A Scanner Darkly (10 page)

He dumped off Luckman and Barris to do a scrounging number for the cephscope; this not only stranded both men and kept them from getting back to the house while the bugging installation was going on, but permitted him to check up on an individual he hadn’t seen for over a month. He seldom got down this way, and the chick seemed to be doing nothing more than shooting meth two or three times a day and turning tricks to pay for it. She lived with her dealer, who was therefore also her old man. Usually Dan Mancher was gone during the day, which was good. The dealer was an addict, too, but Arctor had not been able to figure out to what. Evidently a variety of drugs. Anyhow, whatever it was, Dan had become weird and vicious, unpredictable and violent. It was a wonder the local police hadn’t picked him up long ago on local disturbance-of-the-peace infractions. Maybe they were paid off. Or, most likely, they just didn’t care; these people lived in a slum-housing area among senior citizens and the other poor. Only for major crimes did the police enter the Cromwell Village series of buildings and related garbage dump, parking lots, and rubbled roads.

There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor. He parked, found the right urine-smelling stairs, ascended into darkness, found the door of
Building 4 marked
G.
A full can of Drāno lay before the door, and he picked it up automatically, wondering how many kids played here and remembering, for a moment, his own kids and the protective moves he had made on their behalf over the years. This was one now, picking up this can. He rapped against the door with it.

Presently the door lock rattled and the door opened, chained inside; the girl, Kimberly Hawkins, peered out. “Yes?”

“Hey, man,” he said. “It’s me, Bob.”

“What do you have there?”

“Can of Drāno,” he said.

“No kidding.” She unchained the door in a listless way; her voice, too, was listless. Kimberly was down, he could see: very down. Also, the girl had a black eye and a split lip. And as he looked around he saw that the windows of the small, untidy apartment were broken. Shards of glass lay on the floor, along with overturned ashtrays and Coke bottles.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Yeah. Dan and I had a fight and he split.” The girl, half Chicano, small and not too pretty, with the sallow complexion of a crystal freak, gazed down sightlessly, and he realized that her voice rasped when she spoke. Some drugs did that. Also, so did strep throat. The apartment probably couldn’t be heated, not with the broken windows.

“He beat you up.” Arctor set the can of Drāno down on a high shelf, over some paperback porn novels, most of them out of date.

“Well, he didn’t have his knife, thank God. His Case knife that he carries on his belt in a sheath now.” Kimberly seated herself in an overstuffed chair out of which springs stuck. “What do you want, Bob? I’m bummed, I really am.”

“You want him back?”

“Well—” She shrugged a little. “Who knows?”

Arctor walked to the window and looked out. Dan
Mancher would no doubt be showing up sooner or later: the girl was a source of money, and Dan knew she’d need her regular hits once her supply had run out. “How long can you go?” he asked.

“Another day.”

“Can you get it anywhere else?”

“Yeah, but not so cheap.”

“What’s wrong with your throat?”

“A cold,” she said. “From the wind coming in.”

“You should—”

“If I go to a doctor,” she said, “then he’ll see I’m on crystal. I can’t go.”

“A doctor wouldn’t care.”

“Sure he would.” She listened then: the sound of car pipes, irregular and loud. “Is that Dan’s car? Red Ford ‘seventy-nine Torino?”

At the window Arctor looked out onto the rubbishy lot, saw a battered red Torino stopping, its twin exhausts exhaling dark smoke, the driver’s door opening. “Yes.”

Kimberly locked the door: two extra locks. “He probably has his knife.”

“You have a phone.”

“No,” she said.

“You should get a phone.”

The girl shrugged.

“He’ll kill you,” Arctor said.

“Not now. You’re here.”

“But later, after I’m gone.”

Kimberly reseated herself and shrugged again.

After a few moments they could hear steps outside, and then a knock on the door. Then Dan yelling for her to open the door. She yelled back no and that someone was with her. “Okay,” Dan yelled, in a high-pitched voice, “I’ll slash your tires.” He ran downstairs, and Arctor and the girl watched through the broken window together as Dan Mancher, a skinny, short-haired, homosexual-looking dude waving a
knife, approached her car, still yelling up to her, his words audible to everyone else in the housing area. “I’ll slash your tires, your fucking tires! And then I’ll fucking kill you!” He bent down and slashed first one tire and then another on the girl’s old Dodge.

