“Well,” Dub said. He placed a finger beneath her chin, tugging upward until her brown eyes met his. She really was an attractive woman. “Get to it, then.”
He removed his hand and her head dropped forward, her shoulders slumped and her knees seemed to buckle. She had the look of a penniless drifter who had just watched her last unraveling thread of hope drift away on a stiff wind.
The hand on her shoulder tightened, and somebody burst through the door, shouting, “We need help here, man!”
Two more of Dub’s men were coming across the floor, supporting a third, an unmistakable look of anguish twisted into his face, his legs hanging limp as overcooked strands of spaghetti. Blood seeped through the fingers of the hand he’d clamped over his clavicle; the white t-shirt beneath his biker’s uniform was drenched with it, as were his pants and the handle of the knife sheathed to his belt.
“Now what?” Dub said as the crowd parted and the three newcomers made their way through them. The guy on the right—he was young, nineteen or twenty, with long blonde hair. On his chin was a thin scrabble of beard which would grow no thicker no matter how long he went without shaving. “He’s been shot,” he said.
“The hell happened?”
“I don’t know. We saw him staggering out of an alley.”
“I can help him.”
“What?” Dub turned to see Karen squirming beneath Jet’s grip.
“I can help him,” she said.
“What do you mean, you can help him?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Says she’s a nurse.”
“I am. I’m a nurse. I can help him, stop the bleeding, assess the damage and go from there.”
Dub looked at the wounded man, at the crowd surrounding him, then back to Karen. “Go for it,” he said.
Jet released his grip and Karen stepped forward. She pulled his hand away, grabbed the bloody t-shirt and ripped it away from the wound, staring at it a moment before saying, “We’ve got to get him immobilized, stop the bleeding and sterilize this bad boy.” The guy’s eyes were shut. All the color seemed to have drained from his face. He yelped when Karen pressed against the wound, and then screamed when she moved her fingers around its edges.
“I can feel it, the bullet. Right here.” She lifted her hands away—they were covered in blood.
“All right,” Dub said. “What do you need?”
“Alcohol, and plenty of it. Someplace sterile to lay him down, gauze and forceps—a goddamn hospital would be nice!”
Chuckling, Dub said, “Yeah, a hospital would be nice, if it had any electricity. Be nice if the power’d never shut off and whatever happened hadn’t happened in the first place, except I’d still be in prison, and—” He nodded at Teddy, who gave his shoulders a disinterested shrug—“that fucker’d be taking a dirt-nap.”
“What?” Karen said, the frustrated tone of someone expecting help but getting nothing but nonsensical bullshit threading its way through the word.
“There’s a clinic back through those doors. Should have most everything you need. Tell you what: you keep him alive, get him patched up and back to new, I’ll keep you alive. He dies; you’ll die just like I told you—nailed to the broad trunk of an oak tree.”
To Ben, he said, “You guys take ‘em back to the clinic.” He put his hand on his shoulder and leaned in close. “I meant what I said. She comes through, she keeps him alive; you take care of her, keep her safe. He dies; you take her out and nail her ass to a goddamn tree… What’re you smiling at?”
Ben, still smiling, said, “What can I tell ya… I like ‘em tough. She wiped out two guys, totally fucked-up one all by herself, and she’s that close to wiggling off your hook.”
“Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.” Dub turned to Claude, and to Jet who was standing beside him. “You two come find me in the morning. You’re taking a road trip.”
Claude nodded, and then he, Ben and Jet led Karen and the two guys supporting her wounded patient to the back of the hall. Karen said something as they passed one of the tables, and Ben grabbed an unopened bottle of Wild Turkey off it. When they disappeared through a doorway, Dub turned to Teddy, Bert and Ernie, and the women they had been leading through the lobby.
“Well,” he said. “Where were we... ah, yes. Shall we?”
Dub and his boys ushered their female captives across the room, into a passageway, to the double doors that opened up on the jailhouse steps. Once outside, Dub stood in front of the multi-storied, rectangular concrete building, staring out across the horizon.
