Unexpected Dismounts (7 page)

“I’d pay a great deal of money to see that, actually,” I said to Maharry.

He squinted his already minuscule eyes behind thick, smeary spectacles. “He’s not the only one trying to sell me things I don’t want.”

“Who else?” I said.

“You don’t want to know,” Sherry said.

The grit of her teeth told me I did. “Who?” I said again.

“Some fella come in here wantin’ me to invest my money in the …” Maharry ran a hand over his slicked iron hair. “What did he call it, Sherry Lynn?”

“Save the City Project,” Sherry said.

“‘Save’?” I said. “That’s just another word for running people out of their own neighborhood so money can be made off of it. You know that, don’t you?”

The tiny veins in Maharry’s old cheeks seemed to rise to the surface. “You think I was born yesterday? I told him not to let the door hit him in the backside when he got the Sam Hill outa my store.”

“Good for you.”

I tried to catch Sherry’s eye, but she was crouched behind the counter, muttering something about twenty years’ worth of receipts stuffed under there. I turned back to Maharry, who was shuffling once more toward Stan’s waiting car.

“You know they’ll be back to try to get you to sell, don’t you?” I said.

“They already were.”

I held my breath. Even though business had grown from none at all to a car a week, I didn’t see how much longer Maharry could keep C.A.R.S. open. Sherry had said he had no retirement funds set aside, that he wanted to just breathe his last with his head under somebody’s hood. But the way he was breathing right now, he would spend time in a nursing home before that. A good offer had to be tempting.

“What was the deal?” I said.

“Too good to turn down.” Maharry turned and creased his wrinkles. I swore some dust puffed out, which allowed me to see the small twinkle. “But I did.”

He resumed his shuffle through the glass door. I went to the counter and leaned over to look at the top of Sherry’s head. She was on the floor, surrounded by piles of yellowed slips of paper.

“Do you believe this?” she said. “Who keeps receipts from nineteen seventy-two?”

“You got me. I can barely find mine from last year.” Much to Chief’s chagrin. “Can I ask you something, Sher?”

She looked up at me, and I had to smile into her eyes, eyes I’d first seen dulled by addiction and hopelessness, now alive with irritation and importance and all the things that make up a normal human being.

“Is it about Zelda?” she said.

“Yeah, that’s one thing.”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“You’ll let me know if you do.”

“Of course.” Sherry shrugged. “She gets on my last nerve, but she’s my Sister.”

I nodded and watched her dip into the mass of receipts again. I might have let it go, not stirred her out of the peace she’d been able to find, if it hadn’t been about Desmond.

“I also wanted to ask you about Sultan,” I said.

The light left her eyes. “What about him?”

I tried to use Chief’s teaspoon approach. “I just wondered if you’d heard any scuttlebutt on what happened to his body?”

“No,” Sherry said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t pay any attention to it. He’s dead, and that’s all I need to know.”

Her voice was as thin as the ubiquitous siren that wailed somewhere in the bowels of the West King neighborhood. I needed to back off, and I would—as soon as I was sure.

“I know he’s dead too,” I said. “At least he was last time I saw him.”

Nothing.

“But if anybody knows where his body is, you—”

“Look, I don’t. I just want to put that part of my life behind me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. It has to do with Desmond’s adoption, but don’t worry about it.”

Sherry leaned against the set of shelves inside the counter and closed her eyes. As the siren wailed its way toward King, I gave her a moment to compose her face. That was something she couldn’t have pulled off six weeks ago.

“Is that why he was asking me about him?” she said.

“Who?”

“Desmond.”

I felt my eyes widen. “When was that?”

“The other day, I guess. I told him the same thing I’m telling you, Miss Angel. That sorry piece of filth is dead, and we all just need to leave it alone. Just let it be.”

It took every fiber of my being not to pin her down on when and why and where Desmond was asking about his biological father. Any time I had ever spoken the man’s name in his presence, Desmond had flown into a riot of panic I was hard put to quell.

But as Sherry feigned studying an ancient receipt, I saw her hand trembling. Right after the shooting, she’d said those exact words to me:
Let it be
. If I didn’t want her to lose six weeks’ worth of ground, I had to take that advice.

I couldn’t have pursued it if I’d wanted to. The angry siren whooped in front of the shop, followed by a glass-breaking crash that simultaneously shot out all the lights and shook Maharry from the back.

“Did they run into my building?” he cried.

“No.” I peered out the front window through the downpour. All I could make out were two police cars across the street, lights flashing indignantly, and an already beaten-up sedan smashed into the utility pole.

“I didn’t even hear any tires squealing,” Sherry said as she let herself out from behind the counter.

“I don’t think whoever it was even tried to stop.”

“Drunk,” Maharray said in disgust.

I didn’t point out that it was only eleven a.m. Most people just
stayed
drunk or loaded around here.

Beside me, Sherry swore and pressed her hands to the glass.

“What?” I said.

“Zelda! That’s her getting out of the car!”

Not getting out, falling out. Her body tumbled from the now-open driver’s-side door and splashed into the gutter.

“Stay here!” I said to Sherry.

Before I could get out the door and across Maharry’s parking area, Zelda tried to get up and only tottered for a few seconds before she dropped again, this time face-first into the murky water racing down the curb.

A beefy-looking officer reached for her, and I shouted as I ran, “Wait! I can handle her! Let me handle her!”

Either he didn’t hear me or he thought I, too, was a lunatic, though I suspected the latter because he didn’t even glance at me as he pinned her arms behind her back and pulled her up. When I got to him, she was shrieking, “I ain’t no ho no more!”

