A Purple Place for Dying Read Online Free PDF Page A

it would have about the same effect. A smaller caliber would have given more penetration and less impact, Sheriff."
    "For God's sake, McGee!"
    "There can't be too many people around with that much gun."
    "There aren't, and the ones that have them don't go around bagging blonde wives, boy. I'm going into town. That suit you?"
    "I guess it has to. I would appreciate it if you could drop me at a motel. Something not too far out of town, clean and cheap if those two things go together around here."
    "You going to stay long?"
    "I might ask Mr. Yeoman if I can use that cabin."
    "Don't try to get any cuter than you are."
    "What does that mean, Sheriff?"
    "This is a friendly enough place. We don't have a hard-nose police routine, county or city. We don't need it. But if a good citizen like Mr. Yeoman should mention that he isn't fond of you, we'd have to sharpen your heels and drive you down into hard ground. I guess it's old-fashioned. The people who pay a hell of a lot of taxes get a hell of a lot of service."
    We came out onto Route 87 and turned left. The sun was gone from the valley floor, but the afterglow made the tall pale buildings of Esmerelda look pink. The divided highway ran arrow straight into the city. He pulled into a place called the Latigo Motel, said it was cheap and clean, told me to stay out of trouble, let me out and drove off.
    The motel was built on a narrow plot, and extended at right angles to the highway, trapped between the Idle Hour Lanes and the Baby Giant Soop-R-Mart. In the cool blue dusk they had turned the red floodlights on in their little cactus garden. Across the highway was the Corral Diner-Choice Western Beef, and up the line was the Chunky Burger Drive-in, their juke audible for great distances over the groaning of trucks. A fat and absent-minded young woman with a baby riding her big soft hip, checked me into number seven and took my five dollars plus tax, and came out of her daze when she found out I didn't have a car. She had difficulty comprehending that. She looked awed. I was a true eccentric.
    I went down to seven. There was an extremely small swimming pool beyond the units, with a high redwood fence for privacy. There were a dozen screaming children in the pool. The unit was small, clean and very bare. I shed my jacket and stretched out on the double bed.
    When you can keep moving, when you have to keep moving, you can keep a lot of things at arm's length. But when you stop they come in at you. I had not liked Mona Fox Yeoman. She had seemed artificial, self-important. She had been provocative rather than seductive. A man cannot keep himself from making bedroom speculations. Her manner had given me the feeling that I would like to shake her up, to mat that twenty-five-dollar hairdo, to really get to her and put her to such work she would forget that lady-of-the-manor style of hers. I had not expected to ever be able to, but it was the index of that kind of desire. Some women instigate a good ruffling.
    So she was a big creamy bitch standing beside me in her tailored tight pants, and suddenly she was fallen cooling meat, and it was too damned fast. I had seen dead women. I had seen sudden expected death, and sudden unexpected death, but never before the sudden and unexpected death of a handsome woman. It struck deeper than I would have guessed it could. There was more to it than the fact of a horrid waste. I couldn't identify what there was about it that had rocked me so, and kept rocking me. Somehow it was identified with my own mortality, my own inevitable day to die. She had gone far past childhood, yet when she was down, she was Little Girl smashed, and closer to my heart dead than alive. Emotional necrophilia.
    I had thought that I was in fine balance. I had had a very bad time and I had come out of it very slowly and tentatively, with a skull full of wraiths and remorses, with the blood dreams and the flying twitches, and I had come out of it with enough money for a McGee-style