by Dawson, Mark
“I’ve made a mistake,” she said. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I need to be going.”
He picked up the chopsticks again and stabbed another piece of meat. “Naw, you ain’t made a mistake,” he said as he deposited the pork in his mouth. “You pretty scrawny, all elbows and knees and shoulders and shit, but that’s alright. I ain’t fussy. Most of my girls are like that after they been on the pipe long enough. What you’d call a vocational hazard, you know what I’m talkin’ about? You, though, there’s somethin’ about you that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s that you got a little fight left in you. Don’t worry, you won’t for long.”
She quickly identified possible weapons: the pool table with cues and heavy eight-ounce balls; a bottle of gin on the table; the shotgun; the unloaded pistol.
Pacho got up, his knee nudging the table. The syringe rolled off and fell to the stained carpet.
She assessed threats: most of the others in the room were too far gone to be much trouble; the big black guy was packing—she could see the butt of a semi-automatic at the side of his khakis; Pacho could just reach out and take the shotgun.
He came around the table and stood before her. He still had the chopsticks in his hand, and he made a play of putting them in his mouth, one after the other, and sucking the juices clean off them.
“I changed my mind. I ain’t gonna sell you that gun. Truth is, that’s my new piece. I haven’t given it a road test yet—maybe I’ll hang onto it for a while. Maybe I’ll try it out tonight.”
Trevor had worked his way around her, and now, with a suddenness that took her by surprise, he lunged at her and encircled her waist with one thick arm and her shoulders with the other. He was as strong as a bear. There was a whooping and hollering as the others stopped to watch the show.
“Now then, I got a nice room out back where I take new girls. To check them out, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ you and me could get to know each other better. I can’t have you come over here and leave without enjoyin’ my hospitality.”
Trevor hauled her into the room, Pacho coming after them.
She jammed her head backwards, hard, and felt the crunching impact with Trevor’s nose. He loosened his grip, and Beatrix summoned up all the strength she had left to break free of him.
She stumbled out of his grasp, her balance suddenly off, and walked straight into Pacho’s heavy right jab.
She staggered backwards, and Trevor wrapped his arms around her again.
“You know what?” Pacho spat at her. “Your pretty face is gonna turn awful goddamn ugly in thirty seconds if you don’t settle down and do what the fuck I tell you to do.”
“I’m going to kill you,” she gasped out, but it was a bluff. She felt weak and helpless. The pain was everywhere: the pain in her face from where he had hit her to the steady drumbeat of pain that was a constant all the way around her body.
“No, you ain’t. You alright, Trevor?”
“Think she done gone broke my nose, boss.”
Trevor’s right leg was pressed up against her right leg, and looking down quickly to make sure her aim was good, she raised her foot and stamped down, her heel scraping against the big man’s shin. The pain would have been quick and sharp, and he loosened his hold on her again. This time, she worked herself away just enough to raise her arm and crash the point of her elbow into his face. He went down, squealing, his left hand still fastened around her shoulder, and he dragged her down with him.
She clambered to her feet, struggling away from the soft give of his belly until she was on her hands and knees.
Pacho kicked her in the ribs. It was hard enough to raise her from the floor, and she collapsed down again, the breath punched out of her lungs.
“What’s the matter?” he yelled. “Can’t breathe?” He pointed down to his crotch again. “What I’m packin’ down there, bitch, you better get used to that.”
“You’re dead,” she gasped.
He laughed as he dropped down onto his haunches so that he was close enough to knot his fist in her hair. “Let me tell you somethin’ else. I’ve been aroun’ the block a few times; you could probably guess that already, a successful entrepreneur like me in this particular kind of business. And you’d probably guess, if you were asked, that the chances were I’d killed my fair share of people who got in my way, didn’t do what I told them to do or otherwise just went and flat out pissed me off. And you’d be right.” He yanked her head up. “You fuckin’ listenin’ to me?”
She was drowning in a tide of dizziness. He had pulled her out of it just enough so that she was able to focus on coming the full way back.
He was still talking. “I killed my fair share, and I figure I’ll kill plenty more before I’m halfway done. And here’s the benefit of my experience: the first guy you kill, well, he’s the hardest one of all. I don’t care if you’re a psychopath, you could be Adolf fuckin’ Hitler, and the first one is gonna be the one that gives you nightmares until you get it all figured out inside your head. The second one ain’t easy, but it sure is easier than number one, and by the time you get up to where I’m at, twenty, thirty—hell, when you get up to thirty it’s like scratchin’ an itch.”
“Who would’ve thought it?” she said, her voice weak and rasping.
“Say what, sweet cheeks?”
“I said, who would’ve thought it, me and you having something like that in common.”
“You a killer? ” He laughed and turned to Trevor so that he took his eyes off her for a second.
And that’s all it took.
She reached out for where the syringe had fallen to the floor, her fingers grabbing around it, holding her thumb over the plunger and then stabbing it down, hard against Pacho’s naked foot. The needle punctured the skin and slid all the way in.
Beatrix depressed the plunger.
