PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “I wasn’t exactly devoted.”

  “Ah.” The small note of triumph is no longer small. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”

  Pike sticks his thumb and forefinger under his glasses and rubs his eyes. “I need to talk to Dana.”

  “And if I told you I had no idea where she was? That I don’t track whores.”

  “I’d know better.” His grin would look better on a corpse. “And I have all the time in the world.”

  CHAPTER 48

  ~ Pike leads her eyes to the truck with the barrel of his gun.~

  The Third Street bridge covers a half block on either side of the street, sheltering a long swath of oily concrete that’s been turned into a shantytown. Hacked pieces of corrugated tin and sheet insulation form lean-tos on the iron girders, and tents pitched out of greasy tarps and broomsticks run right up to the snow drifts. Shambling forms huddle around fire pits pounded out of the cement, smoking, drinking, spitting into the fires.

  “This is it.” Pike’s face is steady, but his hands are twitching.

  “We could stop here,” Rory says. “There’s some things maybe it’s better not to know.”

  A thin wisp of snow curls down the snow bank edging the shanty-town. “We crossed that line a long time ago,” Pike says.

  “Not yet,” Rory says. “Whatever it is we’re doing, we’ve long stopped doing it for Wendy. We can turn the truck around. Hell, we can be back at The Oxbow inside of four hours, eating breakfast. Walking’s better than running away.”

  “To be the men who want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters?” Pike rests his hand on Rory’s shoulder and squeezes it firmly. Then opens the truck door. “Besides, crawling ain’t no good at all.”

  Rory shakes his head, following him. “Do you ever have any quotes that fit the fucking occasion?”

  There’s no time for Pike to answer. A black junky leaning lazily on a beam a few feet back from a trashcan fire, a blood spattered syringe hanging from his left hand like it’s a cigarette. His eyes sliver at their approach. “You want something?”

  “Dana.”

  “White bitch?”

  Pike nods. “Where?”

  The junkie chuckles cannily, his eyes flicking at a tin roofed shanty about twenty feet away. “Under that nigger over there.”

  Pike’s there, something dark singing in his veins. He rips the hunk of tin away from the beam and sends it reeling like a drunken dancer across the dirt, and strips the blanket off them. His broad black back, her bruised pink arms strapped across it. Pike boot nails him in his ribs, lifts him spinning in the air. He lands with a grunt on his back in the coal dust and rust, his wet dick wagging ruthlessly in the black air. Dana breathes in sadly, her blue-nailed fingers still clutching at the spot where his back had been. Her pink cunt still open and round, like a misshapen little mouth.

  “Get up,” Pike growls.

  She feels around for her clothes. The man’s switchblade opens with a sharp snick. Pike turns. He’s inches away, still naked from the waist down, his dick swaying like a noose and his thin knife slicking through the air for Pike’s jugular. Rory shoulder-rams him, spoiling the knife blow. He stumbles, turns to face the kid. Rory catches him on the point of the jaw with a sharp uppercut, reeling him back, then slips a knife jab and shoots a one two combination into his nose, popping it like a tomato.

  He should drop. But he doesn’t. Blood swarms from his nose, cascades down his shirt. His eyes burst with rage and his big body tenses to explode at Rory. Rory dodges a wild roundhouse right, but he doesn’t see the knife that follows, cutting through the air in a jagged arc.

  Pike’s gun flames, booms. The .357 slug pounds his black chest like a sledgehammer, sucking flesh, blood and air into a pink vaporous hole that explodes out his back. He takes a stagger step at Rory, his knife still raised. Pike fires again, at his knee this time. He drops, his bloody shin and crooked foot slinging off his leg, attached only by a thread of skin. He tries to scream, tries to howl, but he doesn’t make a sound. The hole in his chest froths and bubbles. And he dies.

  Rory turns his head, pukes.

  Pike points his gun at Dana. Her hand covers her mouth and the irises of her eyes dilate on the barrel. Pike leads her eyes to the truck with the barrel of his gun. “Get the fuck in.”

