Back to the orange-lighted room. I dragged Goldor against one of the tapestry-covered walls, propped him up in a sitting position, took the steel bar in my hands, and swung from the heels, crushing his throat until his head was almost ready to fall off. Next I went to work on his chest and ribs until the skin broke open and his insides started to run onto the rug. When they did the autopsy the cops would tell the doctors about the steel bar—at least they wouldn’t be looking for a martial arts expert.
Flood just sat there, watching me, holding the white boots in one hand. I grabbed her other hand and dragged her to the front door, still wiping off surfaces we could have touched or brushed against. I opened the door and looked out into silent darkness. The floodlights were dead—the Mole had done his work. I could hear the crackle of the flames behind us. We were out of time.
I slipped out with Flood right behind me and quietly opened the doors to the Volvo, whispering to Flood to throw her boots inside and help me push the car from behind her door. I did the same with mine, holding onto the steering wheel with my right hand. The Volvo rolled smoothly down the paved driveway and into the street, and I hopped in when it was moving too fast for me to keep up. Flood did the same a second or so after me. I slipped the stick into second gear, popped the clutch and it fired right up.
I crawled around the corner, took another turn, and flicked on the headlights, then drove out of the area heading north, piloting the Volvo like it belonged there, I hoped.
We passed other cars, but no cops. Route 95 was right where we’d left it. Flood started crying when we crossed into New Rochelle, looking straight ahead out the windshield with tears rolling down her face like she didn’t know they were there. I kept to the exact change lanes through New Rochelle, hooked the Hutchinson River Parkway and exited toward the Triboro. I didn’t say anything to Flood, letting her cry quietly in peace. It was too late for talking.
We were supposed to come away from this trip to the suburbs with an address for the Cobra. Instead we had netted one dead sadist, one homicide investigation, one possible arson rap, and a cold dead trail. By the time we neared Flood’s place I knew I was starting to recover from Goldor’s Taser attack—I could tell by the taste of blood in my mouth.
41
I FLICKED THE Volvo’s shift lever to pull it out of gear and let it coast toward a parking space across from Flood’s door. She didn’t make a move to get out. I had to move fast, there were a lot of things to do before the sun came up on what was left of Goldor.
“Flood. Flood, listen to me. Look, you’re home now. Come on.” Flood looked over at her building but still didn’t move.
“This is not my home,” she said in a dead, blue voice.
“Flood, we don’t have time for you to be fucking mystical. I’ll talk with you later, okay? Just get out. I’ve got to do some work.”
She still didn’t budge, so I tried something else. “Flood, you want to come with me? Want to help me?”
“Help you?”
“Yeah, I need some help. I need a friend, okay?”
The tears were still coming but she had control of her mouth. A first step. She said, “Okay,” and patted my hand like I was the one walking on the ragged edge.
I pulled the Volvo out and found a decent spot near where the Mole had left it the first time. I slipped into the parking garage like a burglar, but nobody was around—no problems. I found the Plymouth, fired it up, and rolled it down the ramps to the checkout point. I paid the toll and split. If the cops came around someday they’d have to get a subpoena and search the records. Even if they got lucky, all they would ever find is that I was checking into the garage about the same time Goldor was checking out. Okay so far.
Flood was standing in the shadows where I’d left her, but she was still too stiff as she walked over to the car door. She slid into the passenger seat, staying over against her door—not crying now, her breathing pretty good, but still a long way from being in control. I found a pay phone near the drive and called Pablo’s clinic—I knew it would be open until at least midnight. I left a message for him to call Mr. Black at eleven that night. Then we got back into the Plymouth, heading for the phone I’d told him to call. I gave myself about a half hour—if Pablo called and I didn’t answer it would take another couple of days for me to reach him. Me not answering was the signal that the wheels had come off someplace. He should connect that with Goldor, but I didn’t want to chance it.
The pay phone for Mr. Black was in a converted storage shed near the back of Max’s warehouse. The message from Mr. Black meant that we were in an emergency situation, so I had to be sure that the phone we used was absolutely reliable. The only way to do that was to make sure it wasn’t used most of the time. I didn’t want to bring Flood into that neighborhood but she was shredding all my choices with her behavior—all I needed was for her to run amok someplace and bring the cops back to talk to me.
Flood could do time, do it standing on her head. There’s not too many guns in jail and without one even the toughest diesel-dyke couldn’t make Flood blink. She’d go deep into herself and make it last for the whole term. I could survive in there too, but so what? By the time I got out all I had built up out here would be just so much garbage and I’d have to start all over again—I was getting too old for all that and I could feel the fear coming in closer and I didn’t have the time to deal with it the way I was supposed to—so I pointed the Plymouth toward the warehouse and concentrated on driving.
We made it into the front entrance with a good ten minutes to spare. I told Flood to just sit there, stay where she was, and slapped my palm twice on the hood of the car as I got out in a see-you-later gesture, to let Max know there was someone else in the car if he was watching. If Max was there, Max was watching.
