Thinner(36)

Hopley's skin was a harsh alien landscape. Malignant red pimples the size of tea saucers grew out of his chin, his neck, his arms, the back of his hands. Smaller eruptions rashed his cheeks and forehead; his nose was a plague zone of blackheads. Yellowish pus oozed and flowed in weird channels between bulging dunes of proud flesh. Blood trickled here and there. Coarse black hairs, beard hairs, grew in crazy helter-skelter tufts, and Halleck's horrified overburdened mind realized that shaving would have become impossible some time ago in the face of such cataclysmic upheavals. And from the center of it all, helplessly embedded in that trickling red landscape, were Hopley's staring eyes.

They looked at Billy Halleck for what seemed an endless length of time, reading his revulsion and dumbstruck horror. At last he nodded, as if satisfied, and turned the Tensor lamp off.

'Oh, Christ, Hopley, I'm sorry.'

'Don't be,' Hopley said, that weird joviality back in his voice. 'Yours is going slower, but you'll get there eventually. My service pistol is in the third drawer of this desk, and if it gets bad enough I'll use it no matter what the balance is in my bankbook. God hates a coward, my father used to say. I wanted you to see me so you'll understand. I know how he feels, that old Gyp. Because I wouldn't make any pretty legal speeches. I wouldn't bother with any sweet reason. I'd kill him for what he's done to me, Halleck.'

That dreadful shape moved and shifted. Halleck heard Hopley draw his fingers down his cheek, and then he heard the unspeakable, sickening sound of ripe pimples breaking wetly open. Rossington is plating, Hopley's rotting, and I'm wasting away, he thought. Dear God, let it be a dream, even let me be crazy ... but don't let this be happening.

'I'd kill him very slowly,' Hopley said. 'I will spare you the details.'

Billy tried to speak. There was nothing but a dry croak.

'I understand where you're coming from, but I hold out very little hope for your mission,' Hopley said hollowly. 'Why don't you consider killing him instead, Halleck? Why don't you ... ?'

But Halleck had reached his limit. He fled Hopley's darkened study, cracking his hip hard on the corner of his desk, madly sure that Hopley would reach out with one of those dreadful hands and touch him. Hopley didn't.

Halleck ran out into the night and stood there breathing great lungfuls of clean air, his head bowed, his thighs trembling.

Chapter Thirteen

He thought restlessly for the rest of the week of calling Ginelli at Three Brothers - Ginelli seemed like an answer of some kind -just what kind, he didn't know. But in the end he went ahead and checked into the Glassman Clinic and began the metabolic series. If he had been single and alone, as Hopley was (Hopley had made several guest appearances in Billy's dreams the night before), he would have canceled the whole business. But there was Heidi to think about ... and there was Linda - Linda, who truly was an innocent bystander and who understood none of this. So he checked into the clinic, hiding his crazy knowledge like a man hiding a drug habit.

It was, after all, a place to be, and while he was there, Kirk Penschley and the Barton Detective Services would be taking care of his business. He hoped.

So he was poked and prodded. He drank a horrid chalky-tasting barium solution. He was given X rays, a CAT-scan, an EEG, an EKG, and a total metabolic survey. Visiting doctors were brought around to look at him as if he were a rare zoo exhibit. A giant panda, or maybe the last of the dodo birds, Billy thought, sitting in the solarium and holding an unread National Geographic in his hands. There were Band-Aids on the backs of both hands. They had stuck a lot of needles in him.

On his second morning at Glassman, as he submitted to yet another round of poking and prying and tapping, he noticed that he could see the double stack of his ribs for the first time since ... since high school? No, since forever. His bones were making themselves known, casting shadows against his skin, coming triumphantly out. Not only were the love handles above his hips gone, the blades of his pelvic bones were clearly visible. Touching one of them, he thought that it felt knobby, like the gearshift of the first car he had ever owned, a 1957 Pontiac. He laughed a little, and then felt the sting of tears. All of his days were like that now. Upsy-downsy, weather unsettled, chance of showers.

I'd kill him very slowly, he heard Hopley saying. I will spare you the details.

Why? Billy thought, lying sleepless in his clinic bed with the raised invalid sides. You didn't spare me anything else.

During his three-day stay at Glassman, Halleck lost seven pounds. Not much, he thought with his own brand of gallows joviality. Not much, less than the weight of a medium-sized bag of sugar. At this rate I won't fade away to nothing until ... gee! Almost October!

172, his mind chanted. 172 now, if you were a boxer you'd be out of the heavyweight class and into the middleweight ... would you care to try for welterweight, Billy? Lightweight? Bantamweight? How about flyweight?

Flowers came: from Heidi, from the firm. A small nosegay came from Linda - written on the card in her flat, sprawling hand was Please get well soon, Daddy - Love you, Lin. Billy Halleck cried over that.

On the third day, dressed again, he met with the three doctors in charge of his case. He felt much less vulnerable in jeans and a MEET ME IN FAIRVIEW T-shirt; it was really amazing how much it meant to be out of one of the goddamn hospital johnnies. He listened to them, thought of Leda Rossington, and suppressed a grim smile.