Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [59]
“I just want to go home,” Jennifer said to him, the rush of his acid breath warm on her cheeks. “I won’t say anything about this. Or about you. I’ll just say I got lost.”
“You gonna be goin’ home, baby,” Malcolm said, still in his seductive voice. “Be a different home, is all. But that’s down the road a ways. Right now you and me got to be thinkin’ about Junior and how we need to make him a happy man.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Jennifer wailed, more with confusion than with anger.
“You pay the good price for good smoke,” Malcolm said, looking past Jennifer, eyes and mind adrift on their own. “And nobody’s got better smoke than Junior. It’s worth it. Whatever the price, it’s gonna be worth it.”
“Why? Tell me why?” Jennifer begged in the soundless room, her upper body trembling from the sharp wind creeping through the cracked walls.
“Junior ain’t normal like you and me,” Malcolm said, easing the knife away from Jennifer’s throat. “He don’t give a five-cent fuck about money. So you can’t just up and pay him out for the smoke. Cares even less about pussy, so there ain’t no sense askin’ him to a slow dance with you.”
Jennifer closed her mouth and eyes, rushing breath through her nose, choking back a violent need to vomit.
“Junior’s religious,” Malcolm said, standing now, brushing the knife against the sides of Jennifer’s arms. “Fucker walks around prayin’ all the time. He’s into that voodoo shit, where you kill a cat or a dog, drink the blood, burn the bodies. But he always keeps somethin’ for himself. Bone, tooth, nail, eyes. Hangs them on a gold chain around his neck. Keeps away what looks to do him in.”
Jennifer coughed up a mouthful of thick bile and spit it out on the floor, inches from the crack pipe resting on its side. Malcolm ignored it, running the knife slowly between the fingers of the girl’s hands.
“So I’m thinkin’ you and me, we gotta give Junior a little present,” Malcolm said. “Somethin’ he’s gonna wanna have hangin’ around that chain. You know what that present’s gonna be, don’t you, baby?”
Jennifer’s eyes widened, the sudden rush of fear forcing her back to push against the wall and her hands to clench into tight fists. Malcolm whistled Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ by the Dock of the Bay” as he undid the fingers of Jennifer’s left hand. She kicked her legs at his side and tried to get close enough to bite, but he shouldered her head away and pried loose the index finger.
“Don’t fight me, baby,” he said in a vacant voice. “It’s only a gift.”
She saw the sheer look of insanity mixed with glee that filled Malcolm Juniper’s eyes and knew she was in an unholy place that promised her no avenue short of torment and death.
She looked up and watched the sharp edge of the knife close in on the soft flesh of her finger, Malcolm’s staccato laughter cutting through her cries.
Outside, on the cold streets of a cold city, a young girl’s screams cascaded down past a silent army of empty cars and distant faces.
• • •
BOOMER STOOD HALFWAY down the alley, back resting against a Jimi Hendrix poster, eating a cold slice of anchovy pizza and holding a cup of hot black coffee. He was wearing an unzipped black leather jacket, crisp jeans, work boots, and a blue Yankee cap. He had a .22 in the front pocket of the leather and a .38 special tucked in the back of the jeans. He chewed the pizza, sipped the coffee, and studied the early morning Harlem street, filled with blue collars on their way to union jobs, and on-the-nods half hanging near tenement doorways, dreaming of the next place to score.
Boomer took a final bite of the pizza, dropped the crust into the coffee container, and tossed them both into an open garbage can.
He took a deep breath and walked out of the alley.
He hadn’t slept all night, sitting straight up in a lounge chair in his silent apartment, staring out into the cold air of an open window. For the first time