Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [55]
A long time later, Jack told Billy Lancing all about what finally happened:
“I had been drinking for so long and not eating that everything was hollow and weird; I felt like some kind of crazy mystic who keeps seeing visions that his eyes can’t remember; I wasn’t really drunk any more after the third day, I was just living on alcohol and pissing pure sugar, and the whole world was sharp and blurred at the same time. I remember one of Mona’s comic books was on the floor by the bed and I sat there looking down at the cover. It had a picture of Batman and Robin on it, grappling with some dirty thugs on a city street at night, the most weirdly beautiful city I’d ever seen in my life. Batman was saying, `This looks like The Joker’s handiwork!’ and one of the thugs was saying, `What the!’ and Robin was saying, `Somebody wants us out of the way!’ and I was sitting there trying to figure out why all these beautiful people were arguing, even though everything they said made perfect sense to me. The comic book was upside down and so I was looking at the picture backwards, but that made it even more real, and I’d heard somewhere that we really see things upside down and then our mind turns them right side up, and I think I was trying to right everything in my mind when they knocked at the door. It was a terrible effort, and burned up a lot of my whiskey.
“I got up and stood in the middle of the room, trying to swing the door around so it would be upside down and she would come in walking on the ceiling with her skirt around her ears, and said something like, `Come on the fuck in,’ and waited a second and then the door exploded, just blew up in front of my eyes, and two guys came running in waving guns. I thought for one second that Mona had hired a couple of redhots to come and take the rest of my money and get her stuff, so I grinned at the guys and said, `Hi, fellas.’ They saw me standing there naked and put their guns back. When I saw the belt holsters I knew they were cops and so I headed out the door, but one of them got me by the ankle and I went down, out in the hall. A man and woman were coming down the corridor, and I looked up at them and they looked down at me, and I said as clearly as I could, `Excuse me,’ but it must have come out wrong and the woman screamed and the man did a funny thing; he was a mousy-lookin little guy with a mustache, I figure he must have brought the woman there to the hotel for a little side action, anyway, he wrinkled his little mouse nose at me, and stuck out his foot and kicked me on the shoulder. Then they both turned and went fast down the hall, and the cops dragged me back to my room, made me get dressed, handcuffed me, and took me down to the Hall of Justice. Just as we were coming out of my room, the bigger of the cops put his hand on my shoulder and asked me if I wanted another drink, and I said yes, and he went back and got one of my bottles and I took a long one, and then he took one, put the bottle back, and said to me, `Boy, we’re going to kill you.’
“I felt glad. I really liked that cop. He told me the truth, that cop did, and I really liked him for it. I wanted to reach out and kiss him, or at least shake his hand. He was a good cop.”
Nine
They took Jack down to the old Hall of Justice on Kearny Street and put him into one of the cells in the city prison. When they booked him down at the desk several hours later he was still sleepy and half-drunk, and beginning to feel the early tremors of a long illness. But even so, he heard the list of charges and began to understand that something had actually happened and he was not having a dream. He was not sure what the specific charges were but he knew there were a lot of them, all bearing different numbers from the penal code. What made it real for him was