  CHAPTER 49

  ~ I ain’t feeling bad about killing him.~

  Rory stands in the bathroom doorway, watching Pike jerk Dana’s arms around the toilet and fasten her wrists together with a zip-tie. Pike’s face is an animal blank. Rory’s scared to leave her alone with him. “I’m gonna kill you,” Dana hisses at Pike. Her heroin high is wearing off and she’s becoming less amicable by the minute. Pike pulls the zip-tie tight with a sharp jerk, then turns from her and steps around Rory into the hotel room. Rory shuts the bathroom door.

  Pike draws his cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket and places them on the nightstand. He pulls a cigarette out of the pack, lights it, and sits down on the bed. Then his hands begin to tremble. First the left, then the right. He drops the cigarette on the floor and his arms lower to the bed like girders and he clenches the bedclothes in his fists. The trembling spreads up his arms and through his chest. His jaw clamps down. His neck steels. His arms bulge and jerk. The whole bed shakes, banging and rattling on its frame, like there’s something caged in his chest, ramming its body against his ribs, like he has to use every muscle in his body to keep it from pawing its way out.

  Then, as quickly as it came, the trembling drops away and his chest falls. Pike grabs the trashcan beside the bed and snatches it up to his face and pukes.

  Rory picks his cigarette up out of the carpet. He puffs it twice to keep it alight and waits for Pike to stop puking. When he does, Rory takes the trashcan out of his hands and gives him the cigarette. Pike draws off it.

  “There was nothing else you could have done,” Rory says. “I’d have done the same if the roles were switched.”

  “I ain’t feeling bad about killing him.” “Then what?”

  Pike’s face warps into an ugly smile. “Let’s get what we need out of her. I’ve had enough of junkies to last me a lifetime.”

  CHAPTER 50

  ~ You always have a choice.~

  Dana’s crying when Pike enters the bathroom, her shoulders trembling softly against the backdrop of the toilet seat. When he shuts the door behind him, her back stiffens like glass setting. He cuts the zip-tie free from her hands, takes her by her arm, lifts her up and sits her on the toilet. Then he hands her a lit cigarette. She sucks on it greedily, finishes it in under a minute. When she’s done, her face is crunched back into place. Tough and cold and ugly enough to make Pike want to look away. “I should have known I’d see you again,” she says.

  “I’m hard to shake.”

  A grin hardens on her face like a kind of rigor mortis. “I’ve heard all about it.”

  Pike pulls his glasses off and cleans them on his T-shirt. He resets them on his nose. “There’s a man who started hanging around my town, asking about Wendy. I need to know who he is.”

  “You need my help. That’s delicious.” She crosses her legs, the filthy slick of her jeans mirroring the bathroom light. “What’s his name?”

  “Derrick. A white trash cop. About my height.” He stops talking. She’s begun to chuckle to herself.

  “Derrick was Sarah’s pimp,” she says, giving the word a delectable pop. “You could have figured that out.”

  “I had the idea, but I need more.” Pike takes in her face like he’s back in Juárez counting cards. He wants every glimmer of thought that runs over her brow, he wants to see through her skull to her firing synapses. “Would he have killed her?”

  She isn’t difficult to read. She gapes at him, stupefied. “You’re hard-headed, I’ll give you that,” she says in a kind of awestruck tone. “Sheoverdosed. On heroin. She was a junky. She’d been trying to overdose since I met her. She got lucky is all.”

  Pike nods. “W
hen you brought Wendy to me, you looked scared. Like you were running from someone. Was it him?”

  It’s only after a minute or two that she manages to close her mouth. “I was scared of you, you dumbshit. I’d heard all about you.”

  Pike gathers the fist of his right hand in his left and doesn’t talk for a long time. “Do you know what kind of pimp Derrick was?”

  Dana shakes her head, something like pity on her face. “No, I guess not. I never did work for him.”

  “Know anybody that did?”

  “There’s a girl named Annabelle, I think. Or at least there used to be.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  She nods.

