Kitten with a whip (15 page)

David jerked with surprise but Jody Said calmly.

"Of course I told him. That's why I blew hot for David in the first place. He's a gentleman and he feels sorry for people who make stupid mistakes.'*

Buck rubbed his hand over his face. "My mistake, not yours, you bitch."

"Then why you making with the jealous husband bit? Tell me that—why?"

" 'Cause I'm in my rights and I'm tired of being pushed around!" Buck's voice rose hysterically, ending in a gasp. He dug in his pocket. A knife handle began to emerge in his fumbling hand. A smart cHck and six inches of whetted blade followed the handle, fully opened even before he had it withdrawn from his pocket.

David stared at the gleaming reaHty of the first switchblade knife he had ever seen. Tensed, he began to speak low-voiced to Jody, "Look, if he's your husband—" but she twisted and crushed out his instructions with a soft kiss.

Buck made animal noises in his throat. Jody turned and announced to the room at large, "That's the way it is now. I can't even remember the lousy piddling way it used to be. Buck's all through and he knows it."

"Then why'd you caU me to come out here?" He adopted his artificial hmp as he came across the room and seized Tody by the shoulder. He pulled her ofiE David's lap. Tfou're not making no buster out of mel Not with some old slob of a pansy. You don't dare like him better than me!"

David was glad the girl was out of his way. He braced himself against the chair and kept his eyes on the kmfe. At the first serious move, he would make his lunge for it. He'd get cut, he knew, but not badly. Buck was liquored up now, slowed down. He could handle him. In the space of one shivering excited breath, he had rehearsed a dozen times what he'd do. And with almost the same urgency he was thinking, I've got to make it up to Julian Clark. We've got to have them over for drinks, get to know them, make friends. We dont have enough friends.

Jody coolly dug a sharp fingernail into Buck's wrist and got her shoulder loose. The knife didn't faze her at all. She said, "Man, how can you think you're so

smokv when you re so nothing, nothing painted blue. Howd you get so built up, huh? Why, I'd roll around with an entire gang of Pandios before Td lay you again. That's actually."

*Tancho?" Buck concentrated on the idea. He shook his blond coiffured head in disbelief but gradually his bleary eyes were drawn to the hall door. "A stinking ratty trick," he mumbled. "Behind my back." All at once his mouth opened wide and he yeUed at the top of his lungs. "Panchol Come and get it, you Mex bastardl" He plunged across the living room into the hall.

David leapea to his feet but Tody flung herself in his way, winding her arms around his waist. "Let him gol" she panted. 'Let him get it out of his systeml"

"But that knife—somebody's going to get hurt—"

"Who11 miss them, any of them?" Her eyes were ablaze with exhilaration; she was wholly aUve again, on top of the world from where everybody else looked small. "Would you rather it was you, David?"

From Katie's room came the yelps of soimd, Nina's lingering piercing shriek, Pancho's howl of scared protest, the crash of fimiiture overturning. Nina came flying down the hall, her lopsided child-face wrinkled with terror. She grasped her panties in one hand and tried to button her blouse with the other. 3he ran for the protection of Midge who still sat unmoving on the sectional. "He's crazyl she babbled. "He's trying to cut Panchol And for nothing, we were just—"

David cast Jody aside, snatched the poker from the fireplace rack and ran for Katie's room. Jody was right, sure; none of the monsters would be missed. But not here, not imder his roof. He couldn't stand around and let murder happen. And as he ran, the logical observer part of his mind was praying, God, dont let it happen here, dont let them get anything on the new carpet. Nine hundred dollars worth of wall-to-waU, tacldess stripping, so much to be proud of. At this moment, it was as important as anything else in his life.

Chapter Thirteen

It was all over by the time David reached the door. He rushed into Katie's room, poker upraised, and there was nothing for him to do but stop short and look at Buck and Pancho.

Buck stood hunched beside the rumpled bed, gazing down foolishly at the knife in his hand. The blade was red at the tip.

David kept the poker poised for striking. "Okay, give me that knife or I'll wrap this thing around your skull," he ordered. Buck obeyed sheepishly; he wiped the blade against the hip of nis levis, folded it back into its sheath and handed it over. His drunken rage was gone. He even looked sober. "God damn," he mumbled penitently.

