I expected the moral issue then and there. Did you kill anybody? But she was the kind who set their own standards.
“Do you have a place to go?” she asked. “A safe place?”
“Yes.”
She helped me to the passenger side of the little car, and helped me lower myself in. She wrested the car keys out of my hand. I made protest.
“Shut up, darling. I won’t be long. Try to hold on. In case you can’t, tell me the address now.”
After hesitation, I told her. She hurried off. She didn’t start her car for a few moments, and I suspected she was swabbing my valuable blood off her leather upholstery. She swung out and went up the street and turned into the underground garage. I undid my jacket, pulled my shirt out of my pants and looked at the damage in front, by the flame of my lighter. It was on the right side, in the softness of my waist. Exit holes are always the worst, unless it is a jacketed slug. This seemed about half dollar size, so the slug hadn’t hit anything solid enough to make the slug mushroom very much. My posture kept the lips closed, and it was not bleeding badly.
I tucked the soaked shirt tail back in and hugged myself. I wished I knew more anatomy. I wondered what irreplaceable goodies were within that line of fire. From the absence of pain I knew I was still in shock. There was just a feel of wetness and looseness and sliding, and a feel of heat. But there was another symptom I did not like. There was a metallic humming in my ears, and the world seemed to bloat and dwindle in a regular cycle. I hugged and waited, wondering if on the next cycle the world would dwindle and keep dwindling and be gone. If she was a very smart woman, if she came back and found me too far gone, she would do well to take me to the address I gave her, and walk away from it.
That son of a bitch had been too eager. The look of people hurrying away with a burden had gotten him terribly excited. The business shot had come about a second and a half after the warning shot. He sounded official. Maybe he was after a citation.
I hung on. I felt suspended in a big membrane, like a hammock, and if anything jounced, it would split and I would fall through.
Suddenly she opened the car door and bounced in. The bounce stirred the first tiny little teeth of pain.
“How are you?” she asked. She threw a small bag into the back seat. She had changed her clothes. She was breathing hard.
“I’m just nifty peachy dandy, Mrs. Melgar.”
She got the little car into motion very swiftly, giving the little teeth a better chance to gnaw. She said, “Just as I was leaving, the phone rang. Men down at the desk. Police. I told the night man to send them right up. I went down the stairs.”
“Fun and games. The romantic vision. Have fun, Connie.”
“My friend, once you decide you want the animal to charge, and once he begins the charge, you cannot change your mind. You stand there and you wait until he is close enough so you can be absolutely sure of him.”
“Grace under pressure. Kindly spare me the Hemingway bits.”
“Are you always so surly when you’re wounded?”
“I hate to see people being stupid for no reason. Get out of this while you have the chance.”
“Darling. I will take every chance to feel alive, believe me.”
The little man inside me decided that teeth weren’t enough. He threw them aside and got a great big brace and bit, dipped it in acid, coated it with ground glass and went to work, timing each revolution to the beat of my heart. She parked in front of 28. I leaned against the side of the bungalow while she unlocked the door. She took me in. My legs were too light. They wanted to float. It was hard to force them down to the floor to take steps.
She managed the lights and the heavy gaudy draperies. She had changed to a dark pleated skirt and a dark sweater. I kept my jaws clamped on the sounds I wanted to make, and settled for the occasional snort and whuff. We got the ruined jacket and shirt off. I sat on a low stool in the bathroom, forearms braced on my knees, head sagging.
She said, “It’s off to the right, in back just under the last rib. You’ve got to have a doctor.”
“I’ve lasted pretty good so far.”
“You look ghastly,” she said. “I think we can stop the bleeding, though.”
She went scouting around and I heard her tearing something into strips. She found a sanitary napkin and fashioned two pads and bound them in place by winding the strips around my middle and knotting them. Now I felt as if I had a heavy bar of lead through me, from back to front, red hot. She found the bourbon and poured me a heavy shot. I asked her to leave the bathroom. I urinated, but it was not bloody. I could take a deep breath without any inner rattling or gargling. But something essential had to be messed up.
As I headed for the bed, I went down. Very slowly, protecting myself, bracing myself, rolling onto my good side. She helped me up and onto the bed. I stretched out on my back, but it felt better to keep my knees hiked up.
She looked down at me and said, “I’m going to use the phone.”
“What are you thinking of?”
“Pablo Dominguez. He might have an idea. At three in the morning, he might have an idea, you know. But is that all right with you?”
“That’s very much all right.”
“Is it hurting a lot?”
“It didn’t help it very much, falling down. This is a borrowed place.”
“It looks it.”
“And a borrowed car. I was planning on getting out of here without leaving a trace, without leaving people around with a lot of questions. Tell Paul if he can manage it, if he can manage anything, getting out of here should be part of it.”
“I don’t think you should be moved any more.”
“Tell him I have some interesting things to tell him.”
I heard her on the phone, close beside me, but I couldn’t keep track of what she was saying. Her voice turned into three simultaneous voices in echo chambers, overlapping into a resonant gibberish. I raised my hand to look at it. It came into sight after a long time, hung there, and then fell back into darkness.
I was jolted awake. Somebody was saying in a husky whisper, “Careful. Easy now!” They were trying to get my legs up over a rear bumper. It was a panel delivery truck. I had clothes on. There was a faint grey of dawn over Buena Villas. My gear was in the truck. There was a mattress in there.
I helped them. I crawled toward the mattress. I had been sawed in half and glued back together, but both ends worked. I saw Dominguez and Connie staring in at me.
“There’s one thing,” I said.
“Don’t try to talk, baby.” Connie said.
I made her understand about the promise and the money, and she agreed that she would immediately put the key and the seventy dollars in Honey’s mailbox, don’t worry about it, the house is in good shape, everything’s fine, don’t worry. In the middle of trying to form the next question, my arms got tired of chinning myself on this bottom rung of consciousness, so I just let it all go.
When I awoke again it was hot. Light came into the truck, dusty sunlight. I was being juggled and bounced. Connie sat on a tool box. It was a bad road. She looked tired. Her smile was wan. She said something I couldn’t hear and felt my forehead. I saw my gear and her small bag and the two sacks of golden idols. I wanted to say something vastly significant, about a woman and gold and a wound, like those things you say in dreams, those answers to everything. But when I unlocked my jaw, all that came out was a bellow of pain.
She knelt and held me and said, “Just a little bit more, dear. Just a little bit more now.”
I was on my face, in a rough softness, in a smell of wool and a sharper smell of medicine. They’d let something loose at me and it was eating its way into my back. I tried to roll over, but a hand came down on my bare shoulder and forced me back. I heard Connie in an excited clatter of Spanish, and a man’s voice answering. Suddenly a huge pain towered shining white and smashed down on me and rolled me under.