The number Pablo had for Mr. Black would ring in a pay phone in a candy store in Brooklyn, one of four in that joint. It was hooked up to a call-diverter which would bounce the signal over to the phone we never used in the storage shed. The diverter was a mechanical thing and not really all that reliable, but if it didn’t bounce the call and Pablo heard any voice but my own he’d hang up and know the Mr. Black signal was for real. Maybe he’d put it together and understand about Goldor and maybe he wouldn’t—this was as close to him as I was willing to get until the crime lab people picked the carcass clean and the grand jury made its secret decisions.
I had time to open the door to the shed, check the dust to satisfy myself that nobody had been around since the last time, and light a cigarette.
And then Pablo called. I grabbed it on the first ring, reminding myself that the whole conversation had to be under thirty seconds. “It’s me, okay?” I said.
“I hear you.”
“The legal research I told you I’d be doing? The stuff you said you might be interested in yourself? Forget it. It’s a dead issue.”
“That is too bad, hermano. You are certain?”
“Dead certain.”
“Adios.”
It would be hours before I could get a paper, and even then I couldn’t count on coverage of Goldor’s death, so I’d have to be especially careful not to talk to people. Fortunately, that comes easily to me—practice makes habit.
I gave Pablo about ten seconds to clear the line, reached under the phone, and pulled out the little gadget that looked like a rubber-edged cup with push buttons numbered one to ten on its face. I placed this over the mouthpiece to the phone, checked to see the seal was tight, and punched in the number of the candy store—the same Mr. Black number Pablo would have written down someplace. When it answered I was connected to the dead line next to the first pay phone. They wouldn’t answer that phone in the store—it had a permanent Out of Order sign on the booth. This hooked me into the diverter’s code box, and I used the push buttons to signal electronically and set the diverter to forward all future calls made to the Mr. Black number over to a pay phone next to a gas station in Jersey City. That broke the circuit. Even if the federales had a
pen register on whatever phone Pablo had used, they’d never work it back to this shed. When I had some time, maybe in a few months, I’d go over to Brooklyn and uproot the diverter and install it someplace else. I’d notify Pablo too when I got the chance. For now, I was more interested in burning bridges than in building them.
I walked slowly back to the warehouse, expecting to see Flood’s blonde hair shining through the windshield, but there was nothing behind the glass. I glanced up at the balcony, couldn’t see a thing—I still didn’t know if Max was on the set. Then I heard a low moaning sound, flowing deep, ending with a grunt. Over and over, like someone working up the strength to do something ugly and then finally getting down to it. Flood—in the semidarkness off to the side where I’d parked the Plymouth. Flood—in one of those elaborate katas I’d seen her do in the studio, flowing between the hood of the car and the side wall, whirling, spinning, thrusting. Her body flashed white in the murky haze of the warehouse. I looked around without moving and saw the bottle-green pants and the jersey top on the floor where she had thrown them, and I knew she’d never walk in disguise again.
It was like no kata I’d ever seen. Flood backed away from the car in tiny, ankle-hooking steps and turned completely, moving her hands like she was sculpting a statue from smoke with her fingers. She flicked a leg toward the sky, rocked back on her heel, and clapped her hands against the upraised foot, like a child playing in the sun. She rolled her body toward the car’s hood and leaned her back against it, pushed her hands down and raised herself until she was parallel with the ground, her legs straight out in front of her. She slowly lowered herself to the ground on her knees, then leaped to her feet and turned so she was facing the car again. She leaned forward, bent at the waist, wiggled her hips like a prizefighter rolls his shoulders, and the leg with the fire-scar lashed out—again and again like a pumping piston gone mad. And then she stopped and I heard the jet-stream of her nasal intake as she danced away from the car. I watched her kill Goldor over and over again and I thought she would never stop the death-dance. She was all alone.
I quietly opened the door of the Plymouth, reached over, and opened the other door too. I looked for the right cassette, fitted it into the player and hit the switch, and the solitary guitar intro rolled out of the speakers and into the empty warehouse.
Flood spun and slammed to a stop in the middle of her mad dance, whipping her hands into a defense against the music. But it flowed out and surrounded her anyway. “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals, the high, clear voice of the girl singer reaching for something that would maybe never be there, but giving it everything she had. And Flood stood there—white stone in silk underwear, waiting.
I walked out of the shadows toward her, willing her to feel the music and be someplace else, my hands open at my sides. “Hey, Flood,” I called softly, “remember reform school?”
She stepped into my arms like she was back at those dances they used to give in the juvenile joints where they would invite the bad girls from the training schools so we could learn the social graces. We danced like we all used to then—our feet hardly moved, we didn’t cover much ground. At first she held me as rigid as a steel vise, but as the tape played through and another song from the fifties came on she loosened her grip, her hands moving up until they hung around my neck, her face buried in my chest. We moved together like that until the whole tape ran down and there was silence in the empty warehouse. I kissed her on the forehead and she put her arms around my neck and ground her hips into me like girls did back then. I felt the muscles in her back smooth out and she laughed deep in her throat and I knew she was past it, back to herself.
