There’s a bit of a wildcard with Joe’s side project. But Joe said that he’d give me plenty of time to vacate. If Joe says it’s safe, it’s safe.
Anyone who survives the explosion is going to see me leave. So I’ll be wearing something purple, Delia Sugar’s color. Delia will get the blame, and nobody is calm enough right now to ask questions. Instant gang war, just add water. I just have to hope Caligula doesn’t ask questions.
I check the windows outside. There’s just a hint of rain. My eyes are going blurry. My arm and my left hip were nagging at me on the way into the library, so I had to take a detour and get focused. I should chase Frances out of here before I depart on my side trip…
I think he’s gone…
I think he’s re-shelving…
Or maybe he’s staring at me and waiting and breathing…
Looking at me like I’m going to explode and he’s not half wrong and…
There’s going to be a lot of innocents on the way to Caligula. A lot of Little Debbies. I don’t think I have enough Clearwater to make it okay…
I hope Joe built my running legs good and strong. They’re going to go through Hell.
Chapter Sixteen
I don’t know if precocious is a word that can be used once your child passes a certain age, but my daughter never lost that nature. It’s the only word I can use to describe her. Right now, she’s on the other side of her bedroom door sitting against it with her back so I can’t get in. The soft muffled thump of her head bouncing against the door every three seconds or so, angry teenager Morse code.
“Go away.”
Thump.
Don’t do that, I tell her.
Thump.
“You’re a nutbag,” she replies.
Thump.
I tell her it isn’t nice to call me names. Like she would care. We used to have the most amazing relationship. Not one of those “like sisters” or “best friends” things you see in Hollywood movies. I wasn’t a cool mom. I was a good mom. A great mom.
Somewhere along the way, she turned on me, and I don’t know why. She didn’t show any of the signs that usually precede this kind of rebellion on TV specials. No black clothes. No heavy eye makeup. No dating pasty stick-thin boys.
So what did I do?
You come out of there, I sing-song.
“Or what?” she screams.
I don’t know, I coo. I’ve got a gun-hee-hee-hee.
What a joker I am. But she falls dead silent. You can feel the seriousness descend into the room. I have to look down and check my hands and make sure that I don’t actually have a gun.
I don’t, but I look away and check again just to make sure.
What did I do? I ask.
“My nose is bleeding, you fuck. There are better ways to say no…”
My attention is drawn by a noise at the far end of the hall. Kind of a tic-tic-tic. A sharp noise, like a penny being flicked down an empty high-school hallway. I look. The place is empty. But that was too loud to be anything but manmade.
I go down the hallway, and with every step, the noise gets a little louder. Now it’s like someone is holding that penny on edge and striking it on the dinner table. Behind me, the bathroom door creaks open. I spin around in time to see my daughter’s head duck back in. Her face looked like an Indian going to war, the lower half stark red. The door slams.
I follow the noise.
“Fucking psycho!” she screams.
I stumble forward at the sharpness of her voice. If someone is in the house, they had to have heard that. I have to protect her.
Nobody’s going to hurt you. Nobody’s ever going to hurt you again, I tell her.
I’m in front of the basement door. The noise is steady now, a hollow tick-tocking sound. I open the door and descend into blackness. I try the light switch, but it doesn’t work.
I make it to the dusty floor by feel alone. The noise surrounds me, a shuffling sound punctuated every half second or so with a hollow knock. I try to think like an intruder. If I was going to hide, where would I go?
Tap. Tap. A sharp noise. Then another noise, a muted golf clap kind of thing.
I take one step forward and the light kicks on above me. I’m blinded. It wasn’t that the power had been cut. The basement lamp is fluorescent, and it just took a while to warm up. There’s enough wattage to light every last recess in the room.
My eyes blur from the strain of the light. I see movement all around me. The walls ripple. I blink once, twice, and my vision clears. I swallow a startled yelp. I look down. I still have my legs, but now I can’t feel them.