Teddy said, “Be dark soon.”
“Something’s different.”
“What do you mean?”
Dub looked up at the sky, held out his hand and said, “That ash bullshit—it’s stopped falling.”
Chapter Eleven
The living room was modestly furnished with a couch and a coffee table. A couple of antique-looking end tables (garage sale castoffs, reworked and retouched, no doubt) stood directly in front of the windows, on either side of two padded Victorian chairs spaced an intimately comfortable distance apart. Scott figured this to be the wife’s hideout while her husband was in his den, gorging himself on food and drink and the must-see sporting event of the evening. A framed oil painting of a smiling circus clown kneeling in a dusty carnival thoroughfare decorated the wall above the couch—arms cradling two small children, he smiled down from his place on the wall with the wisdom of the ages. A broad wicker basket full of cattail plumes and sawgrass sat against the right wall, beneath another oil painting of three cats frolicking in a field of daisies. The Jack Daniels they’d hoisted in toast sat on the coffee table, along with an unopened gallon jug of water and what was left of a twelve-pack of Coke in their 12 ounce plastic containers, and some snacks they’d brought with them from the rear of the house. Lila’s holster and gun, which she’d removed after the decision had been made to hold up there for the night, were on the table, too. Two thick candles and a box of kitchen matches also sat on the table. The white candle wax had burned halfway down to form smooth, creamy pools in a couple of saucer plates that held the candles in place. Scott’s shotgun rested against the side of the couch. Off to the left was the dining room, and the window Warren had vaulted himself through on his way to freedom. Davey sat at the dining room table, playing a game of solitaire. Every once in a while he would glance over at Lila, who was on the couch with her feet on the table.
Scott looked out one of the windows lining the front of the house. Dusk had crept over the landscape. Soon it would be dark, and Scott wondered what might happen when it was dark. Would Warren the Rat Boy return to exact his revenge? Scott doubted that he would. After all, they still had their guns. He’d be foolish to storm the house—even if he came brandishing a firearm, the odds were against him. But what if he came back lugging a street-full of flesh-eating Neanderthals behind him? What if they caught him wandering the streets or hiding in the shadows, watching them roast another woman as somebody slipped up behind him? Scott could just about imagine how it would go when one of those creeps put the serrated edge of a hunting knife to the midget’s throat:
‘I’ve gotta stash house.’
‘Big fuckin’ deal.’
‘With a hot lookin’ babe and a little boy inside it.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘And the prick who cut loose on your gang this afternoon.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Yes, I do say. Hot, hot lookin’ babe.’
‘Take us to them.’
The knife would leave his throat and Warren the Rat Boy would happily lead those Devil’s Own pricks to them, and if it saved his skin and got him a little payback at the same time, so much the better. And what would Scott and Lila and Davey get: a turn on the spit, or crucified beneath the twisted branches of a dead oak tree, or if they were lucky, a bullet to the brain in the hail of gunfire that would surely erupt when the stand was made. Because Scott wasn’t about to be taken alive—not by them—
and he doubted if Lila would go willingly either.
Scott took a seat on the couch and sank back into the plush upholstery. He was tired, exhausted from the stress of waking up and finding his world turned upside-down, and who knew if it would ever right itself again. All the shit he’d gone through this afternoon seemed to have worn him completely down. Unconscious for the last seven weeks, and all he could think about was lying down and drifting off to sleep. Of course, it wasn’t the only thing he could think about—Rat-boy Warren and that depraved motorcycle gang drifted in and out of his thoughts like a swirling cloud of toxic waste.
Scott reached for the water, and Lila said, “Let’s have a shot instead.” She picked up the whiskey, uncapped it and took a drink, and then handed it to Scott, who shrugged his shoulders and accepted it. “Why not?” he said, and gulped down a bit himself.
Scott said, “You really think we’re safe here?”
