[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Rooney moved over beside her. "You look a little peaked, are you sure you feel
all right?"
She nodded silently, almost numbly.
There was something wrong.
"Was there trouble in the operation?" I directed my question at the nurse. Her
face froze over;
she was a hard, cold bitch. I asked her again. She didn't answer.
"You feel be'er eef you put a li'l lisstick on," the Medusa said. Jenny
mumbled something vague at that. I wanted to do something, but didn't know
what.
The decision was taken over by Luis, who appeared magically from the anteroom.
"Time to go," he said. The nurse disappeared back into one of the other
doorways, and we stood up, helping Jenny between us. We moved out into the
anteroom, and there was a waiting line of five new girls. I was amazed and
staggered at the amount of business Quintano had accumulated. If he wasn't a
millionaire, tax-free, he certainly needed a good business manager. The
college kids were there, and the blonde looked just fine, just fine.
We left the house and got back in the car and the gate was raised and we drove
away, in exact reverse order of the way we had made our entrance. And even
though Hot-Rock Luis twisted and turned and drove us back to town by a
different route, it didn't matter: I knew the way to
Quintano's little do-it-yourselfery cold.
Luis left us off at the Woolworth's lot, and burned rubber getting away. The
five of us stood there staring at each other and the cars. "How much was
yours?" the college boy asked. "Four," I
replied. He nodded. "Ours, too." It seemed to make him feel better.
"Can we go?" Jenny said, very softly, beside me. She was feeling weak and
strange, I knew it, and so did Rooney. We got into the car and tooled out of
Tijuana, heading for the border.
We never made it across.
That part of it happened so fast, it can be told fast. We drove down through
the town, getting a noseful and a soulful of dirt and signed testaments to
just how miserable the human condition can get to be. We pulled into the long
line of cars heading for the check-out point at the border, and watched Jenny
from the corner of our eyes. She was shaking slightly, and feeling worse. All
I
wanted to do was make the trip back to L.A. and get her to her own doctor.
Cars were being passed through one after another.
They stopped us, and the inspector leaned in, asked if I had anything to
declare. I figured we were a shoo-in. "Not a thing, sir," I said. "We were
just down looking around, didn't buy a thing."
He started to pass us through, when his eye caught the steel-rim bongos I'd
bought. He looked from them to me. I looked into the back seat and saw them
there. My laugh was as phony as a work of Art by Joseph E. Levine.
"Oh, except those, of course ha ha."
That was our undoing. He asked to see inside the trunk. I opened it and it was
empty. Then he tried the glove compartment, under the back seats, and then the
girls' handbags. Nothing. Just a bottle of pain-killer pills Jenny had had in
her purse for weeks, labeled in Beverly Hills and signed with the name of her
family doctor.
The inspector took the bottle, put it under my left windshield wiper, and
directed me to pull out of line, into an inspection slot. I was hacked. Jenny
Page 33
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
was about to fall out. But I did as I was told.
I could hear a guy somewhere playing a soft lick on a guitar. It struck me how
strange it was: all day in a land where music is supposed to be second nature,
I hadn't heard any live music made by the people. A few bastardized notes out
of a car radio, some organ background for a quiz show emanating from New York,
and silence from the happy, smiling natives of this warm Valhalla. Now, as we
were about to leave, a sound of reality from the other world. It was odd.
The inspector came out of his cubicle and examined us. He examined the bottle.
Then he asked whose it was. Jenny said it was hers. He asked her to come into
the station for a moment to talk to the head man. She looked at me. "I'll come
with you," I said.
We followed him across the concrete walkway to the big glass-fronted office. I
had to support
file:///F|/rah/Harlan%20Ellison/Ellison,%20Harlan%20-%20Love%20Ain't%20Nothing
.txt (24 of 148) [1/15/03 6:37:33 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Harlan%20Ellison/Ellison,%20Harlan%20-%20Love%20Ain't%20Nothing
.txt
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]