by Nancy Rue
“Other side,” I said. “You can have it all—I swear—just relax—”
It sounded so idiotic I shut up. Inside my jacket the phone vibrated against my chest but I didn’t go for it. Ten seconds and this would be over and I could go screaming to Chief in person.
She found the pocket and the money, which she yanked out and stared at as if suddenly she didn’t know what it was and why she was holding it.
“If you’ll just step back, I’ll get this thing out of your way and you can go—do—whatever.”
Some small, good thing in me really wanted to snatch the cash back from her and drag her back to my house and—
Do what? I’d been so incredibly successful with Geneveve, why not think I could change this woman’s life too?
She remained there, staring at the money, and shaking her head.
“Just take one step back,” I said. I even started the engine, slow and soft. It brought her eyes to my face, but she was still. Only her expression moved, into something like sheer disgust. She swallowed and cringed and squeezed her eyes shut, and I somehow knew it was herself she was repulsed by. Or something beyond her that was making her do this.
“I’ll show you where she is,” she said.
I shut off the engine. “Who? Geneveve? Is that who you mean?”
She nodded, eyes still closed. “But we got to hurry.”
“Can we get there on this?”
She was on the seat before I could even reach for my cell phone. With Chief’s warning in my ear—call me before you do anything—I once more restarted the Harley, pulled her shrunken arms around me and said, “Where are we going?”
“Back there.”
She jerked her head toward a potholed driveway that rambled off into darkness next to C.A.R.S. Praying wordlessly, I followed her frantic directions, down a veritable gulley that backed the row of empty stores, then sharply to the left into an alley that ran like a gutter between darkened buildings that, even through my visor, reeked of humanity at its lowest.
“Next driveway!” she said, voice cracking against my helmet.
I started to lean into the turn, but a massive body leaped from a doorway and made a lunge for the bike. My passenger yelped like a whipped dog, but I couldn’t scream. She was squeezing off my breath as she jammed her bones into my torso.
An arm bounced off the windshield and was gone, and I felt more than saw the hulking mass skid on its back and into the wall. After that I was too panicked to look in my mirror. I gunned it to the end of the alley and managed to make the turn without slamming us to the ground. I started to slow down, but the woman pounded my shoulder with her fist.
“Don’t stop! You can’t stop!”
“I have to see if he’s okay. I can’t just leave—”
“He okay. He done run off! I seen him!”
I wanted to believe her and keep going, but what little sanity that remained forced me to make a U-turn in the middle of West King and return to the alley. My phone was vibrating like a pacemaker but I left it alone as I slowed as much as I dared and searched through the dankness.
“I tol’ you. He done run off. That’s what he always do—he just run off.”
I lowered my feet and jerked my head toward her. “You knew who it was?”
“He the same one—you got to get to Geneveve now.”
“Okay, okay.” I dragged in a long breath and settled my hands on the controls. “Which way?”
She pointed to what at first appeared to be a recess in the wall. When I peered in, I saw that it was a long, impossibly narrow hallway that cut through the building and led to the next street. Halfway in, a metal garbage can lay on its side, its contents spewed into a reeking heap.
“There she is.”
“Where?”
“Right there. On the ground. I got to go.”
The woman virtually fell off the back of my bike and skittered away like a stray cat. I wanted to go after her, take her out of the picture that formed in my mind, of her turning the corner and being filleted by a man who thought he could wrestle a Harley. As perhaps Geneveve already had been.
I somehow got the bike propped on its stand and crept into the tight alley, eyes on the garbage can until they adjusted to the broken-necked beer bottles and the misshapen forms of produce so rotted they were no longer recognizable. That little wench I’d felt so sorry for had literally taken me for a ride, and almost gotten us both killed en route.
I glanced over my shoulder. If she’d been telling the truth—if Mr. Man had survived—he was probably ticked off enough to come back looking for me. It would definitely be best if all he found was a stenched-out load of last week’s leftovers. Nearly gagging, I tried to turn around, but my foot slid on a trail of slime that had escaped along the ground. Both arms groped for balance and found only the walls, which were slick in the dampness and delivered me face forward into the foul heap.
Another face fell against mine.
Even as my scream reverberated down the alley, even as I shoved a blackened banana skin from its cheek, I knew the face was Geneveve’s. Bile rose in my throat as I scraped through the oozing detritus and uncovered her lips, purple and swollen together, blood trailing into them from her nose. A gash forked across her forehead like a lightning bolt. It was a hideous kind of déjà vu.
I took her head in my hands, “Geneveve! Geneveve—can you hear me?”
When she groaned between my palms, I yanked her into my arms, where she went limp.
“Oh, dear God, don’t let her die—okay, okay—Chief.”
Somehow I retrieved my phone and poked at his name on the screen with one palsied hand while I held Geneveve with the other and rocked us both. Now I knew why she did that when she was panicked. It was the only way to make sure you were still alive.
It took several rings for Chief to answer. When he did, he didn’t bother with hello. “Where are you?” was his greeting.