His eyes went wide, and then he hopped backwards, comically reaching down for the syringe that was still sticking out of his foot.
Beatrix swept her right hand out for one of Pacho’s discarded chopsticks, gathered it up and held it in her fist with her thumb pressed over the thick end to make sure that it didn’t slide out of her grip, and then pirouetted on her left foot, maintaining the momentum as she raised her fist and punched the thin end of the chopstick against Trevor’s fat, bulbous neck.
The chopstick was made of plastic, and it didn’t shatter. Instead, it perforated the big man’s throat and slid inside for a full three inches, right until the side of her fist ran up against his neck.
She let go and turned again, looking for Pacho.
He had dropped to the floor, sitting down so that his back was pressed up against the wall. There was an unusual expression on his face: the hit from the heroin had already taken hold, and there was peace there, his muscles relaxed and his breathing coming in and out with a gently rhythmic ease; but behind that bliss was terror, his eyes wide and full of it.
She looked down at him. She could leave now, take the gun and go. He was in no fit state to follow, and even if he was, he wouldn’t be able to find her.
But she couldn’t do that.
Trevor was on his knees, pawing at the chopstick in his neck.
She checked the room next door. The music still pumped loudly, the TV still showed the same cheap porno. It was too loud, and they were too far gone for any of them to have noticed what had just gone down.
She crouched down at Pacho’s level. “I didn’t come here for trouble,” she said. “I just wanted to make a purchase. A transaction, simple as that. You had to make it complicated, didn’t you?”
Pacho’s expression changed. It might have been a smile; it might have been what terror looked like on the face of someone who had just mainlined a jumbo hit of heroin.
He had managed to remove the syringe from his foot. Beatrix collected it and checked that it was intact. It was. The
re was a cord from a dressing gown on the chair, and she took it. She looped it around his arm, right above the elbow, and knotted it tight.
“I’ve done some things in my time, Pacho, things that would make your head spin. I was hoping that those days were almost behind me. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they never will be.” She took the syringe, held the needle in the liquid that remained in the spoon, and drew it up into the barrel. There was enough remaining in the spoon to fill the syringe again. “Because one thing I know, and I know it absolutely for sure, I can’t live with the thought of a son of a bitch like you walking around breathing the same air as my daughter.”
Beatrix took his arm again and pressed the needle into a plump, inviting vein. She pushed down on the plunger, watching the heroin slowly disappear, a thread of his scarlet blood appearing in the yellowish fluid until it was all gone. He sighed, tranquil and restful, and his eyes rolled up into his head as his lids slowly descended.
There was a bag in front of Pacho. She opened it and found two cling-filmed bricks of cocaine and ten thick bundles of dollar notes. She dumped the coke on the floor, collected the pistol from the table and dropped it into the bag.
Beatrix went back into the main room and grabbed the sawed-off from the table. “No one moves,” she said, racking the slide. The double click, its promise horribly evocative, underlined the threat that she posed.
“Where’s the ammunition?” she called out to the gang-bangers.
One of them hurried across the room to a cupboard, returning with a box of 9mm rounds for the pistol and a box of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot for the shotgun. Beatrix dropped the boxes in the bag, zipped it up and, covering herself with the sawed-off, backed across to the door. No one moved.
She went through into the bodega, covering the clerk with the gun.
“You got a car?” she said.
He stared at the gun, his eyes wide. “The Impala,” he said. “Outside.”
She waved the sawed-off in his face. “Keys.”
He fumbled in his pocket and handed her a key ring with three keys on it.
“Don’t do anything crazy.”
She went outside. There was an Impala parked on the empty lot next to the bodega. She opened the door, slid the bag and then the shotgun inside, started the engine and put the car into drive. She pulled away and headed back to the glittering lights of Manhattan.
There was a 24-hour McDonald’s along the way, and she stopped there, found her way into the restroom. It was squalid, with dirty paper and puddles of vomit and urine on the floor, dried residue gathered in the cracks between the tiles. There was a syringe in the sink and other evidence that suggested this place was used as a shooting gallery.
Her mind leapt back to the heroin in the spoon.
She closed her eyes and forced the image away.
She opened her eyes again and looked up into the mirror.
Pacho’s punch had glanced off her nose and thumped into her eye socket. Her right eye was circled with a black contusion that was already shot through with livid purples. The ring he had been wearing must have scraped the bridge of her nose, a long graze that had filled with blood and crusted over. There were no hand towels in the dispenser, so she stepped into the fetid cubicle for the last handful of toilet paper, soaked it in tepid water and mopped away the blood. Her eye was fine, but there was nothing she could do to disguise the fact that the mark was there.
Isabella would worry.
Nothing she could do about that.
She rinsed her face, ran her wet hands through her hair. She looked old, tired and gaunt, her cheekbones even more prominent now. Her hair seemed thinner, her skin more papery than she could remember. She would never have bruised as easily as that before. She was being eaten up from the inside, and there was nothing she could do to slow it down. She was on the home stretch now.
She just hoped that she had time.
