The Mexico Run Read Online Free

left of the road, a few miles from the border. It was a dingy-looking place with less than a score of cabins, and there was a lone 1956 Cadillac with dented fenders in front of the office. A neon sign with two letters missing read: Cabins. Single, $5. Double, $6.
        The price was right. The place looked crummy, but after that forty-dollar-a-day deal in San Francisco, I felt it was time I became a little frugal. I pulled up and stopped in front of a sign which read: Happy Hours Lodge.
        I took the bag out of the back of the Jag and entered through a torn screen-door into a sad and discouraged office.
        It made a liar out of the name sign outside.
        The room was virtually bare, except for a fly-speckled, glass-topped desk, on which there were a few outdated copies of sporting magazines, a moth-eaten registration book, and a bell with a button on top to summon the manager. At least the sign said: Ring for Manager.
        I dropped my bag on the floor and pushed the bell.
        Nothing happened.
        I punched it again, and a voice from somewhere behind the closed door said, "One minute, I'm coming."
        It was a woman's tired voice, and a moment later the door leading into the interior opened, but it wasn't a woman who opened the door. It was a young girl, somewhere in her late teens. She was holding by the hand a five- or six-year-old boy with a dirty face and wearing soiled pajamas. She was a blonde, with very blue eyes and a beautiful complexion. She had the face of an angel, and in spite of the ragged Levi's and open-throated, man's shirt she was wearing, it was obvious that she had a body to match.
        She was a damned sight too beautiful to be in a dump like the Happy Hours Lodge, and she was too young to be the mother of the child she held by the hand, unless someone had taken a chance on a prison sentence for seducing a preadolescent.
        I gave her a tired smile, as tired as her voice.
        "If you're the manager here, I'd like a room."
        She didn't smile back. She merely looked at me with a peculiarly curious expression.
        "You want a room here?" She asked it as though she doubted my sanity.
        "For tonight."
        She pushed the register toward me, and I signed it. She watched me as though I were making some sort of terrible mistake.
        "That will be five dollars," she said.
        I took five dollars from my wallet, and she reached for a key on the rack behind the desk.
        "Number One. First cabin next to the office," she said.
        I asked her if I could have a bucket of ice, and she told me she would bring it to the room in a few minutes.
        "You want Cokes, there's a machine outside the door."
        The child in the dirty pajamas began crying for some obscure reason as I hoisted my bag and started for the door. She was talking to him in a soothing voice when the door slammed behind me.
        The room was just about what I would have expected for five dollars at the Happy Hours Lodge. There was a double bed with a soiled counterpane. The night stand next to it supported a lamp with the bulb missing, and a naked, forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture failed to conceal the fact that the flowered paper on the walls was peeling and that the linoleum on the floor was dirt encrusted and cracked with age. The single window facing the road was covered by faded drapes, and these half hid a green shade pulled down to the top of an air conditioner which,' surprisingly enough, turned out to be in working order.
        The formica-topped desk sat on one side of the room, and, oddly, it looked new. There was a straight-backed chair in front of it and, next to it, a folding rack for a suitcase.
        The bathroom was about what I might have guessed. The small sink was rust-stained, and it was impossible to stop the drip from the cold-water faucet. The shower was one of those square, tin contrivances, sold by Sears