The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  He cursed and sat on a bench to get the glass out of his foot. The sock soaked up blood. It didn’t look too bad, but he had trouble standing on it anyway.

  At the top of the hill, he got back onto the bike, nearly falling over, and started down the other side. Part of him, the old, weakened part, wanted to fall asleep with the cool breeze of progress in his face and the droning lullaby of the spokes. He was so busy fighting it off, he rode right past what he needed.

  “You lookin’ for a good time, baby?” the whore asked, as if she were activated by a motion sensor. Hobbs wasn’t looking for a good time, but he stopped anyway. He looked around and spotted what he needed. An extended-stay motel across the street from the tired whore.

  Just as every hermit crab needed a shell, every whore needed a flop. That extended-stay would be where she plied her trade. He leaned the bike up against a light pole and limped back to her.

  She wasn’t that old and she might have been pretty, once. But somebody had beat on her face one too many times. Her eyes were yellow against her chocolate skin, and when she smiled and said, “Hey, baby, you like to party?” she flashed a mouth of ragged teeth, some black, some eaten away up into the gum line, and the rest gone.

  “Yeah,” Hobbs said, pulling some cash from his pocket, “I like to party.”

  She looked at his feet and asked, “Somebody steal your shoes?”

  He followed her back to the motel. It was four stories tall, with exterior stairways and walkways for room access. She headed toward the stairs.

  “Elevator,” Hobbs said, trying to make it sound like a demand, but failing.

  “OK, baby. I’ll make it nice and gentle,” the whore said. “What’s your name? I’m Shavonda.”

  “Elevator,” said Hobbs.

  “I ain’t gonna call you Elevator,” she said, when she pushed the call button.

  They rode up in silence. She tried to rub his shoulder, but Hobbs jerked it away and winced in pain.

  “OK, OK,” Shavonda muttered.

  She was in room 401. The room smelled like cheap air freshener. Below that was the musty funk of old, smoke-soaked carpet and ceiling tiles. There were a king-size bed and an old CRT television. It wasn’t even bolted to the dresser it sat on. Its weight and age were its own security system. It would probably cost more than it was worth to get somebody to carry it downstairs and throw it away.

  Shavonda put a hand on her hip and cocked it to one side in an imitation of being sassy. “So what you want? You want me to suck you or fuck you or what? Gon’ cost extra you want any of that kinky shit, and I ain’t gonna shit on you, no way. I gots standards,” she said, laughing at her own words as if she had said something funny. Maybe she had.

  Hobbs stepped into the room and looked around. The door to the hallway had caught on a spot where the carpet had bubbled up. Shavonda shuffled past him to close it. She smelled awful. Body odor and a sick chemical reek that she had attempted to cover up with the cheapest of perfumes.

  As Hobbs stared at the bed, he heard the door click shut behind him. He asked, “How much for the night? The whole night?”

  “Ooh, you real lonely. You just get out of prison, baby?”

  Hobbs threw a wad of cash at her and then sat down on the bed. “I need to sleep. There’s more for you in the morning. Even more if you go buy me a pair of shoes—size eleven.” Hobbs wrapped his arms through the straps of the backpack and clutched it to his chest. He rolled over on his side and closed his eyes.

  “Ooh, baby, don’t you worry about me,” the old-before-her-time whore cackled, “I be yo’ personal shopper.”

  Hobbs was already asleep.

  Much later he was awakened by a tearing sound. He opened his eyes, and saw the tip of a knife in his face.

  “You just too old for the street life, you know what I’m sayin’? It ain’t my fault. You shouldn’t had been up in here in the first place. If it wasn’t me, it done would have been somebody else,” she said. “I just tryin’ to get ahead, same as you.”

  She moved the knife down between his legs and held it there.

  “Now you don’t move. See, don’t be thinking you gonna change your fate. I’m a old hoochie, and you, you just an old man got robbed. Nothing gonna make you young again. Not one damn thing, you understand?”

  Hobbs lay very still.

