“You’ve got a very pretty face,” the man said.
That you might want to put on your mantel, she thought. “Aw, ain’t you sweet.”
“So, you wanna get out of here?”
“Easy, tiger, you got a name?”
His smile was sly. “Do I need one?”
Ginger returned the smile, but a shiver ran down her spine. She didn’t like where this was going. Guy was too quick on the draw. It didn’t look like he partied either, at least not at her level. She could tell he wasn’t a dealer, a crook, or an addict who would be into her for the trade of sex for substance, despite his insinuations. Something else bothered her. The guy hadn’t glanced down at her cleavage once.
“I’ll take you up on that drink,” she said and downed the rest of her vodka-cran.
“Mind if I make it a double?”
“Long as you make it tall too.”
The man waved two fingers and Jojo came down the bar, happy to get away from the two squawkers doing shots at the other end.
“A Corona and another of what the lady is having, this time double and tall.”
Jojo nodded and cast a sideways glance at Ginger, who made no sign that she was in need of assistance anymore. She planned to be out of there in a matter of minutes.
“Hey, stud, while my drink is being fixed I’m gonna go to the ladies’, powder my nose and stuff.”
“Don’t you be gone too long, now.”
Ginger giggled. “And miss out on you treating me right tonight? I think not. This stool better be free when I get back.”
The man nodded. “I got it covered.”
Ginger figured the drinks order would keep him anchored for long enough. She slipped off her stool and headed for the washroom, feeling him watch her the whole way, eyes slithering over her hips and ass as she walked. It wasn’t lecherous. Predatory was the sense she got. She wanted to shed his gaze like a snakeskin. When she reached the washroom door she risked a glance over her shoulder. The man was distracted a moment, one of the two mouthy girls yelling at him about how cute he looked.
Good, she thought. Cut the head of that bitch, buddy.
Ginger took her chance and banked right, ducking behind a group of people who had just come through the front doors. Before she knew it she was out into the cool night air and flagging down a cab. She’d have to go to Curtis soon, unable to avoid it much longer. Curtis Moffat had what she needed. The cabbie gave her a once-over as she slipped into the back.
“Where to, lady?”
“Anywhere but here.”
Five
NOW.
“Anywhere but here,” Ginger said, looking skyward. “Christ, anywhere but stuck on an island, forced to watch this pathetic little cockfight.”
“He started it,” Nash whined.
“Little?” Felix grunted, grabbing his crotch. “Honey, if I dropped this cock of mine on your head, you’d think a grand piano had landed on your dome.”
Ginger’s eyes could have cut glass. “Buddy, if you’ve ever wanted to see your own dick and balls sailing bloody through the air, then I suggest you keep talking.”
“Dyke,” Felix growled.
“Prick.”
Nearby, the kid on the sand stirred. Nash took a step away, unsure of this one. He looked pale and wiry, unstable even in his sleep. Felix stepped closer until he was almost on top of the kid. Nash watched from the corner of his eye, fearing he might receive a bitch-slap for his earlier slur if he didn’t stay vigilant.
“He’s waking,” Nash said.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Felix pushed the kid’s hip with a foot. The kid grunted and slurred something profane, drool seeping from the corner of his mouth. Felix paused a moment, then delivered a fierce kick to the kid’s shin, snapping him awake with a screech.
“What the hell did you kick him for?” yelled Ginger.
The kid writhed drunkenly in the sand, panicky breaths popping in and out of his lungs as he tried to get his bearings. Felix stepped back to give him some space, but it didn’t help.
“Get away from me!” squealed the kid.
He scrambled to his feet, kicking sand over the still unconscious girl beside him. The baggy jeans he wore inhibited his movements, making him appear clumsy as he staggered back. His stretched and torn wife-beater revealed a thin, hairless chest, peppered with acne. He flailed his arms effeminately at the others, his words coming in a lisping, blubbery babble.
“Wherethefuckwhothefuckwhatthefuck?”
Great, Nash thought. Enter the mincing twink.
Wide-eyed and near tears, the kid retreated to the edge of the long grass, where he picked up a fist-sized rock. He crouched to make himself a smaller target in case anyone decided to take a run at him.
“Who the hell are you guys?” he shouted, holding up the rock as if it were a live grenade.
Nash advanced slowly, arms outstretched and palms to the ground to show he was no threat. Felix swept right, trying to maintain a low profile, looking as if he was preparing to tackle the kid. It did not go unnoticed.
“You wanna get stoned? Just take another step then, man!”
The kid’s arm rose, threatening to pitch the rock, keeping Felix at a safe distance. Ginger finally stood, wiping sand from her ass. She marched past the two men and approached the youngest addition to their fucked-up little family, coming close enough to unbalance him. He stumbled, the rock fumbling from his hands and landing in front of her. Ginger put a foot on it.
“Don’t you come any closer, cunt!” the kid yelled. “I know karate!”
“Look, calm down. I just—”
“You best back the hell up, or I’ll—”
“Hey, will you chill the fuck out already?”
