Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [32]
“Something?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wincing as she tried to itch her swollen nose, moving a tissue toward the cuts and bruises on her face and then pulling it away. “When I looked up, the pig head was dancing around the room like it was on stilts. It leered at me. I thought …”
“Oh brother,” I mumbled, and she was quiet.
“I thought it was going to rape me.”
Struggling to her swollen knees, spine throbbing, Leini crawled toward the stove, raised herself up on it, and grabbed a wooden spoon for protection.
She did not hear the New Year arrive, the clang of the pie plates and bark of the air horns down on the avenue; did not see the pot that flew across the room to crack her brow.
Blinded by the flow of blood, she falls backward, landing in a hot puddle of souse juice on the linoleum, flecks of flesh and boogers of fat soaking through her dress, sticking to her legs.
Did someone fire a gun through the window?
Some drunk on the street hurl a cast-iron pot at her?
The junkman gone beserk?
“Tell me,” I said. “I’ll find who did this to you.”
Bleeding, confused, and afraid, she was somehow calm enough to think that George would understand this. He saw things sometimes. Swore that he did. But she didn’t call out for George.
“I’m frightened,” she cried. “Ya-ya, I’m frightened.”
All of the heat in the house rushed out through the broken window and Leini is cold again, freezing; the skull of the pig resting against the soaked hem of her black dress, a hole the size of a half-dollar behind a wilted ear.
She kicks it away and is alone again; the phantom swirling down the drain in the sink to the bowels of the city; making its way down the storm drains with lost balls and bags of shit before falling into the harbor from the Fallsway; settling into the sleek bed of chrome and magnesium on the bottom of the Patapsco to be held there forever.
“You didn’t call the police?”
“No.”
“An ambulance?”
“No.”
“You …”
“Got to my feet and started cleaning myself up.”
I closed my notebook and told her she could come down to the morgue to see the body if she wanted, but only if she wanted.
We had plenty of other ways to deal with it if she didn’t.
PART II
THE WAY THINGS ARE
STAINLESS STEEL
BY DAVID SIMON
Sandtown-Winchester
He fought the dragging wheel all the way across Saratoga, then down through the park on St. Paul and over to the viaduct. Rush-hour traffic played around him, the people in the cars seeing him but pretending not.
The boy trailed a few steps behind, lost in a daydream, tossing off some freestyle, trying for some flow. Boy thought he had something with his rhymes, but Tate, being so much older, couldn’t really say one way or the other.
“Ain’t no one ’bout a song no mo’?” he asked.
The boy smiled. It was a thing between them.
“Singin’ an’ shit, you know. Key of whatevah.”
“Nigga, please.” The boy shook his head, as if Tate were beyond hope. “’Cause you old school, I gotta be?”
Tate leaned into the cart, fighting the wheel. The boy followed, still in his flow until Tate made a point of throwing out a loud line or two of back-in-the-day sanctified music.
“Oh happy day …”
“Country-ass songs,” the boy said. “Please.”
Halfway across the viaduct, the bad wheel flopped left, pulling the cart off the sidewalk, hanging it on the edge, spilling some of the aluminum strips onto the asphalt. A parcel delivery truck in the close lane had to slow and wait for them to set things right. The deliveryman stayed off his horn, patient enough, but from the cars behind came all kinda noise.
“Lean down on that side,” Tate told the boy.
“Huh?”
“Naw, put weight on it an’ I’ll lift.”
The boy stared at him as more car horns sounded.
“Stand on the motherfuckin’ shoppin’ cart. Lean on that bitch.”
Daymo got it, finally, putting his weight on the front corner of the cart. He was sixteen and maybe 5’9", but built solid, a boy who would tend toward weight if he didn