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, Davey was tied up for a couple of days and nobody bothered him. We’re far enough away from town. There’s nothing out here anybody would want, unless somebody gets bored and starts going house to house just to see what they’ll find.”
“You don’t think that’ll happen?”
“Nah. There’s still plenty of shit to get mixed up in back on those city streets. Hell, we almost stepped into some ourselves in that out-of-the-way alley back there.”
“No shit,” Scott said as he sat the whiskey on the table and pried a bottle of Coke from the plastic ring-tab holding it in place. Air hissed through the opening when he twisted off the cap, the satisfying sound of an old friend left behind in a far away place Scott might never see again. He took a drink and found the familiar sweet taste spilling down his throat—luke-warm, to be sure, but stimulating just the same. “You think he’ll come back?”
“Who, Warren? Would you?”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t, but who the hell knows what that crazy fucker might do?”
“He won’t come back.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Back there at the pit; did you know the shotgun was empty?”
“Huh uh.”
“Neither did I. And he knows it. If there’d been one shell left, his brains would be all over the sidewalk right now. He knows that, too. I wish to hell he would come back—hey, gimme one of those Cokes.” She looked over her shoulder at Davey, hunched over his cards in the waning light as she lowered her voice, “For what he did to that kid, I’d gladly blow his head off. And he did it. Tied face down on the bed, the way he was staring out the window back there. He did it, all right. I could see it in the kid’s eyes.”
“Yep,” Scott said, nodding his agreement as he twisted off the cap and handed the Coke to Lila. She took a drink, and then picked up the whiskey and drank from it as well, handed the Jack Daniels to Scott and said, “Here.”
To Davey, she said, “You all right over there?”
“Yep.”
Scott took another swig of whiskey and chased it down with his Coke. He could already feel the warmth spreading out from his gut. He felt light-headed, a little dizzy as Lila grabbed the bottle and took another snort. She started to hand it back but Scott declined. “I’m good,” he said, and she returned the bottle to the table.
It was getting darker now, and shadows were falling over Lila’s face. Scott could no longer see her eyes, just vacant black holes where they should’ve been, nor could he see her lips move when she spoke. Davey pushed his chair away from the table. He stood up and walked over to Lila and Scott, bent over and picked up the matches. “I’m gonna light a candle,” he said, and Scott said, “You think that’s wise?”
“Why not? Warren did it all the time and nothing happened. How do you think they burned halfway down?”
“Geez, I don’t know if we should do—”
“Look, it’s gonna be pitch black in another twenty minutes. What’re we supposed to do, sit around twiddling our thumbs for the next twelve hours? It’ll be all right. It has been so far.”
The flaring light felt harsh on Scott’s eyes when Davey struck a match and held the flaming head to first one candlewick, and then the other. Scott looked at Lila as Davey shook the match and dropped it smoldering to the table. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “We can’t just sit around like cockroaches all night.”
“I don’t know. I’m just a little freaked out, I guess.”
Davey picked up a candle and carried it back to the dining room table.
The flickering flame of the remaining candle, combined with the distant luminosity from Davey’s, provided just enough light to smooth out Lila’s features. Scott was struck by how lovely she looked when that jagged scar was not visible. The regal, high cheekbones, the way her silky black hair fell across her narrow shoulders. She touched his arm and her hand felt like silk too, cool and soothing against his bare skin, and Scott wondered how long it had been since a woman had actually touched him, dismayed by the sobering fact that he simply did not know.
“It must be hard for you, waking up to all of this, waking up and walking into that nightmare back at the pit. I don’t know how you’ve handled it. But I’ll tell you this: you’ve handled yourself well, and I appreciate that. I feel comfortable with you watching my back.”
“Well…”
Lila picked up the Jack Daniels and the Coke. A bottle in each hand, she tipped the whiskey to her lips, gulped a mouthful and used the Coke to chase it down.
