HCC 115 - Borderline

  Then as they began to reach the outskirts of El Paso he let up on the gas even more and the speedometer dropped to forty.

  In El Paso, at a traffic light, he took two ten-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to her. He was shy about it, telling her he wanted her to have a good meal and buy a pretty dress. She thanked him and got out of the car.

  El Paso, she said to herself. Now what?

  Just what could she do here?

  She didn’t know.

  Yet she had gotten this far without ever knowing what she was going to do from one minute to the next.

  Somehow she’d gotten this far all right. All right, once she had gotten away from Frank and Spider. Or they had gotten away from her.

  Whichever way it was didn’t matter. Just the fact that she was no longer with them was all that mattered.

  No matter what happened to her now—it couldn’t be worse than what had happened to her in that hotel room. Worse than that Texan had done to her.

  She could still feel the pain.

  In spite of the comfortable car ride.

  In spite of the cool air-conditioning.

  In spite of the two days that had passed, and the hundreds of miles she’d put between herself and that room. In spite of it all, the pain was still there.

  Aching.

  Throbbing.

  Her thigh muscles so sore, she had trouble walking.

  And inside of her—the pain extended deep inside her, and the tiny finger-edges of it extended themselves to all parts of her body.

  She had to get out of El Paso, and into Mexico. But first she had to get washed and rested, and get some food in her empty stomach.

  But how?

  Then she slowly remembered the bills she held in her hand.

  She looked at them.

  Twenty dollars, twenty dollars, twenty dollars, her mind repeated and she smiled to herself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The hotel where Weaver was staying was a far cry from the Warwick. This one was called Cappy’s Hotel, and it was on Hinesdale at the corner of Eighteenth. A skid row dump, no air-conditioning and plenty of insects. There was a fan that hung from the ceiling. Weaver lay on his back on a sagging army cot and the fan blew hot air at him. He was lying in a pool formed of his own sweat. The sweat had been caused half by the heat and half by his fear. Weaver was afraid.

  His full name was Michael Patrick Weaver. His friends might have called him Mike or Mickey or Mick or M.P. It was a moot point, for Weaver had no friends. He was short and wiry and ugly, with a little pimple of a nose and no chin at all. His eyes were pig eyes, beady pig eyes, and his forehead was low enough to justify Lombroso’s theories about the physiology of the criminal type. His hair was black and coarse with no curl to it. He wore it combed down across his forehead, an unconscious imitation of Hitler, and this only lowered his forehead that much more. His teeth were bad. They were yellow, pocked with cavities, and two of the incisors were chipped. He was ugly from top to bottom, and his fear made him even uglier.

  They were going to kill him. He thought about this, and shivered. They were going to catch him, first, and then they were going to cart him back to Tulsa. Then the police would give him a beating.

  He knew all about police beatings. He’d had one once, when that big raw-boned cop had caught him having a look in a window. There had been a broad in the window, and the broad had had her clothes off, and Weaver had been having a look. He had stared at her, the feverish excitement mounting within him, the passion building. He hadn’t hurt the broad. He had only stared at her breasts and genitals, had let his mind construct harmless fantasies that hadn’t hurt the broad a bit.

  But the cop saw him, and grabbed him, and dragged him down to the police station. They booked him as a Peeping Tom and they beat the hell out of him. He remembered the big cop working on his face, slapping backhand and forehand, until he couldn’t see straight. He remembered a shorter cop with a rubber truncheon. They had tough cops in Tulsa.

  And that was just for watching, just for being a harmless Peeping Tom. That had gotten him a beating and a fingerprinting and a suspended sentence. This thing, now, was different. This thing was going to get him electrocuted. This thing would get him a very bad beating, three times as bad as the time when he looked at the broad. And after they beat him there would be a trial, and he would be found guilty, and then they would strap him in a chair and throw a switch.

  He would smell his own flesh burning as the current jolted through his body, Then he would be dead, and it would be over.

  Forever.

