HCC 115 - Borderline (8 page)

He sat up now, walked to the stack of comics, picked one up. On the cover a gorilla
held a woman high overhead, one hand on her bare thigh and the other wrapped around
her neck. The gorilla was standing on the edge of a chasm and he was preparing to
heave the woman onto the jagged rocks below. Weaver studied the picture for a moment.
He sighed, and dropped the book back onto the stack.

The hotel room was suffocating him. He had to get out, had to go somewhere and do
something before he went out of his mind. He needed something. He was not sure what
he needed, did not even want to think about what it might be that his nervous system
demanded. But whatever it was, he needed it.

He stood before the mirror over the washbowl, wetted his hair and combed it. He left
the hotel room, walked to a flight of stairs, descended them quickly. Some of the
stairs creaked when he stepped on them. The cracking stairs had an eerie sound and
he was glad to reach the first floor.

There was a very old man behind the desk. He looked up at Weaver, caught the key that
Weaver tossed to him. He looked away without speaking and Weaver went out of the door
onto the street. At an all-night cafeteria he had an order of french toast and sausages
with a cup of coffee. The toast was good but the sausages were greasy and he had to
leave most of them on his plate. He had another cup of coffee. He put three teaspoons
of sugar into each cup and filled it to the brim with cream.

After he left the cafeteria, the two cups of coffee sloshing inside him, he was not
any sleepier. El Paso was a daylight town, quiet at night, and he walked the streets
alone without seeing a single person. The main street of the downtown section was
dark and quiet. Only a few stores left their neon signs on at night; fewer had their
windows illuminated. Weaver walked and walked and saw no one.

He was used to the night, and to silent walks down silent streets. In Tulsa, before
the killing, before the little girl who had been so foolish as to ask him the time,
he had been essentially a creature of the night. A quiet man. A man who worked eight
hours a day, five days a week, as a stockroom clerk in a Lincoln Drive department
store. A man who earned forty-five dollars a week, week after week. Each summer they
gave him two weeks off, with full pay, and he spent his vacations in Tulsa, going
to movies, reading comic books, taking long walks.

He had no friends in Tulsa. He spoke to no one at work and no one spoke to him. He
was ugly, and he was not very bright, and he had no personality as far as anyone knew.
He avoided people, and they were delighted to be avoided by him.

At night, he walked. The night was as exciting as the day was drab, because the night
was dark and a man could walk without being seen, could walk through dark streets
like a ghost across the Scottish moors. A man like Weaver could look through windows
as women took off their clothes. If he was lucky, very lucky, he could look through
windows while married men made love to their wives. Weaver had been a nobody in Tulsa,
a man who had never done a thing. He had never made love to a woman, had never so
much as kissed a woman. He was an orphan, with no family. A nobody.

Now, walking through El Paso by night, he was at least a somebody for once. He knew
this, and in a weird way the knowledge was comforting. He had Done Something. The
Something was a horrible thing, but he had done it, and they had put his picture in
the newspapers and had broadcast his name over the radio. They called him Dracula,
and they called him the Cannibal Killer, but now, for the first time, they knew who
he was.

And this made him feel good, somehow. It was better to be loathed as a fiend than
to be thoroughly ignored, better to be hated than not to be known at all. One act
of horror had given direction to his life, had elevated him from
no
body to
some
body.

He went on walking. The sky was streaked with false dawn. He walked surely now, his
stride powerful, his arms swinging easily at his side. He was the Angel of Death,
he thought. His life had a mission, a strange and terrifying sense of purpose.

He thought now of that little girl in Tulsa. He realized now that he had made several
significant errors in his thinking. Before, that girl had seemed to have been a dreadful
mistake, an end. But she was not an end at all. She was a beginning. She was the first
person he had killed.

She would not be the last.

And, with this re-evaluation of the girl’s role, he came also to a new understanding
of his procedure from that point on. Capture was inevitable, he knew. Sooner or later
he would be caught by the police, caught and beaten and killed. But until then it
was not enough merely to go on living, merely to hide like a scared rabbit and wait
for the inevitable closing of the net around him.

