Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [49]
She didn’t see me and I stayed in the doorway a minute to watch her. I still hadn’t figured out how she could breathe without moving her chest. Flood had her eyes nailed to the door I was supposed to use. Human traffic flowed around her, but she never moved. Some professorial-looking person with an open book in one hand stopped and said something to her. He might as well have been talking to one of the stone lions out front—her big dark eyes never flickered. The professor shrugged elaborately and moved on.
I went in the door and Flood spotted me but stayed where she was. “Nice disguise, Flood,” I said, and reached down to take her hand. She pulled it away but rose up on her toes and kissed me quickly on the cheek to show she wasn’t telling me to get lost. Then she moved her hand toward her waist so fast I only saw the vapor trail, smiled like a little girl who’d just done something clever and held her hand out for me to take. She had small, chubby hands, not what you would expect if you’d seen her use them.
We walked down the lion-guarded steps hand in hand, me being careful on the steps and Flood bouncing along like she was on level ground. Maybe we looked like some graduate student who had stayed in school too long and his date. Hard to tell what we looked like but I guess we didn’t look like a survival expert and a deadly weapon. So maybe the disguises weren’t so bad after all.
It was good walking with Flood in the sunshine, so I made a complete circle of the block just to make it last—and to see if anyone was more interested in us than they should have been. As we turned into the park, I dropped Flood’s hand and slipped my arm around her waist, squeezing her side to get her attention. She looked up at me. Quietly, out of the side of my mouth, I said, “What did you have in your hand?”
Flood looked at me, shrugged, and opened her closed hand. I hadn’t seen her hand move back to her waist, but that was where she must have stashed it—a flat piece of dull metal shaped like a five-pointed star with a hole in the middle, about the size of a half dollar. When I reached for it, it sliced into my finger so cleanly that I didn’t feel the pain until I saw blood—the goddamned thing was nothing but a star-shaped razor. Flood pulled it out of my finger, bent over to look at the wound, put my finger into her mouth, sucked sharply for a second, spit some blood onto the ground. “Hold it closed with your other hand for a few seconds and it’ll stop bleeding. It’s a clean cut.” The star went back into her waistband someplace. I squeezed Flood’s waist again to see if I could make her body bounce a little bit. She was so much fun. “What the fuck is that thing?”
“It’s a throwing star. A defense tool when your opponent is beyond your hands and feet.”
“You throw that thing?” By then we were walking toward one of the old trees that somehow had managed to survive the steady diet of wild dog urine, alcoholic upchuck, and junkie blood for which the park was justly famous. She rolled her shoulders slightly and I heard a faint whistling noise and then a tiny snick like when a knife snaps open. Flood tilted her chin toward the tree and I could see the throwing star sticking out of the mangy bark. We walked over and I tried to pull it out without defingering myself—no go. Flood put her thumb against the side of the star, pushed hard to the right, then shifted her hand and carefully removed it with two fingers. It disappeared again. I didn’t know what the future was going to be for Flood, but I was reasonably certain she’d never be a battered wife.
We walked through the park to the car. I saw