by Julie Smith
Toni reached across the table. "Let me have your hand."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Give me your palm. Then we'll talk."
Oh, well. It's not like I've got a pressing appointment.
She stuck out her hand, palm up. Toni took the hand and studied it.
"Your life line's okay, you have a good family life. There are two important men in your life, and that may cause you some trouble." She paused, as if taking a deeper look. "But here's the thing—you're on a journey right now, you've got to go through some doors, you're going from one level to the next as you travel downward. And you're going to suffer." She looked up, into Skip's eyes.
Skip felt her heart speed up. She didn't believe in this, but she was susceptible to the power of suggestion.
Toni looked half blitzed. "The ways of the underworld are perfect and may not be questioned."
"What?"
"At each door, you're going to suffer a loss. I've got to tell you something. There's danger all around you."
"I'm a cop." Skip snapped out the words, angry; Toni was spooking her.
"Listen to me. This is the most dangerous thing you've ever done. But you can't stop now. The ways of the underworld are perfect."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"What do you think it means?"
"I don't know. The underworld. I don't know—in a way it's where I live. I see the worst side of the city, but let me tell you something—if it's perfect, we're all in trouble."
"Uh-uh. It's not about that."
"What, then?"
"It may be about Dennis. It may have something to do with all that."
Skip remembered Toni's unsteady gait. She wasn't slurring her words, but Skip figured alcohol and an eccentric view of the world had probably combined to produce gibberish that was best ignored.
"You've already suffered a loss, haven't you?"
She thought of Delavon's velvet-footed thugs and laughed.
"Yeah. Of my dignity."
"It will get worse." She reached out again. "Let me see the other hand."
Skip complied, figuring it was a small price to get her to talk about Dennis.
"You have a formidable enemy. A very evil enemy. And she's female." Toni cackled. "Maybe it's yourself."
The things she'd said about Skip's personal life were true, but Toni had probably just made lucky guesses; either that or said the same thing she always said. Skip was damned if she was going to give it any credence. "Tell me about Dennis," she said.
"He was here last night. Phil told you."
"You met him then?"
"Met him?" She seemed to find that hilarious. "Met him? I've known him ten or twelve years. He walks into my life, walks out, back in, back out. Then he gets married and I don't see him for years, and then here he is again. Same place, same time, same line."
"Did he tell you anything about his life?"
"You mean about his father-in-law getting killed? Not a god-damn word—Phil told me, I never even saw a paper. All he talked about was his nice wife and his adorable kid. You wouldn't have had the faintest idea there was anything wrong."
"Was he drinking?"
"Oh, heavily. I guess that was a clue."
"What did he say about Reed?"
She looked puzzled. "Who's Reed?"
"His wife. I thought he talked about her."
"He called her ‘my wife.' I never thought about it. I just assumed he married Evil."
"Evil?"
"That's what I call Evie. His girlfriend when I knew him. Her daddy was some big shot—owned a restaurant or something, but Dennis never said which one. He's the one who was killed, I guess."
Skip produced the wedding picture of Reed and Dennis. "Is this she?"
"Yes." But she grabbed at the picture. "Let me see that. I don't know. She used to be blond and she was skinnier. Sure looks like her, though."
"Dennis didn't talk about what happened yesterday?"
"No. Believe me I'd remember—knowing what I know now."
"Did he seem okay?"
"Okay?"
"Did he have any injuries?"
She laughed. "I'm the one with injuries. All inflicted by the same damn man."
"How'd he look after all that time?"
"Oh, great. Same old Dennis."
"There wasn't anything unusual about him?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did he have blood on him?"
"Omigod. Blood. No, he didn't have blood on him. He was just the same as always. Even dressed the same—T-shirt and jeans. He's got a great rear end. Some things never change."
"Is this a place where you and Dennis used to meet?"
"Oh, sure. I've been a regular all the time I've lived in the Quarter. And he used to be too."
"So he probably came here to find you."
"Are you kidding? He came here to get shit-faced. I just happened to—" She stopped and drummed her fingers on the table.
"Oh, wait a minute. Now that I think of it, he might have wanted me for something. Oh my God, I think I've been had."
I guarantee you you have.
"See, he didn't want to make love with me. I don't think he even wanted a place to stay, especially. I invited him to come home with me, just like I always did, so he did. But he—"
"Wait a minute—can I ask something? How'd you get to your house?"
"Walked. Why?"
"I just wondered what he was driving."
"Don't know. " She shook her head, impatient to get on with her story. "Anyway, he came home with me, but he kind of argued about it—he didn't want it that bad. Then when we got there he just sort of crashed on the sofa, and he was gone before I got up."
She shrugged. "Story of my life."
Skip was about to say something, but Toni had an announcement to make. "Boy, am I pissed."
"I don't blame you. But what do you think he wanted you for?"
"He wanted to know where he could score."
"Ah."
"So I told him about Maya's. Just use my name, I said; no problem—Maya'll take care of you. Shit! He's probably there right now. The bastard"
"Maya's?"
"Yeah, Maya's—party, party, party, all the time party. God knows what Maya's into—but let me tell you, she hangs with some major creeps. Not exactly southern gentlemen, if you know what I mean."
