“You know what I have?” she asked me.
“I … guess.”
“Yeah. I’m gone, John. My T-cell count’s down below two hundred.”
“You have money?”
“Money? It doesn’t make any difference now. That’s why they moved me to this private room. That’s the way they do things here. It bothers the other patients to see someone go out—makes it harder to swallow all the bullshit about a positive mental attitude.”
“How …?”
“How what? What difference could it make now?”
I didn’t say anything for a while. “I did a lot of things,” I told her. “I did a lot of things, trying to find you.”
“You always did a lot of things, John.”
We stayed quiet after that. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, shared them with her. Nobody came in. The sun shifted lower in the sky but it was still coming in her window.
Maybe I fell asleep. I heard her voice like it was in the middle, like she’d been talking for a while.
“I went too far, honey,” she said. “I went too far. I hated them so much. I still hate them.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“Did you …?”
“No. I never saw him. But I kept seeing him. You understand what I’m saying? I just kept seeing him. I was working as a domina. I never had sex. I never had sex since you went down, John. You believe that?”
“Yes. I was just …”
“What?”
“I was … confused.”
“That’s you. Confused. You’re always confused, aren’t you? I’m surprised you made it this far. People always use you.… I thought you’d be used up. All used up. It’s funny, huh? I know how things work, you don’t. And I’m the one—”
“Shella—”
“I never had sex with any of them. Not real sex. I never made a whore’s mistake, either. Whores’re stupid. They think because a man will pay them to piss on his face they can laugh at him. I knew a whore got herself killed doing that. You can’t laugh unless you’ve got control.… It doesn’t matter who’s paying.”
“It doesn’t—”
“Everything matters. Everything gets paid for. My tricks, they could get off being whipped, when I hurt them. Sometimes they’d finish themselves. But I never let anyone inside me. I could have stayed on the phones. There’s real money in that. Talking to freaks. Plug in a credit card and close your eyes and you get what you want. But some of them, they wanted the real thing. And they paid more for it. A lot more. It used to help me too. It was enough, for a while. I’d put on my outfit and make them lick my boots, tie them up, blindfold them. It felt … powerful. But as soon as it was over, they’d get dressed and they wouldn’t look at you. They’d go back to being in charge. They got what they paid for. No matter what you did to them, they were calling the shots. Using you, the way they always do.”
I touched her arm. The bones in her arm. “You don’t have to do that anymore.…”
“I never had to do it, John. Remember what the little gangster in New York used to call you? Ghost? That’s what I was, a ghost. It wasn’t real. Spanking. That’s what some of them call it. Spanking. Like the way you’d do a kid. Some of them did it. To kids, I mean. Some of them go both ways. Like AC-DC, but with the whip. Switch, they call it. If you’re a switch, you’ll give it and you’ll take it. I never took it.”
“I know.”
She acted like she didn’t hear me. “I worked the dungeons first, but then went out on my own. They have such a cute name for it. Domestic Discipline. One day, I had one of them tied up. Before we started, he showed me pictures of his little girls. Two little girls. Told me how he spanked them when they were bad. He had pictures of them. With their pants down. He told me maybe he’d bring them over to me. For discipline, he said. He wanted to watch. I was working on him. Saying the words. Like dancing. I saw his face. It was him. My father. Tied up and he couldn’t move. I could see his hard-on bulging and I wanted to cut it off.”
“It’s all right,” I told her.
“Shut up! I need to finish this. You came all this way to hear the truth.… Sit there and take it. Take it!”
I moved my fingers along her arm, trying to find a vein. Her skin was so pale I could see through it.
“I beat him to death. Halfway through, he got it. Knew I wasn’t going to stop. There was a gag in his mouth. A good gag, big rubber ball. I don’t know if he choked to death on the vomit or his heart just stopped or what. But I could smell when he died. I ran out of there then. I was scared. Scared of myself. But I went back. Right back to it. I did a lot of them, John. A lot of them. All over the country.”
“It’s okay.”
“Okay? Yeah, it was okay. I could have kept going forever. Worked my way through every freak in the world. I never would have gotten sick. I was taking a lot of pills. For the pain. I had to keep moving, once I got started. I wasn’t running from you anymore, just running. I had to do a lot of them before I’d find the right one. See his face. But once I got one done, I had to go. Right then, go.” She took a deep breath. Something rattled inside her when she did it. “They knew about it. They had to know. They knew. One of them even asked me, are you her? They knew someone in the underground was killing them. But I never had any trouble getting clients. Never. I got bigger, stronger.”
“I saw a picture,” I told her.
