Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [50]
“What’s going on?” Mona said. She was sitting up in bed. “What happened to him?”
“Never mind,” Jack said. He kneeled down beside Denny. Blood was pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he looked up at Jack with stiff pain in his eyes. He tried to speak. Nothing came out of his mouth but a bubbling noise. The knife, a six-inch bone-handled Case, lay on the carpet, its well-honed blade face up. The last time Jack had seen the knife had been a few days before, when Denny had been cleaning his fingernails with the smaller blade. He picked it up and folded the blade into the handle and put it into his pocket.
“Are you all right?” he asked Denny. He knew he had betrayed Denny and Denny had come to knife him for it. He understood this, although he could not understand why, or why he felt bad about it. Denny’s eyes were clear. They looked at each other. Jack had never seen such a look of pure intelligence in Denny’s eyes before. It was as if he knew something now that Jack would never understand. But the look faded into pained puzzlement and Denny moaned, the blood thick and black in his mouth.
“All right,” Jack said. He got Denny to his feet and took him over and sat him in the chair by the window, on top of a pile of Mona’s clothes. Denny sat there in a stupor, blood spattered all over him and still flowing from his nose and the corners of his mouth. His jaw hung slightly open. Jack started to get dressed again, and Mona jumped out of bed, naked except for underpants, and went into the bathroom. She came back out with a wet washcloth, and bent down over Denny.
“Hold your head back,” she said to him. She began dabbing at his nose and mouth. The cold touch of the washcloth must have revived him slightly, because he growled deep in his throat, pushed Mona aside, and came at Jack in a crouch. Without thinking, Jack clipped him on the point of the chin, and he went down heavily, his head bumping against Jack’s knees and then down onto the floor.
“Get dressed,” Jack said to Mona. He got down and went through Denny’s pockets, removing his wallet and money. When Mona finished dressing, they carried Denny back to his own room. Sue was asleep, and they woke her up, got her out of the bed, and put Denny on it. He was still unconscious. Sue started cursing Jack, her eyes burning with hatred. Mona took her out of the room. Jack got on the telephone and called the clerk at the desk and told him that Denny had been mugged on the street and made it to his room and passed out, and to call a doctor. The clerk said he had seen Denny come in and he had looked all right, and Jack told him to wait a minute, and then went down to the lobby and gave the clerk a twenty-dollar bill.
“You don’t have a mark on you,” the clerk said with a grin. He was a tall, thin man with one drooping eyelid, and when he smiled, his teeth showed long and yellow. He reached for the jack on the switchboard.
“I tell you, he got rolled. You tell it that way, too. You saw him come in, and then you called the doctor. Right?”
“Anything you say, hotshot.”
The next morning Jack told Sue to clear out. She had gone back and slept in her own room after the doctor had Denny taken away, and Jack went there to tell her.