First Blood

Teasle shrugged. 'All right, play it tough if you want. That doesn't bother me none.' He unhooked the hand-cuffs from his gun belt. 'Let's have your wrists.'

Rambo kept them at his sides. 'I mean it. Let me be.'

Teasle laughed. 'You mean it?' he said and laughed. 'You mean it? You don't seem to understand I mean it too. Sooner or later you're getting in that cruiser. Only question is, how much force I have to use before you do it.' He rested his left hand on his pistol and smiled. 'It's such a little thing, getting in the cruiser is. What do you say we don't lose our perspective?'

People walking by looked curiously at them.

'You would draw that thing,' Rambo said, watching Teasle's hand on the pistol. 'At first I thought you were different. But now I see I've met crazy ones like you before.'

'Then you're one up on me,' Teasle said. 'Because I've never met anything quite like you before.' He stopped smiling and closed his big hand around the grip of his gun. 'Move.'

And that was it, Rambo decided. One of them was going to have to back down, or else Teasle was going to get hurt. Bad. He watched Teasle's hand on the bolstered pistol, and he thought, You bloody stupid cop, before you pull that gun, I could snap off both your arms and legs at the joints. I could smash your Adam's apple to sauce and heave you over the rail. Then the fish would really have something to feed on.

But not for this, he suddenly told himself, not for this. Just thinking about what he could do to Teasle he managed to satisfy his anger and control himself. It was a control he had not been capable of before, and thinking about his control made him feel better too. Six months ago when he finished convalescing in the hospital, he had been unable to keep hold of himself. In a bar in Philadelphia some guy had kept pushing ahead of him to see the go-go girl take off her pants, and he had broken the guy's nose for him. A month later, in Pittsburgh, he had slit the throat of a big Negro who pulled a knife on him when he was sleeping one night by a lake in a park. The Negro had brought a friend who tried to run, and Rambo had hunted him all through the park until he finally caught him trying to start his convertible.

No, not for this, he told himself. You're all right now.

It was his turn to smile. 'O.K., let's have another ride,' he said to Teasle. 'But I don't know what the point is. I'm only going to walk back into town again.'

6

The police station was in an old schoolhouse. And red yet, Rambo thought as Teasle drove into the parking lot at the side. He almost asked Teasle if painting the schoolhouse red was somebody's idea of a joke, but he knew that none of this was a joke, and he wondered if he should try talking himself out of it all.

You don't even like this place. It doesn't even interest you. If Teasle hadn't picked you up, you would have gone straight through on your own.

That doesn't make a difference.

The cement steps leading up to the front door of the station looked new to him, the shiny aluminum door was certainly new, and inside there was a bright white room that took up the width of the building and half the length and smelled of turpentine. The room was checkered with desks, only two of which had anybody at them, a policeman typing, and another policeman talking into the two-way radio that was along the right back wall. They both stopped when they saw him, and he waited for it to come.

'Now that's a sorry sight,' the man by the typewriter said.

It never failed to come. 'Sure,' Rambo told him. 'And now you're supposed to say, What am I, a girl or a boy. And after that you're supposed to say, If I'm too poor to get a bath and a haircut, you'll take up a collection for me.'

'It's not his looks I mind,' Teasle said. 'It's his mouth. Shingleton, have you anything new I ought to know about?' he asked the man by the radio.

The man sat tall and solid. He had an almost perfectly rectangular face, neat sideburns down to slightly below his ears. 'Stolen car,' he said.

'Who's handling it?'

'Ward.'

'That'll be fine,' Teasle said and turned to Rambo. 'Come on then. Let's get this over.'

They went across the room and down a corridor to the rear of the building. Footsteps and voices were coming out open doors on both sides, office workers in most of the rooms, policemen in the rest. The corridor was glossy white, and the turpentine smelled worse, and down at the end there was a scaffold under a dirty green part of the ceiling that had been left unpainted. Rambo read the sign that was taped to the scaffold: OUT OF WHITE PAINT BUT WE GOT MORE COMING IN TOMORROW AND WE GOT THE BLUE PAINT YOU WANT TO COVER THE RED OUTSIDE.

Then Teasle opened the door into an office at the very end of the hall, and Rambo held back a moment.

Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this? he asked himself. It's still not too late to try and talk your way out.

Out of what? I haven't done anything wrong.