  She flashed her hellish teeth in an imitation of a smile and backed out of the room, brandishing the knife.

  Hobbs got up and walked over to the television. The door had gotten caught on the room carpet again, and he could hear the ragged clack of Shavonda’s high heels in the distance. He embraced the television. With a grunt he lifted it free from the dresser. There was pain again, but this time it felt good. It felt right. Matched with what he needed to feel and what he needed to do.

  He walked out of the room, cables and wires ripping out and trailing free behind him. He walked down the hallway, his feet making no sound in socks. A slight twinge of pain in his foot where the glass had gone in and come out.

  He turned the corner and there she was, waiting for an elevator with a stupid look on her battered face.

  “What the fuck?” she said, scrambling for her knife. She brandished it and said, “Hell no, cracker, I don’t want that television. Go on before you get cut.” She pressed the elevator button inanely, as if that would make the car come faster.

  Hobbs lifted the television above his head.

  “Get the fuck away from me, old man. You got robbed, just deal with it. Call AARP or somebody who gives a fuck,” she said as she backed into the stairwell. She kept the knife out in front of her as if it were a talisman, and backed down the stairs, not taking her eyes from him. He stood at the top of the open stairwell holding the old television above his head as if he were a participant in some kind of strange postconsumerist rite.

  When she got to the landing, curiosity got the best of her. She looked up at him and had to ask, “What the fuck you gonna do with that television?”

  Hobbs did not answer.

  Hand on the railing, she edged her way around to the steps, eyes on Hobbs the whole time. She muttered, “My money. Dis my money. Stolt it fair and square.” When her absurdly high heel rocked over the edge of the step, she caught herself with the railing and looked down.

  Hobbs dropped the television.

  She looked back up and saw it coming. She started down the stairs and almost got away. The TV caught her on the back of her ankle and she went down, bouncing and tumbling down the flight of stairs in a shower of broken glass and plastic.

  Hobbs descended, carefully, one hand on the railing. At his age, he thought with a smile, it paid to be careful.

  Shavonda was moaning and trying to clutch her head and the backpack full of money at the same time. It looked as if she thought cash was the antidote to swelling. And why not? It was the antidote to everything else. And the cause of it.

  Halfway down the flight, Hobbs stooped to pick up Shavonda’s knife. He rose and stepped carefully among the fragments of the shattered television, as if he had all the time in the world.

  Through one wild eye, peering out from beneath the bag and the mop of her hair, Shavonda saw him coming. She tried to get up, wobbled uncertainly, and fell. She struggled to rise again.

  Hobbs stuck the knife into her leg as if that were where it belonged. She moaned and tried to crawl away. Hobbs pulled the knife out and wiped it on her leg. Her blood looked like hydraulic fluid against her dark, sagging skin.

  “Aw fuck, man, you didn’t havta do that! Why you do that?”

  “Stick to whoring, you’re no good at stealing.” She let go of the bag without a fight. He didn’t stab her again. It was almost civilized.

  “You have a car?”

  “Fuck you!”

  He stabbed her in the leg again. This time she screamed for help. Hobbs hit her in the mouth with the fist that held the knife and managed not to fall over on top of her in the process.

  She said, “OK,” a
nd spit a little blood out on the concrete. Hobbs looked up and down the stairs. Nothing moved, nobody cared. He had gotten lucky.

  “Get up,” Hobbs said.

  As Shavonda struggled to her feet, she reached out to Hobbs for a hand. When he didn’t help, she said, “You ain’t nothing but a mean old man. That’s all you is. You mean old cracka motherfucker!”

  Hobbs was fine with that.

  Back in the room, he cut the bedspread into strips. When she saw what was going on, she said, “Aw fuck no. No way.” Hobbs shrugged. Then he pressed the knife against her throat smooth and quick. He backed her up to the wall, and when her head touched it, he hit her twice with his elbow. She went out.

  He bound her and gagged her and threw her on the bed.

