The Instant Enemy Read Online Free Page B

jacket.
    Then he decided to make something more of it. He crossed the street to my side, walking with swaggering authority. He was a large heavy man with a freckled bald head. In his big slack smiling face the sharp hard eyes came as a bit of a shock, like gravel in custard.
    “You live around here, my friend?” he said to me.
    “I’m just reconnoitering. You call it living around here?”
    “We don’t like strangers snooping. So how would you like to move along?”
    I didn’t want to attract attention. I moved along. With meI took the license number of the Cougar and the number of the house, 702 Los Baños Street.
    I have a good sense of timing, or timing has a good sense of me. My car had just begun to move when a light-green compact backed out of the garage of the Laurel Apartments. As it turned downhill toward the coastal highway, I could see that Sandy was driving and Davy was with her in the front seat. I followed them. They turned right on the highway, went through a yellow light at the foot of Sunset, and left me gritting my teeth behind a red light.
    I drove all the way to Malibu trying to pick them up again, but I had no luck. I went back to the Laurel Apartments on Elder Street.

chapter
5
    T HE CARD ON THE DOOR of Apartment One said: “Mrs. Laurel Smith.” She opened the door on a chain and growled at me:
    “You drove him away. I hope you’re satisfied.”
    “You mean they’re gone for good?”
    “I’m not talking to you.”
    “I think you’d better. I’m not a troublemaker by choice, but trouble can be made. If Davy Spanner’s on probation, he broke it when he swung on me.”
    “You were asking for it.”
    “That depends on which side you’re on. You’re obviously on Davy’s side. In which case you better cooperate with me.”
    She thought about this. “Cooperate how?”
    “I want the girl. If I get her back in reasonable shape, in a reasonable period of time—like today—I won’t bear down hard on Davy. Otherwise I will.”
    She unhooked the chain. “Okay, Mr. God. Come in. The place is a mess but then so are you.”
    She smiled with one side of her mouth and one eye. I think she wanted to be angry with me, but so many things had happened in her life that she couldn’t stay angry. One of the things that had happened to her, I could tell by her breath, was alcohol.
    The clock on her mantel said it was half past ten. The clock was under a bell jar, as if to shield Laurel Smith from the passage of time. The other things in the living room, the overstuffed furniture and the gewgaws and the litter ofmagazines, had an unlived-with feeling. It was like a waiting room where you couldn’t relax, for fear that the dentist would call you in any minute. Or the psychiatrist.
    The small television set in one corner of the room was on, with the sound turned off. Laurel Smith said apologetically:
    “I never used to watch TV. But I won this thing in a contest a couple of weeks ago.”
    “What kind of a contest?”
    “One of those telephone contests. They called me up and asked me what was the capital of California. I said Sacramento, and they told me I’d won a portable TV set, just like that. I thought it was a gag, but within the hour they turned up here with the set.”
    She switched it off. We sat facing each other at opposite ends of the chesterfield.
    There was a cloudy glass on the coffee table between us. The picture window behind us was full of blue sky and blue sea.
    “Tell me about Davy.”
    “There isn’t much to tell. I took him on a couple of months ago.”
    “In what sense took him on?”
    “To do the clean-up work around the place. He needed a part-time job, he’s planning to start at junior college the first of the year. You wouldn’t know it the way he acted this morning, but he’s an ambitious young man.”
    “Did you know he’d been in jail when you hired him?”
    “Naturally I did. That’s what got me interested in his case. I’ve had my own share of