Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [113]
He looked sick, and not just junk sick; Daria knew that look well enough. She lit a cigarette and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” he said and held her hand.
“You gonna make it?” and he didn’t answer, drew smoke deep into his lungs and rubbed at his stubbly cheeks.
“Can’t sleep,” he said, and the smoke rushed back out again. “Not a wink in three goddamned nights,” and she looked at the red welt across the bridge of his nose, the angry red of infection, remembered the cuts from that morning at Spyder’s and never any explanation for how they’d gotten there.
“Bad dreams?” and she wanted to look over her shoulder, then, maybe even wanted to take back the words before he could answer her. But Keith looked at her and laughed, took another drag off the cigarette and blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. Nothing in his gray eyes she could read.
“I think Cephus has been selling me bad shit, that’s all,” and the moment had passed them by, opportunity missed and no shared confession, no accounting of the horrors that had dogged her sleep for a week blurted out before she could stop herself. No release, no sense of relief afterwards. Only more dread, another weight to carry alone, and regret that the heroin had gotten between them again.
“I’m gonna have to stop buying from that jerkoff before he kills me.”
And she gripped his hand tighter, chewed at her lower lip as she read the graffiti, the writing on the dingy dressing room wall.
“Tonight’s the night,” she said, to him or just to herself, wanted it to be for him but couldn’t be sure if he was even listening. “We’re gonna knock that rep on her ass, and she’ll be talking deal before we can get off the stage.”
“Yeah,” Keith said, surprising her, and when he rubbed at the cut on his nose a single drop of pus the color of custard welled up, beaded, and he wiped it away.
“Tonight’s the night,” he said.
The restroom was freezing, nothing on the blue door but a W slashed into the paint and so much cold inside it was hard to breathe. No hot water, and Spyder was still scrubbing at the spot where he’d stamped her hand with ANGEL in invisible ink, had scrubbed it raw already, strange red under the tattoos, and Niki knew that soon it would be bleeding.
“It’s gone,” she said. “You’ve washed it off, Spyder.”
“How do you know?” she said in a vicious tone, her vicious eyes answering Niki from the mirror. “How the hell can you tell? There’s no way to know if it’s still there or not. You couldn’t fucking see it to start with, so how are you supposed to know if it’s gone?”
“It was just ink, Spyder. And ink comes off with soap and water. That’s how the hell I know.”
But Spyder pressed more of the candy-pink soap powder from the dispenser over the sink and began to lather her hands again.
“You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know shit.”
And Niki grabbed Spyder’s hands, slippery wet and living art, got her around the wrists and held on. Skin like ice from the water, and Spyder howled and tried to pull free.
“What don’t I know, huh? That your father was a fucking lunatic and cut your face up when you were a kid? That you think this has something to do with that?”
“Let go of me,” Spyder said, hissed, and Niki clearly heard the threat, the danger wrapping those four words like acid and broken glass. But she didn’t let go.
“What don’t I know, Spyder? What don’t I know?”
Spyder shoved hard, and Niki was stumbling backwards, collided with a wall and her breath whooshed out between her teeth. Her head hit the metal paper towel holder and she almost blacked out, almost let go.
No, she tried to say. No way until you tell me, but there was no air, nothing but pain in her chest and head, nothing to drive the words.
And something else, something glistening in the air like fishing line or piano wire, not there a few seconds before and now crisscrossing everywhere, everything, strung through the air like taut and silver tinsel, draping