A Scanner Darkly

Presently the door lock rattled and the door opened, chained inside; the girl, Kimberly Hawkins, peered out. “Yes?”

“Hey, man,” he said. “It’s me, Bob.”

“What do you have there?”

“Can of Drano,” he said.

“No kidding.” She unchained the door in a listless way; her voice, too, was listless. Kimberly was down, he could see: very down. Also, the girl had a black eye and a split lip. And as he looked around he saw that the windows of the small, untidy apartment were broken. Shards of glass lay on the floor, along with overturned ashtrays and Coke bottles.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Yeah. Dan and I had a fight and he split.” The girl, half Chicano, small and not too pretty, with the sallow complexion of a crystal freak, gazed down sightlessly, and he realized that her voice rasped when she spoke. Some drugs did that. Also, so did strep throat. The apartment probably couldn’t be heated, not with the broken windows.

“He beat you up.” Arctor set the can of Drano down on a high shelf, over some paperback porn novels, most of them out of date.

“Well, he didn’t have his knife, thank God. His Case knife that he carries on his belt in a sheath now.” Kimberly seated herself in an overstuffed chain out of which springs stuck. “What do you want, Bob? I’m bummed, I really am.”

“You want him back?”

“Well—” She shrugged a little. “Who knows?”

Arctor walked to the window and looked out. Dan Manchen would no doubt be showing up sooner or later: the girl was a source of money, and Dan knew she’d need her regular hits once her supply had run out. “How long can you go?” he asked.

“Another day.”

“Can you get it anywhere else?”

“Yeah, but not so cheap.”

“What’s wrong with your throat?”

“A cold,” she said. “From the wind coming in.”

“You should—”

“If I go to a doctor,” she said, “then he’ll see I’m on crystal. I can’t go.”

“A doctor wouldn’t care.”

“Sure he would.” She listened then: the sound of car pipes, irregular and loud. “Is that Dan’s car? Red Ford ‘seventy-nine Torino?”

At the window Arctor looked out onto the rubbishy lot, saw a battened red Torino stopping, its twin exhausts exhaling dark smoke, the driver’s door opening. “Yes.”

Kimberly locked the door: two extra locks. “He probably has his knife.”

“You have a phone.”

“No,” she said.

“You should get a phone.”

The girl shrugged.

“He’ll kill you,” Arctor said.

“Not now. You’re here.”

“But later, after I’m gone.”

Kimberly neseated herself and shrugged again.

After a few moments they could hear steps outside, and then a knock on the door. Then Dan yelling for her to open the door. She yelled back no and that someone was with her. “Okay,” Dan yelled, in a high-pitched voice, “I’ll slash your tires.” He ran downstairs, and Arctor and the girl watched through the broken window together as Dan Mancher, a skinny, short-haired, homosexual-looking dude waving a knife, approached her car, still yelling up to her, his words audible to everyone else in the housing area. “I’ll slash your tires, your fucking tires! And then I’ll fucking kill you!” He bent down and slashed first one tire and then another on the girl’s old Dodge.

Kimberly suddenly aroused, sprang to the door of the apartment and frantically began unlocking the various locks. “I got to stop him! He’s slashing all my tires! I don’t have insurance!”

Arctor stopped her. “My car’s there too.” He did not have his gun with him, of course, and Dan had the Case knife and was out of control, “Tires aren’t—”

“My tires!” Shrieking, the girl struggled to open the door.

“That’s what he wants you to do,” Arctor said.

“Downstairs,” Kimberly panted. “We can phone the police—they have a phone. Let me go!” She fought him off with tremendous strength and managed to get the door open. “I’m going to call the police. My tires! One of them is new!”

“I’ll go with you.” He grabbed her by the shoulder; she tumbled ahead of him down the steps, and he barely managed to catch up. Already she had reached the next apartment and was pounding on its door. “Open, please?” she called. “Please, I want to call the police! Please let me call the police!”

Arctor got up beside her and knocked. “We need to use your phone,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”

An elderly man, wearing a gray sweater and creased formal slacks and a tie, opened the door.

“Thanks,” Arctor said.

Kimberly pushed inside, ran to the phone, and dialed the operator. Arctor stood facing the door, waiting for Dan to show up. There was no sound now, except for Kimberly babbling at the operator: a garbled acccount, something about a quarrel about a pair of boots worth seven dollars. “He said they were his because I got them for him for Christmas,” she was babbling, “but they were mine because I paid for them, and then he started to take them and I ripped the backs of them with a can opener, so he—” She paused; then, nodding: “All right, thank you. Yes, I’ll hold on.”

The elderly man gazed at Arctor, who gazed back. In the next room an elderly lady in a print dress watched silently, her face stiff with fear.