He had to be positive in his behavior. He had to go on killing, had to seek out other
girls, had to do to them as he had done to the thirteen-year-old girl in Tulsa. Fresh
killings would not hurt him. The police could not beat him any more brutally for additional
corpses. And death in the electric chair, when it came, would be just as painful and
just as final no matter how many girls died at his hands.

False dawn gave way to real dawn. Weaver went to another cafeteria and had another
breakfast, this time a plate of scrambled eggs and an order of toast and jelly. He
left the cafeteria and walked again, finally finding a store where they sold razors.
He bought an old-fashioned straight razor. The salesman asked him if he wanted a leather
strop as well. He told the man he already owned one.

He walked back to the hotel. He put the razor away in a dresser drawer under some
clothing. It was a sharp razor, and he liked it already. Soon, he thought, there would
be blood upon the blade.

The stack of horror comics was where he had left it. He picked up each comic, tore
it in half, and dropped it into the wastebasket beneath the washbowl. He did not need
the comic books anymore. He did not need to live his life through pictures and balloon
dialogue. He would live an active life now.

He went to bed and slept well.

* * *

Marty woke up at ten. He and Meg had called it a night around three, and as usual
he could not sleep more than seven hours at a stretch. He got out of bed and walked
to the bathroom, deciding that he must have a clock in his head, the way he never
slept more. It was strange, because the sense of timing only worked when he was unconscious.
During the day he never knew what time it was. When playing cards he lost all track,
never knew whether he’d been playing for three hours or nine hours. But when he slept,
somehow he always knew.

Meg was sleeping soundly. He took hold of her shoulder, shook her gently. Her eyes
remained closed.

He showered and shaved. He came back and she was still sound asleep. He took a pencil
and a scrap of paper and wrote her a note, telling her that she could fix herself
breakfast, that he would be back soon. He got dressed and went outside to the garage,
got into the Olds and drove away.

The sun was bright, the sky clear of clouds. Marty decided that it would be a good
day to pass up seeing Betty, the bouncy waitress. He found another diner where he’d
been a few times before. He sat at the counter, had ham and fried eggs sunny side
up and three cups of coffee. In this diner there was no waitress, just a counterman
with tattoos on both arms and a surly expression on his face. The counterman didn’t
say two words to Marty in the course of the meal. Marty decided that this was fine,
and much better than Betty and her big tits. He decided to eat breakfast there regularly.
The food was just as good, and they let you eat it in peace.

He smoked three Luckies, one with each cup of coffee. He left the lunch counter and
drove the blue Olds to a cigar store a half mile away. The clerk looked up at him
when he entered and smiled a hello. Marty waited while the clerk finished selling
a pack of pipe tobacco to a man in a blue cord suit. When the man had left, Marty
walked closer to the counter.

He said, “What’s the word?”

The clerk scratched his bald head. “A feller was around last night,” he said. “Looking
for a gin rummy game. You play gin rummy, don’t you?”

“When I can’t help it.”

“Well, he was looking for a game. He drove up in a fishtail Cadillac with Florida
plates on her.”

“What stakes does he play?”

“He said something about a dollar a point. Hollywood, spades double. I think that’s
the way he said it. I don’t know gin rummy so I can’t be sure, but that sounds about
right. It mean anything?”

“It means an expensive game,” Marty said. “A stupid game. You get a heavy hand and
you fall on a lot of money. The cards do all the work. All you need is a card memory
and a head for odds and the cards do the rest.”

The clerk didn’t say anything. Marty took out a cigarette, lit it. He said, “Maybe
the guy’s a card mechanic. Maybe he’s hustling, looking for a mark.”

“You mean a cheater?”

“Yeah.”

“It don’t appear so,” the clerk said. “He came in here an’ left a string of horse
bets. Left two hundred dollars, with me, maybe a bit more.”

“What did he play?”

“Long shots, mostly. Played ’em on the nose.”

