Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [118]
Flood took her hand off my thigh, patted around in my clothes until she found a cigarette. She found the wooden matches and lit one, holding it to my mouth for me to take a drag. Between Flood’s kick and Goldor’s backhand, my mouth was a little below par, but the cigarette tasted good. Or maybe it was just good to be smoking while Goldor burned.
I use the West Side Highway when I have to go uptown. It’s not always the fastest route but it’s the safest. The Plymouth might not be able to outrun anything on the road—although it will blow away any normal patrol car—but the special suspension gives it a real edge on a rough road and they don’t come much rougher than the West Side Highway. I swung back towards Flood’s studio and found a safe-looking place to park. It was the dead hour on the street—late enough for the predators to have retired for the night and not yet early enough for the first citizens to emerge from their fortresses to try to make an honest living. The sky looked reddish to me, but I couldn’t tell if it was the coming sunrise or my blurry vision. Flood walked along next to me, but the bounce was gone. She walked straight ahead like a soldier—her hips never brushed against me like they usually did. She didn’t understand yet, and I had to make her see what had really happened if we were going to flush a snake out of the urban grass.
Her key unlocked the downstairs door. The staircase was unlighted, and Max’s black robes made most of her disappear ahead of me. I could just barely see the blonde hair and hear the whisper of silk. The studio was empty again. We walked past the marked-off section and into her space, and Flood sat down. She was still off her game—usually she would be throwing off her clothes by now and heading for the shower, but I guess she figured some dirt doesn’t come off with soap. I took out a cigarette but she didn’t stir, so I went and found something to use for an ashtray myself. I sat and smoked in silence while I thought it through. Finally I looked over at Flood. “You want me to tell you a story?”
She started to shrug like she didn’t give a damn what I did, then gave me a half-smile and said “Sure” without enthusiasm.
I said, “Come here, okay?” and she got up and walked over to me. She sat down real close and I took her shoulders in my hands, spun her around like a top, the silk pants sliding smoothly on the polished floor until she was facing away from me. I pulled gently until she was lying on her back, her head in my lap, looking up in my direction—but not seeing me. I stroked her fine hair as I told her the story.
“I was in the can once with this hillbilly. Actually he was from someplace in Kentucky but he had lived most of his life in Chicago. They had two men in a cell then—the joint was overcrowded and the race situation was bad. Virgil was a good man to have in your cell—quiet, clean, and ready to take your back if he had to. He didn’t look for problems, just wanted to do his time. In the joint you don’t generally talk about your beef—you know, how you got there and all—but if you cell with a man, sooner or later you hear his story. Or at least the story he wants to tell.
“When Virgil arrived in Chicago to work the mills, he met this girl from his hometown and they fell in love and got married. Before she met Virgil, this girl had been with this other man from down south—a real evil, vicious freak. He had done time on a road gang for beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Virgil’s wife thought she’d left this man behind her, but he showed up one day when Virgil was at work. He slapped her around, hurt her without making any marks—he knew how to do that. He made her do some things she didn’t want to do. Then the freak told her he would be back, anytime he wanted, and if she told Virgil, he’d kill her man.
“And it went on like that, you know, for months and months. Virgil would go to work, and this freak would come around. Sometimes he would take the money Virgil left for his wife to buy food