  He shivered, a weird action in the intense heat. He remembered now, remembered the thing he had done. His breathing grew heavy as the scene flashed through his mind again:

  A night, and a girl.

  The girl was thirteen years old. He didn’t know this then but found it out later in the newspaper stories. The girl was thirteen years old, and the girl had soft pale green eyes and the budding breasts of a precocious adolescent. Brown hair, soft brown hair that would be very soft to touch. Legs that were starting to come into their own, a little awkward still, a slight bit bony, but beginning to fill out. A mouth with no lipstick on it.

  She shouldn’t have been out that late. It was after midnight, Saturday night, and Weaver was on his way home from the movies. They had a pair of horror movies that night, one about a vampire who drank the blood of women, one about a man who could transform himself into a black panther and leap from trees upon passing girls.

  The movies had excited Weaver. He had imagined himself as the vampire in one beautiful sequence where they had shown the vampire, his fangs in the neck of a terror-stricken blonde. Weaver remembered the shrill screams of the blonde, remembered how the camera had shown the tops of her creamy breasts, how the vampire had sucked her blood and left her dead. In the other movie he had mentally changed placed with the black panther. When the animal dropped from a high limb upon the back of a youthful brunette—this girl, too, providentially equipped with a low-cut gown that exposed her breasts—Weaver’s excitement had been almost too much to bear. The beast’s talons clawed the girl’s shoulders and Weaver wanted to scream with passion. And now he was on his way home. The passion was bottled up inside; when he reached his small furnished room on Tulsa’s north side, he would relive the two movies and relieve his frustrations the only way he knew. For now, he was just walking. Walking alone, through dark streets.

  And then he saw the girl. She was walking toward him, and he looked at the fluffy brown hair that looked so soft. He saw her waist and thought that he could span it with his hands. He saw her breasts, and he saw the promise her loins held. He saw her throat, an ivory column, and he recalled the teeth of the vampire in the throat of the blonde.

  Even then he might have done nothing, might merely have added her to his masturbatory fantasy that night. But she spoke to him. She walked right up to him and asked him what time it was.

  He didn’t own a watch. He told her it was late. His voice had an odd quality to it, a metallic whine.

  “Oh, gosh,” she said. “I should of been home hours ago. I went to this movie, see, with Elvis in it, and it was so good I saw it through three times. My Ma’s gonna skin me alive, but it was some picture. Don’t you just love Elvis?”

  Those were the last words the girl ever spoke.

  The streets were dark and empty. Weaver grabbed her, one hand over her mouth, the other on her shoulder. There was no convenient alleyway but a darkened storefront was a handy substitute. He got her into the storefront, his arms strong with muscle and desperation. He released her for a moment, and her mouth opened for a scream. He hit her in the mouth with his closed fist. He knocked out three of her front teeth.

  She was wearing a plaid skirt and a pale yellow blouse. He tore the blouse open and buttons bounced crazily on the pavement. He cupped her breasts with his hands, squeezed, then tore her bra in two. The breasts sprang out with rosebud nipples at their tips.

  He
was the panther now. He slapped a hand over her bleeding mouth and banged her head against the pavement. He sprang at her, and his teeth found her breast, and his teeth closed in the grip of a vise. A black panther striking his prey—

  The girl screamed against his hand. He bit her breasts, drew blood from the tender flesh. His hands tore her skirt upward, reduced her cheap white cotton panties to scattered remnants of cloth. He grabbed her with one hand and tugged at the tenderest part of her body, biting her breast flesh all the while with his chipped yellow teeth.

  He fumbled with his own clothing. He undressed himself as much as was necessary and threw himself upon her. Whenever she tried to moan, he slapped her head against the pavement. He took her, forcing himself into her, and while he violated her his teeth found her throat.

  He was the panther no longer. He was the vampire, now.

  One of Tulsa’s newspapers called him the Cannibal Killer. The other referred to him as Dracula. Both described how the girl’s flesh had been literally eaten away in sections, how there were toothmarks in her throat, how the back of her head was a pulpy mess from the beating he had given her. Both reported quite honestly that she was very very dead, and that she had not died pleasantly at all.

