I didn’t realize I was just standing there with my fingers clamped over my face until Ginny came back for me. She put her hands on my arm. “It’s that bad?”
“All of a sudden. Doesn’t usually come on this fast.”
She said, “Is there anything I can do?” But she knew there
wasn’t. She’d done everything anybody could do when she came looking for me in the first place.
I said, “Take me home.”
She shook my arm. “No chance. We’ve got all those friends of Alathea’s to go see, remember? We’re late already.”
I said it again. “Take me home.”
“Brew,” she whispered, “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
With an effort, I pulled my hands off my face. I must’ve looked pretty fierce, because she winced. “I want to be alone. It’s bad enough when I’m alone. This morning was easy. It’s going to get worse. Do you think I like having you watch me fall apart?”
That reached her. It didn’t ease the tight worry in her face, but it got me what I wanted. She took me home.
By the time she got me up to my apartment, the pressure in my skull was squeezing sweat out of my face like beads of thirst. I shook like a cripple. It was all I could do to get across the room and sit down on the convertible couch I use for a bed.
This one was going to be a sonofabitch.
Had it ever been this bad before? I couldn’t remember. Probably not. Every time is always the worst.
Ginny sat down beside me for a while. She looked like she wanted to hold my hand. “Are you going to be all right?”
From somewhere, I dredged up the energy to say, “There’s nothing here. I never keep the stuff in my apartment.”
“That isn’t what I asked. I asked you if you’re going to be all right.”
I said, “You go on.” If she didn’t leave soon I was going to scream. “Talk to Alathea’s friends. I’m going to sit here. As long as I have to. Then I’ll get something to eat. Then I’ll go to bed. Pick me up in the morning.”
“All right.” She didn’t like it, but she swallowed it. “I’ll make sure the answering service knows where I am.” A minute later she was gone.
A minute after that, I wanted to cry out,
Ginny
!
But this mess was one I’d made for myself, and I was going to have to live with it. So I just sat where I was and watched the sunlight in the room get dimmer.
Soon there were red-hot bugs crawling along my nerves, ticks and chiggers and cockroaches of need, and at one point I thought I could hear high-pitched mewling sounds coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my face. But I just sat where I was and waited. Waited for the sun to set. Waited for night. There was a cure for this, and I was going to go get it. Never mind what I’d told Ginny. I was going to go as soon as it was dark. As soon as I recovered enough control over myself to move.
I hung on for the sake of the dark. After a while there was no more light in the room, and the pressure eased a bit. Not much—this was going to be a long one—but enough so that I could tell my arms and legs what to do with some hope of having them listen to me.
I lurched into the kitchen and drank what felt like about a gallon of water. Then I left my apartment, struggled down the long stairs to the street, and went shambling in the direction of the old part of town.
Looking for that cure.
T
he cure I had in mind was an old Mestizo named Manolo.
Somewhere in the old part of town, he would be sitting alone in the corner of a bar, sipping a glass of anisette, and looking for all the world like the last remains of some long-dead grandee’s noble family. He’d be sitting there like a sleepwalker, and if you saw him you’d be afraid to wake him up for fear the shock might fuddle what was left of his wits. But all the time he’d be as alert as a cat, soaking up little bits and hints of rumors, facts, information, as if he took them in through his pores. He knew a world of secrets. And if you asked him the right questions—or if you asked them the right way, or maybe if he trusted you for some reason—he’d tell you one or two of them.
There was a good chance he’d be able to tell me the secret of Carol Christie, and I knew how to ask.
I had an idea in my head that made my nerves crawl as bad as the DT’s, and this was the only way I knew of to check it out.
I’m not like Ginny—I’m not a puzzle solver. For instance, it might never have occurred to me to compare the watermarks of those two notes. My brain doesn’t work that way. I get where I’m going—wherever that is—by intuition and information. In a city like Puerta del Sol, there are a lot of information dealers, and I know at least half of them. And I’m not talking about stool pigeons, punks who shill for the cops.
Like most independent businessmen, old Manolo was a specialist. Next to el Senor himself, Manolo knew more than anybody in the city about who’s doing what to whom and how in the grubby world of drugs. The cops could put away
most of the pushers in the state if they just knew what old Manolo knew.
I was doing my best not to think too much about Alathea. I didn’t dare. I was already too jittery—if I stopped to consider what I was thinking, I might not be able to control myself until I ended up at the bottom of a bottle somewhere. No, all I wanted to know was how a good swimmer ends up drowning in the Flat River.
It was the kind of question you had to ask at night. People like old Manolo don’t exist during the day. When the sun comes up, they evaporate, and all you can find of them is what they leave behind—a rank, sodden body snoring away like a ruin on a pallet full of fleas somewhere, as empty of answers as an old beer can.
