At about three o’clock that morning, the stranger staggered into his Berkeley apartment. He was drunk as hell by this time. Sick as hell and hurting bad. The taste of vomit was in his throat, and he was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d cracked a rib. Plus his guts were in a jumble. Plus his face was a fucking mess.
He shut the door. He groaned. He leaned against the wall wearily, watching the dark room spin.
It had been a good night. From the first moment he’d walked into Shotgun Alley. He still remembered—he could still recall—the feeling of it. Knowing the fight was coming, everything inside him bright and still and clear. And then dropping that psycho Mad Dog—that was pure pleasure. And so was drinking with Cobra, who was a smart and funny guy. And watching Honey, running his eyes over Honey, thinking about how fine it would feel to peel those jeans off her…
Leaving out the part about getting kicked to shit, it had been a good night all around.
But he was finished now, wiped out. Hurt, drunk, sick, the rest of it. He wanted to drop down onto the bed like a tree falling. He wanted to sleep right through his hangover and into the night to come. If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was to sit down and write a goddamned report to his goddamned boss.
But his goddamned boss would be expecting it when he came in to work in the morning. And when he thought of the old man’s weary, heavy face, of those hangdog eyes and their expectations…
Aw, fuck him, he thought.
But the truth was, he didn’t want to disappoint him.
So with another groan, he reached over and flicked up the light switch. He tried to lift his head off the wall and look around him, narrowing his eyes against the glare.
The apartment was big and mostly empty. A bed in the next room, a table and some chairs in here. Nothing on the wall, no pictures, nothing personal. It was a sublet, just another short sublet. He never stayed anywhere long. He lived in motion, from one place to another. Something in him always racing like an engine. Anything began to feel like home and he was history, he was a trail of dust.
He pushed himself upright. Started across the room. He shed his leather jacket as he went, dropped it on the floor. He made his crabbed, wounded way over to the table by the window. Settled into the chair there, wincing, holding on to his side. With his free hand, he opened the desk’s front drawer. He wrangled out the palmtop computer he had in there, plus a portable keyboard. He hooked them together, working hunched forward, baring his teeth in pain.
While the palmtop booted up, his eyes sank closed. Unseen, the world spun lazily round. His stomach yawed. He had to jack his eyes open fast. He looked out the window to steady himself. A pretty woman’s gigantic face—a billboard advertising a bank—grinned brilliantly down on Telegraph Avenue. On the sidewalk below her, trash skittered past a beggar asleep in a cardboard box. The scene went in and out of focus, dipped and turned—Christ, he was plowed. He stared at it, waving in his seat like a cornstalk in the breeze. He stared at it till it came straight.
“Awright, awright,” he muttered then.
He hauled his attention to the palmtop. He placed his quaky, blood-encrusted fingers on the keys. He thought for a minute. And then one corner of his swollen mouth lifted. That ironical smile.
Weiss, he typed carefully. I’m in.