Free Strange Embrace by Lawrence Block Page A

Haig said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. About not being a cop, I mean. Us cops don’t live in penthouses. Not even with all the graft we take. Go to sleep, Johnny. I’m going to go collect some graft.”
    A moon-faced, dull-eyed doctor tried to give him a hard time in the morning. “You need bed rest,” he kept saying. “The bones need a chance to relax. We can’t be responsible—”
    Johnny explained very carefully that he would sign a quitclaim absolving the hospital of all responsibility, that he could take care of his own damn skeleton, and that nothing was going to keep him in bed. The doctor was clearly unhappy but, just as clearly, there was not a hell of a lot he could do about it. Johnny signed the quitclaim, signed himself out, and caught a cab back to his place.
    He reassured Ito that he was alive, which was no small task. He washed up, changed clothes, then called Jan and gave her a quick rundown on the beating and the conversation with Haig. “So you can stop worrying,” he wound up. “Whoever is trying to send the show up the nearest creek isn’t using razors this year. Somebody else killed Elaine.”
    “And it looks like Carter?”
    “That’s the way it looks to Haig. Not to me.”
    “Be careful,” she told him. “Very careful. I’ll be worrying about you. And Johnny…”
    “Yeah?”
    “You’re hurt,” she said. “Floating ribs. I won’t be able to hug you. We won’t be able to…uh—”
    “We’ll find a way,” he said. He hung up. It was time to go hunting for Sondra Barr.

Chapter Eight
    S ONDRA, UNFORTUNATELY, DID NOT ANSWER Johnny’s ring. But a neighbor, of whom Johnny presumed to make inquiries, proved quite cooperative.
    “Sonny doesn’t hang around her pad much,” said the neighbor. “You might fall over to the Gila Monster. She makes the scene there kind of regular.”
    “How do I recognize her?”
    “She’ll probably be turned on,” the neighbor said. He was a young man with a beard that covered most of his face, which was probably just as well. “She’s always turned on. So am I, but I’m on a Zen kick. You know—meditation. I turn on to visions of hallucinatory reality.”
    “That’s nice,” Johnny told him. “What does Sondra use?”
    “Anything. Tea, meskie, hash, juice—she’s not particular. So that’s how you can recognize her. Which won’t help much.”
    “No?”
    “No. Because everybody is turned on at the Gila Monster. It’s that type of scene.”
    It was that type of scene. When Johnny walked in, he found himself in a low-ceilinged basement that should have been left as a basement, or condemned, or something. The dark, scarred door opened inward. One sealed-up window. Tables and chairs, no two alike, that could once have been furniture on the Mayflower, or maybe on the Ark.
    And people. Young men with beards who looked like Actor’s Studio types on the skids—torn sweaters, uncut hair, unshaved faces—sprawled over chairs, their eyes shut and their mouths hanging open like caverns. Girls wearing dungarees and sweatshirts and looking most unappetizing, with white lipstick and too much eye shadow. One of the girls had to be Sondra Barr. And, after he had managed to convince the lantern-jawed waiter that he was not a policeman, he learned which one she was. She sat, glassy-eyed and inert, at a small table at the rear. She was alone. He joined her, spoke her name. She looked up at him and her violet eyes were unfocused, blank, opaque.
    “My name’s Lane,” he told her. “Johnny Lane. I want to talk to you.”
    She did not answer him.
    “About a friend of yours, Sondra. Elaine James.”
    The eyes were still unfocused but the girl came halfway to life. “Elaine’s dead,” she informed him. “Good girl, Elaine. But dead.”
    Sondra stared sadly at him. Then, strangely, she began to laugh. The laughter sent chills up his spine. It was sickly dry laughter like the rattle of bones in a dusty graveyard.
    “Tell me about