Free No Cure for Death by Max Allan Collins

then.”
    I smiled at her; suddenly I flashed on sitting across from her in a study hall. I said, “He called me this afternoon and said he was in town, staying out here. I’d sure like to surprise ol’ Phil. Kind of... pop in on him, you know?”
    “Oh sure. Well, hey, why don’t you take his spare key here and do that?”
    “Could I?”
    “Boss might frown, but what the heck? Ain’t as if I don’t know you.” She reached behind her on the wall of keys and plucked one off. “Here you go.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Sure,” she said, returning to her magazine.
    Just as I was going out the door, her voice behind me said, “Nice seeing you again, and talking.”
    “Yeah, nice talking to you, too.”
    There was music, hard loud rock music, behind the door to room seven. Tiny fingers of gentle smoke were crawling out around the door’s edges, bearing the fragrance of burning incense. I put my ear to the door and heard no one speaking, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was safe to assume Taber was alone. I looked around a couple times, catching sight of a shining new green Javelin in the stall adjacent to the room, and then went ahead and worked the key in the lock.
    The lights were out, so as I went in I hit the switch.
    He was on the bed, on his back, shirt off, wearing nothing but faded bell-bottom jeans. His chest was pale and hairless, but his face was fully bearded and the hair on his head, while showing signs of thinning, was frizzily long. A joint was tight in his lips, and he was caressing it easily with the fingers of one hand; he drew a long toke on it. On the nightstand next to the bed was the stick of burning incense, but even with that hanging in the air the pervasive smell of the joint’s smoke couldn’t hide. From past experience I made it as more than simple pot—more like hashish. Maybe it was some of that smack weed that was going around, pot cured in heroin.
    He didn’t react right away. He just stayed right on his back looking up at the ceiling, the only sound coming from him being the sucking in on the cigarette.
    I shut the door and went over to a bureau opposite the bed where a cassette tape player’s twin speakers were putting out the music. I turned it down.
    All at once he came off the bed at me, like a threshing machine made out of skinny arms and legs and hair, and my back was to the wall and his bony fists were crashing again and again into my ribs. I pushed his head away with the heel of my hand and sent him down with ease, like I’d batted a weighted punching dummy, but he came back the same way, bounced right up and a sharp, hard little mallet of a fist jacked my eye, and then another jarred my stomach, and then my eye again, and the “V” point of an elbow shot pain through my balls and from there, in increasing waves, throughout my body, and suddenly I was on the floor and Janet Taber’s common-law mate, a hideous scarecrow come to life, was raising a bare foot to stomp me, yelling, “Don’t mess with my karma, man!”
    Simultaneously I caught my senses and his foot, and I heaved him in the air. He thudded softly on the bed and I ran over and held him down on it with a straight-arm and said, “Easy man, I didn’t mean to bring you down, come on man, let’s cool it now.”
    I cooed at him like that for a while, and finally he settled down. He didn’t
come
down—that smack weed or whatever the hell he was on was too potent for that—but I was happy to have him just floating in one spot.
    “Phil Taber?”
    He looked at the left corner of the room and concentrated on something—a mote of dust, maybe, or a piece of lint—and his smile flickered. I took that to mean yes.
    “Janet was your wife?”
    He nodded, and as he did, a convulsion took hold of him and made his whole body nod with him.
    “What are you doing in Port City?”
    His voice was soft, almost inaudible, but I heard him say: “Hey, man, I ain’t
that
fuckin’ high.” And a cackle ripped out of him with