I could only whisper nonsensically, “I’m in some alley off of some other alley off of King—”
“I’ll find you,” he said.
I shoved the phone somewhere onto my person and cradled Geneveve with both arms. “Can you hear me?” I said. “Geneveve?”
Her eyes opened and rolled back, leaving only a white stare that shivered through me. I put my face close to her distended mouth and felt her breath wheeze against my cheek.
“Okay—thankyouGodthankyouGodthankyouGod.” I kicked at the garbage and made a space. Still holding her in the crook of my arm, I struggled out of my jacket and spread it on the ground with my elbow.
“I’m going to stretch you out so you can breathe—just keep doing it—don’t stop breathing—”
“She alive?”
I practically convulsed. I had myself thrown across her, yelling for the jackal to stay away from her, before I realized it was Chief’s big hands that took hold of my shoulders and held on until I stopped freaking out.
“Easy, Classic,” he said. “It’s just me.”
I put my hand over my mouth to keep from retching. “I didn’t even hear you ride up.”
“Didn’t. I walked it.” He crouched next to us, seemingly unaware that he was squatting in filth. “She’s breathing. Pulse?”
“I didn’t check, but she was conscious for a second.” I was feeling a little more conscious myself, now that I was next to somebody sane.
He lifted one of her eyelids. “She still is. Yo, Geneveve.” He patted her face and her eyes rolled open again. “Can you move?”
I ran my hands up and down her arms. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”
Geneveve shuffled her feet on the ground and flopped her hands before she lolled her head to the side again.
“Okay—she heard you, right?” I said. “She’s not brain-damaged.”<
br />
I was sounding like a bad episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but Chief nodded as if I were making sense.
“Her nose is probably broken.”
“If that’s as bad as it is, she’s lucky, then.”
“I don’t think that’s as bad as it is, Classic.” Chief rubbed the sides of his thighs and shook his head. “This girl is loaded.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chief formed a plan for getting Geneveve home, and I followed it without question, which was quickly—and strangely—becoming my new career. He waited with her while I drove my bike back to the house to pick up the van, and he promised in the meantime to determine whether we should take her to the hospital. There were going to be big questions if we did.
I had enough of my own. Not even considering the ones about why she ran off when she seemed to be doing better, what had happened on West King? Did she try to pawn my stuff and get robbed and beaten? That was the most logical explanation, if one iota of this was logical. But nobody needed to mess up a puny little thing like her that badly to get a DVD player away from her. And who was “Nobody”? The woman who’d led me to Geneveve seemed to know, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see she thought it was the same clueless thug who’d tried to take down an eight-hundred-pound motorcycle at thirty miles an hour. My biggest question was why I didn’t crash into a wall when it happened. That had to be the grace of God, because I didn’t have the biking skills to avert that kind of wreck. But Mr. Man was still on the loose like the wasp you didn’t get the first time you smacked at him with the flyswatter. Only because I was distracted enough already to be a danger on the bike did I not keep looking over my shoulder to see if that hulking shadow was coming after me.
Which was why I almost screamed when I opened the garage and Owen was there, sitting on the gear locker in his golf togs, solemn as a judge. As it was, I stayed astride the bike and shook for fifteen seconds before I shut it off and swallowed and breathed and did every other thing I could think of to keep myself from running him over with the thing. I’d had one freak-out too many, and there was still Geneveve and Chief to get back to with the van.
I whipped off my helmet. “Owen, what are you doing here?”
“We have to talk, Ally,” he said.
Another long breath. “I know, I know—I’m sorry about the noise. I’ll take care of it.” I got off the bike and waved my hand at him. “I need to get in there, Owen—could you please move?”
He didn’t, except to sniff the air and rub at his nose and visibly decide that what he’d come for was more important than the stench coming off of me. “I was against calling the police,” he said. “That was Miz Vernell. She runs from confrontation like a scared rabbit. Now me, you know I’m more of a Mack truck in these situations. But now, Ally, you’ve got me between a rock and a hard place—”
“Owen, get up.”
“You don’t have five minutes for ten years of friendship?”
“Not this five minutes.”
I all but stamped my foot. When he still didn’t budge, I hung the helmet from the handlebars and dug my keys and cell phone out of my jacket pocket. I was drenched in sweat and smeared in blood and saturated with the nauseating odor of decayed life, but Owen merely shook his head and said, “You’re leaving us no choice, then. I’ve got to—”
“You and Miz Vernell and whoever else, just do what you have to do. Right now, I’ve got things to do and …”
I threw it off with a head shake and jumped into the van, my cell phone already one with my ear. “Hank?” I said. “We’ll be back in about ten minutes with Geneveve—I’ll explain then. Just have Desmond sequestered somewhere, will you? He doesn’t need to see this.”