  He left fingerprints behind. His fingerprints were on record, from before, and the police knew who he was. He left Tulsa, running like a frightened rabbit rather than a lordly panther. He left on a Trailways bus and headed for Mexico. He had seen criminals run for Mexico to escape the law. It seemed as good a place to go as any. He ran like a rabbit, and he found a rabbit warren hotel in El Paso, and he was there now.

  Because it was not so easy to run to Mexico. The men at the border had his picture and his description and his fingerprints, and they would be waiting for him to try to get across. As long as he stayed in Cappy’s Hotel he was reasonably safe, at least until the police followed him to El Paso and made a door-to-door check for him. The minute he tried to cross the border, they would grab him.

  He had already given up. He’d developed a fatalistic attitude about it all. Soon—in a week or two—he would run out of money. Soon he’d be a rabbit flushed from its burrow. Then they would catch him. And beat him. And strap him in the electric chair so that he could smell his own flesh burning.

  Now it was only a matter of staying alive as long as he could, of living each day as it came and waiting for the police. He had been at Cappy’s Hotel for almost a week. He stayed in his room as much as he could, leaving it only to eat at a lunch counter down the street or to buy comic books at a newsstand. The comic books were horror comics, the only kind he cared for. Right now there was a huge stack of them on the cigarette-scarred bureau. He had read them all twice through.

  He stood up. There was a sink in the room, its porcelain bowl stained yellow where the water from each tap ran to the drain in the center. He ran water into the bowl, dipped a towel into it, and wiped the sweat from his ugly face. He got his hair wet and combed it down over his forehead, the way he liked it. He looked at himself for just a second in the cracked mirror over the bowl.

  He had to go to the bathroom. His room was a cheap one, two bucks a day, and it did not have a private bathroom. He put on a shirt and walked out of his room, leaving the door ajar. He headed down the hallway.

  The girl was leaving the bathroom just as he was approaching it. He looked at the girl. She looked at him, then averted her eyes. Women seldom looked at Weaver for any length of time. He was, really, very little to look at.

  But the girl was fine to look at. She was short and slender, with breasts that pushed her shirt front out and hips that fitted her khaki pants snugly.

  Weaver did not know that her name was Lily Daniels.

  He knew only that she looked very much like another girl, a girl in Tulsa, a girl he had raped and tortured and killed. A little older, but similar, like she might have been the other girl’s big sister. He turned to watch her continue on down the hall. She went into a room just next door to his, and he kept watching her until she had closed her door.

  He went to the bathroom and used the toilet. He went back to his own room, then, and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed under the fan, which resumed blowing hot air upon him. He tried to sit still but it was impossible. He could not get the girl out of his mind, could not banish her image, could not stop his mind from inventing horrible things that he wanted to do to her. She was like the girl in Tulsa, and he had done terrible things to the girl in Tulsa.

  He wondered what he was going to do Lily Daniels. Something awful, he thought. Something really terrible. The thought excited him.

  * * *

  Meg Rector was drunk, more or less. She hadn’t planned it that way, not when she first entered the dimly lighted cocktail lounge. She’d planned on having a few drinks, and she’d planned on finding some excitement in one way or another, but she hadn’t planned on getting drunk.

  It had worked out that way. The excitement, nebulous enough in her own mind, had failed to materialize. The bar drew a quiet crowd—dark men in lightweight suits whom she somehow assumed to be gangsters, cool-eyed women in expensive gowns, upper-middle-class married couples having a quiet drink before dinner. There was soft music and subdued conversation. There was no excitement.

  Meg stayed at her table. From time to time her glass was empty, and from time to time the waiter came and took away the empty, replacing it with fresh Beefeater and a pair of fresh ice cubes. She drank her drinks slowly enough, never getting high, never sinking into alcoholic depression, never even realizing the effect the liquor was having upon her.