"How's that?"
"Well, once I went in the bedroom, looking for a bathroom, and the door closed behind me. I just had enough time to see I was alone with two guys before the light went out." She stopped and sipped, building suspense.
"So what'd you do?"
"Screamed." She shrugged. "It worked, but Maya was a little put out."
"How mad at Dennis are you?"
"Pissed as all hell. Wouldn't you be?"
"I can think of a great way to get even. Why don't you take me over to Maya's?"
A smile played at the corners of Toni's lips. "Maybe I'll just do that."
"Let me make a phone call."
Suddenly Toni seemed much more alert than Skip had imagined. "Uh-uh. I might take you—I just might do that. But no one else." She drained her glass, and Skip wasted not a moment.
"Let me get you another drink." She gestured to Phil, and then she changed the subject for a while. When Toni had drunk half her wine and slowed down a bit, she brought up Maya's again.
"Listen, Toni, I can't go there without backup. How about if they stay outside? Just you and I go in?"
"Goddammit, okay!" She made a fist and brought it down on the table. "I'm going to get that bastard for what he did to me."
Skip wasn't sure what he'd done to her. Nothing much, it sounded like. But Toni was the kind of drunk who lost track of such considerations. Skip hoped she stayed loaded long enough to get her to Maya's.
8
People had brought food to Reed and Dennis's, and Nina had sent some from the restaurant. Grady and his mother had sat down together, but neither of them had really
eaten. Sugar did not talk about Arthur, about her loss—even about Reed and Sally. She talked only about Nina, how she was ruining the restaurant, how she couldn't do anything right, how nasty she was to sweet Sugar, herself a paragon of behavior and business sense.
That was okay for Grady, it was more natural—it was the Sugar he was used to and for now preferred to the passive one, the strange one of the night before.
She was with some friends now, friends of Arthur's. Sugar didn't really make friends, and she and Arthur had so little in common they didn't have couple friends. Yet people had come over, and Grady was grateful. He had no idea how to take care of his mother, had never seen the possibility he'd need to. He'd devoted his life to protecting himself from her.
Grady had brought his computer over—a small notebook that it had taken him a long time to be able to afford. He was upstairs now, practicing his own peculiar brand of therapy—the one thing that had gotten him through so far. He found that when he wrote, when he created his own universe, he left this one behind. He had problems with his father, a whole lot of problems, but he did not want to think of what Arthur's death meant to him.
What had happened to Reed and Dennis and Sally was another matter. In his heart he didn't feel they were dead, and he was feeling less and less sure they'd been kidnapped, because there'd been no ransom demand, and it had now been more than twenty-four hours. He and his mother had carefully left telephone messages at both their houses, so there'd be no problem getting in touch. And there was always the restaurant—anyone could call there.
If they weren't dead, what? He didn't like to think about it, what that might mean. And he thought it odd that his mother wasn't trying to find them, wasn't bending everyone's ear with cockeyed theories as usual. Instead she had turned her attention to the restaurant, and to Nina, her newly declared enemy. There must be a reason for that. And Grady thought he knew what it was. She had fears about Reed and Dennis—the same ones he had.
He wanted to stop writing about the vampires, to branch out, to write about reality. But how to go about that? The thought of it made his stomach flop. Writing was important, it was necessary, it was his obsession.
It scared him to death.
When he really thought about it, writing was like a vampire. It caressed you, it wrapped its treacherous arms around you, and it sucked you dry.
No, no, no, it isn't like that. A vampire would suck your blood and cast you aside. Writing ensnares you; it keeps you; it won't let you go.
Like Sugar would if anyone would let her.
But writing is the good mother.
Right.
So do it.
An idea came to him, simply to do a writing exercise rather than a finished, publishable product. just to let his mind go wild and see what happened.
He started writing what appeared to be a children's story:
* * *
Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Bill. Bill lived on a strange planet with some people he wasn't too sure about, but it wasn't all that bad a life.
Children were allowed to do anything they wanted, especially climb as many trees as they liked, and keep lions as pets. Or tigers, if they chose, but Bill preferred a nice lion because you could get a good grip on its mane when you rode it.
They ate nothing but fruit and spaghetti and sometimes pizza, so no one had to cook very much and no animals had to die. The spaghetti hung from certain trees that grew in a grove, like Spanish moss hangs from certain trees here. Sometimes the people asked the neighborhood giraffes to reach up and get it or, when it grew low, they sent the children out on their lions for it.
Sauce for the spaghetti came down from a mountain, in a sort of waterfall, and the people caught it in barrels. That happened once a week, and every week the sauce was different—sometimes you got tomato, sometimes pesto, sometimes Alfredo or primavera.
Flying saucers made out of pizza dough blew through now and then. The people caught them in nets they put in the tallest trees and plants. You could put the sauce from the waterfall on the saucers and make a very fine pizza if you didn't mind not having any cheese. Which no one did because they never heard of it.
It would have been a very good life if it hadn't been for the Evil One.
