“I’ll be in touch,” he says, strolling back toward his jeep.
It’s probably for the best.
I lie on my bed and stare up at the darkening ceiling, where a patch of chipping paint perfectly catches the changing colors of the world outside. Yes, it’s probably for the best. But if my mind is relieved, my body isn’t, and by the time the ceiling has turned the color of a fading bruise my hand is snaking down between my legs.
Chapter Six
Hound
As I drive over to Mac’s bar, I think about the lie I just told, and try and decide whether or not I’m worried about it. The truth is, I don’t have the ability to erase Dean’s debts, not really, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything to help them; that doesn’t mean I can’t buy them some time. If it’s not my decision whether or not Dean has to pay off all his debts, I can try and smooth-talk Mac out of collecting his teeth right away. The only thing is to think of something persuasive to say. I drive slowly, thinking about my father. He always knew what to say, always had the right words, was always able to talk his way out of a jam. Except one night when…But I won’t dwell on that. I’ve never understood what someone gains by dwelling on the bad things that happened to them. I want to try and think of something clever about past losses, maybe something from one of my books, but I’m head-tired and body-tired and want to get this business with Mac out of the way.
Under my tiredness, I’m floating on a cloud, floating high above all this petty shit. For a long time I’ve been thinking about getting a place in the suburbs, or maybe further, maybe way further, maybe somewhere so far away I can completely reinvent myself, stop being Hound the Hitter and start being…being what? Hound the Librarian? I laugh gruffly. I don’t know, but something else, something less violent. And Daisy—she’s like something out of a dream. Even if I didn’t get to drill into her again, that sweet peachy ass and those tits and those moans and that face , a face to chase you into your dreams, even if I didn’t get all of that, I’d still be obsessing about her. There’s something cute about the way she looks around all nervous and shy, all the while with lust in her eyes she can’t hide. I think of myself walking around a nice, solid, calm house with Daisy on my arm, the realtor saying to her husband or his wife later that day, “They were such a nice couple.” I’m ashamed by these dreams as I pull into the parking lot of Mac’s bar, which is a dingy one-room drinking den and a front for Mac’s bigger, more lucrative businesses. Dreams like these don’t belong in places like Mac’s bar, which doesn’t even have a name since it blew away in the wind a couple of years ago and nobody through to replace it.
No, dreams like beautiful women and nice houses and a life where violence isn’t the beginning and the end don’t belong here. I stop outside the bar, squeezing the steering wheel and taking a few deep breaths. I have to forget all that shit now. All that other-life shit. I have to be the Hound everyone in Mac’s bar knows, the Hound who some of the men respect, and still more fear.
When I step from the car, I leave my dreams on the driver’s seat, and by the time I push through the rickety, squeaking door I can hardly remember what those dreams were. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. The bar is empty apart from Nora, the one-armed barmaid who worked here even before Mac owned the place, worked here in the Depression as far as anybody can work out. She’s the oldest person I’ve ever seen, with wrinkles stacked upon wrinkles, and her stump moves skillfully across the bar, wiping it down with a rag wrapped around the place where her elbow used to be. I nod to her and then go into the backroom, where Mac will be, with his files and phone calls.
I knock. A booming voice calls, “Come. In.”
Mac is almost as large as me, around six-ten, and just as wide. The difference is he wears a sharp grey suit with glimmering cufflinks and an expression of perpetual seriousness, which I’ve never been able to manage. His fingernails are scrupulously clean. His hair is grey and thick, mostly covering the fading Swastika tattoo he got when he was younger than me and in prison. Only two edges poke out, making it look like two strands of hair plastered to his forehead.
Standing at his shoulders are his goons, Ripper and Hitter, ginger-haired twins who are always gripping bone-colored knuckle-dusters, and who always seem eager to use them. The only difference between the twins is that Ripper’s nose is bent out of shape from where he broke it in a bar fight, and Hitter has a scar just above his eyebrows. They’re as still as the desk and the safe and the shelf, pieces of furniture, never moving unless Mac asks them to.
“Sit down.”
I take a seat. I’ve always respected Mac, even if he’s never given me what I once wanted: some kind of pale phantom of Dad. When Dad died, Mac took me in and kept me on the road Dad set me on, giving me a job and skulls to crack, and once upon a time I thought that the more skulls I cracked, the more likely it would be that Mac would clap me on the back and call me “son”. Even if that day never came, I still respect him. He was once a collector himself, and now he spends his days sorting money and giving orders. A solid man, with a solid, hard face, the wrinkles making it look somehow harder, like an old rock, not infirm at all. But Mac never took the next step; he never got out completely, like I want to…No, leave that in the car. Let it die here. It can’t live here. There’s no sun here.
“Any news on Dunham?” he says, after writing something on a piece of paper.