Ginger’s explosiveness caused the kid to jump back. He looked at her with surprise and maybe a new respect. Ginger put her hands on her hips and tipped her head sideways, lips pursed wearily. The kid hung his head at the sight of it, embarrassment pinching his face.
“You finished being a drama queen?” asked Ginger, voice suddenly soothing.
The kid swallowed hard and breathed deep, trying to regain some composure. Ginger took another step toward him.
“Do you, in fact, know karate?” She chuckled.
“No” was the sullen reply.
“I didn’t think so. What’s your name, kid?”
“Kenneth . . . Kenny. My friends . . . they call me Kenny.”
“Kenny, Kenny, Kenny,” she cooed. “You’re not in any danger from us, okay? My name’s Ginger. That’s Nash and Felix. We’re just as lost as you are, babe. Wish I could give you some answers, but I can’t. So take a deep breath and relax as much as you can. No one is here to harm you, okay?”
Ginger gave Felix a glare for the shin kicking. The look he gave back said he’d do it again. Nash took a step toward Kenny, but the boy flinched.
“Listen to the lady, kid. We won’t hurt you. She’s right about that much.”
The kid nodded, but inched closer to Ginger for protection. She let him enter her comfort zone easily. Nash was taken aback by the woman’s kindness toward this new one in their midst, concluding it was some kind of homo thing. She was a dyke, kid was a fag, and that united them. Nash resented it.
“Okay,” Kenny said, breathing slower. “I’m cooling out.”
Ginger nodded. “Good. That’s real good. . . .”
A few more words softened the boy’s armor until he was putty. Kenny put his hands in his pockets and cracked a half smile, nodding his head in a bid of truce. Nash felt a flare of annoyance. Felix was on the same page, arms folded and eyes slit with contempt. They were both thinking this Kenny kid was going to have to be the babysat bitch in the bunch.
“Sorry for yelling at you,” Kenny said. “I didn’t mean to call you a cunt.”
>
Ginger smiled. “Forget about it. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
“I think you can be forgiven under the circumstances—”
Nash’s voice could have bit through concrete. “Jesus, when you two little bitches finish finger-banging each other, do you think we can figure out what we’re gonna do about this predicament of ours?”
Ginger’s face darkened and she spat venomously in his direction, murmuring a string of obscenities. A slap across his face would have satisfied her, but she restrained herself. Instead, she turned to Kenny and thumbed over her shoulder.
“I should probably tell you now, when God created righteous cunts, he made the mold out of Nash over there.”
Nash snorted. “You got some fucking nerve, woman—”
A moaning sound came from the sand. The Hispanic girl was starting to come to. Disoriented and mumbling, she lifted her head. When her eyes fixed on the others she instantly rolled away and cowered.
“It’s okay, honey,” Ginger said. “We don’t bite.”
The girl didn’t answer. Judging by the confusion on her face, Nash wasn’t sure she was capable of giving a reply.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The girl swallowed hard, never taking her eyes off them. She was petite, but not fragile. Her dark hair and skin could have been sensuous, if both didn’t look so horribly neglected. Felix’s rumbling voice visibly rattled her when he spoke.
“Answer the man. What’s your name?”
Nash frowned. “I don’t think she speaks English.”
“Oh, she speaks it, alright,” Felix said, looking the girl in the eye. “Too many cons have tried to pull the no Eengleesh card on me in my time.”
Each of them threw a sharp glance her way. The girl swallowed again, but this time answered with a thick Spanish accent.
“Maria is my name.”
She drew her knees up under her chin, wrapping her arms around her shins. The eyes that looked around were those of a terrified animal. Kenny sat on the fringe of the grass, scratching at his chest and offering her a weak smile that did nothing to set her at ease. Felix mulled over the scene, looking back toward the footprint trail with a compulsion that suggested a freshly stuffed candy nose.
Six
TWO DAYS AGO.
Felix Fenton’s candy nose burned so bad he thought he might yell. Every vein in his right nostril was aflame. Nasal drip was like acid. The coke he’d bought was of the harshest variety and his sinuses were paying for it. What the hell was it cut with? Salt? Carpet deodorizer? If Felix’s sense of smell wasn’t so wrecked already he might have sniffed a clue. Blow was always cut with something worthless, that much was true. You couldn’t avoid it these days. Pollutants bought from dollar stores caused purity to plummet everywhere. Felix preferred something like powdered baby laxative in his order when he was getting shortchanged. A few extra visits to the crapper he could deal with. This shit, though, jammed up his nose, was all kinds of wrong. Forty bucks well misspent, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Don’t you dare blow your nose, he thought. Don’t waste a goddamn milligram now. The pain will pass. Wait it out.
His eyes watered before glazing. There it was—the kick, the payoff that he worried might not come. Felix shuddered, teeth grinding, gums flexing, tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth.
“Fuck yeah.”
He rubbed his nose, trying to derail the unreachable itch forming halfway to the back of his throat. The kick was surprisingly decent, but not nearly enough. Felix had to have another. The stairwell of his run-down apartment building was not the wisest spot to indulge. Even so, he crammed himself into a dusty corner, unable to wait another minute. Coke was the appetizer, the link in the chain that connected him to his true anchor, something to tie him over until he got settled in his apartment where he could cook.