I held out my hand as if the dance were finished, she took it and we walked back toward the car to sit the next one out. On the hood was a pile of black silk. She seemed to know what it was. She put on the loose, flowing pants and the thigh-length robe with the wide sleeves. As she stepped into the black silk I saw the red dragons embroidered on each sleeve and I knew Max had been there.
We gathered up Flood’s whore-clothes and threw them in an old oil drum—I knew they would disappear into ashes and she seemed to know it too. I got into the Plymouth. Flood slid in beside me, slammed in close to me, put her left hand on the inside of my right thigh and left it there while I backed out and pointed the car’s nose toward her studio.
42
THE PLYMOUTH ROLLED silently through the empty streets, heading for the West Side. Flood was quiet until we got to the highway, but her hand on my thigh wasn’t tense. When I went into the entrance ramp she looked over at me. “You got any more of that music?” and I reversed the cassette and we listened to Gloria Mann sing her “Teenage Prayer” and I guess we both thought about the things we wanted when that song was on the street. There was a lot of music in the juvenile prisons back then. Guys would get together in the shower rooms because the echo effect made everything sound better—it was all groups, nobody thought about being a solo artist. We only heard what came over the radio—it was no big racial thing, all the groups were trying for the same sound. The last time I was locked up for a few days there was almost a race riot—some of the white guys objected to the constant diet of screaming-loud soul music that they piped in twenty-four hours of every bleak day. Music was more participatory when I was a kid—you got three or four guys together and that was it. Whatever they sounded like on the street corner is what they sounded like on the record. Too many kids today don’t seem to give a damn about music, they only envy the musical lifestyle—gold chains and limos and all the coke they can stuff up their noses. But the kids themselves haven’t changed—the newspapers say they have, but they don’t know the score. As long as you have cities you have people who can’t live in them and can’t get out either. As long as you have sheep, you have wolves.
Flood took her hand off my thigh, patted around in my clothes until she found a cigarette. She found the wooden matches and lit one, holding it to my mouth for me to take a drag. Between Flood’s kick and Goldor’s backhand, my mouth was a little below par, but the cigarette tasted good. Or maybe it was just good to be smoking while Goldor burned.
I use the West Side Highway when I have to go uptown. It’s not always the fastest route but it’s the safest. The Plymouth might not be able to outrun anything on the road—although it will blow away any normal patrol car—but the special suspension gives it a real edge on a rough road and they don’t come much rougher than the West Side Highway. I swung back towards Flood’s studio and found a safe-looking place to park. It was the dead hour on the street—late enough for the predators to have retired for the night and not yet early enough for the first citizens to emerge from their fortresses to try to make an honest living. The sky looked reddish to me, but I couldn’t tell if it was the coming sunrise or my blurry vision. Flood walked along next to me, but the bounce was gone. She walked straight ahead like a soldier—her hips never brushed against me like they usually did. She didn’t understand yet, and I had to make her see what had really happened if we were going to flush a snake out of the urban grass.
Her key unlocked the downstairs door. The staircase was unlighted, and Max’s black robes made most of her disappear ahead of me. I could just barely see the blonde hair and hear the whisper of silk. The studio was empty again. We walked past the marked-off section and into her space, and Flood sat down. She was still off her game—usually she would be throwing off her clothes by now and heading for the shower, but I guess she figured some dirt doesn’t come off with soap. I took out a cigarette but she didn’t stir, so I went and found something to use for an ashtray myself. I sat and smoked in silence while I thought it through. Finally I looked over at Flood. “You want me to tell you a story?”
She started to shrug like she didn’t give a damn what I did, then gave me a half-smile and said “Sure” without enthusiasm.
I said, “Come here, okay?” and she got up and walked over to me. She sat down real close and I took her shoulders in my hands, spun
her around like a top, the silk pants sliding smoothly on the polished floor until she was facing away from me. I pulled gently until she was lying on her back, her head in my lap, looking up in my direction—but not seeing me. I stroked her fine hair as I told her the story.
“I was in the can once with this hillbilly. Actually he was from someplace in Kentucky but he had lived most of his life in Chicago. They had two men in a cell then—the joint was overcrowded and the race situation was bad. Virgil was a good man to have in your cell—quiet, clean, and ready to take your back if he had to. He didn’t look for problems, just wanted to do his time. In the joint you don’t generally talk about your beef—you know, how you got there and all—but if you cell with a man, sooner or later you hear his story. Or at least the story he wants to tell.
“When Virgil arrived in Chicago to work the mills, he met this girl from his hometown and they fell in love and got married. Before she met Virgil, this girl had been with this other man from down south—a real evil, vicious freak. He had done time on a road gang for beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Virgil’s wife thought she’d left this man behind her, but he showed up one day when Virgil was at work. He slapped her around, hurt her without making any marks—he knew how to do that. He made her do some things she didn’t want to do. Then the freak told her he would be back, anytime he wanted, and if she told Virgil, he’d kill her man.
“And it went on like that, you know, for months and months. Virgil would go to work, and this freak would come around. Sometimes he would take the money Virgil left for his wife to buy food and all. Once he took some Polaroid pictures of her—said he’d show them to Virgil if she ever said anything—nobody would believe her now.
Flood Page 27
