It had proven difficult in the courts, Bob Arctor reflected as he drove along the San Diego Freeway south, to get convictions on theft and sale of electronic detection devices illegally installed in someone’s residence. The police could only tack the bust on somewhere else, under another statute violation. However, the pushers, in an analogous situation, reacted directly. He recalled a case in which a heroin dealer, out to burn a chick, had planted two packets of heroin in the handle of her iron, then phoned in an anonymous tip on her to WE TIP. Before the tip could be acted on, the chick found the heroin, but instead of flushing it she had sold it. The police came, found nothing, then made a voiceprint on the phone tip, and arrested the pusher for giving false information to the authorities. While out on bail, the pusher visited the chick late one night and beat her almost to death. When caught and asked why he’d put out one of her eyes and broken both her arms and several ribs, he explained that the chick had come across two packets of high-grade heroin belonging to him, sold them for a good profit, and not cut him in. Such, Arctor reflected, went the pusher mentality.
He dumped off Luckman and Barris to do a scrounging number for the cephscope; this not only stranded both men and kept them from getting back to the house while the bugging installation was going on, but permitted him to check up on an individual he hadn’t seen for over a month. He seldom got down this way, and the chick seemed to be doing nothing more than shooting meth two or three times a day and turning tricks to pay for it. She lived with her dealer, who was therefore also her old man. Usually Dan Mancher was gone during the day, which was good. The dealer was an addict, too, but Arctor had not been able to figure out to what. Evidently a variety of drugs. Anyhow, whatever it was, Dan had become weird and vicious, unpredictable and violent. It was a wonder the local police hadn’t picked him up long ago on local disturbance-of-the-peace infractions. Maybe they were paid off. Or, most likely, they just didn’t care; these people lived in a slum-housing area among senior citizens and the other poor. Only for major crimes did the police enter the Cromwell Village series of buildings and related garbage dump, parking lots, and nubbled roads.
There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor. He parked, found the right urinesmelling stairs, ascended into darkness, found the door of Building 4 marked G. A full can of Drano lay before the door, and he picked it up automatically, wondering how many kids played here and remembering, for a moment, his own kids and the protective moves he had made on their behalf over the years. This was one now, picking up this can. He rapped against the door with it.
Presently the door lock rattled and the door opened, chained inside; the girl, Kimberly Hawkins, peered out. “Yes?”
“Hey, man,” he said. “It’s me, Bob.”
“What do you have there?”
“Can of Drano,” he said.
“No kidding.” She unchained the door in a listless way; her voice, too, was listless. Kimberly was down, he could see: very down. Also, the girl had a black eye and a split lip. And as he looked around he saw that the windows of the small, untidy apartment were broken. Shards of glass lay on the floor, along with overturned ashtrays and Coke bottles.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Yeah. Dan and I had a fight and he split.” The girl, half Chicano, small and not too pretty, with the sallow complexion of a crystal freak, gazed down sightlessly, and he realized that her voice rasped when she spoke. Some drugs did that. Also, so did strep throat. The apartment probably couldn’t be heated, not with the broken windows.
“He beat you up.” Arctor set the can of Drano down on a high shelf, over some paperback porn novels, most of them out of date.
“Well, he didn’t have his knife, thank God. His Case knife that he carries on his belt in a sheath now.” Kimberly seated herself in an overstuffed chain out of which springs stuck. “What do you want, Bob? I’m bummed, I really am.”
“You want him back?”
“Well—” She shrugged a little. “Who knows?”
Arctor walked to the window and looked out. Dan Manchen would no doubt be showing up sooner or later: the girl was a source of money, and Dan knew she’d need her regular hits once her supply had run out. “How long can you go?” he asked.
“Another day.”
“Can you get it anywhere else?”
“Yeah, but not so cheap.”
“What’s wrong with your throat?”
“A cold,” she said. “From the wind coming in.”
“You should—”
“If I go to a doctor,” she said, “then he’ll see I’m on crystal. I can’t go.”
“A doctor wouldn’t care.”
“Sure he would.” She listened then: the sound of car pipes, irregular and loud. “Is that Dan’s car? Red Ford ‘seventy-nine Torino?”
At the window Arctor looked out onto the rubbishy lot, saw a battened red Torino stopping, its twin exhausts exhaling dark smoke, the driver’s door opening. “Yes.”
Kimberly locked the door: two extra locks. “He probably has his knife.”
“You have a phone.”
“No,” she said.
“You should get a phone.”
The girl shrugged.
“He’ll kill you,” Arctor said.
“Not now. You’re here.”
“But later, after I’m gone.”
Kimberly neseated herself and shrugged again.
After a few moments they could hear steps outside, and then a knock on the door. Then Dan yelling for her to open the door. She yelled back no and that someone was with her. “Okay,” Dan yelled, in a high-pitched voice, “I’ll slash your tires.” He ran downstairs, and Arctor and the girl watched through the broken window together as Dan Mancher, a skinny, short-haired, homosexual-looking dude waving a knife, approached her car, still yelling up to her, his words audible to everyone else in the housing area. “I’ll slash your tires, your fucking tires! And then I’ll fucking kill you!” He bent down and slashed first one tire and then another on the girl’s old Dodge.
Kimberly suddenly aroused, sprang to the door of the apartment and frantically began unlocking the various locks. “I got to stop him! He’s slashing all my tires! I don’t have insurance!”
Arctor stopped her. “My car’s there too.” He did not have his gun with him, of course, and Dan had the Case knife and was out of control, “Tires aren’t—”
“My tires!” Shrieking, the girl struggled to open the door.
“That’s what he wants you to do,” Arctor said.
“Downstairs,” Kimberly panted. “We can phone the police—they have a phone. Let me go!” She fought him off with tremendous strength and managed to get the door open. “I’m going to call the police. My tires! One of them is new!”
“I’ll go with you.” He grabbed her by the shoulder; she tumbled ahead of him down the steps, and he barely managed to catch up. Already she had reached the next apartment and was pounding on its door. “Open, please?” she called. “Please, I want to call the police! Please let me call the police!”
Arctor got up beside her and knocked. “We need to use your phone,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”
An elderly man, wearing a gray sweater and creased formal slacks and a tie, opened the door.
“Thanks,” Arctor said.
Kimberly pushed inside, ran to the phone, and dialed the operator. Arctor stood facing the door, waiting for Dan to show up. There was no sound now, except for Kimberly babbling at the operator: a garbled acccount, something about a quarrel about a pair of boots worth seven dollars. “He said they were his because I got them for him for Christmas,” she was babbling, “but they were mine because I paid for them, and then he started to take them and I ripped the backs of them with a can opener, so he—” She paused; then, nodding: “All right, thank you. Yes, I’ll hold on.”