Kimberly suddenly aroused, sprang to the door of the apartment and frantically began unlocking the various locks. “I got to stop him! He’s slashing all my tires! I don’t have insurance!”

Arctor stopped her. “My car’s there too.” He did not have his gun with him, of course, and Dan had the Case knife and was out of control, “Tires aren’t—”

“My
tires!”
Shrieking, the girl struggled to open the door.

“That’s what he wants you to do,” Arctor said.

“Downstairs,” Kimberly panted. “We can phone the police—they have a phone. Let me go!” She fought him off with tremendous strength and managed to get the door open. “I’m going to call the police. My tires! One of them is new!”

“I’ll go with you.” He grabbed her by the shoulder; she tumbled ahead of him down the steps, and he barely managed to catch up. Already she had reached the next apartment and was pounding on its door. “Open, please?” she called. “Please, I want to call the police! Please let me call the police!”

Arctor got up beside her and knocked. “We need to use your phone,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”

An elderly man, wearing a gray sweater and creased formal slacks and a tie, opened the door.

“Thanks,” Arctor said.

Kimberly pushed inside, ran to the phone, and dialed the operator. Arctor stood facing the door, waiting for Dan to show up. There was no sound now, except for Kimberly babbling at the operator: a garbled account, something about a quarrel about a pair of boots worth seven dollars. “He said they were his because I got them for him for Christmas,” she was babbling, “but they were mine because I paid
for them, and then he started to take them and I ripped the backs of them with a can opener, so he—” She paused; then, nodding: “All right, thank you. Yes, I’ll hold on.”

The elderly man gazed at Arctor, who gazed back. In the next room an elderly lady in a print dress watched silently, her face stiff with fear.

“This must be bad on you,” Arctor said to the two elderly people.

“It goes on all the time,” the elderly man said. “We hear them all night, night after night, fighting, and him saying all the time he’ll kill her.”

“We should have gone back to Denver,” the elderly lady said. “I told you that, we should have moved back.”

“These terrible fights,” the elderly man said. “And smashing things, and the noise.” He gazed at Arctor, stricken, appealing for help maybe, or maybe understanding. “On and on, it never does stop, and then, what is worse, do you know that every time—”

“Yes, tell him that,” the elderly lady urged.

“What is worse,” the elderly man said with dignity, “is that every time we go outdoors, we go outside to shop or mail a letter, we step in … you know, what the dogs leave.”

“Dog do,” the elderly lady said, with indignation.

The local police car showed up. Arctor gave his deposition as a witness without identifying himself as a law-enforcement officer. The cop took down his statement and tried to take one from Kimberly, as the complaining party, but what she said made no sense: she rambled on and on about the pair of boots and why she had gotten them, how much they meant to her. The cop, sitting with his clipboard and sheet, glanced up once at Arctor and regarded him with a cold expression that Arctor could not read but did not like anyhow. The cop finally advised Kimberly to get a phone and to call if the suspect returned and made any more trouble.

“Did you note the slashed tires?” Arctor said as the cop started to leave. “Did you examine her vehicle out there on the lot and note personally the number of the tires slashed, casing slashes with a sharp instrument, recently made—there is still some air leaking out?”

The cop glanced at him again with the same expression and left with no further comment.

“You better not stay here,” Arctor said to Kimberly. “He should have advised you to clear out. Asked if there was some other place you could stay.”

Kimberly sat on her seedy couch in her debris-littered living room, her eyes lusterless again now that she had ceased the futile effort of trying to explain her situation to the investigating officer. She shrugged.

“I’ll drive you somewhere,” Arctor said. “Do you know some friend you could—”

“Get the fuck out!” Kimberly said abruptly, with venom, in a voice much like Dan Mancher’s but more raspy. “Get the fuck out of here, Bob Arctor—get lost, get lost, god-dammit. Will you get lost?” Her voice rose shrilly and then broke in despair.