Scott wished she would give it a rest. She may have been comfortable with him watching her back, but he wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with her, not in the condition she must surely be in—unless she had the constitution of a seafaring captain, she had to be blitzed. She’d already swilled down much more than Scott, and there she was guzzling another mouthful. He felt a little better when she returned the whiskey to the table, but not much. For all he knew, she’d be grabbing it again soon.
She relaxed for a moment, settling in against Scott as if they were two lovers out on a date, and that made Scott think once more of his wife, bringing forth a host of questions he wasn’t sure he wanted answered, like: where was she and what had happened to her? Was she safe like him, or locked away in some filthy cage, waiting her turn on the spit? Did she have her hand on another man while Scott sat here with Lila’s soft hand on him? Was she even alive?
“I was on a bus when it happened.”
“What?”
“I used to be a model. Two years ago I could’ve taken you into any bookstore in America and picked up a magazine with my face either on the front cover or buried in its pages. I guess it all goes back to my childhood. You see, I always got anything I wanted, because I was so cute, so precious to my mother, who seemed to have planned out my entire life from the day I was born. Nothing I ate ever stayed with me; no fat clung to my hips or waist. My hair was perfect, the color, the texture, everything about it. Perfect raven hair and brilliant blue eyes. Raven, my mother used to say, because black just wasn’t good enough for her. Too common for her little Princess.
“She entered me into a baby contest and I won it. By the time I was seven years old, I’d either flat out won or placed second in every stupid contest she dragged me off to, and let me tell you, there were plenty of them—do you know I never graduated high school? Never even attended. I was too busy making my mother rich—of course, by then Rose had come along. Rosie, my perfect little sister. She wasn’t perfect to Katie, though. Oh, no, not to Katie, she wasn’t. Rosie didn’t have perfect raven hair like me. The food she ate stuck to her like glue. She was pudgy and round, with frizzy brown hair and slightly crossed eyes to boot. But she was my sister and I loved her more than anything.”
Lila sighed.
“My perfect little Rosie,” she said.
She picked up the Jack Daniels and brought it to her lips. Scott saw the thin track of a tear glistening in the candlelight when she tipped the bottle up. He wanted to stop her from taking another sip, but he didn’t. He did
n’t know what to say or where her story was headed—obviously nowhere good, but what could he say? Nothing. So he sat silently by while she took another sip of whiskey, chased it down with some Coke and returned the whiskey to the table, and then, setting to work absentmindedly peeling the label off her bottle of Coke, she continued her story:
“My parents divorced and Rosie went to live with my father—Katie was happy to let her go. Didn’t want anything to do with her. Wasn’t good enough for Katie. Wasn’t perfect, like me. Time went by and I rarely saw Rosie, or my father, and as the years went by and I worked more and more, I hardly saw them at all. But I did see her from time to time, and I deeply cherished those moments. I worked and Rosie went to school, and she was so smart. I was four years older but she was smarter than I was ever going to be. And I loved her for it. Sure, she had a weight problem, but so what? She was my little sister, and I loved her.”
Bits of paper littered Lila’s lap as she gripped the plastic bottle tightly in both her hands, staring out at the front windows much the same way Davey had earlier in the day in the back bedroom. Scott wondered what she saw reflected in the glass.
“I worked and Mama pocketed the money. She didn’t get to spend much of it though. Isn’t that a gasser? Huh? Sat on that money like King Midas himself and it didn’t do her much good. Huh uh. All that money and along comes pancreatic cancer to snatch it away from her. And where was I while she was wasting away in that hospital bed? Snorting line after line of coke, trotting off from one corner of the globe to the other while Mama cried out my name to anyone who’d listen. And did I come home? Did I call her one goddamn time? Not me. I was too busy turning a thousand dollar a week cocaine habit into a five-hundred dollar a day heroin addiction.
“I finally did come home when Rosie called. I met her at the hospital, and there was Rosie, my perfect little sister with her pudgy little body and the wire frame glasses my mother so hated. And she was splendid, the way she took control of the situation. She even handled the funeral arrangements so we could lay to rest with dignity a mother who had shunned her all her life.
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