Luckily, I’ve never once failed Mac, so I have a bit of leeway when it comes to stuff like this. “I used my contact at the bank to look into his finances.” This part is true. The next isn’t. “He found some cash in an offshore account, waiting to be released. I found Dean and shook him down, gave him a couple of cracked ribs.” This is good because anybody following Dean won’t be able to tell if he’s hurt his ribs or not. “He’s going to get our cash, soon, and if he doesn’t I’ll take care of him myself.”
Mac just nods. “Okay.” I’m about to stand up when he lifts his forefinger, his gold ring glinting in the light of a single bulb. “We’re not done. I have a job for you.”
He gives me the details: he needs information from a man about where another man is hiding, he needs the information tonight, and he doesn’t care if the man is killed or not.
Then he looks at me for the first time, instead of down at his papers or his money, and I’m sure I see Ripper and Hitter smile together, as though they know this is some kind of testing moment, as though they know that Mac is making sure I’ve still got the steel for this. I understand, after the business with Dean, but it still stirs some of the Old-Hound anger, the anger which would make me leap across the room and smash their skulls together until nothing remained but ginger-haired paste. I swallow the rage, and wait for Mac to speak.
“This won’t be a problem, will it?” he says, the two prongs of his Swastika shifting as his eyebrows rise in a paternal smile.
“No,” I reply. “Of course it won’t. I’ll text you the address.”
“Text one of the burner numbers.”
Ripper reaches into his pocket and hands me a folded up piece of paper. “Should work,” he grunts.
“Alright. Expect it soon.”
I leave the office, nod to one-armed Nora, and return to my jeep. My mind starts straying to places it shouldn’t as I drive toward this man’s apartment, like what his mom’s name is and what he does in his spare time. What TV shows he likes. If he prefers soccer or football. But then I kill all that. I’m not Henry, I have to remember; Henry Roscoe, the name which appears on my online course login page, doesn’t exist here. Only Hound exists.
I’ve been doing this for so long that getting a hold of the man is no problem. I just press a buzzer to an apartment which isn’t his, tell the nice lady that I live on the first floor and I’m stuck out of the building, and then stroll up to the seventh floor to where the apartment is. Then I knock on the door and say, “Hey, man, I’ve got this whole spare pizza, they gave me one by accident. You hungry? I know this is a little strange…”
I hear the guy shifting around as he approaches the door.
After that, I don’t really let myself think about what’s happening. I tie the man to a chair and stuff a rag in his mouth and only take the rag out when he promises not to scream. Then the questioning starts, the repeated question: “Where is your friend? Where is he hiding? Where is your friend…” I use the man’s kitchen knife and go to work on him when he won’t answer, but I let my body go into autopilot, my hands knowing how to handle the blade without my mind having to intervene. My mind is romping faraway, in a place where me and this new Daisy girl are hugging by a fireside reading some book which looks ludicrously small in my bear hands. As the man screams, I imagine, instead, that Daisy is crying out in delight. When he begins to whimper, it’s Daisy, giggling into my ear. For a woman I just met, she’s a sanctuary unlike anything I’ve ever retreated to before. By the time the bloody business is done and I have the address, and the man is bleeding and crying and blood coats my hand like grime from a dirty pond, I’m hardly aware of my surroundings.
I leave the apartment, drive my jeep to an empty parking lot in a ghostly part of town, and then send the text. After that, I just sit there for a long time, until the blood has dried under my fingernails and my mind and my body are one thing once again. When that happens, it’s tempting to start thinking about what I just did. When I can feel, really feel, the blood tugging on the hairs of my arms with each movement, it’s tempting to close my eyes and contemplate the pain I just caused.
But that’s not Hound, not something tough guy, brutal Hound would do. So instead I start the car and drive toward my apartment, where a shower is waiting, where dreams of Daisy are waiting.
Chapter Seven
Daisy
After four hours at the café, it’s time for more fun at The Lady Shack. I’m a little anxious about Dad, too, seeing as I tried to call him this morning and there was no answer. But knowing him he’s probably huddled over some green-felt table somewhere gambling away money he doesn’t have and causing us more problems. Working at the café was easy because nobody really talks to me there. It’s one of those industrial places where thousands of people work and making friends is made impossible by the ever-shifting schedule. But when I get into the Shack’s changing room and see Sarah and Jessica, somehow always able to find the time to huddle together and laugh meanly about everybody else, I know it won’t be as easy. Their eyes, all four of them, move to the rings on my finger like flies hovering over…well, hovering over the words that are about to start pouring out of Sarah’s mouth.
“What is this ?” Sarah abandons her ignored sandwich and leaps over to me, staring goggle-eyed at the rings. “What’s happened? Did you treat yourself to a little imaginary wedding last night?”
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” I say as I begin getting changed, “and you must be around the same, right? So why don’t we drop the whole high school routine and just get on with our lives?”
Sarah lets these words wash over her like so much air. When she next speaks, I realize I might as well have said nothing. “So, who is the unlucky gremlin, then?” Behind her, Jessica giggles harshly.
“I think you ought to buy one of those papooses parents carry babies in,” I say. “That way, Jessica can sit on your back and the two of you can walk around laughing at every little thing you see.”