  A chemical and biological fact was responsible for the fact that she got drunk. The fact is this: the liver removes alcohol from the bloodstream at the rate of one ounce per hour. A man may drink one ounce of alcohol per hour for his entire lifetime and never become remotely drunk. But if he drinks more than an ounce per hour, and if he does this for a sufficient number of hours, he’s going to fall under alcohol’s influence. This is inevitable.

  Meg averaged two drinks an hour, and each had a full jigger of 90-proof gin. A jigger is an ounce and a half, and 90-proof gin is forty-five percent alcohol, so with the aid of pencil and paper and patience one can easily determine that she was taking in one and one-third ounces of alcohol per hour. She had a head start, too, in the form of the bottle of chianti she had had at Giardi’s.

  By seven in the evening, then, she was drunk.

  She stood up slowly but steadily, took a crisp dollar bill from her purse, folded it once and dropped it upon the table top for the waiter. She walked steadily out of the cocktail lounge to the street. At the doorway she braced herself for a rush of unbearable heat, since the cocktail lounge had been air-conditioned and since the street was not. She opened the door and stepped outside, and she was surprised to discover that the breeze which blew at her was pleasantly cool. El Paso evidently cooled off in the evenings, and for this she was thankful. Heat right now might knock her over. Hot air, after a plethora of gin, is a bad chaser.

  She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the breeze. She felt fine, she decided; not at all wobbly, not at all nauseous, not at all sober. It was a good feeling. If excitement was going to materialize, she was going to be able to accept it. She was in the right sort of mood. Not sick, not ready to fall on her face, and not sober.

  At the corner she saw that she was still on Carleton Boulevard. So far the street had been good to her, having supplied her with good food at Giardi’s and good gin at the cocktail lounge. She saw no valid reason to desert Carleton Boulevard. She crossed the street and stayed with Carleton, heading toward more bright lights.

  The bright light section was the approach to the border. She saw small shops selling souvenirs of Mexico, which impressed her as odd items to purchase on the Texas side. Other shops offered to convert dollars to pesos. She still had Mexican money in her purse, money from Mexico City which she had never bothered to reconvert into dollars.

  Now, evidently,
she would have a chance to spend some of it, some of those one- and five- and ten-peso notes. A peso was around eight cents, she knew, and it was hard to think of a bill worth eight cents as being legal tender in anything but Monopoly. She stopped by a streetlight to take her wallet from her purse and go through the Mexican bills in one compartment. She had eighty-six pesos, or $6.88. She wondered what she could buy with eighty-six pesos. Not very much, she decided. But she knew they took American money in Juarez, just as they had in Mexico City.

  They didn’t even stop her at the Customs shed. She could understand that; the only thing you could smuggle profitably into Mexico was gold, and she could hardly carry gold in a handbag. Cars were a profitable smuggling item as well, since Mexico had a hundred percent import duty on them, but she was on foot. The Customs man smiled at her and motioned her on through. She took a few dozen steps and she was in Mexico again.

  Ciudad Juarez, she said to herself. Big deal.

  There were no cigarettes in her sterling silver cigarette case. She found her way to a stand that sold junk jewelry and souvenirs and cigars and tequila and, finally, cigarettes. She looked at the display and pointed to a pack labeled Delicados. A Mexican with a drooping moustache handed her the pack and she gave him a one-peso note. Surprisingly, he returned some Mexican coins in change. She looked at them oddly, wondering what they could give you that was change for eight cents. She dropped the coins in her purse, opened the pack of cigarettes and filled her cigarette case. She lit one, drew on it, inhaled. It tasted exactly like any American cigarette.

  In flawless English, the Mexican asked her if she would like to buy a packet of filthy pictures.

  Sober, she might have stalked away haughtily. Sober and still married to Borden Rector, she would certainly have done so. But she was drunk and divorced and hunting for excitement. While she could imagine more exciting fare than filthy photographs, she didn’t want to miss any bets.