And all around me, lining every wall, are a series of rolling coat racks standing edge to edge, surrounding me. And they alternate. One is filled with prosthetic legs of all sizes, some broken and bent. Some with primitive joints that are visible like an action figure, others coated in latex, realistic to the last detail. Some are simple steel pipes, others are polymer, PVC, space-age futuristic comfort cruising machines.
Some of the racks are dripping red. Some of them have chains attached to the coat rack crossbars, and on the ends of the chains are meathooks, dug into the sawed-off stumps of real thighs. Real legs, severed, blasted, torn, shredded. They twitch, and each twitch sets off a chain reaction, a nasty Newton’s Cradle, one leg bumping another, swish-swish. Equal and opposite reaction, swish-swish. Until it gets to the end of the rack, where the next set of legs, the synthetic ones, carry the motion, and it’s swish-swish-click-click. Tap tap. Golf Clap. Ever so light and airy. The scariest sound I’ve heard. Tap-tap-click-click-swish-swish, and I’m going to suffocate down here.
And a man’s voice says: “You did this to yourself. First do no harm.”
And at the top of the stairs I see the silhouette, and it comes for me. And this time I can’t wake up.
No, I scream. No, no, no, and I’m pulling my hair out like a bad actress in a seventies movie. And the door slams with such incredible force that some of the legs fall from the racks, and the legs I’m standing on, the beautiful, curvy, sweet, supple legs, they snap like twigs, and down I go into a pile of metal, blood, flesh, dust, and plastic.
There’s another man, his slumped body near me in the pile of debris. He reaches out for me with one hand, or maybe he died that way since he’s not moving, a glint of light plays off the ring on his finger. His fingertips brush mine, then he fades into blackness. I float out of myself, see my body there on the floor, everything fading away, swallowed by the linoleum, until it’s just me, staring up, empty and dead-eyed. Legless.
I’m somewhere else. An alley. Ambulances are coming and it can’t be good.
I blink and the room looks like white, sterile, sanitary. Just for a second. Then it’s just empty, black and dusty. I’m pulling myself across the floor, towards the stairs, past two artificial legs and a set of crutches.
Through the open basement door I hear her voice say, “Fucking bitch. Leave me alone! Bitch.”
And I answer, my voice weak:
I’ll save you. I’m coming to save you.
Nobody’s going to hurt you ever again.
Ever.
If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll see to it.
Chapter Seventeen
Nobody’s ever going to hurt you again.
I don’t remember shooting up, barely remember the library, but here I am. Shit. I still hear her voice echoing down the hallway. What happened? The dashboard clock tells me it’s late afternoon. Of course, according to the dash clock, it’s always late afternoon. One look outside confirms it. I lost a whole day.
My van starts a little rough, but I coax it into motion and make my way down the road for my ten o’clock meeting, ready or not here it comes. By the time I’ve rolled a couple of blocks, the bottle loses its pull on me. The little demon inside my head curls up for a nap. Fine by me.
Those bitter memories from last night are like a vise on my brain, tightening with every mile I move closer to my destination. Some of that was real
. Some of that happened. Maybe all of it. The legs. All of those legs and limbs, dismembered parts floating just below the surface of the black pond in my memory.
The buildings on either side of the street manifest those ghosts. Disembodied legs and breasts and asses painted on signs to advertise good times. The Red Light district. This is the only other area of the city that the law never seems to notice. The police have a plan, and for the most part, it works. Keep crime “legal” in these designated areas of the city, and you can spend more time and less money policing the low crime districts. Less stress and work for the cops, happier citizens, everything is good. There’s the standard raid every month or so, a big bust that hits all the news outlets, someone gets hauled off or taken down, usually a two-bit player who was ripe for a fall anyway. The citizens see their tax dollars at work, lament the state of humanity, and return to their sitcoms.
Part of me enjoys the idea of Red Light. There’s something about the lure of it, I guess. Seeing broken boys and girls making a living the easy way by taking it the hard way. Going to the back-alley heroin clubs where everybody knows your vein. Or maybe it’s because this is the last step, the closest we all come to being like animals, hunting for food and sex. Not all of the women here are hookers. Some are sex addicts, some are drug addicts, some are just crazy. Same goes for the men. You can buy and sell anything in Red Light.