David dropped the knife in his pocket and turned to Pancho. Fright mottled the boy's swarthy face as he crouched against the pink dresser, still at bay. Behind him, on the dresser drawers, the decals of clowns and teddy bears cavorted in their cataleptic merriment, and he was as frozen in position as any of them. Only his blood moved. His right hand was gripped around the biceps of his left arm and between his fingers the redness flowed slowly down to his elbow and dripped rhythmically onto the carpet.

"How bad is it?" David asked.

Pancho jerked his eyes away from Buck and came to life with a noisy breath. "What'd I do?" he whined. "I wasn't blowing any trouble."

Buck shook his head slowly, unable to explain what he couldn't understand himself. On the bed the big panda doll regarded them all with impartial button eyes.

From the doorway, Jody passed her judgment. "Jerks!"

"Here, put this poker away," David told her. To Pancho, he repeated, "How bad is it?"

Pancho peeked under his hand and looked sick. *lt*s bleeding. See how I'm bleeding.'*

"WelJ^ get in the bathroom and 111 see what I can do. Don't step in any of itl" As he followed Pancho, he pointed a finger back at Buck. "You—straighten that bedspread."

In the bathroom, David washed the wound with a cold cloth. It was a six-inch gaping slash down the outside of the arm but he couldn't tell how deep it went. No matter how fast he sponged away the blood, it kept welling up and dripping into the sink. It didn't pump forth in spurts so he felt sure that no artery had been severed. "A bandage isn't going to do much," he told his patient. "It'll take stitches."

"I can't go to no doc," Pancho complained. "He'd want to know how come I got this." A shadow filled the doorway. Buck was standing there awkwardly. Pancho glanced his way and laughed shakily. "You're pretty messy, dad."

"Didn't mean it," Buck said, shamefaced. "One of those things."

"One I owe you, that's all," Pancho said Ughtly.

David commenced to wind gauze bandage around the wound, as tightly as possible without cutting off the circulation. The white gauze turned red as fast as he could wind. "This is only temporary at best," he told Pancho again. "You're going to have to see a doctor right away."

"Hear tfie man, Buck? You stick me, I'm going to stick you—with a doctor's bill."

Buck grinned. "Up your bucket. Ill kiss it and make it well."

"And give me what you've got? Oh, hell no."

David ran out of bandage. "That's it." Buck draped his arm companionably across Pancho's shoulders and they sauntered out toward the hving room. David opened the bathroom window and drew a deep breath of the warm night air. The sight of blood didn't bother him but, working so close to Pancho, the smell of the medication on the back of the boy's neck was beginning to nauseate him. With a sigh he turned back to the sink to clean it. As he scoured, he brooded over his lack

of comprehension of these people. He, the bystander, was far more disturbed by me assault than they were.

They must have gotten conditioned to violence somehow, he decided. To them it came cheap. Look at their easy use of 'IdUer" as an endearment. I grew up when money was expensive and so was life and everything was on a pretty even keel, he thought. You knew tomorrow wouldnt he too much different from today and you were pretty far grown up, with all your standards and values established, before tomorrow came and killed some thirty million people in the war and then another million in that Korean nonsense. And you still cant be sure it's over.

That's what these kids were bom to—cheap Hfe, cheap money, cheap everything. People can't imderstand anything any more unless they can count in the biUions and even one lousy biUion is incomprehensible. Looking at it that way, no wonder there's nothing stable about them. Everything's tentative, built to last a minute and no more. Tlieir friendships, their enmities, all based on the here and now because one minute later somebody may look into a microscope or press a button and nothing anyone knows will be true any more. One minutes all you've got, kids; tomorrow is as mysterious as a billion. So Pancho got his arm sliced open. It could have been his jugular or his heart, hut don't worry about it. Worry is only for the higher animals, the elder ones who organized this mess . . .

At that point, he pulled his thinking up short. He didn't like the tack it was taking. Damned if he was going to absolve Tody and her tribe of all blame, much less begin to shoulder it himself. They were the freaks, not he, and for every Buck and Jody there must be a thousand decent responsible Idds wno could face up to hard luck and a queasy overpriced world and come through all right. Sid Wright's boys were a good example. So his own misfortune wasn't that he had become involved with the younger generation but that he had become involved with these particular twisted ambassadors of it. And that nothing in his backgroimd had prepared him to deal with them.

