Ladies' Night (9 page)

"Let me help you."

The voice was young and female. He looked up. The woman stooped beside him fishing for the bottle. Her hair was short, cropped close to her head. He didn't much care for that. He liked a woman to be feminine.

"
When
ya
gonna wake up and smell the coffee?
" he rasped.

The woman raised her head and stared at him. Not bad looking despite the hair. She picked up the half-empty fifth.

"Hey,
ya
found it. Good girl!"

She smiled. "It's broken, though," she said.

"
Izzit
?"

He tried to focus.

The girl was nuts. The bottle wasn't broken.

"Is not," he said.

"Sure it is," she said, and swung it in a short arc, smashing it against his mouth and chin. His last two brittle teeth shattered into his chalky gums. He tasted blood and shards of glass redolent of sweet wine. He tried to spit them out but his lips were in tatters.

Nothing hurt, though. Nothing ever hurt till morning. If he had another fifth maybe not even then. So fuck her.

He'd survive.

He made a face, the kind of face he used on the little girls to scare them of the drunk, to scare them home to their fucking mommies. The girl was looking at him like he was some sort of bug.

She
was the bug.

"
Why
doncha
wake up
. . ." he tried to say but the words only gurgled in his mouth and pushed a long shard of glass he wasn't even aware of out over his chin. He coughed, and that was bloody too.

And the girl wasn't scaring.

He didn't like her eyes.

He thought,
this is gonna be bad
— and then it
was
bad, because the hand with the pretty gold ring drew back the bottle and then pushed it forward into his face and twisted it so that it tore a jagged trench of flesh from the bridge of his nose across both cheeks and down as far as his lower lip.

She released it and the bottle stayed there, like a false face made of glass.

He felt a quick, burning flash of unexpected agony and then passed out in broken shock, vomiting into the still-capped neck of the bottle. He gasped and began to choke. His face went livid blue.

~ * ~

At the newspaper stand on 72nd Mary Silver walked quietly away from the stack of papers and magazines which had surrounded her and, knife in hand, proceeded down Broadway.

The knife got a lot of use.

The first was a Greek who had just come out of the subway station after a strange little ride on the #2 line. A woman on his car, a black woman, had begun laughing at 14th Street and hadn't stopped until they reached Penn Station. Whereupon she leapt suddenly from her seat and began to kick the subway doors with her imitation patent leather shoes. The other riders on the train had witnessed her fury with varying degrees of amusement. All except the Greek. The idiot sister he'd left on Corfu made any such amusement impossible. He left the subway blindly, lost in remembrance.

When Mary came up behind him he was still brooding on his sister and because the knife was sharp and the blade thin he felt no pain at first. His only thought was that the woman had punched him hard between the shoulder blades. Why she should do that he didn't know any more than he knew what had happened to the woman on the subway.

He felt the wetness seeping through his shirt and a sudden faintness overcame him and he fell to his knees. He died in that position, watching the woman continue past him down the street.

The second man was a young yuppie broker in suspenders and a baggy white Ralph Lauren shirt which set his Hamptons tan off nicely. As she passed him she stabbed him in the kidneys. The man watched the red stain spread over his shirt like burning celluloid on a movie screen. The shirt had been brand new. It cost him two hundred dollars.

At 70th Street she passed a fat old man and smiling, stabbed him in the ass. A playful gesture. The knife sunk only to the depth of an inch or so but the old man howled and tripped and fell to the pavement and lay sprawled there waving his hands and screaming.

She proceeded down Broadway, steel blade dripping.

~ * ~

He was staring at a copy of Jim Thompson's
The Killer Inside Me
, wondering if he should steal it. Lydia was still in the storage room and his jacket had big pockets. The cover of the book was badly ripped but his copy at home was falling apart completely. It would be like taking day-old bread from a bakery. Why not?

Because you're honest, that's why not
, he thought.
And because you like her.

Face it, you
more than
like her
.

"
Shel
, come here a minute," she said.

He sighed and climbed off the ladder. He could guess what was coming. Lydia was going to ball him out again for something he'd done or failed to do — which would make it about the fifth time that night. She was in a
pissy
mood. Couldn't she see he was exhausted? Up the ladder, down the ladder.

Couldn't she see he was crazy about her?

Sure, she had ten years on him. She had a boyfriend and a business too but none of that mattered. He knew she loved books. They had that very much in common. They could talk books the next thirty years of their lives together given the opportunity. He knew it. He'd like to do just that.

That and . . . the other thing.

His shirt was plastered to his back. The air conditioner wasn't working again. It was miserably close in here, so that his thick heavy glasses kept slipping down his nose. He pushed them back and walked to the storage room.

It was pretty dark. There was just the single 30-watt bulb she refused to change for a bigger one — Lydia was actually a little cheap, always saving on the electricity — and they could have used a new air conditioner too. The light didn't do much more than push back the murk into the corners.

"Where are you?" he said.

"Back here."

He was relieved. She didn't sound mad at all.

He walked inside. The back room was wall-to-wall boxes set on rows of metal shelving, filled with books. They were the first things they'd inventoried.

So what was she doing back here?