He left and walked slowly back down the stairs, step by step. When he reached the bottom step something banged and rolled down after him: it was the can of Drāno. He heard her door lock, one bolt after another. Futile locks, he thought. Futile everything. The investigating officer advises her to call if the suspect returns. How can she, without going out of her apartment? And there Dan Mancher will stab her like he did the tires. And—remembering the complaint of the old folks downstairs—she will probably first step on and then fall dead into dog shit. He felt like laughing hysterically at the old folks’ priorities; not only did a burned-out freak upstairs night after night beat up and threaten to kill and probably would soon kill a young girl addict turning tricks who no doubt had strep throat if not much else besides, but
in addition to that
—

As he drove Luckman and Barris back north, he chuckled aloud. “Dog shit,” he said. “Dog shit.” Humor in dog shit, he thought, if you can flash on it. Funny dog shit.

“Better change lanes and pass that Safeway truck,” Luck-man said. “The humper’s hardly moving.”

He moved into the lane to the left and picked up speed. But then, when he took his foot off the throttle, the pedal all at once fell to the floor mat, and at the same time the engine roared all the way up furiously and the car shot forward at enormous, wild speed.

“Slow down!” both Luckman and Barris said together.

By now the car had reached almost one hundred; ahead, a VW van loomed. His gas pedal was dead: it did not return and it did nothing. Both Luckman, who sat next to him, and Barris, beyond him, threw up their arms instinctively. Arctor twisted the wheel and shot by the VW van, to its left, where a limited space remained before a fast-moving ‘Vet filled it up. The Corvette honked, and they heard its brakes screech. Now Luckman and Barris were yelling; Luckman suddenly reached and shut off the ignition; meanwhile, Arctor shifted out of gear into neutral. The car slowed, and he braked it down, moved into the right-hand lane and then, with the engine finally dead and the transmission out of gear, rolled off onto the emergency strip and came by degrees to a stop.

The Corvette, long gone down the freeway, still honked its indignation. And now the giant Safeway truck rolled by them and for a deafening moment sounded its own warning air horn.

“What the hell happened?” Barris said.

Arctor, his hands and voice and the rest of him shaking, said, “The return spring on the throttle cable—the gas. Must have caught or broken.” He pointed down. They all peered at the pedal, which lay still flat against the floor. The engine had revved up to its entire maximum rpm, which for his car was considerable. He had not clocked their final highest road speed, probably well over one hundred. And, he realized,
though he had been reflexively pushing down on the power brakes, the car had only slowed.

Silently the three of them got onto the emergency pavement and raised the hood. White smoke drifted up from the oil caps and from underneath as well. And near-boiling water fizzled from the overflow spout of the radiator.

Luckman reached over the hot engine and pointed. “Not the spring,” he said. “It’s the linkage from the pedal to the carb. See? It fell apart.” The long rod lay aimlessly against the block, hanging impotently and uselessly down with its locking ring still in place. “So the gas pedal didn’t push back up when you took your foot off. But—” He inspected the carb for a time, his face wrinkled.

“There’s a safety override on the carb,” Barris said, grinning and showing his syntheticlike teeth. “This system when the linkage parts—”

“Why’d it part?” Arctor broke in. “Shouldn’t this locking ring hold the nut in place?” He stroked along the rod. “How could it just fall off like that?”

As if not hearing him, Barris continued, “If for any reason the linkage gives, then the engine should drop down to idle. As a safety factor. But it revved up all the way instead.” He bent his body around to get a better look at the carb. “This screw has been turned all the way out,” he said. “The idle screw. So that when the linkage parted the override went the other way, up instead of down.”

“How could that happen?” Luckman said loudly. “Could it screw itself all the way out like that accidentally?”

Without answering, Barris got out his pocketknife, opened the small blade, and began slowly screwing the idle-adjustment screw back in. He counted aloud. Twenty turns of the screw to get it in. “To loosen the lock ring and nut assembly that holds the accelerator-linkage rods together,” he said, “a special tool would be needed. A couple, in fact. I’d estimate it’ll take about half an hour to get this back together. I have the tools, though, in my toolbox.”

“Your toolbox is back at the house,” Luckman said.

“Yes.” Barris nodded. “Then we’ll have to get to a gas station and either borrow theirs or get their tow truck out here. I suggest we get them out here to look it over before we drive it again.”