She slid the keycard into the reader, waiting for the chunk as the door unlocked. She opened it carefully. She had hoped that Isabella might be asleep, but she wasn’t. The television was tuned to a late night talk show and, as Beatrix passed the bathroom and reached the bedroom, she saw her daughter sitting on the bed, her back propped up with two pillows.
“Mummy!” she said, sliding to the floor.
“Hello, Bella.”
Her face dropped. “What happened to your eye?”
“I had a disagreement with someone,” she said.
“Are you . . .”
“I’m fine. Relax. It’s just a black eye. It’s nothing.”
She dropped the black bag onto the bed and unzipped it.
She took out the sawed-off shotgun first. It was a Remington, the barrel hacked off with a saw, the grooves of the teeth still visible against the metal. It was a useful find, devastating at close range. The buckshot could rip a man like canvas and blow hinges off doors.
A very useful find.
She took out the Beretta next. It was small and sleek, polymer and steel, with no protrusions to snag against clothes if it was carried in a pocket. It had low-profile sights and bevelled edges. There was no slide to be seen, and the reversible mag release was the pistol’s only raised feature.
She checked to make sure it was unloaded and handed it to Isabella.
“This is yours,” she said. “It’s smaller than the ones you’ve been practicing with, but it’s compact and easy to carry. Easy to hide, too. Six rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, so you can’t fire without thinking. You’ve got to be accurate.”
She took out the box of ammunition, Federal Champion 115gr FMJ, and gave it to Isabella to load the magazine.
Her daughter held it in her hand and assessed it.
“What do you think?”
“It’s small.”
“Still packs a punch. Treat it with respect.”
She watched as Isabella field-stripped the pistol, checking the workings and then assembling it again.
“It’s new,” she said.
“As good as.”
Jimmy Kimmel was on the TV. Beatrix found the remote and switched off the set.
“It’s late,” she said.
“When do we get started?”
“Tomorrow,” Beatrix replied. “It’s a big day. We need to sleep.”
Chapter Nine
She had wanted to start first thing in the morning, but the day dawned bright and clear, and to her surprise, she felt better than she had for days. It could only be a temporary thing, but it gave her a jolt of optimism, and she decided that she should take advantage of it.
She didn’t have many days left to her, and the days that she would actually be able to enjoy numbered even less.
Isabella was just starting to rouse in the bed next to her, and so she quickly used the bathroom and then dressed for the day.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she said as the girl blinked away the grogginess of waking.
“Hello, Mummy.”
“Sleep well?”
“Yes. What are we doing?”
“Up you get.”
“Are we going out?”
“You want to look around New York, don’t you?”
She had left the Impala in the hotel garage. It would be safe there. She was confident that it was stolen, and anyway, how likely was it that someone involved in the drug trade would report the theft of a car that they themselves had likely stolen? And even if it wasn’t stolen and they did report it, the garage of one of the most expensive hotels in Manhattan would have been at the bottom of the list of places that the police would think to look.
Yes, she thought. It was safe.
They filled their day to the brim, as much as Beatrix’s health allowed. They started in Central Park, visiting the Belvedere Castle, the Friedsam Memorial and the Sheep Meadow. They took taxis south, sto
pping at Carnegie Hall, the Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, and then followed FDR Drive all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge. They rode along Wall Street, then into Battery Park, then stopped at the 9/11 Memorial. They ate hot dogs from a street vendor and then took the ferry to Ellis Island and gazed up at Lady Liberty. They returned to Manhattan and spent a lost hour in the vastness of Macy’s, with Beatrix buying her daughter a three-hundred-dollar jacket that she obviously liked, but was too polite to ask for. They drank coffee and ate pastries and then, as dusk approached, cut northeast until they were in Times Square. Beatrix was dog tired, but there was one more thing that she wanted to do. They followed the crowds, the massive digital billboards throwing a changing wash of neon across the gridlocked cars and taxis that jostled for position, and stopped to laugh at the hawkers and hucksters, pushing their tawdry art on credulous tourists. Isabella tugged Beatrix across the road to the huge McDonald’s. They passed beneath the enormous red and yellow arches and went inside. They ate cheeseburgers and fries, drank Cokes and then ventured out into the clamour and bustle again.
“Where now?” Isabella asked.
Beatrix looked up at the sky; it was dark enough now.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go.”
They took a taxi a half mile along Seventh Avenue, then along West 34th Street, turning onto Fifth Avenue and then, finally, West 33rd Street.
Isabella looked up.
“That’s the Empire State Building, isn’t it?”
Beatrix smiled.
They looked up at the building as it stretched overhead.
“It’s beautiful,” the girl said.
“You want to go up?”
She beamed. “Can we?”
“Of course. Come on.”
They went inside the art deco lobby with the two Stars and Stripes that hung from poles attached to brackets in the wall. Beatrix paid their entrance fees, and they waited for the elevator. A sign on the wall said that visibility was good for twenty-five miles in daylight and that there was a light breeze. They rode up the first lift, changed at the mid-point, boarded another and climbed all the way to the eighty-sixth floor.