But I didn’t get the chance to ask. I wasn’t more than five blocks away from my apartment, just turning onto Eighth Street on my way toward the Hegira and all the other bars where Manolo might be drinking his anisette, when things started to get out of hand.
Down from the corner of Eighth and Sycamore, there are a couple of abandoned buildings with a long dirty alley between them. They’re close enough to the old part of town so even the cops don’t walk into an alley like that unless they have backup on the way. I was just about to cross in front of that alley when the screaming started.
A woman screaming, terror and pain. Somewhere back in the semidarkness of the alley.
My body is faster than my brain, and by the time the woman screamed again, before I’d even thought about it, I was headed toward the sound as fast as I could run.
Probably I should’ve pulled the .45 out where I could use it, but when you’re as big as I am, you get in the habit of thinking you don’t need a weapon. Anyway, I had good reason not to trust the way I handle a gun.
This time—for once—it turned out I’d done the right thing. The only reason the woman didn’t get hurt worse was that I got there so fast. The man had already torn off most of her clothes, and he had her on her back in the dirt. She fought like fury, but he was much too strong for her.
He should’ve heard me coming—I’m not exactly light on my feet—but he must’ve been too far gone. Holding her down, he sprawled himself between her legs and started to thrust at her.
I was moving too fast to land on him without hurting her, so instead I caught hold of the back of his shirt with both hands as I went past and used his weight to pivot me to a stop. I was ecstatic with rage—the pressure inside me was exploding. Frustration and dread and all the long pain of trying to fight my way off the stuff came to a head in a second, and I went happily crazy.
The man wasn’t small, but for all the good his size did him he might as well have been. My momentum lifted him bodily into the air, and as I pivoted I swung him around and slammed him against the wall of the building. When he bounced back at me, I saw he had a switchblade, but even that didn’t slow me down. I blocked it aside, grabbed him again, wheeled, and threw him face first into the other wall as if I were trying to demolish the building.
Before he could turn, bring his knife around, I got him. With a long swing that came all the way up from my shoes, I hit him in the small of the back, just on the left side of his spine.
A gasp of pain broke out of him. His knife skittered away into the dark somewhere. He spun around and flipped forward, fell on his face, then jerked onto his side, arching his back as if he were trying to get away from the pain. His legs went rigid, and he kept pushing with them, slowly skidding his body in a circle.
There was a high keening noise in my ears, like the sound of blood rushing through my head, and I had a terrible urge to haul off and kick him. I wanted to do it. I could already feel the jolt of my toe hitting his back. But I didn’t. He’d had enough.
Instead I turned away and went to see about the woman.
She huddled, sobbing, against one of the walls. She had her knees pulled up tight in front of her, and she clutched the remains of her clothes about her desperately, as if those scraps were all that was left of her. Her face was pressed
against her knees. She didn’t look up when I spoke to her.
I hunkered down in front of her. Not knowing what else to do, I put one hand on her arm.
She flinched away so violently that I had to draw back. But at least the movement made her lift her head. I saw she was Chicano. It’s hard to tell the age of young Chicano women—when they first stop being kids they look too old for their years, and later on they look too young—but I didn’t think she was more than seventeen. Not pretty, but beautiful. Either the bad light or the tears made her eyes look dark as bruises.
“Hush child,” I said to her gently in Spanish. “The harm is past. I am Señor Axbrewder. My name is known in many places. Are you injured?”
She didn’t say anything. But she made an effort and finally managed to swallow her sobs. In answer to my question, she shook her head.
The man on the ground behind me groaned.
Her eyes jumped fearfully toward him, but I said, “Do not fear. He is hurt, and will not harm you now.” This time when I touched her arm she looked back at me and didn’t flinch.
“That is well,” she said in English. Strength was starting to come back into her face. There was a dignity in her tone, perhaps in the way she spoke English, that touched me more than any amount of crying. “He is a pig, and I spit on him.”
I liked her English so much I switched to it myself. “We’ll do better than spit on him. The rape laws around here are pretty tough.” That’s one advantage of living in a state where some of the old Spanish traditions and values still carry weight. “We’ll put him in jail. He won’t get out until he’s too old to even think about doing something like this again.”
She nodded her head once, sharply. “Yes.”
“Good.”
I got up to check on the man. He was groaning louder and moving around a bit now, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a white dude—an Anglo all dolled up in the kind of cowboy-tourist finery no self-respecting Westerner
would wear. That made him a hit-and-run rapist, the kind that never gets caught because by the time the cops go looking for them they’re already in some other part of the country, bragging about how those “Mex chicks” couldn’t get enough of them. “Not this time, ace,” I muttered at him. Then I went back to the woman and asked her name.
