HCC 115 - Borderline by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

hands from her breasts to the ignition and steering wheel.
    The engine roared.
    He shifted and then stepped on the gas.
    The car lunged forward and Meg’s body jerked. She steadied herself but her breasts
     kept moving. They jerked upward and then back, and then bounced.
    Marty kept watching them and began to remove one hand from the steering wheel.
    “The road!” she screamed. “Watch out!”
    He heard the scraping sounds of wheels on gravel and felt the hard bounces as the
     car went onto the shoulder of the road.
    Then his eyes were back on the road and he jerked the wheel quickly to the left.
    The car shot back onto the road and then continued to roar straight ahead.
    Marty’s head was throbbing and his heart was pounding and his breath was heavy.
    But was it from that near accident or from her, he wondered.
    “Take it easy, Marty,” she said, “If we’re going to get our-selves killed, let’s at
     least do it after we try those positions.”

CHAPTER THREE
    Lily was on her way across the border when the blue Olds roared past her. She looked
     up and saw the man at the wheel and the long-haired brunette at his side. Then the
     car was gone and she forgot them. She was across the border now, in Juarez, and it
     wasn’t such a big deal after all. Just another town, full of Mexicans instead of Americans,
     and that was about it.
    Still, she thought, almost anything was a hell of a distance better than the Paso
     hotel where she was staying. Cappy’s Hotel, the home of every flying ant and palmetto
     bug in Texas. A humming fan and a squeaking dripping sink and tenants who never washed.
     A wiry and ugly gink who stared at her when he passed her in the hallway. They could
     take Cappy’s Hotel, she decided, and they could shove it. It was cheap enough, and
     it would do until she could either connect with somebody or get her hands on some
     long bread. All she had for the time being was what remained of the two tens she’d
     gotten from the jerko who had driven her to El Paso. Two bucks had gone to Cappy,
     whoever he was, and three bucks and change had gone for food, and two bucks more had
     gone for a clean blouse. That left her with somewhere between twelve and thirteen
     dollars. Hardly enough to retire on. Hardly enough to feel particularly secure about.
    Juarez. The first step was to find the right people, the kind of people she could
     swing with. These were the sort of people she had known in North Beach and she knew
     that she would find them again in Juarez. Border towns were attractive areas for that
     sort. They would avoid the American side and stay on the Mex side because things were
     cheaper and freer and easier there. You paid less for food and drink, and you bought
     marijuana with relative impunity, and if you were on the harder stuff it was easier
     and less expensive to make a connection with a pusher.
    She was in Juarez, and she was cruising. She stopped at a corner to catch her breath,
     spat with annoyance when a pair of dirty-faced Mexican urchins tried to beg a few
     coins from her, then continued onward. Her feet led her along almost intuitively.
     Denver had had its own little hard core of the hip cognoscenti and S.F. had had many
     more, and Lily had known them well in both towns. It was easy to guess what street
     might hold a place where particular people would be congregating. It was easy to pass
     some bars without a second glance, easy to turn at the proper street and walk into
     the proper Mexican tavern. She did all this intuitively and it took her less than
     a half hour before she found precisely the place she had been looking for from the
     beginning.
    A small frame building, painted years ago and drab now. A scattering of sawdust on
     the floor. Brown wood, varnished once, the varnish long worn away by time. A small
     bar with six stools. A Mex behind the bar, old and white-haired. Four or five tables,
     two of them round, the rest square. Five kids in their twenties at one