“Yeah. I saw you and knew that you needed training or you’d be dead too soon. Ricky was different. He was broken in when I got him. But I always wanted to see what I could do with a beginner.”
She turned to him. “You’re only good as your woman is good. If she’s a heller, a whiner, a baby, you’ll be on a dead-slab in no time. She won’t let you think clear.” She showed him her hard white fingers. “My nails are clipped short for a cat. I won’t rip your back. Now—it’s up to you. You want to die tomorrow or four years from now?”
“Is it that way?”
“That’s the way it is.”
He suddenly broke, standing there. He didn’t know why but he just had his arms around her, trembling.
“I’m glad you came. I wouldn’t want to be alone tonight.”
She kissed him, almost clumsily, and he thought he felt her tremble deep inside. Then, she slapped his face with her hands, twice, hard.
“A kiss’s for one thing! A slap’s for another! You’re not a kid! Learn that, if you stick with me! Grow up!”
He stopped shaking.
In his nostrils the warm clean smell of her body, with no dime perfume to spoil its cleanliness, became suddenly apparent.
He waited for her to make the first move.
“I’m not a kid now…” he said.
Their feet rustled in the dry sand.
CHAPTER TWO
L. A. Boss-Man
He was wanted. For the first time in his life people actually were seeking him. The same people who’d shoved him into gutters, starved his parents, ignored him in coal mines, refused him coffee dimes—these same people were horrifiedly aware of him now, and concerned with his welfare, and what he was doing each day. Sure. Sure.
Broghman, in angry, shocked rips, tore the morning paper down and across and down again.
Julie set a steaming coffee mug on the table of the Motel Inn room and ordered, “Drink it. And quit reading papers. They lie like hell.”
He felt of his big brown hands and the gun shining on the blue tablecloth. “God’s sake, Julie, I’m not a criminal. I’m a human being.”
“Sure. Both of us are. Self-preservation you know.”
He learned to walk tall, stiffer, with his guts tucked in. She told him how to talk faster, pull a gun by the swiftest, safest method, pressing it close to his body so only a few people would see it. She could have written a book about banks. She wrote on her tongue for him. There were ways of hitting people’s nerves with the knife edge of your stiff-hand to knock them out as good as a gun—she showed him. A moustache appeared sandily on his lip. His hair grew sandy on his neck, and grew the way she ordered it to grow.
It was acting, rehearsing for a bigger part.
In his dreams, her voice struck again and again at him:
“No, no, Johnny! Not that way, this way!”
The day Julie bought the new car and drove into Victorville, Broghman found himself sweltering in the little two-by-four room, rummaging idly through her traveling kit, sorting out handkerchiefs, a lipstick, a packet of photographs.
Shucking them from their envelope, he lined the pictures side by side on the bedspread in the sunlight, it took him a minute to understand what his eyes were looking at.
At first, they had looked like pictures of himself.
This one here, standing by the sedan in a dark suit. There was something about the dark cloth over long, muscled bones. Something suggestive in the posture. And this one. Himself, almost. In hiking breeches, a shabby hat cocked over rebellious hair. And the last one—Julie with her arm around this man who didn’t look at all like Johnny Broghman but at the same time did.
It gave him a stunned feeling like having a body in two places at once. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
The door opened a few minutes later, while he was still looking. Julie’s hard silhouette stood in a square of sunlight. There was just a flicker of surprise in her cheek muscles, then she shut the door, put one hand on a hip.