I pass by a corner grocery store, its insides dark and mysterious, the silhouettes of two women move behind the glass. Another jolt hits me. This intersection. Something about that man in the alley from my dream, and this intersection. I was following him. I don’t know what I mixed last night, booze or pills or needles, but it’s not letting go easy.
His car. What was it about this corner and his car? Waiting for the light to roll from red to green, I get flashes of a night.
A hooker. I was stuck in traffic. She leaned into a window, swaying her hips a little as she talked. I followed the car. Angry? Watched it from a block away until they were done. When they finished, I saw her head bounce off the inside of the passenger-side window. Then the door opened, and she flew out, landing in a heap on the sidewalk.
Busted her nose on the concrete. Sprang up to her feet, quick like a rabbit, but she couldn’t stand. Dazed. She screamed at the car, and it sped off. She stepped in front of me before I could follow him. Put her hands on my hood, drops of blood spattering down, turning my hood into a slutty Pollack. She was skinny, shaking from cold or withdrawal, staring at me with big Chihuahua eyes. Told me to leave him alone. Wasn’t worth it. Then she just smiled a bloody smile, a mix of blackened gums and bloody lumps of bad teeth. She walked away like nothing happened. If I couldn’t catch him, then it would be her. I chased her to the end of the block.
And now, the light is green. There’s a woman staggering across the intersection, towing a shopping cart impossibly laden with cans and bottles. Teetering, like they’re all going to…
Tumble down. Twice. She couldn’t walk straight. When I caught up to her, she turned and spat a bloody streak across my shirt. Go home, she said. For my own good. Told me I should have my pimp take care of it if I had a beef. And that set me off. Whatever was left in me that was proper and dignified…
I punched her hard. She dropped to the sidewalk, a little Rorschach of blood popping from the back of her head across the concrete. I saw her cheek, the one I didn’t hit, marked with a square purple bruise, the kind only a ring could make. A ring I knew.
Then, a chunk of brick sailed by my head. Her street sisters, coming to the rescue. I ran back to my car, pulled into traffic, and felt completely lost. I made it three blocks before I had to stop. My eyes blurred. Couldn’t pull over. Frozen in the middle of the road for ten minutes. Heedless to the horns blaring behind me, mindless of the angry pedestrians and horny johns tapping on my windshield. Horns so loud I can hear them…
Because I can hear them. A routine patrol by some rookie cop who drew the short straw. He’s behind my van. He honks, then gets on the PA and tells me to keep moving. Wouldn’t hit the sirens because that would bring the heat down on him. I comply, moving on, frustrated, chasing that broken string of memory.
There is no such thing as a bad part of town. There are two worlds. One where people were lucky enough to find themselves enslaved by jobs, bills, families, anything to take their mind off of the decay that surrounds them. Any pointless task that can be marketed, polished, and sold to give someone a feeling of hope, progress, meaning in their life. And then, there’s the feudal society that opened my eyes and made me aware of life, true life, every reeking, lurking, disgusting nook and cranny of it. Where people have to move, have to struggle or die.
Some people can quote you song lyrics like nobody’s business. Me, I can tell you the safest spots to score a hit or get serviced, and in Red Light, I’ve done neither. I think.
That Chihuahua girl. She probably had a life once, too. Before some awful change brought her here and she started over. Her face floats through my mind, the thick scab on her lower lip where her tooth had bitten through from the fall. The Chihuahua girl belonged to a loose-knit cabal of women of the night who congregated at the city cemetery before hitting the streets. The graveyard was an old, slumping sinkhole of wet mud and scrubby grass that was built God-knows-when before the settlers came. It’s full of crypts and graves, and is home to the Mistress of the Night, one Delia Sugar.
