“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 Arctor set the can of Drano down on a high shelf, over some paperback porn novels, most of them out of date.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 chain 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 Manchen 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 battened red Torino stopping, its twin exhausts exhaling dark smoke, the driven’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 neseated 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 tines! 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 acccount, 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 Manchen’s but more raspy. “Get the fuck out of here, Bob Arctor–get lost, get lost, goddammit. 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 Drano. 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,” Luckman 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.