Bill found out about the Other Side when he was sent out to pick spaghetti and couldn't reach it—someone had come along and trimmed each strand an inch or two, maybe three, just enough so a boy standing on a lion couldn't reach it. He was flabbergasted—so flabbergasted he squeaked in amazement, causing his pet lion to bolt, which caused Bill, in turn, to fall off him, onto the jungle floor. The ground was usually soft with vegetation, so he wouldn't normally have been hurt, but there was a hard root right under him, from the spaghetti tree he'd been trying to pick. Bill hit his knee on the root and knocked some of the skin off. He'd never in his life had an injury. Such things were very rare on his planet and he didn't know what to think.
He was terrified—so terrified he set up a howl that sent all the elders of the town flying to his aid.
Then he was embarrassed—so embarrassed it made him feel a way he'd never felt before—a nasty, red, jagged kind of way that made his throat close and his cheeks hot.
He learned later that he was angry—so angry he made his hands into fists and started hitting people; and kicking people. In turn, that made some of the elders angry and they hit him and kicked him back.
A buzzing began among them. He heard words he didn't know. "Evil, evil. The Evil One. Evil One."
Finally, one of the oldest women, the one they called the Wise Woman, held him and patted his back and soothed him until he felt better.
When he got home, he told the people he lived with what had happened to him, and they said the same words he had heard in the spaghetti grove. "Evil. The Evil One," they said. "She planned it that way," they said. "She cut the spaghetti short so that no one could harvest it, and she is devilishly clever. Do you see what she did? She made sure that whoever tried to harvest the spaghetti would be standing right over a root, so that he would fall down and knock the skin off his knee. She must be punished."
Bill didn't understand at all. "I don't see how anyone could do that," he said. "There are thirty spaghetti trees in the grove and every one of them had short spaghetti. How could she know I would be under the one with the exposed root? And how could she know my lion would bolt? And how could she know that if it did, I would fall off it?"
"You ask too many questions," they said. "Elders know things that you don't."
And that was all they would ever say.
But that night he heard terrible shrieks and screams that turned the planet into an ugly and fearful place. He dreamed about crawling things with many legs and writhing things with forked tongues and winged things with fur and fangs.
He woke up hot and exhausted and asked the others what the sounds in the night had been.
"Oh, that was the Evil One," they said. "We punished her."
That was not the only time he heard those screams. He heard them many times after that, always when something went wrong on the planet.
Once the barrels that caught the spaghetti sauce had been slightly moved so that some of the sauce fell on the ground and could not be eaten.
He found out later that the man whose job it was to set the barrels said the Evil One had moved them.
Once, one of the children who couldn't yet swim fell in a river and almost drowned.
He found out later that the child's mother said the Evil One distracted her, so she couldn't watch her child.
Once someone burned a pizza he was making.
He knew he was not supposed to ask questions, but that time he was simply too puzzled to keep quiet. "‘Was there a punishment last night?" he asked.
"Why, yes, there was," said the people he lived with.
"Did they punish the man who burned the pizza?"
"Of course not," they said. "The Evil One was punished."
"But surely it was th
e man's fault about the pizza," said Bill.
"Why did they punish the Evil One for that?"
"Because it wasn't the man's fault," they said. "It was the Evil One's fault. She turned up the heat when he wasn't looking."
"Why would she do that?" asked Bill.
"You ask too many questions," they said.
* * *
Grady was thrilled when he was done, sure he was finally getting somewhere, that this was a breakthrough at last. However, when he read it over, he thought, Fine. Good statement of the problem. But no resolution.
* * *
Heavy curtains covered the windows, and the lights were kept on, so that Reed couldn't tell whether it was day or night.
The television was on as well, and Reed had been given some books and magazines to read. One hand was free; the other was handcuffed to the chair she sat in.
The room itself was beautiful, or nearly so—but perhaps it was just a beat off. The ceilings weren't quite high enough for the heavy period furniture, and most of the pieces were reproductions. Still, they had been chosen with care, almost certainly by a decorator. The carpet was thick and the curtains were expensive brocade-gold, not Reed's favorite color, but undeniably rich-looking. The mantel was genuine—something that had probably been bought at auction—and so was the clock that stood on it. Above the mantel hung a dark, brooding European painting of some sort; nineteenth century, Reed thought. It had probably cost plenty, and it cast a pall of gloom on the room.
It was a room that was meant to impress, and in that it succeeded, with its ostentation if nothing else. A room you'd be thrilled to get in a bed and breakfast, say, but not one you'd necessarily want to live in—and certainly not one in which you'd wish to be handcuffed to a chair.
She was not gagged. Thinking it might help and certainly couldn't hurt, she'd screamed loud, hard, and long, to no avail. It occurred to her that the room must be soundproofed, though why it would be was beyond her.
She had nothing but questions about this situation.
A hand had gone over her mouth the minute she stepped in the gate at this house, the house where she'd followed the kidnapper, Once inside the gate, she could see there was a porte cochere behind the wall, and cars parked there. The place was lit up as if there were a party going on, and Reed could hear voices. She was dragged to a side entrance, following the kidnapper, she thought, but she'd lost sight of Sally and could no longer hear her.