Delia is a bit too eccentric for a madam, if you ask me. She’s Nigerian I think. You should see her come out at night, striding the tops of decrepit tombs and cisterns and fountains, prowling above her flock, moving like a ripple against the night sky. Her flock is something to behold as well. Each with a bright purple accent somewhere on their body to mark them as one of hers. Hair dye. Sashes. Pants, shirts, bras, whatever.
Nobody messes with Delia’s children. And what a family they are. Skinny little boys whose ribs stretch through their too-pale skin. Knock-kneed Goth queens and toothless middle-aged heroin addicts. Black, yellow, brown, red, a regular rainbow coalition. The cheapest lays in town, all of them. Homeless and jobless and devoted entirely to the continuation and elevation of their holy mother Delia.
Delia provides. Delia finds them clothes, and food, and warm spots to sleep, and drugs, and whatever they’d like. All they have to do is obey her. She tells them who to look for. She tells them who their jobs will be. And if there haven’t been enough reservations made on the evening, she’ll send them out into the city proper for some random coupling. Free samples, she calls it. Drawing in new business.
They never see a penny of it. They just go back to her. Easiest life there could be. You do your job, and you get exactly what is promised to you, and really, excluding societal norms, what’s wrong with that?
Chihuahua girl worked for Delia. But she’s not why Delia’s on the list. I wonder if she’s still alive, or if she had a kid, or maybe gained a pound or five. Does she still have what’s left of her teeth?
It’s driving me crazy, darting at my mind like a mosquito. I close my eyes for a brief moment, because I know this is important. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Delia. There is something important about Delia. I don’t want to rush Caligula, because this plan is important, but I want Delia now. She’ll have answers.
“HEY LOOK—!!”
My eyes snap open at the sound of the shout, and I get a split-second view of a stick-like figure with ratty purple hair just before she makes a sickening kettle-drum thud on the hood of my van. My front tires hop as they roll over her body, and I manage to slam the brakes hard enough to avoid running her over with the back wheels.
I should call Joe, tell him I might run late for that ten o’clock. I hope he knows to hold off on the fireworks at Caligula’s. Maybe he’ll come looking for me.
Did I just kill my Chihuahua girl? It doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that I’m in the middle of Red Light and I’ve run over one of the queen’s daughters.
PART TWO
A C
hange of Plans
Chapter Eighteen
Nobody on the street seems to have noticed my faux pas. I hear scratching under my van like a puppy anxious to get outside. Like a skinny crank whore getting burned by a hot tailpipe. I open the door and see one long leg angling out from under the van, clad in a black and white striped legging. Now I know how Dorothy felt.
Beneath the van, over the tick-tick-tick of my cooling engine, she’s laughing. She shifts and screams. It turns into a high-pitched whine, and then she swallows hard and starts laughing again. By the time she’s pulled herself out from under the van, I see that her upper body has moved and her leg has stayed in pretty much the same place. I must have powdered her hip. I try to tell myself it’s her fault for being so damned malnourished. Drink some milk, and maybe it would have just been a deep bruise.
“Oh shit…” she says, pulling herself out a little further so she can see up into the van. “I’m gonna tell…”
I’ve got the door open, looking her right in the face, all puffed on one side. I don’t think it’s Chihuahua girl, but I’m a little teary. Running wouldn’t be the swiftest plan right now, but it’s all I’ve got. There are people approaching the van. All of them look concerned, angry, afraid. All of them are wearing purple.
At first, not one of them seems to care about the woman trapped beneath my van. Instead, they see my face and they think I’ve been mangled in the accident. Even when they’re next to my van, almost standing on the girl, they take little notice of her. One of them, towards the back of the huddle, shuffles forward and drags her from beneath the van. Her screams are horrendous. I only wish I could feel what she feels right now. Legs. Broken legs dangling and flopping and bleeding and hurting. Even that, I would take.
My eardrums pop and my head snaps forward. I see myself in a clean room, my legs dangling like the whore’s, blood…telling me I’m going to lose them. Nothing can be done. It’s the only way. Where’s my voice? I want to scream, but I can’t. I won’t let myself. Another flashback, I tell myself. It can’t hurt me, but these people can.
Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Page 12
