HCC 115 - Borderline Read Online Free PDF Page B

at.
    But the girl was fine to look at. She was short and slender, with breasts that pushed
     her shirt front out and hips that fitted her khaki pants snugly.
    Weaver did not know that her name was Lily Daniels.
    He knew only that she looked very much like another girl, a girl in Tulsa, a girl
     he had raped and tortured and killed. A little older, but similar, like she might
     have been the other girl’s big sister. He turned to watch her continue on down the
     hall. She went into a room just next door to his, and he kept watching her until she
     had closed her door.
    He went to the bathroom and used the toilet. He went back to his own room, then, and
     closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed under the fan, which resumed blowing
     hot air upon him. He tried to sit still but it was impossible. He could not get the
     girl out of his mind, could not banish her image, could not stop his mind from inventing
     horrible things that he wanted to do to her. She was like the girl in Tulsa, and he
     had done terrible things to the girl in Tulsa.
    He wondered what he was going to do Lily Daniels. Something awful, he thought. Something
     really terrible. The thought excited him.
    * * *
    Meg Rector was drunk, more or less. She hadn’t planned it that way, not when she first
     entered the dimly lighted cocktail lounge. She’d planned on having a few drinks, and
     she’d planned on finding some excitement in one way or another, but she hadn’t planned
     on getting drunk.
    It had worked out that way. The excitement, nebulous enough in her own mind, had failed
     to materialize. The bar drew a quiet crowd—dark men in lightweight suits whom she
     somehow assumed to be gangsters, cool-eyed women in expensive gowns, upper-middle-class
     married couples having a quiet drink before dinner. There was soft music and subdued
     conversation. There was no excitement.
    Meg stayed at her table. From time to time her glass was empty, and from time to time
     the waiter came and took away the empty, replacing it with fresh Beefeater and a pair
     of fresh ice cubes. She drank her drinks slowly enough, never getting high, never
     sinking into alcoholic depression, never even realizing the effect the liquor was
     having upon her.
    A chemical and biological fact was responsible for the fact that she got drunk. The
     fact is this: the liver removes alcohol from the bloodstream at the rate of one ounce
     per hour. A man may drink one ounce of alcohol per hour for his entire lifetime and
     never become remotely drunk. But if he drinks more than an ounce per hour, and if
     he does this for a sufficient number of hours, he’s going to fall under alcohol’s
     influence. This is inevitable.
    Meg averaged two drinks an hour, and each had a full jigger of 90-proof gin. A jigger
     is an ounce and a half, and 90-proof gin is forty-five percent alcohol, so with the
     aid of pencil and paper and patience one can easily determine that she was taking
     in one and one-third ounces of alcohol per hour. She had a head start, too, in the
     form of the bottle of chianti she had had at Giardi’s.
    By seven in the evening, then, she was drunk.
    She stood up slowly but steadily, took a crisp dollar bill from her purse, folded
     it once and dropped it upon the table top for the waiter. She walked steadily out
     of the cocktail lounge to the street. At the doorway she braced herself for a rush
     of unbearable heat, since the cocktail lounge had been air-conditioned and since the
     street was not. She opened the door and stepped outside, and she was surprised to
     discover that the breeze which blew at her was pleasantly cool. El Paso evidently
     cooled off in the evenings, and for this she was thankful. Heat right now might knock
     her over. Hot air, after a plethora of gin, is a bad chaser.
    She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the breeze. She felt fine, she decided;
     not at all wobbly, not at all nauseous, not at all sober. It was a good feeling. If
     excitement