Wild Town (19 page)

“So, while she’s workin’ in your suite, she taps your chloral hydrate, like she did, yeah, when she killed Dudley. She fills up the fountain pen or cigarette lighter, or whatever she carries the stuff in. Then, she drops in for a visit with Joyce, and dumps most of it into Joyce’s drink. Joyce keels over. Rosie washes their glasses and puts ’em away, then puts the rest of the chloral into an empty perfume bottle. It’s supposed to be suicide, see? Joyce supposedly killed Dudley, an’ now she’s gotten scared or remorseful an’—’Scuse me.”

Ford picked up the phone again. He said, “Lou Ford speak—oh, hello, Amy, how are you? Understand the boys grabbed Rosie without no trouble.”

“Never mind about Rosie!” Amy snapped. “Mac just got here, and—”

“Figured it was about time,” Ford chuckled. “Bet he ran all the way from town, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did, the poor darling! He was actually crying, he was so afraid something had happened to me. And—you stop that laughing, Lou Ford!”

“Me?” Ford grinned. “What’s the matter, Amy? Almost sound like you was mad about somethin’.”

“You’re doggoned right, I’m mad! You lied to me, Lou! You promised me he’d be safe. You said he couldn’t be hurt a bit. Y-you said that she—she’d—” Amy choked with fury, and her voice broke. “S-she—why, it’s just terrible! He’s got a lump on his head as big as an egg!”

“No kiddin’,” Ford said. “Well, I don’t imagine it hurt him much. Prob’ly went to sleep right afterwards.”

“You just wait, Lou Ford! Just wait’ll I get my hands on you! I’ll—No, you may not talk to Mac, and I’m not letting him talk to you! I’ve got him lying down with an ice-bag on his head, and he’s not getting up until I say he can.”

Ford’s face tightened, pain stabbed through his heart, flooded the jeering black eyes. For a moment his world had been penetrated—that private, one-man world—and he knew a sense of loss so great that it was almost overwhelming.

“That’s real good, Amy,” he said gently. “You keep on takin’ care of him that way, don’t never stop. Because he’s a mighty nice fella, and I know he’ll take good care of you.”

“Lou!” she said quickly. “Wait a minute! I—”

But Ford had already hung up the phone.

He bit the end from another cigar, tucked it into his mouth. He flicked the head from another match. “Now, about that missing five thousand,” he began. “I don’t know what—”

A soft snore interrupted him. Hanlon’s mouth was slightly open, and his eyes were firmly closed. And he slept the peace of the just. Or the adjusted.

The loneliness swept over Ford again, the loneliness and the bitterness. But only briefly; it was gone almost as soon as it came. He grinned and stood up quietly. He tiptoed out of the room.

He went down the hall, Stetson shoved back on his head, cigar gripped between his teeth, rocking in his high-heeled boots. Laughing at himself, jeering at himself. Laughing away the unbearable.

He reached the entrance, and he stood there for a moment. He breathed in the cold air of darkness and stared up into the heartbreaking beauty of the Far West Texas sky.

It sure was a fine night, he decided. Yes, sir, it sure was, and that was a fact…

James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films
The Killing
and
Paths of Glory
). Films based on his novels include
The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters,
and
After Dark, My Sweet.

In December 2011, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson's
Nothing More than Murder.
Following is an excerpt from the novel's opening pages.

I
’ll let you write in the box number,” I told the girl behind the counter. “Have to let you do something to earn your money.”

She smiled, kind of like an elevator boy smiles when you ask him if he has lots of ups and downs. “Yes, sir. What is your name, please?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to pay for the ad now.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, just as much as to say you’re damned right you’re going to pay now. “We have to have your name and address, sir.”

I told her I was placing the ad for a friend, “Mrs. J.J. Williamson, room four-nineteen, Crystal Arms Hotel,” and she wrote it down on a printed slip of paper and stabbed it over a spike with a lot of others.

“That runs one word over three lines. If you like, I think I can eliminate a—”

“I want it printed like it stands,” I said. “How much?”

“For three days it will be two dollars and forty-four cents.”

I had a dollar and ninety-six cents in my overcoat pocket—exactly enough if Elizabeth had figured things right. I pulled it out and laid it on the counter, and fumbled around in my pants pocket for some change.

I found a quarter, two nickels, and a few pennies. I dropped them into my coat as soon as I saw they weren’t enough, and reached again. The girl stared at my hands—the gloves—her eyebrows up a little.

I came out with a half dollar and slid it across to her.

“There,” I said, “that makes it.”

“Just a minute, sir. You have two cents change coming.”

I waved my hand at her to keep it. I didn’t want to try to pick up those pennies with my gloves on, and something told me she’d make me pick them up. I wanted to get out of there.

She hollered something just as the door closed, but I didn’t turn around. I hit the street and I kept right on walking without looking back.

I guess I must have gone a dozen blocks, just walking along blind, before I realized I was being a chump. I stopped and lighted a cigarette, and saw no one was following me. It began to drift in on me that there really wasn’t any reason why anyone should. I felt like kicking myself for letting Elizabeth plan the thing.

She’d insisted on my wearing gloves, which, I could see now, was a hell of a phony touch. She’d had me print out the ad in advance on a piece of dime-store paper, and that looked funny, too, when you put it with the other.

And then she’d figured out the exact price of the ad—only it wasn’t the exact price.

I went on down the street toward film row, wondering why, since she always fouled me up, I ever bothered to listen to Elizabeth. Wondering whether I was actually as big a chump as she always said I was.

I wish now that I’d kept on wondering instead of plowing on ahead. But I didn’t, and I don’t think it proves I wasn’t smart because I didn’t.

After Dark, My Sweet

The Alcoholics

Bad Boy

The Criminal

Cropper’s Cabin

The Getaway

The Golden Gizmo

The Grifters

Heed the Thunder

A Hell of a Woman

The Killer Inside Me

The Kill-Off

The Nothing Man

Nothing More than Murder

Now and on Earth

Pop. 1280

Recoil

The Rip-Off

Savage Night

South of Heaven

A Swell-Looking Babe

Texas by the Tail

The Transgressors

Wild Town

“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

—
New York Times

“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

—Stephen King

“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

—
Washington Post

“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

—
New Republic

“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

—
Vanity Fair

“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

—
Chicago Tribune

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 1957 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from
Nothing More than Murder
copyright 1949 by Jim Thompson
Cover design by Julianna Lee, cover art: Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Mulholland Books Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
www.mulhollandbooks.com/jimthompson
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First e-book edition, December 2011

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ISBN 978-0-316-19594-2