“Yes?” she said. Then she closed her eyes. I thought she was going to sleep again. I sat there, watched her. Then she started talking again, but it was a whisper. Not like she was weak, just telling secrets.
“I got to need it. More and more. I saw his face all the time. Once I must have passed out when I did it. When I came to, he was there, all tied up and bloody. I left him there, went into the bathroom to take a shower. Then I saw it. Blood. On my mouth. All over my mouth. Then next time I did it, I stopped pretending. Stopped playing. I drank their blood. It was the best, sweetest, purest thing I ever did. That’s how it must have happened.”
It was getting dark in the room. When she went to sleep, I stayed right there.
She didn’t sleep so long. I had time, though. Time to think. When she opened her eyes, I told her.
“I can get you out of here,” I said.
“What?”
“You can come with me. You don’t have to … die here, Shella. We can go someplace. You can talk to me. Like it was. I can find him, too. Take him out before you go.”
Her eyes were real soft, like they used to be, sometimes. I felt her hand on me. “Who, honey?”
“Your father. Like I promised.”
“He’s dead, baby. Long time dead I found out. Once I started my march, I knew I could do him. Do him myself, the way it should be. He never left where he was—it was easy to find out. He just died. In his sleep. He was an old man. Just died. There’s nothing left to do.”
“We could still …”
“I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to go anyplace either. I want to be done. Out of this.”
She looked at me. A hard straight look. Shella’s look. “One more deal, my partner. One more deal. You came a long way to hear. If I tell you what you want to know, will you do it?”
I lit a cigarette to get some time. She tapped my hand for a drag. I held it to her lips. She couldn’t sit up anymore.
“Will you?”
I just nodded—I couldn’t talk.
“I love you,” Shella said.
Her neck snapped like a dry twig.
I walked out the front door of the hospital. It was getting dark. The Jeep was sitting there. Like Duke’s radio, with new batteries in it.
I got behind the wheel, started the engine. I sat there for a minute.
Then I put on the headlights and pulled out of the parking lot, driving slow.
When I got to the highway, I headed east.
Going to pick up my jacket.
BOOKS BY ANDREW VACHSS
“Vachss is in the
first rank of American crime writers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
BLOSSOM
Two things bring Burke from New York to Indiana: a frantic call from an old cell mate named Virgil and a serial sniper whose twisted passion is to pick off couples on a local lovers’ lane.
Crime Fiction/0-679-77261-8
BLUE BELLE
With a purseful of dirty money and the help of a hard-bitten stripper named Belle, Burke sets out to find the infamous Ghost Van that is cutting a lethal swath among the teenage prostitutes in the ’hood.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76168-3
BORN BAD
Born Bad is a wickedly fine collection of forty-five stories that distill dread down to its essence, plunging readers into the hell that lurks just outside their bedroom windows.
Crime Fiction/0-679-75336-2
DOWN IN THE ZERO
The haunted and hell-ridden private eye Burke, a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children, is investigating suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb and, along the way, discovers a sinister connection.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76066-0
FALSE ALLEGATIONS
A professional debunker specializing in “false” allegations of child sexual abuse has stumbled across the case of his career—the real thing. What he needs now is a man who knows how to find out the truth, a man like Burke.
Crime Fiction/0-679-77293-6
FLOOD
Burke’s newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She enlists Burke to follow a child’s murderer through the catacombs of New York so she can kill him her bare hands.
As Burke tries to unravel a string of sex crimes, he is caught in the crossfire of two rogue cops who are setting him up to be the next victim.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76663-4
HARD CANDY
In Hard Candy, Burke is up against a soft-spoken messiah, who may be rescuing runaways or recruiting them for his own hideous purposes.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76169-1
SACRIFICE
What—or who—could turn a gifted little boy into a murderous thing that calls itself “Satan’s Child?” In search of an answer, Burke uncovers mechanisms of evil even he had not imagined.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76410-0
SHELLA
At the heart of this story is a natural predator, Ghost, searching for a topless dancer named Shella, who has vanished somewhere in a wilderness of strip clubs, peep shows, and back alleys.
Crime Fiction/0-679-75681-7
STREGA
The implacable Burke has a new client, a woman who calls herself “Strega” (Italian for an erotic witch)—and a new assignment that leads him into the deepest oceans of the twisted city.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76409-7
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, AUGUST 1994
Copyright © 1993 Andrew Vachss
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.
The Knopf edition of this book was cataloged as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vachss, Andrew H.
Shella : a novel / by Andrew Vachss.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-375-71907-3
I. Title.
PS3572.A33S48 1993
813′.54—dc20 92-75207
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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