69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Espionage
ISBN: 9781453263358
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

HE WOKE UP SLOWLY, weakly. First, with his eyes still clenched shut and his frame motionless, consciousness began to return to Ralph. For a long moment he remained in one position without moving his eyelids at all.

When he finally opened his eyes the light hurt them and he shut them again quickly. He tried to yawn and stretch and his muscles ached dully in the process. He breathed heavily and turned over onto his back.

He felt like hell.

He opened his eyes a second time and this time they stayed open. Haltingly he pulled himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness almost knocked him to the floor and he had to clutch the side of the bed for support. He sat down again on the side of the bed with his feet on the floor and stared blindly at the wall.

His mouth was parched, his throat bone-dry. There was a sick, queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach that was spreading quietly throughout his system. His head felt too large and bulky for his neck to support it. His arms, when he reached for his shoes, didn’t seem to work as well as they had in the past.

He stood up again. The dizziness slugged him in the teeth again but this time he was able to master it and stay on his feet. By the elaborate process of putting one foot in front of the other he managed to reach the bathroom and step under the shower.

The shower helped. It didn’t do the trick single-handed, of course, and when he finally finished his turn under first the hot spray and then the cold spray and stepped out of the tub again, he felt a good deal better but a long ways from human. The dizziness was still present in a smaller dose and his thirst was unchanged.

He drank glass after glass of cold water, not even pausing to count them. He filled the plastic glass and poured it down his throat again and again in a heroic attempt to fill his stomach with water. Then he took his toothbrush and removed the fuzzy woolen sweaters that seemed to be shrouding his teeth.

He looked in the mirror and shuddered. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. There was a gash on his cheek where he had evidently managed to cut himself during the night. And his face, in one way or another, had aged a good ten years in the one night. The lines in his forehead and around his nose and mouth had deepened perceptibly. He wondered how much of this was a temporary effect of drunkenness and how much was a permanent change.

Back in the bedroom he dressed slowly and methodically, wondering but not caring where Stella had gone, wondering but not caring how he himself would spend the day, wondering about a great many things but caring about very little of anything. He put on a blue sport shirt and a pair of khaki pants, tied his

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