“Then he’s not a crook,” Marty said. “He’s too stupid to be a crook. He’s got too
much money and he’s looking for ways to lose it. A Miami Beach boyo heading across
the country in his Cad and looking for action on the way. I don’t want to play him.”

“Why not?”

“He could get lucky and beat me. Gin is mostly luck, especially the rules he plays
by. I don’t like the game enough to play. I’ll pass it up.”

“Suit yourself,” the clerk said. “You want any action?”

Marty took a five dollar bill from his wallet, passed it to the clerk. “Three and
five in the double,” he said. “That’s all.”

He left the cigar store. Marty wasn’t a horse player. It didn’t make sense to him.
The books took a twenty percent cut and what was left wasn’t worth it. But he liked
to bet the daily double. All it cost him was five dollars, and when it ever came in
it was like winning a lottery. The payoff was big enough to make it worthwhile.

He drove back to his house, slowly. He stopped on the way at a gas station and filled
the tank with hi-test. He had the Mex kid check the oil and water and put air in the
tires. He tipped the kid a dollar and headed home again.

Meg, he thought. That was a broad, that was the right kind of broad. Eyes open, brain
working right. And good in bed, so good, giving as good as she got, meeting him halfway,
needing him just as he needed her. Meg was fine. He was glad he had picked her up.

In front of him, a traffic light turned red. He double-clutched the car, down-shifted
to second, eased the brake on. While he waited for the light to turn green again he
thought some more about Meg. She said she wanted excitement. She wanted to let go
of everything, that was the way she put it.

Well, fine. He could use a little of the same, a little letting go of everything.
About a week, say. A week or so of dissipation, a week of hard hot lust and hard drinking
and hard living, a week of hell on wheels. You could get all tied up, just living
the same life every day. You could be building a box around yourself without realizing
it, and all at once you were in the box and somebody was puttying up the air holes
and pretty soon you couldn’t breathe anymore. When that started to happen you had
to kick like hell until the box fell apart.

Excitement—that was her word, that was what she wanted. He had told her that Juarez
was a good place for it, which was true enough. It was a perfect place. There were
a hundred different kinds of sex, a dozen places to gamble, a million ways to get
high. The cops let you alone. You got high and got drunk and got picked and got laid,
and when you were done you crawled across the border and everything was sane again.
That was the way to do it. When the light changed he dropped into first, let out the
clutch, shot across the intersection. He drove straight home and left the car outside,
at the curb. Then he walked to the front door and unlocked it with his key.

He hoped Meg was up. He wanted to talk with her.

* * *

That morning, Lily let Cassie pay for breakfast. They ate in Juarez at a bar that
served tacos and chili. Lily ate a big plate of chili and a pair of chicken tacos
and drank a bottle of orange soda. Cassie picked up the tab. She still didn’t know
about Lily’s twelve dollars, and Lily saw no reason to clue her in. The less money
she spent, the more she would wind up with. That much was elementary.

“Look,” she said to Cassie, “I gotta get back to Paso. I left some stuff in the hotel.
I want to get it.”

“I’ll come along.”

“No.”

“Why not? You sick of me, baby? I thought you had a good time last night.”

“It was okay.”

“Just okay?”

Lily looked at the redhead. “I got kicks,” she said. “I dug what we were doing.”

“I thought you did.”

“But I have eyes to be alone.” She thought for a moment, closing her eyes to concentrate.
“I’m an introvert type,” she went on. “I have to be alone some of the time or I get
bugged. It’s nothing against you, it’s the way I swing, the way I move. I can’t be
around people too long or it gets to me and I flip a little.”

“I’m hip. I know what you mean.”

“So later,” Lily said. “I’ll go back to my crib for my stuff, then maybe catch a flick
in Paso. I could dig sitting alone in an air-conditioned movie for a few hours.”

“You got bread for a movie?”

“Some guy’ll buy my way in. Some horny cat who wants a chick to sit next to him for
a while. Once I’m inside I’ll tell an usher he’s bothering me and that’ll get rid
of him.”

“You ever do that, Lily?”

“Once or twice.”

“It sounds like a drag. Suppose the guy gives you a hard time?”