  He picked up her bag, a wad of fabric that had once been decorated with sequins; so many of them had fallen off that it now looked as if it had been fashioned from a lizard with a skin disease. He found a foil packet with some powder in it and the keys to a Dodge. Old keys, separate ones for the ignition and the trunk.

  He took them and left.

  TEN

  It looked like a trunk key, but it was worse than a trunk key. It was a hatch key. In the lot, the whore’s car stood out as the shittiest turd in the pile. A brown Dodge Omni with the rear bumper hanging half-off. Hobbs thought there was no way the car was going to start. But it turned right over as if the future held hope.

  The headliner was falling, and the smell was so bad he rolled down the windows. Didn’t matter much, it wasn’t as if the air-conditioning worked. He drove until he found an expensive part of town. Big, old houses in a treelined neighborhood. He could smell the money. If he were a small-timer, he would think about knocking one of these off.

  It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. It was a gigantic house in the style of a French château. In the front yard, dwarfed by the expansive lawn and the size of the structure, was a small blue real estate sign—“For Sale.”

  He turned the next corner until he found what he was looking for. An alley in the back of all the houses. An overgrown remnant from a more civilized time. All these old Southern neighborhoods had them. Remnants of a time when it would have been unseemly to leave your trash in front of your house. When even the milkman knew that it was rude to use the front door when you came to fuck somebody else’s wife. All deliveries to the rear.

  He drove the car right over the saplings and brush that had grown up in the disused alley. He parked the Omni and got out, leaving the keys in the visor.

  He walked the rest of the way to the château. When he peered through the slats in the gate, he couldn’t see any sensors or cameras. He used the knife to jimmy the garden latch and let himself into the backyard. Somebody had spent a lot of money letting this yard go in the precise way to make it look like a French country garden. It was a riot of carefully overgrown vines and flowering plants and preweathered antiques.

  The sun, bright and hot, the crumbling plaster statues, the scattered wildflowers, all combined to make this yard seem like a ruined corner of some abandoned heaven. Hobbs didn’t give it a second look. Heaven wasn’t for him.

  He headed for the three-car garage on the right side of the house. The door was unlocked. As his eyes adjusted to the cool darkness of the garage, his head spun. The emptiness and the faint smell of oil and gasoline made this room feel like the dead end of something. He put his hand on a wall and closed his eyes until the feeling passed.

  The door into the house was locked, knob and dead bolt. Hobbs searched the garage. In an alcove he found garden tools and a potting bench and a rusted old mattock.

  He swung the mattock until he’d made a head-size hole in the wall beside the door. Then he reached through and unlocked the door. Before he opened it, he pressed his forehead to its cool surface and took three deep breaths. Hobbs was at the end of himself and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop here. If he couldn’t defeat the alarm…

  He grabbed the knob in his left hand and held the mattock with his right. Then he opened the door and moved as fast as an old man with a limp could manage.

  As soon as the door sensor opened, the security system began its urgent and ominous beeping. It led him right to the panel. He smiled at the twenty-year-old hunk of yellowing plastic. Then he hooked the blade of the mattock over the top edge of the panel and raked it off the wall. Bits of drywall rained down on the tile floor, and the panel was left hanging by wires. Hobbs grabbed the wires and gave a yank. They led off to the left.

  He threw open a coat closet, empty but for a few boxes, and found what he was looking for. A metal box mounted on the wall. He put the spike of the mattock right through the middle of the door. After a moment’s struggle he got the box off the wall. He dropped the mattock, cracking the tile, and took the box under his arm.

  The beeping stopped, but Hobbs did not. With the mangled box under his arm, he searched until he found a bathroom. He raked the top off the toilet and dumped the box into the tank. The alarm well and truly defeated, he leaned against the wall and slid down onto the floor.

  He sat there, panting, waiting for his heart to slow. He was safe, for now. He resisted the urge to sleep on the tile floor of the bathroom and went in search of a bed.

  ELEVEN

  “And then the son of a bitch stabbed me in the leg wif my own knife and stole my money! Can you believe that shit?”

  “Yes,” said Mazerick, trying not to smile. His phone rang.

