The Instant Enemy Read Online Free Page A

playing with matches.
    I didn’t know how to talk to them. “Your mother’s pretty sick about this, Miss Sebastian.”
    “She’ll be sicker.”
    “That sounds like a threat.”
    “It is. I guarantee that she’ll be sicker.”
    Davy shook his head at her. “Don’t say anything more. Anyway his minute is up.” He made an elaborate show of checking his wrist watch, and I caught a glimpse of what went on in his head: large plans and intricate hostilities and a complicated schedule which didn’t always jibe with reality. “You’ve had your minute. Good-bye.”
    “Hello again. I need another minute, or maybe two.” I wasn’t deliberately crossing the boy, but I wasn’t avoiding it, either. It was important to know how wild he really was. “Dome a favor, Miss Sebastian. Take off your glasses so I can see you.”
    She reached for her glasses with both hands, and lifted them from her face. Her eyes were hot and lost.
    “Put them back on,” Davy said.
    She obeyed him.
    “You take orders from me, bird. From nobody else.” He turned on me. “As for you, I want you to be out of sight in one minute. That’s an order.”
    “You’re not old enough to be giving orders to anybody. When I leave, Miss Sebastian goes along.”
    “You think so?” He pushed her inside and shut the door. “She’s never going back to that dungeon.”
    “It’s better than shacking up with a psycho.”
    “I’m not a psycho!”
    To prove it he swung his right fist at my head. I leaned back and let it go by. But his left followed very quickly, catching me on the side of the neck. I staggered backward into the garden, balancing the wobbling sky on my chin. My heel caught on the edge of the concrete deck around the pool. The back of my head rapped the concrete.
    Davy came between me and the sky. I rolled sideways. He kicked me twice in the back. I got up somehow and closed with him. It was like trying to wrestle with a bear. He lifted me clear off my feet.
    Mrs. Smith said: “Stop it!” She spoke as if he really was some half-tamed animal. “Do you want to go back to jail?”
    He paused, still holding me in a bear hug that inhibited my breathing. The redheaded woman went to a tap and started a hose running. She turned it full on Davy. Some of the water splashed on me.
    “Drop him.”
    Davy dropped me. The woman kept the hose on him, aiming at the middle of his body. He didn’t try to take it away from her. He was watching me. I was watching a Jerusalem cricket which was crawling across the deck through the spilled water, like a tiny clumsy travesty of a man.
    The woman spoke to me over her shoulder: “You better get the hell out of here, troublemaker.”
    She was adding insult to injury, but I went. Not very far: around the corner where my car was parked. I drove around the block and parked it again on the slanting street above the Laurel Apartments. I couldn’t see the inner court or the doors that opened onto it. But the entrance to the garage was clearly visible.
    I sat and watched it for half an hour. My hot and wounded feelings gradually simmered down. The kick-bruise in my back went right on hurting.
    I hadn’t expected to be taken. The fact that I had been meant I was getting old, or else that Davy was pretty tough. It didn’t take me half an hour to decide that both of these things were probably true.
    The name of the street I was parked on was Los Baños Street. It was a fairly good street, with new ranch houses sitting on pads cut one above another in the hillside. Each house was carefully different. The one across the street from me, for example, the one with the closed drapes, had a ten- foot slab of volcanic rock set into the front. The car in the driveway was a new Cougar.
    A man in a soft leather jacket came out of the house, opened the trunk of the car, and got out a small flat disk which interested me. It looked like a roll of recording tape. The man noticed my interest in it and slipped it into the pocket of his