had the .45 in my hand and it makes one hell of a hole when the lead goes through flesh and intestines and tears the backbone right out of a man. It blows you back six feet, all doubled up, living long enough to wish you were dead, and when I picked the .38 out of his fingers I looked at his face and said nice and quiet, “You only got ten minutes to go, buddy, but it can be the worst ten minutes of your life. You want me to shorten them or make you really hurt?”