The dust got into his nose and made him want to sneeze. He held his breath so he wouldn't have to. Even if he did love books he didn't much care for the old musty smell of them, like the smell of mold in a cellar. He thought he was probably a little allergic.

He heard shuffling to his right.
Over there
.

He stepped in front of the next row of shelves and saw her way down the end of the row, facing the grey cinderblock walls, her back to him, half in shadow, her head tilted down like she was reading.

In the dark?

"What's up,
Lyd
?"

She turned.

It wasn't reading.

What she'd been doing was she'd been working at the buttons of her shirt.

She was almost finished.

He couldn't believe it. All he could do was stand there gawking like a dope while she slipped the shirt off her shoulders and he saw that she had no bra on, that her breasts were naked —
and god she was pretty there!

He braced himself against the metal shelving.

"Well? What do you think?" she said.

"Huh?"

She flipped open the top button of her jeans and zipped the zipper and pulled them down over her thighs, the thighs a little too big but that was okay because her stomach was nice and flat and she had lovely breasts and it was all so good he could barely look at her. But he did look. She smiled.

"What do you think?"

This wasn't like Lydia at all.

Lydia was his boss.

Lydia was . . .
modest
.

He couldn't believe his luck.

But he couldn't answer her, either. Not while he was looking at her body anyway. So he wrenched his eyes up to her face and held them there, determined, her face in shadow, looking at it anyway because it was the right thing to do even as she bent slightly to pull down the pale-colored panties and then stood a moment and then took one step toward him.

Out of the shadows.

And Sheldon wanted to scream.

Because the lips that were smiling at him were split in a dozen places and gleaming with blood,
her blood
where she had bitten them, bitten almost
through
them in some places and he started to say,
Lydia, Jesus ! what've you done?
but he didn't really think there was a Lydia there anymore to talk to.

Her teeth were grinding so hard he could actually hear them. Her pale blue eyes looked contaminated with red, twitching in their sockets like caged birds. And he did not even consider seizure, epilepsy or something, because the look on her face was evil, terrible, the fear of her went right to his bones and he screamed, long and loud and yet without the strength to pull away as her cold arms wrapped around his neck and she opened her ruined mouth and bit him, deep into his neck and pushed him to the floor.

His glasses cracked beneath him. He heard his own blood pulse and splash the dirty concrete floor.

As consciousness raced away from him and she clung and bit deeper and he felt her tongue move inside the open wound he gazed up at the boxes above him and saw the one marked with red grease-pencil near his head and even upside down he could read it.

FILE UNDER HORROR
it said.

~ * ~

On 73rd and Broadway in front of the Beacon Theatre a stewardess who had worked the first-class compartment on the very same flight that had brought Elizabeth in from LAX to Kennedy was walking her dog, a miniature poodle named Marvin, her pooper-scooper, toweling, and plastic baggie in hand, when a pair of teenage girls with leopard jackets and red and green hair jumped out of a '74 Chevrolet and approached the dog murmuring
nice doggie, nice doggie
, bent down and with one girl holding and the other pulling tore its head from its body.

~ * ~

Jim "
Jumma
" Jackson moved slowly off the yellow plastic seat and tossed his food wrappers and the cup from his shake into the trash bin.

It was about fuckin' time.

Over an hour, watching and waiting for the booster who was the only potential trouble in the place to get the hell out of there like he was doing now, ambling out the door.

He pretended to study the overhead menu, like here was a dude with one real big appetite back for seconds and then moved up to the counter. It was only then he realized that there was nobody there.

What the fuck's this?

Break-time, bitches?

The Man went by outside, siren wailing. About the sixth in the past hour. But the squad car wasn't stopping here and that was what counted. He tapped the call-bell for some service.

Nobody home.
Come on
, he thought.

He couldn't even see the cook at work behind the rows of stacked-up burgers, fries and Big Macs. He tapped the bell again. He could hear the burgers working on the grill and he could smell the fat. He fingered the pistol in his jacket pocket.

"Hey! How 'bout
gimme
some service here!"

He glanced around the restaurant. The only one looking at him was the old bag lady by the window. The kid and his girlfriend were playing at some touch-me shit. The old man wolfed his burger.

He hit the bell a third time.

"Hey! What the fuck you
doin
' back there!"

Easy; brother
, he thought.
You be cool now.

The bag lady was grinning at him. The old man blinked up from his burger. The bag lady wouldn't remember him, she was too fucking crazy but the old man might.

Got to be cool
.

He saw movement behind the counter and the familiar uniform
finally!
One of the bitches was on her way out here.

But it was getting complicated now. The fucking old bag lady was out of her seat and moving in his direction. No good. You didn't want nobody
near
you when you pulled this shit. Only way to handle it was to pull his piece right now and say fuck it.

Which was what he did.

The timing would be okay. He glanced at the girl coming toward him behind the racks of burgers. He slid the gun out of his pocket and turned and pointed it at the bag lady.

"Hold it, bitch!" he said and she did.

Okay
.

He turned to the girl who had come up beside him at the counter, turned cool and calm and pointed the gun at her face.

The girl was grinning.

And her face was covered with . . . what the fuck . . .?