JК
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas :: Thompson Hunter S.
Страница: 182 из 255“You’re right. They’d probably burn me at the goddamn stake… set me on fire right there in the dock. Shit, it doesn’t pay to try to help somebody these days…
We coaxed Lucy down to the car, telling her that we thought it was about time to “go meet Barbra.” We had no trouble convincing her that she should take all her artwork, but she couldn’t understand why my attorney wanted to bring her suitcase along. “I don’t want to embarrass her,” she protested. “She’ll think I’m trying to move in with her, or something.”
“No she won’t,” I said quickly… but that was all I could think of to say. I felt like Martin Bormann. What would happen to this poor wretch when we cut her loose? Jail? White slavery? What would Dr. Darwin do under these circumstances? (Survival of the… fittest? Was that the proper word? Had Darwin ever considered the idea of temporary unfitness? Like “temporary insanity.” Could the Doctor have made room in his theory for a thing like LSD?)
All this was academic, of course. Lucy was a potentially fatal millstone on both our necks. There was absolutely no choice but to cut her adrift and hope her memory was fucked. But some acid victims - especially nervous mongoloids - have a strange kind of idiot - sapient capacity for remembering odd details and nothing else. It was possible that Lucy might spend two more days in the grip of total amnesia, then snap out of it with no memory of anything but ourroom number at the Flamingo…
I thought about this… but the only alternative was to take her out to the desert and feed her remains to the lizards. I wasn’t ready for this; it seemed a bit heavy for the thing we were trying to protect: My attorney. It came down to that.
So the problem was to work out a balance, to aim Lucy in a direction that wouldn’t snap her mind and provoke a disastrous backlash.
She had money. My attorney had ascertained that. “At least $200,” he’d said. “And we can always call the cops up there in Montana, where she lives, and turn her in.”
I was reluctant to do this. The only thing worse than turning her loose in Vegas, I felt, was turning her over to “the authorities”… and that was clearly out of the question, anyway. Not now. “What kind of goddamn monster are you?” I said. “First you kidnap the girl, then you rape her, and now you want to have her locked up!”
He shrugged. “It just occurred to me,” he said, “that she has no witnesses. Anything she says about us is completely worthless.”
“Us?” I said.
He stared at me.
We coaxed Lucy down to the car, telling her that we thought it was about time to “go meet Barbra.” We had no trouble convincing her that she should take all her artwork, but she couldn’t understand why my attorney wanted to bring her suitcase along. “I don’t want to embarrass her,” she protested. “She’ll think I’m trying to move in with her, or something.”
“No she won’t,” I said quickly… but that was all I could think of to say. I felt like Martin Bormann. What would happen to this poor wretch when we cut her loose? Jail? White slavery? What would Dr. Darwin do under these circumstances? (Survival of the… fittest? Was that the proper word? Had Darwin ever considered the idea of temporary unfitness? Like “temporary insanity.” Could the Doctor have made room in his theory for a thing like LSD?)
All this was academic, of course. Lucy was a potentially fatal millstone on both our necks. There was absolutely no choice but to cut her adrift and hope her memory was fucked. But some acid victims - especially nervous mongoloids - have a strange kind of idiot - sapient capacity for remembering odd details and nothing else. It was possible that Lucy might spend two more days in the grip of total amnesia, then snap out of it with no memory of anything but ourroom number at the Flamingo…
I thought about this… but the only alternative was to take her out to the desert and feed her remains to the lizards. I wasn’t ready for this; it seemed a bit heavy for the thing we were trying to protect: My attorney. It came down to that.
So the problem was to work out a balance, to aim Lucy in a direction that wouldn’t snap her mind and provoke a disastrous backlash.
She had money. My attorney had ascertained that. “At least $200,” he’d said. “And we can always call the cops up there in Montana, where she lives, and turn her in.”
I was reluctant to do this. The only thing worse than turning her loose in Vegas, I felt, was turning her over to “the authorities”… and that was clearly out of the question, anyway. Not now. “What kind of goddamn monster are you?” I said. “First you kidnap the girl, then you rape her, and now you want to have her locked up!”
He shrugged. “It just occurred to me,” he said, “that she has no witnesses. Anything she says about us is completely worthless.”
“Us?” I said.
He stared at me.