“I know what happened!” Sarah cries, clapping her hands together. I’m in my underwear now, about to put on my Shack uniform. I think it’s the only time I’ve ever been desperate to get out there and wait tables. “You found some poor icky hobo and dragged him back to your place and bounced on his pogo and then the two of you broke into a supermarket and stole some cheap flimsy trash. Am I close?”
Close to having your teeth smashed in, I think, but I don’t say it. What Sarah’s doing would be considered “light-hearted banter” by management. If I said that, it’d be considered a threat. Plus, I’m fairly certain Sarah gave Steve a blowjob at the last Christmas party, and I’m one-hundred percent certain I didn’t, which doesn’t exactly go in my favor where leeway and threats are concerned. Finally, I’m dressed. I close my locker, turn the key, and shoulder past Sarah, who’s tittering at something I didn’t hear. Her final stab comes just as I leave the changing room: “I hope he didn’t taste too homelessey! ”
If I thought safety could be found out here, however, I’m proved wrong straightaway. Marsha’s face is a picture of panic, her eyes wide, her hands scratching at her tights. As soon as I emerge she darts at me, throwing one hand to my shoulder and the other across the tables. “Look at this ! Mayhem! I’m going to need you in groups F, D, and E, okay?”
I see what she means: lunchtime, the place jam-packed full of businessmen types, with the added stress of two separate group of frat boys and what appears to be a stag party, twenty loutish men chanting at the corner table.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Let’s get to it.”
It’s just as horrible as it looks, six hours of being grabbed at, cheered at, talked up, leered at, and dribbled over. The men turn into animals after a few lunchtime beers and start looking at me like I’m not a woman at all—albeit a woman in breast-crushing clothes—but a piece of meat on a conveyer hook going past them every few minutes. When I approach them, they’ll nudge each other, egging each other on, and once or twice one of them manages to wrap his hand around my thigh. Unfortunately, this is pretty normal in places like this; all throughout the day, I see the same thing happening to some of the other girls. I almost snap at one man, who wears big horn-rimmed glasses and is old enough to be my father. He thinks it’s funny to pretend to unzip his pants every time I approach, and I begin to think it would be funny to let him finish only jam his cock in the zipper when he’s done. After about an hour, I stop being present in the room. I drift off and let my mind wander, let it romp in places where these perv men and their perv hands don’t exist. Finally, feet aching, head aching, chest aching with the effort of restraining my anger, it’s time to go.
“You did great today,” Marsha says, her eyes all puffy from where one customer made her cry.
I spot Steve in the back, near the kitchen, laughing loudly at something Sarah said.
“Thanks.”
I’ve never been so glad to ride the bus, sitting on the plastic seat and staring out the window at the sweltering city. I don’t even care that it’s boiling and sweat slides down my forehead constantly. Anything to be out of that hellhole. And tomorrow is Saturday, which I have off; I work Sundays, but Saturday! Saturday! Maybe I won’t even get up at all, just stay in bed, staring at the ceiling and enjoying the freedom of not having to look sexy. Looking sexy can get damn tiring.
As I get closer to my apartment building, I know that tonight isn’t going to be a time to stumble into my apartment and relax. First I know this because there is a vague, massive shape leaning against the wall, and then because the vague, massive shape grows features: locks of jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes and a crimson faded shirt and grey sweatpants, sturdy brown workman’s boots. Something happens to my legs when I see him, something I think says a lot about how I feel about this arrangement. They stop, wanting to both run toward him and run away from him. Both urges hit me, with equal strength. I could turn and run back down the street, or I could run into his arms. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have to think about Dad’s debts, but as it is, the choice is made for me. I walk toward him.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he says, smiling.
“Hi.” I offer him a small wave, even though we’re only feet apart now.
“You sound glum.”
“Glum,” I echo. “I guess that’s one word for it.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“I work at a place called The Lady Shack,” I respond. “What do you think happened? Assholes did what they do best. They behaved like assholes.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, would I?”
I shake my head, but a smile touc
hes my lips. “Can I help you?”
Hound reaches across—I feel like I’m a toy-sized miniature and a giant is reaching down to me—and touches my ring finger with surprisingly lightness. “Is that any way to talk to your husband, Daisy?”
“I don’t know, Hound. I’ve never had a husband before, Hound.”
My voice is tired and snarky but I can’t really help it. When you spend all day most every day being fake nice, when you get a chance to be real snarky, it’s hard to resist.
“Anyway,” I go on, “I’m pretty sure you told me not be fake around you. You said you could pay for that. So surely that means I can talk to you any way I damn well please?”
He holds his hands up, chuckling. “You’ve got me there. But please, please, calm down, you’re starting to make me afraid.” He pretends to shiver, rubbing his arms. “So afraid. Please stop. You’re so scary when you get angry. You make me want to cry.”
Without thinking, I reach across and jab him in the arm. “Quit it,” I snap.
WIFE FOR A PRICE Page 5
