The Damned Read Online Free PDF

have turned into a queer, a fairy.”
    “What a grotesque—”
    “Let me finish. The idea was deeply implanted in you that women are something nasty. Loving a woman is faintly unpleasant to you. You love me. So far it has been strong enough, that love, to take good care of us. But unless we go and dig out the causes, we’ll never have a good life. Please, John.”
    “I have nothing to say to him or to that woman. After what they did—”
    “Nothing to say to them, but maybe something to learn from them. If their love, legalized or not, has been strong enough to last for fifteen years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found something very special, very refreshing. And I’ve noticed one thing. You keep saying your father ran off with that woman. According to what I’ve heard about it, he left with her quite openly after trying for two years to get your mother to agree to a divorce.”
    “Get your clothes on,” he said harshly.
    “Cover up the nasty woman. Get her under wraps. I bet you’d put me in a Mother Hubbard if you thought you could get away with it.”
    “Shut up!”
    “You see, the angrier you get, the better my guess seems to be. And here is your ultimatum, John Carter Gerrold! Either we go out there, or I leave you.”
    “You don’t mean that!”
    “I mean it with all my heart.”
    “That’s the only thing that would get me out there. The thought of losing you.”
    “Then humor me.”
    He forced a smile. “It looks as though I’ll have to. Shall we get back?”
    “Soon as you zip me up in back, my friend “
    He zipped her up, kissed the nape of her neck. They started back toward the distant highway, hand in hand.

 
Chapter Three
     
    DEL BENNICKE upended the tepid beer and let it fill his throat. He lowered the bottle and stared across at the young girl and boy walking along the high bank, headed for the river with blanket and thermos bottle.
    A nice little bit. He liked the shape and size of her. A trim little figure and pointy little breasts and a neat way of walking. The kid with her was a pup. All hands and feet, gangly with heavy dark-rimmed glasses and a sort of girlish look around the mouth. Husky enough, though. Somehow he didn’t look as though he’d be able to take the right kind of care of that little atsui kenju.
    He scrubbed his lips with the back of a thick brown hand, tossed the empty bottle into the roadside dust. Ragged kids scrambled for it, eager for the deposit money. The victor gave Del Bennicke a white-toothed grin.
    Suddenly, in spite of the heat, Bennicke shivered. Ye gods, what kind of man could start smacking his chops over a platinum blonde when all the time he was carrying around in the back of his mind the picture of that room in the gook’s house in Cuernavaca?
    Boy, you really put it in a sling that time. These Latins can get impetuous, so the man says. He had been in jams before, plenty of them. But never a daisy like this. A man in his home town could hardly yak his way out of this one—and in a foreign county he’d have no chance at all.
    He’d taken the only way out. Left them lying there and got in the car and headed for the border, the shortest, fastest way.
    Bennicke was a short, compact man with thick shoulders, a wise and worldly tough-nut face, brisk tilted eyes, and a black brush cut, wiry as horsehair. Wars and rumors of wars in the earth’s far corners had nurtured him. He had the strut of the soldier of fortune, but too fond a regard for his own skin to wish to hear any shots fired in anger. A brisk line of patter and more brass than a dozen temple gongs had enabled him to worm his way into the homes of the weirder variants of the international set, and be adopted as mascot, drinking partner, or bed companion, depending on the circumstances.
    He was a professional guest, and between times he had smuggled gold, worked on oil crews in Venezuela, pimped in Japan. Fists and tongue and knife had got him out of nearly every variety of trouble. He