The Neon Jungle Read Online Free PDF

had changed his environment back to the apartment, that other apartment of over a year ago. And when he had finished the report and looked up, there had been a physical shock in the readjustment. It’s funny, he thought, the way it keeps happening to you. Relax for a few minutes, and she sneaks back into your life. And it’s like it never happened—the sudden midnight convulsions, the frantic phone calls, the clanging ambulance ride, Dr. Weidemann walking slowly into the waiting room, mask pulled down, peeling the rubber gloves from his small clever hands.
    “I’m sorry, Paul. Damn sorry. Pregnancy put an extra load on her kidneys. There was some functional weakness there we didn’t catch. They quit completely. Poisoned her. Blood pressure went sky high. Her heart quit, Paul. She’s dead. I’m damn sorry, Paul.”
    But the mind kept playing that same vicious trick of bringing her back, as though nothing had happened, as though she sat over there in the corner of the room, reading, while he finished his report.
    Then she would say in her mocking way, in which there was no malice. “Have all your little people been good this time, darling?”
    “Like gold.”
    She understood how it was. She had understood how a graduate sociologist working on his doctorate could take this poorly paid job just to gain field experience in his major area of interest, and then find himself cleverly trapped by that very interest, trapped by the people who were depending on him to fight for them. It had been a rather wry joke between them.
    “I don’t mind, Paul,” she had said. “I honestly don’t. Please don’t worry about it. We can manage. We’ll always manage.”
    “The pay will be spread pretty thin after you have the kid.”
    “We’ll put him to work and make him pay for the next one.”
    “That’s easy to say.”
    “Stop it, Paul. You love what you’re doing. You’re rebuilding lives. That’s worth a little scrimping and pinching.”
    “I could teach at the university and make more than this, for God’s sake.”
    Now, of course, the pay didn’t make much difference. It went for rent for the one-room apartment down in the neighborhood where most of his parolees were, for hasty meals at odd hours, for gas for the battered coupe. There was nothing left now but the work.
    He decided to walk down to the corner for some cigarettes. As he was going down the front steps a police car pulled up in front, on the wrong side of the street, and Rowell stuck his clown face out the window. “How you doing, Preacher Paul?”
    Paul felt the familiar regret and anger that always nagged at him when one of his people slipped. He went over to the car. “Who is it, Rowell?”
    “You mean you think it’s possible for one of those little darlings of yours to go off the tracks? And them all looking so holy.”
    “Have your fun. Then tell me.”
    Rowell’s tone hardened. “My fun, Darmond? You give me a got of fun with those jokers of yours.”
    “If you’d get off their backs, they’d make it easier.”
    “If I get off their backs they’ll walk off with the whole district.”
    Paul knew that it was an old pointless argument. Nothing could change Rowell. Paul had followed closely the results of the experimental plastic surgery performed on habitual criminals to determine the effect of physiognomy on criminal behavior. He suspected that Andrew Rowell had, throughout adolescence, suffered the tortures of hell because of his ludicrous face. It had made him a vicious, deadly fighter. At some point in adolescence the road had forked, and Rowell had taken the path that made him a successful police officer, rather then the criminal he could have been. Once when they had both been relaxed after discussing a particular case, Paul had tried to explain his theory to Andy Rowell. He knew he would never forget how white the man’s face had turned, how clear was the look of murder in those owl eyes.
    Rowell had said then, in a labored rusty