Sally's in the Alley, Norbert Davis [i like reading .txt] 📗

and bottom, and then as he rolled closer it moved and jiggled its arm, semaphore fashion, and became human.

Doan slowed up. The desert at dusk is not a one hundred percent safe place to pick up hitchhikers. Quite often they rap you on the head and throw you in a ditch where, after suitable curing, your skull makes a nice nesting place for scorpions. However, the prospect didn’t bother Doan much. He knew from some spectacular experiences in that line that he was difficult to murder.

The figure, on closer inspection, turned out to be a female one complete in all its component parts and encased in a neat blue slack suit and possessing blond hair done up precisely in a blue snood. It was a young female figure and had an air of coordinated and trained determination.

Doan pulled up beside her. She opened the door opposite him before he had a chance to, and leaned in the car and looked at him. Her features were even and assembled with good taste, and she had earnest, deep blue eyes.

“Hello,” said Doan mildly. “Would you like a ride?”

“What’s your name?”

“Doan,” said Doan.

“I’m Harriet Hathaway, and I’m on my way to Fort Des Moines to join the WAACs and serve my country.”

“Happy to meet you,” said Doan. “Would you like a ride?”

“Do you propose to make improper advances to me, Mr. Doan?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought of it,” Doan told her. “But if you really insist I can probably turn up something in that line.”

“I don’t insist! And if you have any such ideas I advise you to discard them.”

“Plunk,” said Doan. “Gurgle-gurgle. They’re discarded. Would you like a ride?”

“Yes, I would. Don’t bother to move, please. I can handle this.” She picked up a small, dark blue bag and placed it precisely in the middle of the front seat. She got in and sat on the far side of it and closed the door efficiently. “I’m ready.”

Doan started the car.

“If you’d use the clutch properly the gears wouldn’t grate that way,” Harriet Hathaway informed him. ‘

“No doubt you’re right,” said Doan.

“Men are very nasty beasts.”

“Aren’t they, though?”

“I’ve just gone through a singularly unpleasant experience with one.”

“A fate worse than death?” Doan asked.

“What? No! I’m quite capable of protecting myself from anything like that. I’m the woman’s golf champion of Talamedas County.”

“Oh,” said Doan.

“I was also the runner-up in the finals of the Basin City National Tennis Tourney last year.”

“Oh,” said Doan.

“I’m also considered the best horsewoman in the Rio Hondo Riding Club.”

“Oh,” said Doan.

“This experience had nothing whatsoever to do with—with sex.”

“It must have been rather dull,” Doan observed.

“It was not! It was beastly! This person offered me a ride in Masterville. He was wearing dark glasses and I detest people with weak vision, but I accepted. I was willing to accept any means of transportation to get to my post of duty as rapidly as possible.”

“Sure,” said Doan. “Through rain and snow the postman always rings twice.”

“What?” said Harriet Hathaway. She watched him narrowly for a moment. “Are you intoxicated?”

“Just slightly dizzy,” Doan answered.

“It’s probably because the sun has been so bright today. You should pull your windshield visor down when it glares. That’s what it’s for. But to go back to this horrible person who gave me the ride. He was a slacker. He admitted it!”

“How interesting,” said Doan.

“Interesting! It’s criminal! If I only knew his name I’d report him. I asked him what he was doing to serve his country in this emergency and he said, ‘Nothing.’ I asked him what he intended to do in the future and he said, ‘Less.’ Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

“Never in my life,” said Doan. “Did you tell him you were going to join the WAACs?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He asked me if they knew it.”

“Do they?”

“Well, no. I put in an application, but they haven’t replied to it. Naturally they’ll accept me.”

“Naturally,” Doan agreed.

“I told that to this horrible person. I told him that no matter how degrading and disgusting the work they assigned me might be, I would smile and serve.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He just said, “Oh, God,’ in a very disgusted tone. I didn’t mind the profanity, although I think it’s bad taste. It was the sentiment behind it I disapproved of. I told him so, very emphatically. I explained to him the duties and responsibilities we owe our country for the glorious privilege of being one of its citizens.”

“Then what?”

“He stopped the car and told me to get out. He said he wanted to vomit, and he always vomited in private if he could manage it. He literally pushed me out! Right on this deserted road in the middle of the desert! And then drove off and left me!”

“You said you didn’t know his name,” Doan remarked. “Haven’t got any idea where he hangs out, have you?”

“No. Are you going to try to find him and teach him to respect patriotic American womanhood?”

“Well, not exactly,” Doan said. “I think maybe I could use a slacker like he is in my business—”

“What is it—your business?”

“It’s rather confidential.”

“Oh!” said Harriet Hathaway, thrilled. “It’s government work, isn’t it?”

“Not unless you’re thinking of a different government than I think you are.”

“Oh, I know you can’t say anything about it,” said Harriet understandingly. “I’ll just bet you’re an agent of some kind or other.”

“Of some kind or other,” Doan agreed. “Other, to be strictly accurate.”

“You can trust my discretion, Mr. Doan. I know just What’s that queer noise?” She turned around. “There’s a dog in your back seat!”

