Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [79]
Lucia left her aunt behind when she was fourteen, traveling with the money she had earned running bets for her uncle and the extra cash given her by grateful customers. She also left behind the blue print dress and the black shoes.
Too many stops and too many wrong men later, she found herself living and partnered with an angel dust and coke dealer in a two-room apartment in Lexington, Kentucky. The gangly, brown-haired young man with the funny smile and the tattoo of Casper the Friendly Ghost floating down the center of his back was the first man in her life she didn’t charge for sex. His name was Otis Fraimer, but she always called him Jerry and he never seemed to mind. She knew it wouldn’t last, knew they were only one knock on the door or one bad buy away from a jail sentence or a bullet, but she felt comfortable with him. And she never did expect Jerry to die, to end up slumped over the steering wheel of a burning car, two shots through his heart and his throat slashed.
She left herself little time to mourn.
Not when Jerry’s rival and the man responsible for his death, a fifty-year-old former gunnery sergeant with a severed leg and an engaging smile, offered to bring her in as a full partner. Harry Corain was intent on expanding his drug business, looking to move beyond the low-end money of downstate Kentucky and head into the fertile terrain of nearby Ohio, where the cities of Cincinnati and Columbus were more than eager to offer a demand equal to his supplies. Lucia, who was by then seventeen and tired of being poor, made the move and, in no short order, reorganized Harry’s runners into small teams of movers and packers, insisting on a crew that was free of users and abusers. She left the muscle end of the business to Harry and his younger brother, Terry, a draft dodger as quick with a knife as he was slow with a word.
Lucia handled all the cash and coke transactions.
She gained the loyalty of the mules and sellers by cutting them in on a small percentage of the action, this despite strong protests from the Corain brothers. She hired a cancer-riddled career booster from Canton named Delroy Rumson to teach her all he knew about laundering money and reinvesting clean cash into safe, insured, and tax-free municipal bonds. In return for the knowledge she picked up during his six-month cram course, Lucia promised to keep up the $800-a-month home-care payments for Delroy’s retarded daughter, Dorothy, after he died.
It was the first of many promises she didn’t keep.
Lucia married Harry Corain on April 18, 1964. It was her twentieth birthday, and a week after the wedding she told him she was pregnant with his child, even though she had no intention of keeping either husband or baby. She was simply buying herself more time and using whatever pull Harry had among other midwestern drug runners to build on what she was already raking in.
Two months into the pregnancy, Lucia drove over the Kentucky state line into Cincinnati during the early morning hours of a soft summer day and had an abortion performed in the basement office of a ramshackle two-story house half a mile off Ezzard Charles Boulevard. Dr. Ranyon B. Travis had long ago lost his medical license to drink, drugs, and bribery, and now found himself earning a living disposing of the unwanted for a three-hundred-dollar-cash-up-front fee. Travis had a modest reputation among the dopers and hookers working the riverfront strip and could be counted on to keep his business quiet, if for no other reason than that the years of booze and drug binges had made it impossible to remember.
Travis had been up all night with an underage co-ed and had already gone through half a pint of gin and two grams of coke when Lucia walked into the foyer leading down to the basement steps. He dressed quickly, splashed water on his face, swallowed two five-hundred-milligram Benzedrine tablets, and prepped Lucia for her abortion. Five minutes into the procedure, she felt a sharp, stinging burn in her pelvic region and immediately knew that the doctor with the shaky hands and