“Strictly amateur,” he called to her over the din of music. “Dead fish, broken sea shells, old stone walls, lovely faces.”
“But here’s what you want, Meyer, for God’s sake,” she said. She shook her dark hair back, turned at an angle to him, wet her lips, arched her back, then stood hipshot, head lowered, eyes hooded, lips apart, staring into the lens with stylized lustful invitation.
She struck three such poses and Meyer recorded them dutifully, but I knew he had no interest in that kind of record. When he thanked her and put the camera away, she went over and turned the volume down and said, “I posed for a lot of art model stuff, you probably saw it in girlie magazines, except I haven’t done any the last two years. I’ve got such a good body, the way it photographs, I got pretty good money, but let me tell you it’s harder work than you’d think. It worked out pretty good as something to keep some money coming in when we got the word to knock off for a couple of weeks, and another thing, when you tell the fuzz you’re a model, and you’ve got the glossies and the magazines to prove it, they better believe it.”
Meyer had returned to the chess game. She left the music turned down, went and built herself a new drink and came back and stared at the board as I made a pawn-takes-pawn move that would force a recapture and open up the middle squares.
“Maybe,” she said, “instead of that dumb game you boys could stake me twenty for a start and we could play threeway gin. Quarter of a cent? You’d get my marker for the twenty and I never faulted on a marker in my life, you can believe it.”
“Maybe later,” Meyer said.
“Excuse me all to hell,” Vangie said, turned up the music and went back to her dance, pausing to take her tiny sip of the drink from time to time.
That night I was back in an old dream, asleep on the yellow couch in the lounge, the air-conditioning off, the Flush unbuttoned, a faint coolness of night breeze moving through the screening of the open hatches forward and along the length of her and out the stern ports and doorway.
I always remember after awakening that I have dreamed the same dream many times, but in sleep it is always new. Back in that tumbledown shed on the hillside at night, in the stink of the leg wound that has gone bad, rifle braced on a broken crate, trying to push the illusions of the high fever out of my mind so that I wouldn’t get the crazies and imagine they were coming up the slope toward me through the patterns of moonlight, and fire at hallucinations and thus give them the chance to find me and finish it, then wait there and also kill the girl when she came in the morning with the medicines. Then something touched my shoulder and I knew they had sneaked around behind me.
I went in an instant from the dream to the reality of the touch in the darkness of the lounge, made a hard spasmed leap from that prone position that took me over the back of the couch, with, in the moment of takeoff, my right hand snatching the little airweight Bodyguard, hammerless .38 special. I rolled noisily to the wall, and where shadows were deepest, moved swiftly and silently to the light switch near the desk. I could see a shadow moving away from the couch. Squinting in advance to void the dazzle of the lights, I came up into a crouch and hit the switch.
Vangie had been backing away. She stared at me, mouth sagging, eyes squinched against the sudden glare, and stopped there looking at me and at the deadly muzzle of the little short-barreled handgun. I let the nerves and muscles go loose, slipped the weapon temporarily into the desk drawer.
“Salvage business!” she said in a thin enraged tone. “Salvage? For chris sake!”
I yawned. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You startled me. There are some people around who don’t appreciate me at all.”