Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

end?”
    “The way it always has. He’ll get on my nerves. You know. Giving orders like he owns me. You can do this and you can’t do that. No other boyfriends. No ramming around town. Stay right here. Hell with that noise. That’s when I quit.”
    “How?”
    “How big is this town? I move four blocks and he can’t find me. He can walk the streets howling like a dog, but he can’t find me.”
    “How much longer do you give him?”
    “You’re pretty sharp, Mike. Oh, maybe a month.”
    “This has happened before?”
    “Oh, sure. A thousand times. But not with a fella so rich like Troy.”
    “Why does it happen?”
    She smirked. “You mean like whadda they see in me? Nothing you can’t see right now, Mike. I’m not pretty. But I could always get fellas hanging around. I used to wonder. My God, how women hate the hell out of me! I’m the way I am. That’s all. I like kicks. And I don’t feel a damn bit shameful about the way I am. Like that song, doin’ what comes natcherly.” She swung the dangling leg.
    Mike put his empty glass aside. “I better be on my way.”
    She didn’t get up. She looked blandly up at him. The gray eyes were slightly protuberant. In the dim light he could see a slow pulse in her throat. “You in a big fat rush?” she asked.
    “I’ve got to be getting along.”
    “You’re a cute guy, specially when you look nervous like now. I could tell you what you were wondering about. I can always tell. Don’t you want to find out?”
    “But Troy might…”
    “I told you I do anything I want to do. I wouldn’t answer the door or the phone. I’d have no reason to tell anybody, and you sure wouldn’t want to. Like a bonus, for trying to help your pal.”
    He looked at her and felt actually, physically dizzy. Her gray eyes seemed to grow big enough to fill her half of the room. Her voice had been like fingernails being drawn sharp and slow down his spine. It was a persuasive, evil magic—a spell cast by a contemporary witch, a soiled, scrawny, decadent witch.
    He shook himself like a wet and weary dog, and made his voice flat and hard and said, “No thanks.”
    “Suit yourself,” she said and got up and went to the door with him.
    When he was in the hall, safe, like the swimmer caught in an undertow who climbs out onto a sand bar, he turned and said, “It’s messed Troy’s life up, Jerranna.”
    “So I’m bleeding? It wasn’t me, Mike. He was ready to be messed up. He was looking for it.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    She lifted one narrow shoulder. “I just know. I can tell. I knew others like that. They get hooked on me, like on a drug, on account of—like a drug—I can stop them from thinking about anybody else or anything else in the world. I can keep them from even knowing who the hell they are, and maybe that’s what they want me for. But they got to be ready for me. So don’t blame me.”
    “You’ve got it all figured out.”
    “I’ve been here and there,” she said, and winked with great solemnity and closed the door, opened it immediately and said, “Thanks for the jugs,” and closed it again.
    After he had gone down one flight he leaned against the wall for a few moments, his eyes closed. His body felt sticky and there was a bad taste in his mouth and a dull headache behind his eyes. Though not a superstitious man, he felt that he had been in the presence of evil. Not contrived evil, full of plots and connivings, but a curiously innocent and implacable evil. He knew that Buttons should never know how close he had come to an act that would have irreparably changed his own inner image of himself, made it forever hard for him to have looked deep into his own mirrored eyes.
    As he reached the sidewalk he saw Troy paying off a cab driver a hundred feet away. As the cab pulled away, Troy turned and saw him. Troy looked lean and pallid, unpressed, unsteady on his feet. Mike wondered what in hell he could say to Troy. Troy whirled and went around the corner