“I noticed that,” Doan told her.

“He’s awfully big.”

“Yes,” said Doan.

“He’s snoring—”

Doan sighed. “Yes.”

“He’s a Great Dane—”

“So his pedigree says.”

“I don’t like Great Danes. They’re stupid, and they’re a nuisance.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Then why did you buy this one?”

“I didn’t. I won him in a crap game.”

“I don’t believe in gambling. You might lose.”

“I did,” said Doan. “The only trouble was that I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I’d won something pretty fancy until I got him home and he started sneering at me and snubbing me because I didn’t have a ten-room suite in the penthouse of the Park-Plaza Hotel.”

“I know. Then, later, you grew so fond of him and he of you that you couldn’t part with him.”

“What?” said Doan. “Fond? I detest him, and he despises me.”

“Oh, no,” said Harriet confidently. “Dogs always love their masters.”

“Explain that to Carstairs sometime when you’re not busy. It would be an interesting new theory to him.”

“Does he always sleep like this?”

“Turn around again,” Doan said.

Harriet turned around. Carstairs’ broad, blunt muzzle was just a half inch from the end of her nose, and his eyes were fiery greenish slits staring unblinkingly into hers.

“Oh!” she gasped.

“Relax, stupid,” said Doan.

The rear seat springs bonged as Carstairs hurled himself back into the cushions again.

“Oh,” said Harriet, swallowing. “Oh.”

“He gets resentful when people make disparaging remarks about him,” Doan explained.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t know he could understand… Why, he can’t understand! Dogs can’t understand what people are saying!”

Doan shrugged. “Okay.”

“You signaled him some way. I know! You mentioned his name!”

“Have it your way…”

“Well, I don’t like him—”

“He’d feel insulted if you did. What did this horrible person who picked you up in Masterville look like?”

“Well, he was tall and skinny and unhealthy looking, and he had a beard that grew in patches in a disgustingly unkempt manner. He was really most unpleasant, and I didn’t bother to pay much attention to him. I always say we should ignore the lower elements of the population and concentrate our attention on people of culture and breeding.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Bet what?”

“That you always say that.”

After that they rode in silence for awhile. Doan turned on the headlights, and the car moved smoothly and silently through the white tunnel they dug in the night. A few stars came out. In the Mojave the stars aren’t coy. They don’t twinkle and wink at you. They just stare. Sometimes, when you’ve been alone too long, you begin to think they’re taking an altogether too personal interest in you and your affairs, and then you get sand-silly and start running in circles and screaming.

Carstairs licked Doan on the back of the neck. Carstairs’ tongue, spread out flat, was as wide as a four-inch paint brush and had much the same effect when used judicially. It never failed to make Doan jump. Now the car swooped across to the wrong side of the road and back again.

“Damn you!” Doan said emphatically.

“What?” Harriet asked, startled.

“Carstairs,” Doan explained. “He has an urgent personal errand to attend to.”

He stopped the car and shut off the motor, palming the ignition key as he did so. He got out and opened the rear door.

“Come on. And don’t step on a rattlesnake, like I hope you will.”

Carstairs looked up the road and down the road and snorted twice disapprovingly and then ambled off into the shadows. Doan walked around to the back of the car and stared up at the stars without much enthusiasm. He looked down after a moment, his eyes caught by the gleam of the chrome handle on the trunk compartment.

It was still turned sideways. Doan attempted to turn it back to the locked position. Something was holding it. It was something soft that gave slightly under pressure.

Doan opened the compartment curiously. It had a light in it that snapped on as he did so and showed the man in the compartment quite plainly. He was sitting down, his knees doubled up, and his head twisted back sideways. It was the middle finger of his left hand that had kept the compartment from locking. The edge of the lock had roweled the skin and flesh across the knuckle, but it wasn’t bleeding.

Doan let his breath out slowly and quietly, and then breathed in as slowly. The man had been stabbed expertly in the side of his throat, and blood was caked thick and scaly all over the front of his coat. He was not a large man and not young. His suit, where the blood hadn’t stained it, was blue, and it looked as though it hadn’t fitted well even when he was alive.

Carstairs came out of the shadows. He paused for a second and then peered around Doan and sniffed once. He backed off two steps, his upper lip curling.

“I know,” said Doan. “He’s not fresh. I wonder just what kind of a story I’m going to tell Arne that will account for me picking up a three-day dead hitchhiker with a sliced jugular vein.”

Carstairs watched him silently.

“The compartment was unlocked,” Doan said absently, “and he could have been shoved in there any place I stopped, only I didn’t stop any place where there weren’t a lot of people around…” He paused and looked toward the front of the car. “Maybe I’m getting softening of the brain.”

He closed the compartment, after gingerly shoving the lax, leaden-tinged hand out of the way, and made sure it was locked this time.

“Get in,” he said.

Carstairs climbed quickly and silently into the backseat. Doan closed the door after him and got in the front seat and started the car.

“This horrible person,” he said, rolling the car back on the highway, “the one who picked you up, where did he go after he put you down?”

“On along the