Read Online The Damned by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

Miss Mooney?”
    “I’ll walk, thanks.”
    Bill swung the truck out of line, put it in reverse, leaned out the door, and backed it up the hill. There was more blue in the tree shadows, and some of the brassy look had faded out of the sky.

 
Chapter Five
     
    AS THEY had made the turn off the Pan-American Highway at Victoria, to head toward Matamoros, the police sedan had halted them.
    The twins, Riki and Niki, in the back seat of the big gun-metal Packard convertible, had been amusing themselves with a bottle of golden tequila, and had been passing it up to Phil Decker just often enough so that he made a serious attempt not to breathe into the face of the mustachioed cop.
    Phil’s kitchen Spanish turned out to be pretty inadequate and the cop had no English, and so the cop had taken them across to a restaurant where there was a man with respectable English.
    When he got the word, Phil held a conference with the twins. They were identical twins, a pair of sleek show-girl blondes wearing identical blue denim play suits. Tequila had made the four blue eyes a bit glassy.
    “Like this,” Phil said. “There’s some kind of delay at the ferry about a hundred miles down the road there, and the cars are getting across too slow. If we stay at the hotel here, we can probably get across in the morning with no trouble. Or we can go to Laredo to cross, which is no dice on account of the one-week stand near Harlingen. We stay overnight, we got to fly like big birds to get settled in and straightened away from Harlingen tomorrow night.”
    “Woops, we’re marooned,” said Riki.
    “We can take a chance on the ferry, but when these kids say something is bad, it’s usually worse.”
    Niki turned owlish. “Think of our public, Phil. Leave us lay in supplies, advance on the ferry, and picnic as we wait. A hundred miles from now some of the sting ought to be out of this sun.”
    The suggestion was carried by a vote of two against one, the twins against Phil, and with resignation he procured a picnic of sorts from the hotel. When he got back to the car he found that Riki and Niki had done a bit of foraging, and the bottle supply was once again up to par.
    As they had started down the highway, the twins had started to sing again. There were not enough of them, nor was there enough quality, to make it come out Andrews or Fontaine, but it came out lusty, with a nice drive to it.
    Phil Decker drove doggedly. The long run at the Club de Medianoche had filled up the kitty, and Sol had lined up enough stands between the border and New York so that they ought to be able to arrive with the kitty maybe a bit bent but not busted.
    And this time, he told himself grimly, they were going to make the TV idea work. Sell it to somebody. The kids were young and had talent. And he wasn’t getting any younger. The routines would have to be cleaned up, but that wasn’t hard. Wangle a few guest spots, and pray. This time the Triple Deckers ought to come through.
    He had no illusions about himself. He knew he was a baggy-pants comic with an ugly face, a heavy left hand on the piano, and a sense of timing and pace learned the hard way, learned in crumby clubs from border to border. It was the kids who were going to clinch it for him. A piece of luck finding the kids right when Manny got so sick and had to quit. A pair of Cleveland gals who’d won an amateur contest and had been booked around with a poor act of their own devising. He’d watched them, made the offer, sewn them up, gone to work on them. Now they had a bag of tricks. The gutty singing, and the duet strip. It had been tough talking them into the strip, but after they’d gone through the paces that first night in New Orleans, awkward and damn near blushing all over, the gals had been convinced that he was right. And they had the milkman skit, and the sorority-house skit, and that blackout business with the violin. A fast, rough show, with plenty of long slim legs, and plenty of double-talk