Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [29]
Bobby Case said to Billy seriously, “You know, you and me ought to go to Frisco. There’s a hell of a lot of money down there, and they’ll spot you like crazy; we could cut those old fuckers up for a fortune. I did it once before, and they all thought I was just lucky.”
“That’s an idea,” Billy said. “That’s an idea.”
“Goddam,” Denny said, “you two’d be murder together.”
There were three boys in the car Billy had never seen before, and one of them said, “I don’t actually think you fooled anybody in San Francisco, Case. I think those men just couldn’t stand the idea of your beating them.”
“That’s true,” Billy said to him. The boy who spoke looked about eighteen, and had a high forehead and a long, inquisitive nose and almost no chin. “I’ve seen that in Seattle; guys who just couldn’t take the idea of bein beat by some colored kid.” He laughed. “They were my meat!”
“I’ve got your meat,” Denny laughed.
“Now, that’s two dollars,” Billy laughed. Mano turned away from his driving for a moment with an impatient look, and Billy wondered if, after all, he didn’t like Negroes. Well, if he didn’t, fuck him. The others didn’t seem to mind. He guzzled beer from the bottle Levitt had passed him from the opened case on the floor, feeling the cold needles go down his throat. Tonight, he thought, I’m gonna party like the world was comin to an end.
Five
The party got out of hand almost immediately. The original idea had been a poker game to trim Billy Lancing, with a party to drink up as much of the free liquor as possible and haul the rest away—all very quiet behind the blackout drapes of the expensive home—but the poker game fizzled out, and then, to get some girls, they had had to invite too many people. It rapidly developed into a brawl.
The first odd thing Jack noticed was that Kol Mano disappeared only a few minutes after they had arrived. He had parked his car almost two blocks away, under some trees, and when they got to the house, sneaked around to the back and gone in, Mano had said, “This is uncool.” Shortly after Denny had shown Mano all the stacks of cased whiskey, Mano vanished, and Jack decided that a couple of the cases of whiskey were gone, too. Mano probably hadn’t planned to stay at all, and vaguely Jack felt as if he had been taken. Mano was strange; people had hinted that he was a drug addict, a queer, lots of things, but Jack didn’t know anything about it; he only saw Mano as a very cool man who never seemed to be too far from the money. Now he was gone. Jack had been meaning to sit down and have a talk with him. He shrugged. Some other time. There was the party going on.
Somebody had gotten on the telephone, and now there were about fifteen people running around the house, nearly two boys for every girl from the look of it; and Jack meant to get himself one of the girls. Just because he had been to the Model Hotel the day before and again that very afternoon meant nothing. He wanted a girl very badly. Some were even pretty, and he decided he wanted the prettiest one for himself.
He wandered through the three floors of the house, a bottle of Scotch in his hand, looking over the action. There were kids everywhere. None of them had ever been in a house like this before. Most of them, like Denny, lived in crowded homes in places like St. Johns or Sellwood, or Northwest Portland, and the sight of all this wealth subdued them. They just walked around at first, almost intimidated by the near-presence of the rich and powerful owners of the property, looking in the closets at the racks of expensive clothing, in the bureau drawers packed full of silken things. But after a while the whiskey and familiarity dulled their sense of being in a museum, and they began to get noisy, and to act as if they were in an ordinary home, having an ordinary party. Only Jack, Denny, and Billy Lancing knew for certain that they were committing a crime by just being in the house. They had told the others that they had