The Man Who Killed His Brother by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

to set. Waited for night. There was a cure for this, and I was going to go get it. Never mind what I’d told Ginny. I was going to go as soon as it was dark. As soon as I recovered enough control over myself to move.
    I hung on for the sake of the dark. After a while there was no more light in the room, and the pressure eased a bit. Not much—this was going to be a long one—but enough so that I could tell my arms and legs what to do with some hope of having them listen to me.
    I lurched into the kitchen and drank what felt like about a gallon of water. Then I left my apartment, struggled down the long stairs to the street, and went shambling in the direction of the old part of town.
    Looking for that cure.

5
    T he cure I had in mind was an old Mestizo named Manolo.
    Somewhere in the old part of town, he would be sitting alone in the corner of a bar, sipping a glass of anisette, and looking for all the world like the last remains of some long-dead grandee’s noble family. He’d be sitting there like a sleepwalker, and if you saw him you’d be afraid to wake him up for fear the shock might fuddle what was left of his wits. But all the time he’d be as alert as a cat, soaking up little bits and hints of rumors, facts, information, as if he took them in through his pores. He knew a world of secrets. And if you asked him the right questions—or if you asked them the right way, or maybe if he trusted you for some reason—he’d tell you one or two of them.
    There was a good chance he’d be able to tell me the secret of Carol Christie, and I knew how to ask.
    I had an idea in my head that made my nerves crawl as bad as the DT’s, and this was the only way I knew of to check it out.
    I’m not like Ginny—I’m not a puzzle solver. For instance, it might never have occurred to me to compare the watermarks of those two notes. My brain doesn’t work that way. I get where I’m going—wherever that is—by intuition and information. In a city like Puerta del Sol, there are a lot of information dealers, and I know at least half of them. And I’m not talking about stool pigeons, punks who shill for the cops.
    Like most independent businessmen, old Manolo was a specialist. Next to el Senor himself, Manolo knew more than anybody in the city about who’s doing what to whom and how in the grubby world of drugs. The cops could put away
most of the pushers in the state if they just knew what old Manolo knew.
    I was doing my best not to think too much about Alathea. I didn’t dare. I was already too jittery—if I stopped to consider what I was thinking, I might not be able to control myself until I ended up at the bottom of a bottle somewhere. No, all I wanted to know was how a good swimmer ends up drowning in the Flat River.
    It was the kind of question you had to ask at night. People like old Manolo don’t exist during the day. When the sun comes up, they evaporate, and all you can find of them is what they leave behind—a rank, sodden body snoring away like a ruin on a pallet full of fleas somewhere, as empty of answers as an old beer can.
    But I didn’t get the chance to ask. I wasn’t more than five blocks away from my apartment, just turning onto Eighth Street on my way toward the Hegira and all the other bars where Manolo might be drinking his anisette, when things started to get out of hand.
    Down from the corner of Eighth and Sycamore, there are a couple of abandoned buildings with a long dirty alley between them. They’re close enough to the old part of town so even the cops don’t walk into an alley like that unless they have backup on the way. I was just about to cross in front of that alley when the screaming started.
    A woman screaming, terror and pain. Somewhere back in the semidarkness of the alley.
    My body is faster than my brain, and by the time the woman screamed again, before I’d even thought about it, I was headed toward the sound as fast as I could run.
    Probably I should’ve pulled the .45 out