  “Will you show me?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  CHAPTER 51

  ~ The sun sheds her and she shrinks in her chair.~

  Dana totters away from them, winding down the sidewalk through Clifton’s gaslight district, shaking her head to herself like she’s seen a circus animal perform some trick she didn’t think possible. Rory sticks his hands in his sweatshirt pockets and looks at Annabelle’s house. It’s a long yellow-sided shotgun shack, hunched among the Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival mansions. Hooking for Derrick must not have been too bad. “Ready?” Rory says to Pike.

  Pike doesn’t say anything in return. He looks like he’s been running through the woods all night, and just came across a landmark that reminds him he’s still miles from home. He moves slowly to the front door and knocks.

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice peels out.

  “Annabelle?”

  The door opens. She’s blonde and built slight, almost like Wendy. She’s no girl, though, that shows in her wide blue eyes. “I’m Annabelle.”

  “You used to work for Derrick Krieger?”

  Annabelle’s face breaks in a strange smile. “You’re cops, right?”

  Pike nods. “Something like that.”

  Annabelle holds the door open. “Please, come inside.” She waves them into the living room. “Sit down. I can’t say I’m exactly happy. But I’ve been waiting for this.”

  Rory sits beside Pike on a leather Manhattan couch. The walls are lined with books and there’s a thick paperback volume with a horse on the front open on the mahogany coffee table. She takes a matching armchair across from the couch and sits crosslegged. The clear winter sun lights on her from the skylight above and Rory’s chest caves a little. She’s the kind of whore he thought only existed in movies.

  “We’re not cops,” Pike says.

  Annabelle cocks her elfin head curiously. In the sunlight, her face changes every time she moves, breaking into some new gradient of itself, each more compelling than the last.

  “My daughter worked for Derrick,” Pike continues. “Sarah was her name, but she’s dead.”

  “I knew Sarah. She looked like you, a little.” Annabelle slides a small plate with a pack of rolling papers and a bag of Drum tobacco from under the book on the coffee table. “What do you need from me?”

  “Anything you can tell me,” Pike says, but his face calls him a liar.

  Annabelle plucks a rolling paper out of the pack. “Derrick is a cop who has an unseemly interest in whores.” She expertly fingers a groove in the paper. “There’s not a whore in this city who doesn’t know what he is. Nor a cop. Nor anyone else. There might be a few in the suburbs who haven’t heard, but not here in the city.” She taps a mound of tobacco into the rolling paper. “He’s a killer, too, of course. But everybody knows that, too.”

  “Who?”

  “That boy he shot in the back. The one that started the riots.” She rolls the paper between her thumbs and forefingers. “He wasn’t a suspect in anything, and he wasn’t trying to get away. He was one of Derrick’s dealers who’d made the mistake of pinching heroin to sell for himself.” She rolls the cigarette. “None of that is anything you needed me to find out, though.”

  A cloud passes over the sun and Rory watches Pike’s face blot out in the sudden gloom. There’s something obscene in the dogged way he’s going after this. He’s disintegrating, and in the face of this woman he doesn’t have a chance. Rory has a sudden urge to throw an arm around his shoulders and raise a hand, to signal to the referee that this fight’s over. “I need to know what he was like. When he was with you, what kind of pimp was he?”

  “He wasn’t my pimp,” Annabelle answers. “He never took money. He was more of a, well, interested party.”

  The sun returns and flows in from the picture window behind Pike. It backlights his massive form and shades his face, illuminating

  Annabelle in a brilliant yellow wash. “I need to know if he could have killed Sarah,” Pike says in a low voice.

  Annabelle lights her cigarette. “He could have.” A stream of blue smoke flows from her nostrils and floats away in the sunlight. “But he didn’t. I was at his place the night she died. All night.”

  The words quiver in Pike’s face like they’ve been delivered with an electric prod. He rubs his knees and slowly stands, holding his right hand out to her. “Thank you.”

  The front door opens and slams shut. A girl of maybe seven steps inside and stamps snow off her oversized snow boots. “I’M HOME!” she calls.

  “We’re right here,” Annabelle says. “There’s no need to shout.”

