Into the phone, Barris was saying in a weird, high-pitched slow voice, “Operator, is it called the inhalator squad or the resuscitation squad?”
“Sir,” the phone tab squawked from its speaker by Fred, “is there someone unable to breathe? Do you wish–”
“It, I believe, is a cardiac arrest,” Barris was saying now in his low, urgent, professional-type, calm voice into the phone, a voice deadly with awareness of peril and gravity and the running out of time. “Either that or involuntary aspiration of a bolus within the–”
“What is the address, sin?” the operator broke in.
“The address,” Barris said, “let’s see, the address is–”
Fred, aloud, standing, said, “Christ.”
Suddenly Luckman, lying stretched out on the floor, heaved convulsively. He shuddered and then barfed up the material obstructing his throat, thrashed about, and opened his eyes, which stared in swollen confusion.
“Uh, he appears to be all right now,” Barris said smoothly into the phone. “Thank you; no assistance is needed after all.” He rapidly hung the phone up.
“Jeez,” Luckman muttered thickly as he sat up. “Fuck.” He wheezed noisily, coughing and struggling for air.
“You okay?” Barris asked, in tones of concern.
“I must have gagged. Did I pass out?”
“Not exactly. You did go into an altered state of consciousness, though. For a few seconds. Probably an alpha state.”
“God! I soiled myself!” Unsteadily, swaying with weakness, Luckman managed to get himself to his feet and stood rocking back and forth dizzily, holding on to the wall for support. “I’m really getting degenerate,” he muttered in disgust. “Like an old wino.” He headed toward the sink to wash himself, his steps uncertain.
Watching all this, Fred felt the fear drain from him. The man would be okay. But Barris! What sort of person was he? Luckman had recovered despite him. What a freak, he thought. What a kinky freak. Where’s his head at, just to stand idle like that?
“A guy could cash in that way,” Luckman said as he splashed water on himself at the sink.
Barris smiled.
“I got a really strong physical constitution,” Luckman said, gulping water from a cup. “What were you doing while I was lying there? Jacking off?”
“You saw me on the phone,” Barris said. “Summoning the paramedics. I moved into action at–”
“Balls,” Luckman said sourly, and went on gulping down fresh clean water. “I know what you’d do if I dropped dead– you’d rip off my stash. You’d even go through my pockets.”
“It’s amazing,” Barris said, “the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage. So that the risk of–”
Silently, Luckman gave him the finger.
A screech of brakes. A horn. Bob Arctor looked swiftly up at the night traffic. A sports car, engine running, by the curb; inside it, a girl waving at him.
Donna.
“Christ,” he said again. He strode toward the curb.
Opening the door of her MG, Donna said, “Did I scare you? I passed you on my way to your place and then I flashed on it that it was you truckin’ along, so I made a U-turn and came back. Get in.”
Silently he got in and shut the car door.
“Why are you out roaming around?” Donna said. “Because of your car? It’s still not fixed?”
“I just did a freaky number,” Bob Arctor said. “Not like a fantasy trip. Just . . .” He shuddered.
Donna said, “I have your stuff.”
“What?” he said.
“A thousand tabs of death.”
“_Death?_” he echoed.
“Yeah, high-grade death. I better drive.” She shifted into low, took off and out onto the street; almost at once she was driving along too fast. Donna always drove too fast, and tailgated, but expertly.
“That fucking Barris!” he said. “You know how he works? He doesn’t kill anybody he wants dead; he just hangs around until a situation arises where they die. And he just sits there while they die. In fact, he sets them up to die while he stays out of it. But I’m not sure how. Anyhow, he arranges to allow them to fucking die.” He lapsed into silence then, brooding to himself. “Like,” he said, “Barris wouldn’t wire plastic explosives into the ignition system of your car. What he’d do–”
“Do you have the money?” Donna said. “For the stuff? It’s really Primo, and I need the money right now. I have to have it tonight because I have to pick up some other things.”
“Sure.” He had it in his wallet.
“I don’t like Barris,” Donna said as she drove, “and I don’t trust him. You know, he’s crazy. And when you’re around him you’re crazy too. And then when you’re not around him you’re okay. You’re crazy right now.”
“I am?” he said, startled.
“Yes,” Donna said calmly.
“Well,” he said. “Jesus.” He did not know what to say to that. Especially since Donna was never wrong.
“Hey,” Donna said with enthusiasm, “could you take me to a rock concert? At the Anaheim Stadium next week? Could you?”
“Right on,” he said mechanically. And then it flashed on him what Donna had said–asking him to take her out. “_AlIl riiiight!_” he said, pleased; life flowed back into him. Once again, the little dark-haired chick whom he loved so much had restored him to caring. “Which night?”
“It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m going to bring some of that oily dark hash and get really loaded. They won’t know the difference; there’ll be thousands of heads there.” She glanced at him, critically. “But you’ve got to wear something neat, not those funky clothes you sometimes put on. I mean–” Her voice softened. “I want you to look foxy because you are foxy.”
“Okay,” he said, charmed.
“I’m taking us to my place,” Donna said as she shot along through the night in her little car, “and you do have the money and you will give it to me, and then we’ll drop a few of the tabs and kick back and get really mellow, and maybe you’d like to buy us a fifth of Southern Comfort and we can get bombed as well.”
“Oh wow,” he said, with sincerity.
“What I really genuinely want to do tonight,” Donna said as she shifted down and swiveled the car onto her own street and into her driveway, “is go to a drive-in movie. I bought a paper and read what’s on, but I couldn’t find anything good except at the Torrance Drive-in, but it’s already started. It started at five-thirty. Bummer.”
He examined his watch. “Then we’ve missed–”
“No, we could still see most of it.” She shot him a warm smile as she stopped the car and shut off the engine. “It’s all the _Planet of the Apes_ pictures, all eleven of them; they run from 7:30 P.M. all the way through to 8 A.M. tomorrow morning. I’ll go to work directly from the drive-in, so I’ll have to change now. We’ll sit there at the movie loaded and drinking Southern Comfort all night. Wow, can you dig it?” She peered at him hopefully.
“All right,” he echoed.
“Yeah yeah yeah.” Donna hopped out and came around to help him open his little door. “When did you last see all the _Planet of the Apes_ pictures? I saw most of them earlier this year, but then I got sick toward the last ones and had to split. It was a ham sandwich they vended me there at the drive-in. That really made me mad; I missed the last picture, where they reveal that all the famous people in history like Lincoln and Nero were secretly apes and running all human history from the start. That’s why I want to go back now so bad.” She lowered her voice as they walked toward her front door. “They burned me by vending that ham sandwich, so what I did–don’t rat on me–the next time we went to the drive-in, the one in La Habra, I stuck a bent coin in the slot and a couple more in other vending machines for good measure. Me and Larry Talling–you remember Larry, I was going with him?–bent a whole bunch of quarters and fifty-cent pieces using his vise and a big wrench. I made sure all the vending machines were owned by the same firm, of course, and then we fucked up a bunch of them, practically all of them, if the truth were known.” She unlocked her front door with her key, slowly and gravely, in the dim light.
“It is not good policy to burn you, Donna,” he said as they entered her small neat place.
“Don’t step on the shag carpet,” Donna said.
“Where’ll I step, then?”
“Stand still, or on the newspapers.”
“Donna–”
“Now don’t give me a lot of heavy shit about having to walk on the newspapers. Do you know how much it cost me to get my carpet shampooed?” She stood unbuttoning her jacket.