  He answered, saying, “Hang on,” and then stepped out of the room. That left Wellsley staring at the foulmouthed, raggedy old whore in her hospital bed.

  “You gonna catch that motherfucker or what?” she asked.

  “Ma’am, state and federal agencies are working to apprehend him right now,” Wellsley said, on autopilot.

  “You best better see I get my money back. Stacks and stacks of it. All I done saved during my life of hardship.”

  Stacks of money, thought Wellsley. Her heart leaped into her throat. But it couldn’t be. He couldn’t have gotten to it. Must have knocked somebody else off. Maybe that dead guy—but how had he known there would be cash there? That guy in the neighborhood had just been a civilian, a guy who flipped houses for a living.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  Wellsley nodded. She let the autopilot drive. “Now this car, was there anything special about it, anything else of value that we should be on the lookout for?”

  “That piece of shit never did run right. He ain’t gonna get far in it, I promise you that. You let him keep it. Or you take it. I don’t give a fuck.”

  Wellsley became concerned about the call going on in the hallway. She moved to the door and stuck her head out. Mazerick was looking right at her with a curious expression on his face. He jumped a little when he saw her. What did he know?

  Of course she hadn’t told him the whole truth. What person ever really tells another person the whole truth? But never mind truth, Wellsley was worried about what was being whispered into his ear right now.

  Mazerick covered the receiver and said to her, “Found the car.” Then he asked the person on the other end of the phone, “And the rest of it?” Wellsley saw his eyes flick toward her and then away. The other thing was definitely about her. He covered the phone and said, “Hey, I gotta handle this, can you finish up with her and then we will roll.”

  He stepped back out into the hallway without waiting for her agreement. Typical male prick.

  Wellsley looked back at Shavonda.

  “You ain’t got no more questions?” Shavonda demanded.

  Wellsley shook her head.

  “Well, ain’t you gonna go about catching this mans that did this to me? Or don’t you care about one more black woman, more or less?”

  Wellsley leaned in as close as she could stomach before she said, “Oh, I’m going to get him. But it’s your own fault. If you’re gonna steal from somebody, you do it right.”

  Shavonda’s mouth hung open. “Y
ou ain’t sposda do me like that!”

  Wellsley said, “Sister, if you act like the weaker sex, you’re gonna get treated that way.”

  In the hallway Mazerick said, “Neighbor called it in. I’ve got patrol hanging back so we don’t spook him. C’mon, Agent, I’m gonna show you the rich part of town.”

  Rich, thought Wellsley, letting the word reverberate in her brain. Rich. What really rich person would ever choose to live in this landlocked town?

  As he drove them to the scene, Mazerick let it fly. “I checked with a buddy of mine in the bureau.”

  Wellsley kept her eyes on the scenery sliding by as she said, “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” said Mazerick. It was an old cop trick. Never ask until you know the facts. The facts aren’t what you want when you question somebody. What you want is the emotion, the reaction to the facts. Anybody can fake a fact. Almost nobody can fake an emotion. They can hide it or suppress it, but not fake it. So she just sighed, stared out the window, and waited.

  Mazerick broke first. “You want to tell me?”

  “You say it.”

  “You’ve been suspended, removed from duty pending investigation. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  She tried to get tears to come, but they wouldn’t. Maybe she hated this guy too much. Maybe she just wasn’t weak enough to cry anymore. So she turned and told the truth, eyes not wavering from Mazerick.

  “I needed your help. And I thought, if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t help me.”

  “Did you kill your partner?”

  Wellsley got hot. “Yeah, I shot him dead. That’s why I’ve come all this way to catch this bastard whose name I don’t even know. It’s not like this jackass killed my partner Barry and ruined my career. No, that’s not what’s driving me at all,” she said, dripping with sarcasm.

  “Easy, easy,” said Mazerick, taking one hand off the wheel in a gesture of surrender. “Hold your fire. I’m not out to get you. I just like to know what I’m getting into. Especially when a pretty face tends to cloud my decision making.”