I left Owen open-mouthed in my garage and screamed the van out of Palm Row. Once on St. George, I got Chief on the phone and let his voice pull me back to West King, one cryptic word, one calming phrase at a time. By the time I arrived, I was together enough not to come apart again when I saw Geneveve’s head dropped over his arm as he carried her to the van, her mouth agape and slick with fresh vomit.
“That’s the drugs,” he assured me. “She’s just passed out.”
“What a comfort,” I said.
He looked at me over Geneveve’s lolling head, and for an instant in the midst of the blood and the scum and the wretchedness, his eyes twinkled at me.
“There you go, Classic,” he said. “Keep your sense of humor.”
He eased Geneveve onto the backseat and propped her head up with the various articles of clothing that littered my van. For once I was grateful that, as Bonner always pointed out, I drove around in a closet.
“Take the turns easy or she’ll end up on the floorboards,” Chief said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“Un-huh. I’m following you,” I said.
And then I spent the entire drive to Number 2 Palm Row wondering what possessed me to say that. Okay, yes, I’d been happy for him to call the shots through the whole thing because I hadn’t even known where to begin. But for Pete’s sake, I knew my way home.
Didn’t I?
It took some time to get Geneveve bathed and disinfected and iced, which Hank mostly took care of while I stood in the shower and washed away things that had never been on my body before. The only thing that wouldn’t go down the drain were the mental pictures—the hardcore women twitchy with fear, the tiny one running like an alley cat, Geneveve left in the alley with the garbage. That was what I still saw when I joined Hank and Chief in the living room. That and Geneveve buried under blankets in the red chair, father back than the day I first wrapped her up and put her there.
I sank onto the couch and took whatever was in the mug Hank tucked into my hand. Its scent was enough to erase the odor lingering in my nostrils, but the house itself still felt as if its peace were being pressed down by something heavy.
“Is she passed out, unconscious, what?” I said.
“Geneveve,” Chief said, in a voice at once low and yet commanding enough to force her eyes open. She seemed to have to bring herself back from a dead place, which she returned to in seconds, as if responding to us required too much effort.
“Has Desmond seen her?” I said.
Hank nodded.
“Was he freaked?”
“No, I got the feeling this was not a new experience for him—at least the blood and the bruises. He did say—how was it he put it?”
Chief looked up from his cell phone screen. “He said, ‘I seen her wasted before, but never this bad. She gone.’”
I almost let go a laugh, but I knew if I did it would turn into something out-of-control that would require drugs for me.
“So much for ‘I’ll never use again,’” I said. “I am completely at a loss now. Any ideas? Anybody?”
Chief sat up straighter, stretching his back, and I noticed for the first time that he was still smeared with Geneveve’s bodily fluids. And that this whole time he’d been in a dress shirt and slacks.
“Did you come straight from the office?” I said.
“I have one idea. It means somebody coming over here—and I don’t even know if it’ll pan out.”
“You want to call the police?”
“Do you?”
“Should we?”
“Is somebody ever going to answer a question?” Hank said. “Or are we just going to keep asking them?”
“I’m just afraid if we bring in the police, they’ll take Desmond.”
They both raised their eyebrows. If I’d been them, I would have looked at me that way too. It was another one of those things I didn’t know I thought until it came out of my mouth.
“He’s driving me nuts, and I’m probably screwing the whole thing up,” I said. “But it doesn’t feel to me like anybody else is going to do any better right now.”
“So what’s your idea?”
“I know a couple people involved in NA. It’s worked for them. I could make a call.”
“NA?”
“Narcotics Anonymous.”
“You’re thinking of—yeah,” Hank said. “Al, it’s worth a try, in my view.”
I couldn’t picture Geneveve sitting in a circle of corporate cocaine users saying, “Hi, I’m Geneveve, and I’m an addict.” I couldn’t even imagine her sitting up, period, at this point. But I was fresh out of options, so for the umpteenth time that night, I looked at Chief and said, “Okay.”
Up until then I hadn’t said okay that many times to one person in my entire life.
Chief went out onto the screen porch with his phone, and Hank nodded at the mug I hadn’t taken a sip from.
“Drink,” she said.
“You’re lucky,” my mouth said. “No, I don’t believe in luck. You’re blessed.”
“Why? Because I’m the only one in the room who doesn’t smell like rotten eggs? I might take him out in the back and hose him down in a minute.”
No. Because you can be the one to take him out and hose him down.
Fortunately it didn’t come out of me this time. I’d have to figure out a way to purge it later, though, because it couldn’t stay in there.
Hank let there be quiet for a while, which I appreciated. We were still resting in it when I heard a Harley rumble, two rumbles, rounding the corner and mumbling to a stop in front of the house.
“That should be them,” Hank said.
“Who?”
But Hank was already at the front door waving. Chief came back in from the screen porch.
“Whoever it is came on bikes?” I said.
He passed me with, “We’ll have to keep this confidential.”
I gave up asking questions.
Hank led two women in from the foyer—one tall and statuesque, the other short and golden and beautifully Hispanic.
“I think you know Leighanne and Nita,” Hank said.