She said, “Teresa Sanguillán.”
“Well, Teresa Sanguillán.” All of a sudden, I was trembling—reaction, I guess—and I had to fake a hearty tone to keep my voice from quavering. “I’m afraid you’ve got a long night ahead of you. We’d better get on with it.”
She didn’t respond. The brief look she cast down at her clothes said more than enough.
I groped mentally for a second, then shrugged off my jacket and handed it to her.
Her eyes snagged momentarily on the butt of the .45 under my left arm, but then she took the jacket. I turned my back and went to look for the knife. I found it a few feet away, snapped it closed and dropped it into my pocket. Then I started to rouse the dude.
While I was shaking him to his feet and she was getting herself covered as best she could, I asked her how she’d happened to run into this clown.
I liked her—she had spunk. Now that her fear was over, she was just mad. But it was a controlled mad, cold and vehement. I was glad about that, because it meant she wasn’t going to back out on me, refuse to press charges. In a tight, even voice, she told me she worked as a domestic out in the Heights, where a lot of professional people live. She was on her way home to her mother and two younger sisters, but the bus she had to take didn’t go into the old part of town, so every evening she had to walk this way home in the dark. The Anglo had been on the bus with her, and when she got off he followed her, giving her some sort of speech about how girls weren’t safe on the streets alone at night. It only took him three blocks to start treating her like a hooker, and when she gave it to him to understand that he was mistaken, he turned nasty.
The whole thing made me want to hit him again. While
I was getting him up, I saw his penis still hanging out of his open fly. I was tempted to leave him that way. But on second thought, for the sake of Teresa Sanguillán’s dignity, I tucked him in and zipped him up. Then I lifted him to his feet and dragged him along. The three of us went out to the street.
In that part of town, you can’t find a unit at night if you go looking for it with a bloodhound. I didn’t feel much like lugging the dude all the way back to Cuevero Road in hopes of spotting a cop or a working phone booth, so we went on down Eighth Street and turned in at the first bar we came to. The few lethargic drinkers in the place looked at us with only momentary interest despite our far-from-tidy appearance. The barkeep knew me and let us use his phone. First I called the cops. Then Teresa called a friend who had a phone, so the friend could take a message to her mother. Then we went back outside to wait. It would’ve been nice to sit down in the bar for a rest, but considering the shape I was in, I didn’t want to stay in such close proximity to all those bottles.
It was an easier decision than it should’ve been, almost twenty-four hours since my last drink. I was wearing my white armor—knight rescues maiden—which helped. But that was only part of it. Vanity is no match for alcohol. If it were, half the distilleries in the country would go out of business. No, the main thing was that I was working, doing something I believed in. While we stood out there on the sidewalk I almost didn’t regret that I wasn’t back in the bar having a drink.
I passed the time by shaking the dude every time he started to fade or shutting him up whenever he started to groan, and by asking Teresa questions—simple questions, the kind she could answer without having to forget that she was mad. After about five minutes the cops arrived. There were two of them in the unit, and they drove up quietly, trying not to attract attention.
Once they heard what had happened they didn’t seem very eager to make an arrest. They inspected Teresa and the dude and me, and shuffled their feet, and asked us a bunch
of questions without writing any of the answers down, generally making it clear that they wanted us to forget the whole thing. I suppose I could understand their situation—in this city, Anglo versus Chicano was every cop’s nightmare. But I wasn’t having any. Teresa Sanguillán and I were citizens, the dude had committed a crime, and we had a right to have him arrested. I handed over the knife, and finally the cops gave in. They piled us into the back of their unit and took us over to the Municipal Building.
The building is just as bad at night as it is during the day. It’s always disorienting. During the day you have the impression that the sun set hours ago, and at night you end up thinking it’s noon outside. But this time I didn’t let it bother me. As long as Teresa had her chin up, I didn’t intend to let anything get in my way. I knew it could turn out to be messy, but I didn’t care.
The so-called arresting officers took us to the duty room, where all the detectives had their desks. The person who designed the room was either a drunk or a real joker—the place looked like the embalming room of a mortuary. For a while we were ground along by the usual routine of police work. The arresting officers made a statement to one of the detectives. He tried to ask the dude a few questions, but the dude was hurting too bad to make sense, so the detective put him in the tank to wait for a doctor. Then a couple of detectives took Teresa and me to opposite sides of the room—so we couldn’t check our answers with each other—and made us tell our stories a few times. After that, we were given the opportunity to sit around and wait.
The cops do stuff like that on purpose. They try to put pressure on the people filing the charges. Most of them don’t actually want the people to back out, but from a cop’s point of view, if a victim is going to back out, the sooner the better. Saves wasted effort and frustration later on. So they give you a chance to reconsider. A long chance.