Read Online The Neon Jungle by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

needle, and the wonderful tenseness of the last few seconds of waiting. She half heard Fitz’s sigh of relief. She went out into the hall. “That way,” Ginny said, pointing. “Thirty-eight.”
    She moved down the hall, feeling as if she were moving in a dream. The doorknob of Room 38 felt chill in her hand. She turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. It was a room like Ginny’s. A heavy man sat on the bed. He had a bald head. He had small dark eyes. He held a cigarette mashed between thumb and middle finger. He looked sharply at her, grinned, snapped his cigarette against the wall, and, standing up, said, “Come on in and close the door, honey.”
    Teena turned and ran, instinctively yanking the door shut in his face as she turned. She fled down the hall. She heard a harsh yell as she got to the head of the stairs. She went down the first flight so fast that she came up against the wall at the landing, stinging her hands. She was crying with fright so that she could barely see. She heard Ginny call her angrily, shrilly. She pushed open the heavy fire door that opened into the bright June afternoon. She ran down the alley and turned toward the railroad station. She sobbed aloud as she ran, and after she became aware of people stopping to stare at her, she slowed to a fast walk, and kept her face turned away from those she met. She looked back and thought she could see Fitz standing way back on the sidewalk.
    When she reached home she went softly up the stairs to her second-floor room and shut the door. She lay on her bed. Every time she shut her eyes she could see him, see his grossness, see the bald head with the gleam of sweat.
    And then her mind slid uneasily back to the look of the box Ginny had held out. And the crawling wanting began again, worse than before. She rolled her head from side to side. She held her fists hard against her forehead.
    There was the box and the slick, sweet needle gleam, and the teaspoon, caked and blackened with delight, and the waxy stub of candle. She could have pretended the other thing was happening to someone else. Such a little unimportant thing to do to acquire something that would deliciously end the crawling want, the itching, the grainy eyes.
    She heard Jana’s warm mellow voice. “Telephone, Teena! You up there, Teena? Teena!”
    Teena held her forearm across her mouth and bit it, making a pain she could barely stand. Jana stopped calling. Teena looked at the deep white notches in her arm that began slowly to turn red. She doubled her fist and hit her thigh as hard as she could. The pain knotted her muscles, cramped her leg. She wondered if they would give Fitz a fix anyway. Probably not. He’d be half wild by now. Suddenly she remembered the single stick she had hidden in her jewelry box. She had not wanted it before, wanting only the sick sweet swoop of the way the needle would hit, the way Bucky had fixed her in the vein the last time, drawing blood back up the needle and hitting her hard again.
    Her hands shook and she had a terrible moment when she thought it was gone. Then her fingers touched the dryness. As she lifted it out, some of the contents spilled. She made a little paper scoop and took a deep breath and made her hands stop shaking long enough to pick up every shred and work them all back into the coarse paper tube. She lay on the bed and took the match and lit it and held it a moment and then touched the paper. She breathed as fast and hard and deep as she could, never taking the cigarette from her lips. The red line of burning climbed steadily up toward her lips. She kept it up until she had to pinch one tiny corner of the very end, until the last deep drag stung her lips.
    She had been afraid of the distinctive smell of it in the house. But this was an emergency. She got up and disposed of the tiny butt that was burning her fingertips. She opened the windows wider, went back to the bed. It was, she thought, like being given spun-sugar candy when you