At the first intersection, I swung the wheel right and went half a block before I touched the switch for the headlamps. With the dash lights on, I could see the pointers on the clock there; it was 2:28. I could also see my left hand as I returned it to the wheel, and the way it was trembling…
The streetlamps in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate glowed a dull amber, mingling with the shine from the swollen face of the moon to brighten the empty streets. I drove two blocks distant, on Geylang Road, and left the Citroen in a public parking slot. I wanted to park directly in front of Tina Kellogg’s building, but that hadn’t seemed wise; once Dinessen’s body was discovered, there would be a bulletin out on his missing automobile, and I had no way of knowing when that would be. The two-block walk would be a long haul-and a dangerous one, in my blood-spattered condition-but it couldn’t be helped. I had enough strength to make it, and enough sense to keep to cover.
Two cars passed as I made my way through the landscaped grounds of the buildings in the estate, but neither of them was a police vehicle. I saw no one. I was breathing heavily when I reached Tina’s building; I had just about reached the limit of my endurance as well. Once into the vestibule, I tried the interior door. It was locked. I leaned heavily against the bank of mailboxes on the far wall, found the button for Apartment 34, and put my finger on it, leaving it there.
A long time passed, and then an intercom unit mounted to one side clicked and hummed static. Tina’s voice said guardedly, metallically, “Yes? Who is it?”
I put my mouth close to the speaker. “Dan Connell.”
“Dan! My God, what-?”
“Let me in, can you? I have to see you.”
“What is it?”
“I need help, Tina. I’m hurt.”
“Hurt? What happened-?”
“Let me in and we’ll talk,” I said. “But prepare yourself. I’m in pretty bad shape.”
The unit clicked and hummed again, and the inner door buzzed softly, like a giant mosquito. I shoved it open and pulled myself up the stairs to the third floor, hanging onto the hand railing. Tina had her door open on a night chain, peering out at me when I came down the hallway, and I heard her gasp audibly when she saw my face, my body, my clothing in the pale light from a domed wall fixture.
She snapped the chain free and opened the door, and I stumbled into the apartment past her and sank into one of the chairs at the half-table in the wall niche; I didn’t want to bleed all over her girlfriend’s settee. Tina closed the door, locked it, and ran over to me, her face white, her eyes wide. She wore a flowered Chinese robe, held closed by a pair of buttons, and it was obvious, even in my condition, that she wore nothing beneath it. Her hair was tousled, her face scrubbed free of make-up. She looked like somebody’s teenage daughter.
Soft fingers probed at the dried blood on my right arm, gently. Then, without speaking, Tina hurried out of the room-and came back half a minute later with iodine, gauze, adhesive tape, a bottle of wood alcohol, a package of absorbent cotton. She set everything on the table, still silent, her face grimly concerned, and then poured alcohol on a wad of cotton and began swabbing at the caked blood. Twisting my head to watch her, I could see the puckered bluish edges of the entrance hole on the near side, just above the elbow, and the exit hole on the far side when she turned the arm over. The alcohol burned coldly, like an ice abrasion.
I said, “Listen, Tina, I had no right coming here-I know that. I’m six kinds of bastard, and if you want to throw me out after you bandage that arm, I’ll go without argument. But I’d like to stay the night; I need sleep and I need it badly.”
Her lips pursed slightly. “Why did you come here?”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“Are you in trouble with the police?”
“Yeah. But trite as it sounds, I happen to be innocent.”
“How did you get shot?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked up at her, but her eyes were cast downward at my arm. “You’re entitled to know what I’m involving you in just by being here now,” I said. “All right, it’s this way-” and I told her all of it, about the Burong Chabak and about Van Rijk and Dinessen and Marla King and Tiong, and what had happened on this long, long night.
She listened without interruption, her fingers busy with the alcohol-soaked cotton. When I had finished speaking, she said, “That’s a fantastic story.”
“The truth isn’t always simple.”
“I suppose not.”
“I’m not lying to you, Tina.”
“I think I believe that, God knows why.” She paused, as if she wanted to say something else, and then moved away to enter the kitchenette. She came back with a clean dishtowel. “I’m going to put iodine on your arm,” she said. “You’d better bite onto this.”
I put the towel between my teeth and bit down on it, and the iodine set fire to my entire right side, bright and hot and lingering in my armpit. But the pain wasn’t all that bad; I had lived with agony too many consecutive hours.
Tina put gauze pads over the puckered wounds and unrolled adhesive tape tightly over them. When the arm was bandaged she poured alcohol on a fresh cotton ball and went to work on the pulpy spot over my temple. She asked then, “What are you going to do?”
“That depends on you.”
“I… won’t turn you out.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
She sighed softly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m going to try to get out of Singapore. I don’t have another choice.”
“But where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you have money?”
“A few dollars.”
“I… don’t have much myself, but I can let you have about a hundred or so if it will help.”
“It’s nowhere near what I really need,” I said. “Keep your money, little girl.”
“But how will you get off the island?”
“I don’t know yet; there are ways.” The fever was spreading hot and enervating through my body now, and my eyelids seemed to be fluttering up and down like window shades over distorted glass. Tina finished putting a bandage on my temple, took the towel from where I had put it on the table, and wiped some of the sweat off my forehead. Then she stroked my hair, and her fingers were cool, cool.
“Dan,” she said, and there was alarm in her voice. “Dan, you’ve got to get to bed. You… you look awful.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you stand up all right?”
“Think so.”
“I’ll help you into the bedroom.”
“Can sleep on the settee, once I’m rid of these clothes…”
“No, you’ll sleep in the bed.”
I got up on my feet, leaning against her momentarily, the softness of her, the firmness of her. The trembling worsened, spreading to every extremity of my body now, and my knees felt strange and uncontrollable. The room seemed to shimmer slightly, in distortion.
“The bathroom first,” I said, “I have to get out of these clothes
… the blood…”
I took two steps away from Tina, and the room dissolved slowly, curiously, into an oscillating grayness, into a netherworld of shadow images like shapes seen through a dense fog. Tina’s voice clutched at me, fading, fading, something dropped into a deep well, and the grayness began to spin, I began to spin, spinning and falling and jarring impact and the void.
Chapter Sixteen
… rushing, rushing, the strip rushes up, the wheels touch and bounce and touch again, we’re almost down but we hit something, the Dakota begins to roll, I can’t hold it, oh God, oh God, the world tilts crazily, lights spin and spin and spin, there is an impact, no, no, Pete screams, he screams, there is the stench of high octane fuel, no, I feel myself being lifted, lifted, no, blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming…