Shattered

City. What happened to them?”
        She must not have known, for she did not answer.
        Leland wiped his left hand on his trousers while he held the wheel in his right, repeated the gesture and drove with the left. “I looked in all the motels near the Highlands. They weren't staying in any of them. I've lost them. Somehow, they got away from me.”
        “You'll pick them up again,” she said. He had hoped that she would be sympathetic and would encourage him. Lovely Courtney. You could always depend on Courtney.
        “Maybe I will,” he said, squinting out at the rolling hills of sand and the distant blue-and-rose mountains. “But how? And where?” He hoped she had the answer to that.
        She did. “In San Francisco, of course.”
        “ San Francisco?”
        “You have my address there,” Courtney said. “And that's where they're going. Isn't it? “
        “Yes,” he said. “It sure is.”
        “There you are.”
        “But… Maybe I can catch them in Reno tonight.”
        The lovely, soft-voiced, ethereal girl said, “They'll change motels again. You won't find them.”
        He nodded. It was true.
        For a while, then, he went away from her. He was not in Nevada now, but in Philadelphia. Three months ago. He had gone downtown to see a film which had been entertaining and which… Well, the girl in it had looked so much like Courtney that he had been unable to sleep that night. He saw the film the next night too, and he learned from the lobby posters that the actress who fascinated him was Carol Lynley. But he soon forgot that. He went back to the film night after night, and she became the real Courtney. She was perfect. Long yellow-white hair, elfin features, those eyes that seemed to pierce him… Gradually, the sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth times he saw the movie, he began to experience a regeneration of sexual desire-which was odd, because the film was family fare. Finally, though, he had gone bar-hopping and had picked up a girl. He had made it with her… But she looked nothing like Courtney. Afterward, when he was spent, lying atop her, he looked into her face and saw that she was not Courtney, and he was angry. He felt that he had been tricked. She had cheated him. And so he started hitting her, slamming his hard fists into her face, over and over until-
        He blinked at the blue sky, white sand, gray-black road. “Well,” he said to the girl on the seat beside him, “I guess I will skip Reno. They won't stay in the right motel, anyway. I'll just go right on in to Frisco.”
        The golden girl smiled.
        “Right on in to Frisco,” Leland said. “They won't expect me there. They won't be ready for anything. I can take care of them real easy. And then we can be together. Can't we? “
        “Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
        “We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?”
        “Yes.”
        “You'd let me touch you again.”
        “Yes, George.”
        “Let me sleep with you again.”
        “Yes.”
        “Live with me?”
        “Yes.”
        “And people would stop being nasty to me.”
        “Yes.”
        “You don't have to worry about me hurting you, Courtney,” he said. “When you first left me, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to kill you. But not any more. We're going to be together again, and I wouldn't hurt you for the world.”
        

    Twenty
        
        Courtney answered the telephone on the first ring, and she was even more exuberant than usual. “I've been waiting for your call,” she said. “I've got some good news.”
        Alex was ready for a piece of good news, especially if it was delivered in that warm, throaty voice of hers. “What is it?”
        “I got the job, Alex!”
        “At the magazine?”
        “Yes!” She laughed into the phone, and he could almost see her standing there with her golden head thrown back and her taut throat exposed. “Isn't it wonderful?”
        Her happiness almost made up for everything that had gone wrong in the last few days. “You're absolutely sure it's what you wanted?”
        “It's better than what I wanted.”
        “So… You and Colin will be old San Franciscans in short order-and I'll have to take a month off just to catch up with you.”
        “You know what the pay is?”
        “Ten dollars a week?” he asked.
        “Be serious.”
        “Fifteen?”
        “Eighty-five hundred a