“Double down,” he muttered and pulled a tiny vial from his jacket pocket.
He tapped another bump into the concave of his long pinky fingernail and pressed it to his nostril. With a piggish snort he vacuumed it into his head. There was pain again, though not as severe as before. The kick was less too, but piggybacked the previous one nicely. It gave Felix’s exhausted legs the energy to bound two steps at a time up the three flights to his floor.
At his landing he considered a third bump. These weren’t proper rails he was snorting, mere sprinklings at best. He looked at the vial again, half full with cheap cocaine, and swallowed the bitter chemical that leaked into his throat from his sinuses. The coke called his name again and again. Felix’s better half, now shrunk to less than an eighth, chastised him for listening.
You can’t wait thirty seconds until you’re in the privacy of your own damn home? What the fuck’s wrong with you, nigga? Get a grip.
Felix ran that squeaky angel off his shoulder nine times out of ten these days, but he let it cruise this time. Privacy was something he was becoming less mindful of and might pay the price for if he didn’t take care. Cops were always looking for an easy bust and Felix, black and male and addicted, was enough of a target already. The vial found its way back inside his pocket.
“. . . I’ll keep you updated, sir.”
An unknown voice up ahead. Felix rounded the corner into his hallway and stopped. Six doors down, shuffling away from his apartment door, was a mystery man. White and suspicious, that was all Felix took into account. He was slipping something into his back pocket as he tried to leave the scene. Felix had no doubt the guy had just been fucking with his front door.
“Hey!”
Felix quickened his step as he approached. The man looked over his shoulder and their eyes met. Felix tried on his mad dog glare, the one he used around the neighborhood regularly to warn others to give him a wide berth. It didn’t create an ounce of concern in the man’s reciprocating gaze. Felix got within three feet of him and reached out to grab a shoulder.
“Hey, what the fuck do you think—”
Felix had been a boxer at one point in his life, back when it had been important for a sample cup of his piss to come up clean. He saw the right hook coming, despite the uncanny speed of the delivery. Felix weaved, feeling knuckles graze his neck. He countered with a poorly timed uppercut that connected with the man’s sternum instead of his chin. The man grunted, but was otherwise unfazed. Felix tried for a headlock.
“Asshole, you just signed your own—”
In a flash the tables were turned. Arms got inside Felix’s guard, wrists slipped past his face, easily outmaneuvering his attempt to defend. Before he knew it Felix found himself in a clinch and at the man’s mercy.
Death warrant.
He’d underestimated his opponent, a critical mistake. One sentence filled the ticker tape of his thoughts, still transmitting as the first instance of pain came.
This is how it ends.
The man’s forearms crushed Felix’s head like a vise, compressing his cheekbones, squashing his ears to his head, burning them with friction as he tried to pull free. When the knee came up, Felix wasn’t ready. It was like something he’d seen in an underground Muay Thai fight once. The man’s knee bore into his gut with such upward force that Felix felt his heels lift off the ground. Seconds later another knee planted in the same spot and the vise grip released. Felix dropped like a puppet with strings slashed, the wind knocked out of him. His breath would not return.
Dude is pro, Felix thought. That wasn’t luck.
On his knees and doubled over, forehead a foot from the floorboards, Felix knew the misjudgment would cost him. His lungs demanded oxygen, though intake was impossible. He anticipated only two or three seconds before a heel or fist came down on the back of his head, or, worse, a bullet. He could visualize the police report: murdered execution style. Felix braced for the sound of a hammer being cocked. Instead he heard a low Texas drawl, the smile b
ehind it as unmistakable as the pained breath in it.
“It’s your lucky day, boy. Any other and I’d have finished you for that.”
A vicious kick to the ribs flipped Felix on his back. Breathless, he lay there, staring at the discolored, waterdamaged stucco of the ceiling, waiting for hands to rifle his pockets and make off with his wallet and contraband. The robbery never came. His attacker was already on his way out, boots clomping back the way Felix had come. One last remark came from down the hall.
“You best count your blessings while you can, man.”
Felix dared not move, wheezing, coaxing his lungs to expand enough for a full breath. With strength returning he propped himself against the wall in a sitting position and fought the urge to vomit. He took a tiny baggie out of the inside pocket of his jacket and carefully checked it over, making sure it wasn’t damaged in the fight. This was his other purchase, his one true master: that which had made a modern-day slave out of him. The fine white powder inside didn’t look much different from what was in the vial, but the two were incomparable to Felix. The heroin held his eyes and gnawed at his brain stem. He thought of freshly fallen snow, a delightful worm wiggling through white drifts. His voice was pained, wispy, when he finally spoke to the empty hallway.
“Hell, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Seven
NOW.
“Who knew hell could look so beautiful?” Felix said, eyes skating over the turquoise water, fingers finding their way inside his open shirt to caress the two-day-old bruise on his stomach that was camouflaged from the others by his dark skin.
Bait: A Novel Page 3