With the bathroom clean and orderly again, he wrung

out a bath towel under the faucet and returned to Katie's room. He righted her Httle blackboard desk that had gotten knocked over in the scuffle and picked up the pieces of chalk that had fallen out of it. Then he got down on his knees to scrub away the blood that still glistened on the carpet. The drops stood out prominently on the dark tweedy weave that he and Vir-ginifl had finally decided on because it wouldn't show uie dirt. David sighed and began to blot and rub with the clammy towel. He hoped that cold water would do the trick but he wouldn't be able to tell for sure until it had dried. On his hands and knees, he pursued the trail along the hall to the bathroom, sponging as he went, swearing imder his breath. When the trail came to an end, he rinsed the bloodstains out of the towel and spread it to dry along the edge of the tub.

Buck and Pancho and Jody were deep in a serious discussion when David returned to the Uving room. They broke off at his entrance, all three glancing at him in such a way as to make him certain that he had been the subject matter of their conversation.

Davia looked around. "Where are the other girls?'*

"They took off," Jody said indifferently. "Guess they thought the session was getting a Httle rough."

'*Yeah," Pancho said disgustedly to Buck. 'That's another bit I owe you, big man. Nina was just starting to moan it up when you busted in with the sharp stuff."

"We still got Jody."

She snorted. Anxiously, David peeked out through the Venetian blind. The low-slung hotrod was gone, too, and his hopes shriveled. He hadn't reahzed till now how tenaciously he had been clinging to the vague but possible scheme that somehow Jody could be persuaded to leave with her friends, or even that her friends could be bribed into abducting her. But now their transportation had run away and he was saddled with not one helHon but three of them.

"You should've at least have got the keys," Pancho was complaining.

"For Midge's bucket? You must be off to the moon or somethingi She won't turn loose of the keys for no-

body. I mean, she knows it's the bucket that keeps her in circulation, not her fat tail."

"Maybe you shouldVe used the knife on her instead. She's got skin to spore."

"Next time."

"Why didn't you have sense enough to beat it with the other girlsr David asked Jody. "It was a perfect opportunity."

*I couldn't run out on you, David, leave you with a mess on your hands. I'm not like that. Besides, this way's better."

"Better for who?"

There was a quick silence as if he had supplied a cue. They looked at each other, waiting for one to turn spokesman. Jody stepped into the breach. "David killer, we've been racking over what we should do next." She paused with a tender smile, inviting him to ask what. When he didn't, she continued. "Well, this is your own idea, David, and I think you're absolutely right. Remember, you said Pancho has to see a doctor?*

"Just a minute," David interrupted. He regarded Pancho, who grinned apprehensively. "I thought you were afraid to."

"Well, yeah, I am," Pancho. "I go to a doc with a cut like this and no matter how I say I got it, they're going to check with the cops. And anything that's happened anywhere in town tonight, 111 get hauled in for. Maybe you never been rousted, huh?"

"Maybe you'd rather lose your arm."

"Let me finish," said Tody. "It so happens that Buck knows a doc that'll paten up Pancho's arm without asking any dumb questions. All you have to do is just run us down to Tijuana—"

David was shaking his head before Jody had finished speaking. Buck growled, "We might just up and take your car, you know."

"I don't think so," David told him steadily. "We'd tangle and this time you don't have the knife."

"Oh, Buck, shut up," Jody commanded. "That's all you know, going ape and throwing your weight around. Give David a chance to think it over and he'll see what's the bright thing to do. After aU, if he doesn't

drive us down to T-town, well just have to hole up here and take our chances." She smiled winningly at her host

DeUberately, he scowled back at her. Inside he was quaking with the thrill of being on the verge. She was Daiting him, of course, holding out the possibility of getting rid of her in exchange for taking them all to Tijuana. '"Well ..." He mustn't appear too anxious. He mustn't let her guess that he had hatched this identical scheme this afternoon, had it ready to go in the back of his mind. He looked from one to the other of them in pretended desperation. Finally, he threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust. "Well, I guess I'm stuck. Okay, 111 drive you down there."