  Rory’s backbone’s jolting like he’s been hit by lightning. The little girl nods her blackhaired head at him and she clomps across the living room, disappearing down the hallway on the other side of it. Rory can’t speak. He’s only vaguely conscious of Pike next him.

  When he finally speaks, Pike’s voice is thick and weird. “Who is she?”

  “She’s my daughter.” Annabelle’s eyes flick from Pike to Rory.

  Pike’s right hand moves to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, like of its own accord. “Who’s her father?”

  Annabelle’s cigarette droops in her hand and the sun sheds her, seeming to shrink her in her chair.

  Pike lights his cigarette, his chest swelling with smoke. “Derrick,” he answers for her.

  Annabelle nods. “Like I said, he didn’t take money. In fact he even paid us a sort of child support. The only condition was that they never see him. Those were his terms and ours.”

  CHAPTER 52

  ~ He knows he ain’t going anywhere.~

  The highway cuts through the snow-covered foothills like a wet black wound. Rory’s nauseous just thinking about the curves to come. He swallows a handful of pills that make a sick crackling sound as they clear his dry throat. “What do we do now?”

  Pike takes a curve too fast, easing his hands on the wheel, letting the tires slip on the wet blacktop, then find their own way back to traction. “Nothing.”

  “We don’t tell nobody? About him dealing drugs and shooting up black kids?”

  Another curve. Pike grips and slams the wheel around it like the truck’s a part of himself he’s trying to beat into shape.

  “That’s something you tell somebody about. You sure as hell don’t sit on it and wait for him to kill somebody else.”

  “Who are you planning to tell?”

  “Somebody. The newspapers.”

  “When we get back give a call to the Enquirer. I’m guessing they ain’t gonna move real quick on a story that could restart the riots. On your say-so alone.”

  “Then I’ll try the black papers. I know there’s got to be at least one black paper.”

  “There’s plenty of them. And you ain’t gonna win any Pulitzers telling blacks in Cincinnati the cops are corrupt. It’ll dissipate into the air like every other story that comes out of the black papers.”

  “What happened to all that shit you were saying about oceans without water or what the fuck ever?”

  “The particular shit covering this state won’t be purged by us. I guarantee you of it.”

  “You don’t think he killed her anymore, do you?”

  Pike shakes his head. “If anybody killed her, it wasn’t him.”r />
  “Well.” Rory nestles back in the seat. He closes his eyes. “Shit,” he says. He goes to sleep.

  Pike cracks his window, lets a cool slip of air run in over his face. He watches the hills run past and forces his mind to empty, to concentrate on the road ahead of him. He could clear out. Back to Texas, or maybe Colorado. There couldn’t be anyone left alive he knew. The way the people he ran with lived, they had to be dead by now. But just in case, he could try the Black Hills or head up to Montana. His days out west had never carried him that far north. Or he could make it through Texas and cross the border, like he’d done a thousand times before. Mexico is freedom. Mexico is washing yourself of all the shit that comes from making it in the North. Mexico is shaking Sarah, Alice and Derrick in one clean move. And this time he’d be crossing clean. Nothing illegal.

  It sounds good. It sounds like the best idea he’s ever had. He gets tight in his chest as if he’s already on the road, already driving all night. Sucking down a Styrofoam cup of coffee, watching the snow melt off and the land empty. Clean highway air, with a hint of his exhaust on it, drifting to him through his cracked window.

  Then his eyes water. He thinks of Sarah’s corpse lying alone in the abandoned house. Of the junkies scuttling over her and mauling her and ejaculating into her. His backbone jolts and his eyes twitch. He thumbs his glasses up his nose and he knows he ain’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER 53

  ~ Dragging their beer cart in a Sisyphean arc.~

  A tin-roofed roadhouse across from a gasket factory in Cincinnati, the building facing sideways into an abandoned lot, like a piece of debris that’s blown out of the factory’s orbit and spun to rest at a cockeyed angle. Inside it’s a dim-lit tunnel with a high Formica bar and a pockmarked Hispanic bartender, leaning on the bar and watching news on the television, a toothpick hanging from his thin lips. The only patron is a gray-bearded man in a dirty Reds ballcap.