River Girl by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

ringing as we walked in the door. Lorraine picked it up.
    “Yes? Yes. He’s here now. He just came in. Hold on a minute.” She handed it to Buford.
    “Yes, speaking,” he said. He listened for a moment. “All right. Just keep your shirt on. Yes, Marshall. Of course I’ll send Marshall. He’ll be there before you can stop screaming.” He hung up.
    “You can get your coffee if you want, Lorraine, I’ll stick around.” She looked at him, grabbed her purse, and left, knowing it was an order.
    When she was out the door he turned to me. “It’s that Bell woman. Yelling her head off. Some big sawmill hand’s gone berserk and is trying to kill one of the girls. She wants you. For God’s sake, try to get it quieted down without anybody getting hurt.”
    I knew what he meant, and didn’t even get the gun out of the filing cabinet where I’d left it Monday. I don’t like guns anyway; I had enough of them during the war. I was out the door before he’d finished talking.
    I took my own car because there wasn’t time to go to the county garage after one. Traffic was snarled in the square, as it always is on Saturdays, and I had to creep through it, cursing. When I got clear of that I shot down the next six blocks giving it the gun all the way. All we needed now was for somebody to be killed in one of those places and the county would blow up right in our faces. I slid to a stop in front of the chili joint and ran across the street to the hotel. The street was quiet except for the wailing of a juke box in one of the beer joints, and fortunately there wasn’t any crowd gathering. I could hear a noise as of someone hammering in the back of the building.
    Abbie let me in the door and then slammed it shut, fast. She had the filmy blue robe clutched around her with one hand and was waving an empty gin bottle in the other. The tight curls seemed to strain outward from her head as if she carried an electrical charge.
    “Stop the crazy fool!” she was yelling. “He’ll kill somebody!”
    “All right, relax,” I said. “Where is he?”
    “Upstairs. At the end of the hall. My God, stop him!” I went up the stairs on the run, still hearing the pounding. The hallway had no windows at the ends and was dimly lighted with one small, unshaded bulb, and all the doors were closed. I could see him down at the end and ran toward him. He was a big devil, naked except for a pair of shorts and one sock, and he was swinging a small table by one leg like a footstool, hammering on the door with it. He had one of the upper panels already knocked in and was working on the other. Inside the room I could hear a girl’s voice, high-pitched and on the edge of hysteria, not crying or pleading but dredging up obscenity I’d never heard before in twenty-seven years.
    “I’ll get you, you lousy little slut,” he yelled, smashing the table into the door again and splintering the other panel.
    “All right, knock it off, Mac,” I said. “You’ve had your fun.”
    He paused, with the table pulled back for another swing, and looked around at me. I was still ten feet away, moving toward him. In those things you can never let them see any hesitation or you’re a dead duck, but I didn’t feel too sure about it. He was as big as I was, or larger, and crazy with rage, and he appeared to be only around twenty, an age when you haven’t found out yet that you can be hurt. “Drop it,” I said roughly. He stood poised to swing. “You a law?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Give me that.” I reached for the table. I don’t know whether it was because he could see I was alone and didn’t have a gun or whether he was so wild with rage he didn’t care, but at any rate I saw his face go wild again and he swung. I tried to get inside it, but the table caught my arm and shoulder and I fell over against the opposite door. I could hear somebody scream down at the other end of the hall, and realized Abbie had followed me up the stairs.
    “I’ll show her!