She surprised him: she said, “I won’t leave it like that even if you will. Mitch, I thought I came on this crazy thing because I wanted revenge on my father, and it’s true, I did—I still do. But that wasn’t all. A little while ago I came out of the shower and saw you lying there and I knew I’d really come with you because I just wanted to be with you. If I’d let you leave me along the road somewhere I’d never have seen you again, and I didn’t want to lose you. Maybe it’s just a delirious reaction to this whole weird thing we’ve been through—maybe it’s something I’ll get over when I wake up one morning and the nightmare’s over. But I want to have a chance to find out. If that’s the way it turns out I won’t be scared to say so—let’s keep it clean and honest between us, can we?”
“We can try,” he said, and began to turn toward the door. Suddenly he went rigid. “My God. What time is it?” He looked at his watch and his face fell. “Jesus, you know how long we’ve been here? It’s almost eight o’clock. That damned farmacia’s bound to be closed by now—they pull in the sidewalks at sunset in these towns, don’t they?”
“We’ll find him in the morning, then,” she said, practical and unruffled. She had remarkable resilience—perhaps all women did, but he wasn’t experienced enough to tell. She said, “Anyhow we’re in no condition to face up to Floyd tonight. We need a good solid meal and a long night’s sleep, and time to think out what we’re going to do. My brain’s too fuzzy for that right now and I imagine yours is too.”
“I guess,” he said, and put his head down, thinking. “Matter of fact, I have got one or two ideas, but I don’t want you to get caught in the middle. You’ve been through enough.”
“If you’re leading up to a suggestion that I ought to go home, forget it, Mitch.”
“Look, Floyd’s on the run from big trouble. Now what do you think he’d do to anybody who got in his way?”
“I know. But even a train stops, Mitch—something’s bound to fracture that superman complex of his. We can do it.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure of that.”
“We can do it,” she said again, firmly, and followed him to the door; but then she said in a different voice, “Why’s he like that, anyway?”
“Floyd? He was born a son of a bitch. He doesn’t need reasons.” He held the door for her and then walked over to the adjacent room and knocked. There was no reply; the lights were on and through the window he could see the room was empty, the bed undisturbed, the bathroom door wide open and the bathroom light switched off.
“She’s not here,” he said, suddenly cold. His glance whipped around the swimming pool but it was deserted.
Terry said, “She probably only went somewhere to eat.”
“And not tell us first? What if she went to Floyd?” He was shaking; he grinned loosely. “Look at me. Nerves of steel. Tower of strength. Maybe we both ought to get the hell out of here.”
Terry said, “The car’s still here. She hasn’t gone far. Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mitch—Billie Jean isn’t a threat to us. She’s in just as much trouble as you and Floyd are. She won’t go running to the police.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. But what if she decided to join up with Floyd? If she tells him we’re looking for him, he’ll be waiting for us. He’d just as soon kill us as step on an ant—and down here there wouldn’t even be any questions asked. They kill you around here for your shoes and wristwatch. It happens all the time. A couple of gringo tourists found dead in some alley—who’d bother?”
Terry said, “Let’s go have dinner and sleep on it. We’ll think better in the morning.”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he went with her.
C H A P T E R Sixteen
It wasn’t all that long after dark but Caborca at night was like Barstow at three o’clock in the morning. That was the morose judgment of Charley Bass as he moved machine-like through the streets, his heavy shoes thudding, empty-eyed in a wilted shirt. Charley Bass was a jaded Yankee slicker with a tired masculine appearance, thin hair combed carefully over the pink scalp, square chin tucked close to his chest on the short wide neck and powerful shoulders of a thick frame that had played collegiate football fifteen years ago and hadn’t yet begun to fatten up too badly.
A bum staggered near with his palm outstretched. Charley Bass gave him a synthetic capped-teeth smile and pressed a coin into his palm and the bum breathed profuse thanks over him in a wash of beer-breath. All along the street there were girls leaning against the walls in dark doorways and Charley Bass gave them each his practiced appraisal before he moved on. Most of them, when you got up close, were fat and filthy; one was a boozy raddled old whore who poked her anxious face forward above her ropy neck and spat on the ground when Charley Bass went by shaking his head no. He felt hard-up horny but not so hard-up he wanted to risk a dose of crabs or native siflis.
He turned a corner and saw the sputtering fizzy neon of beer signs around the plaza a block away; he went that way, past a weathered fence. Tomcats yelled passionately somewhere in the darkness nearby and one cat streaked slyly across the dark top of the fence, stopped midway and stood arched on its claws. Charley Bass picked up a stone and hurled it at the cat. There was a yowl and the cat disappeared. He went on, tasting the sour flavor of bile, remembering in an unhappy rush of images the golden-thighed Hollywood girls with no last names, the series of middle-aged nymphomaniacs, last month’s sticky affair with that banal woman in Barstow. Somehow he never seemed to attract the kind of woman he wanted to attract.
A cacophony of trumpet-guitar music assaulted him on the square, coming out of the open-walled fronts of three cantinas which stood open to the plaza like penny arcades. He stopped outside the first one, a dank place that smelled of urine and beer, and swept it with a quick scrutiny, and went on along the sidewalk. He was about to pass by the second cantina, which seemed even dingier than the first, but he saw a girl eating a taco at a back table and he stopped, went back, and twisted in through the crowded doorway.
It was a cheap saloon with pungent atmosphere—two pinball machines, a dark scratched bar like a Western movie saloon set, no bar stools; half a dozen small tables standing on uneven legs on sawdust and grease. There was a straightforward row of bottles—cheap wine, Mexican beer, rum and tequila—under a wall crowded with beer posters, dusty snapshots, and half a dozen broken rusty old guns of the sort obtainable at a hock shop for ten or fifteen pesos. The terrible band stood around at the far end of the bar, four musicians, one tooting a raucous trumpet and the others playing guitars of various sizes and resonances. There was a great deal of smoke and noise. Charley Bass tried to remember whether it was Thursday or Friday night. There were plenty of people in the place. Almost all of them looked like locals; Caborca wasn’t a tourist town.
Except the girl. She was from the States, that was obvious. Charley Bass crowded up to the bar and after an exercise in bad Spanish and sign language managed to buy a glass of black beer which he sipped as he turned his back to the bar and studied the girl over the rim of his glass.
Her dress was soiled, her fingernails dirty, her hair tangled in ropy disorder, but she was big and sloppy and exciting, her mouth full and sensuous, her eyes pushing out a sleepy, provocative sexual aura as tangible as the smell of the bar room. Her hefty hips and big freewheeling breasts made straining curves against her tight soiled dress.
She had a lot of fingerprints on her. But she was a girl who wanted sensation and did as she pleased: a woman in heat.