The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,55

might have insulted his ancestry or told him where to go, maybe even broken his arm, but tonight I said nothing.

I WALKED AWAY in the wrong direction and ended up in a section of town even seedier than Lou’s. Passing a dark doorway I was startled by the appearance of a raspy-voiced stranger.

“Help a fellow out?” he asked. I couldn’t see him well but he was young and unshaven, and I almost reminded him that the depression was over. On second thought I pulled the gun from my coat and, after letting him get a good, long look at it, offered it to him, butt first. He stared without taking it.

“Go on, take it. Go earn yourself a living.”

With some reluctance, even a smidgeon of fear, he took it and pocketed it. “Thanks, bub.”

I turned and walked back in the other direction, toward the hotel. When I got to the Inside Straight I stopped back in and Vera greeted me by name, touching me ever so slightly on the sleeve as I passed her. I stopped as though an interesting but absurd thought had just come to me unbidden.

“Say, Vera, I don’t suppose you ever get off work, do you? I’m here for a week with nothing to do.” With an effort to appear casual I pulled a couple of Hycodans from my shirt pocket and displayed them before tossing them back out of sight.

She knew the pills by sight, and she gave me a look that on a less poised woman might have been described as brazen. “I do get off work, every night. Tonight included, if you’re up late.”

“I plan to be,” I said, and I made up my mind to consider the rest of the week a vacation from all my cares.

VERA MADE THE week go by quickly and painlessly, for me at least, like one of those vacations where you start dreaming about setting up housekeeping. Her sexual appetite may have been diminished but her intense desire for more narcotics helped her pretend. The hycodan was more potent than the Mexican codeine she normally supplied herself with, and within the week she’d lost some of that shimmering quality in her eyes and even her hair seemed dulled and flattened, as if the dope were leeching out the chemicals from her last permanent wave. When I said goodbye I made her a gift of the remaining pills, a gesture that prompted her to give me an address and a phone number in case I ever passed through town again, but I didn’t keep them. I didn’t expect her to be around if I ever got back.

THE DOCTOR HAD been paid and moved out the afternoon before we were to leave, along with his nurse, and Collins was drinking gin and barking insults and orders at me and Park both. There was no show of gratitude for his involuntary cure, and though none was expected or required—we were being paid for our trouble—the return of the old Collins wasn’t particularly agreeable. Once he’d availed himself of one of Hot Springs’s more expensive prostitutes—more expensive and less attractive than the one I’d brought to my room that first night, just as Herb had warned—he declared himself ready to return to Wichita and save his empire.

When the time came to go I elected to make the trip by train. Park said nothing but I knew he resented having to drive all that distance weathering the old cocksucker’s abuse. There seemed to be some residual fogginess to Collins’s demeanor from his months as a narcotics fiend—it didn’t occur to him, for example, that he could make Park drive and hire an airplane himself—but nothing sufficient to alarm the board of directors, I didn’t think, and most of the time it was camouflaged by his caustic disposition.

I WATCHED OUT the window as we passed through the bright green, topographically complex southwestern Kansas terrain my father had grown up in. It was coal mining country now, populated by Czechs and Poles who’d moved there at the turn of the century to dig the anthracite, but in his youth it had been nothing but farmland. Some of my favorite boyhood memories were here, playing with cousins in barns, lording it over them as a sophisticated boy from the big city, on intimate terms with its gangsters and speakeasies. It was pure rot, of course, but they all went to the picture shows and they pictured Wichita as the very heart of urban sin and