Weep for Me by John D. MacDonald Page A

talking about a plan to go to the movies.”
    “Inside I’m not like that. Inside I’m all fluttering. Things running up and down my back. That’s the way luck feels.”
    I slid my fingertips up the side of her cheek, into the dark hair. I clenched my hand in the dark hair, and it was crisply electric in my hand. I watched the way her face changed, watched the darkness come over it, the blindness. And it was like before. More explosive, if anything. Her frenzy gave her a madwoman’s strength. This wasn’t love. It wasn’t an emotion. She was a whip, fashioned of velvet and fine wire. I think she lost all sense of identity, time, location. It was as though we wished only to punish each other, to inflict a quick hurt.
    And when it was through, we lay as though we had fallen from a great height, as though our bodies lay smashed at the base of a cliff. She came back in her robe and sat beside me. She brought the shaker from the refrigerator, poured the two glasses.
    “We’ll finish these drinks, and then no more, Kyle.”
    “No?”
    Our voices were dead. “We want nothing that will weaken us or confuse us. No more drinks. Lots of sleep.No more sex. It’s like … like a fight we’re going to have. When I was a little girl, twelve, I guess, there was a man in the neighborhood. Every chance he got, he’d put his hands on me. I went into training for him. I practiced. I found an old stocking in some trash and put a stone in the toe. The next time he reached for me I hit him. He fell down and I kept hitting him. Later I was glad it wasn’t a bigger stone, because I would have killed him before they pulled me away.”
    “Sounds like a lovely neighborhood.”
    “There were seven kids. I don’t know where any of them are, or even if they’re all alive. This thing we’re going to do, Kyle. Somehow, to me, it’s like hitting that man. Can you understand that?”
    “I can see some reasons for a Spartan existence for the next six weeks, but not too Spartan.”
    “Look at us now, Kyle. Dead. Dull.”
    I pulled her down and kissed her. “Not too dead.”
    She pushed herself up angrily. “I don’t like being kissed. I don’t like silly little affectionate gestures. Don’t kiss me or pat me when I walk by or try to hold my hand or any of that sort of thing.”
    “O.K., O.K.,” I said, a little hurt. We each had one drink. She poured the rest down the sink and handed me the shaker.
    “Run along, Kyle. Weve got a lot to think about. We can think about it apart, better than together. Try to think of all the things that can go wrong. Like somebody deciding to close out his account at the wrong time. Or Mr. Nairn seeing you take money. Or Limebright getting curious about the statements I happen to spoil.”
    I went down to my apartment. Memory of the long lines of her was becoming part of my hands. My eyes knew the precise relationship of form and mass—the abrupt line of breast, the belly’s flatness, the top line of thigh. My nose had learned of the spice, and the woman scent. But these were reflective things, learned afterward, sedately. Not while it was going on—because there no senses functioned. It was only a blinding darkness, a narcotic, a thing now started that could not be stopped.

Chapter Eight
    T hursday, after work, she tapped on my door, handed me a list of accounts we could tap, and told me to come up to her apartment later.
    I locked the door. It was one thing to plan it out, as though it were some kind of game. It was another thing to have the list in your hand. It was like looking up from the book and seeing the murderer standing there.
    Nobody can stick you in jail for thinking. Not in this country. And I suddenly recognized the deep canyon between the thought and the deed.
    And they couldn’t jail me for making little marks on a list. So I checked it over and eliminated the risky ones, the ones who had their fingers in so many pies that they might decide, all of a sudden, to wipe out their