“I don’t care what your job description is, girl,” the officer said to her. “You’re under arrest.”

“I’m responsible for her,” I yelled at him over Zelda.

He looked at his bejowled partner. “I’d say she’s doing a heck of a job, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, and you’ve got a total handle on it,” I said. “Just let me take her home.”

When I put my hand out to grab Zelda’s, the jowly officer was suddenly between us, hand on his holster.

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to step back.”

“You don’t get it. She knows me. She’ll respond to me.”

The bulky officer who had a hold on Zelda pulled up her lolling head to face me.

“You recognize this lady?” he said to her.

Zelda’s eyes rolled back into her head.

“I’m going to take that as a no.” The officer went for his handcuffs, but Zelda lurched to life and stuck her arms straight in front of her. One icy hand caught my face and clawed at it before her limbs, all four of them, sprung out as if they were trying to escape from her body. I pulled my own hand to my cheek and drew back a palm smeared with blood.

“She’s bleeding!” I said.

“No, that’s yours,” Officer Jowls said. “I’d get to the ER and get a tetanus shot if I were you.”

He, too, had to shout to be heard over Zelda’s screams, which were now one long unintelligible slur. It took both officers to keep her from lunging at me or them or whoever she thought we all were. Then, just as suddenly, she deflated and slumped over the officer’s beefy shoulder. White vomit trailed from her mouth and dropped into a crack in the sidewalk below. The rain worked at it until it disappeared.

“What did you do to her?” I said.

“Didn’t do anything,” one of them said. “She’s labile.”

“
What?”

“She has flipped her, uh, stuff, all the way out.”

The handcuffs were on Zelda by this time, even though I was sure she’d never move again. And then she did. One bare foot kicked out and banged into the side of the cruiser they were dragging her to. The other jerked back and caught Officer Jowls squarely in the shin. She spat out expletives like so many gobs of phlegm, something about somebody stealing her shoes, but I ran to her as if she were calling my name. She clearly wasn’t. Her eyes were scarlet and so dilated they looked ready to blow. They weren’t sending a message to her brain about me, or anyone else for that matter.

And yet I still wedged myself between the struggling trio and the car. “Please,” I said, “just take her to the ER, and I’ll take responsibility for her from there.”

Officer Jowls opened his mouth, undoubtedly to threaten
me
with handcuffs if I didn’t move, but the heavyset one looked back over his shoulder and said, “Kent, you wanna deal with this, please?”

He was talking to a third officer who must have just joined the scene, seeing how he wasn’t soaked to the skin like the rest of us. I recognized him as young Officer Kent, a red-haired rookie I’d had dealings with more than once. Why did they hire fourteen-year-olds as police officers?

“Come on, Miss Chamberlain,” he said. “Let these officers do their job.”

He didn’t take me by the arm, but I knew that was next. Or Jowls and Beef Face were going to throw me in the back with Zelda, who once again looked like a ragdoll in a coma.

“Ma’am, please, for the last time.”

I glared at Jowls and let Officer Kent nudge me away from their police cruiser and toward his own.

“Let’s get out of the rain,” he said.

“I’ll go on my bike,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“To the hospital. With them.”

“They aren’t taking her to the hospital.”

“She needs help!”

“Come on. We’ll talk.”

It struck me as he ushered me into the front seat that Officer Kent had done some growing up in the few months since I’d last had a brush with him. Maybe he was even shaving now.

I didn’t realize I was shivering until he joined me in the car and turned the heater to full on. He produced a blanket and politely handed it over. I stuffed my face into it for a few seconds so I wouldn’t scream,
What is the matter with you people?
A Nudge would have been wonderful about then. And not
wash their feet
. Mine, and Officer Kent’s, were already sopping wet.

When I brought my face up, he said, “They’ll see to her medical needs. You might want to see about yours.” He pulled the visor down so I could look in the mirror. There were four unmistakable claw marks down my left cheek, although I was sure that the blood-mixed-with-rain made it look worse than it was.

“I’m fine,” I said, but he handed me a wet-wipe anyway, and I dabbed halfheartedly at my face. What I really needed was oxygen; I was clearly about to go into cardiac arrest.

“You’re not familiar with somebody flipping out,” Officer Kent said.

“The women who come to me are usually half out of it, but not like that.”

“You’ve seen people on downers,” Kent said. “I think we’re talking speedball in this case.”

“Speedball,” I said.

“They mix heroin and cocaine on aluminum foil, put a straw in their mouth, and then light it from underneath.”

I didn’t know how Zelda could have afforded heroin and cocaine. There wasn’t that
much in the petty-cash jar.

“How long before I can bring her home?” I said.

Officer Kent looked at me as if I were the one who was fourteen. “We’re not just dealing with a drug offense,” he said. “She led us on a five-block chase before she crashed her car into the pole.”

“It’s not her car,” I said, and then wanted to rip my tongue out.

“Correction. A stolen car.”

“We have a good lawyer,” I said.

“Would you mind some advice, Miss Chamberlain?”

I would mind, but I nodded anyway.

“It isn’t worth it for you to get yourself hauled in for interfering with an arrest. You’re already getting a little bit of a reputation—”

“What isn’t worth it?” I said. “That woman? That human being whose father gave her methadone when she was ten years old doesn’t deserve my help?”

Splotches of color bigger than his freckles blotched Kent’s face. He studied the steering wheel. “How much help are you going to be if you’re in the cell with her?”

“Then you tell me, Officer Kent,” I said. “You tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Let us—”

“Let you do what? Haul her in, dry her out, slap a fine or a jail sentence on her, and then turn her loose with the same shame and hopelessness running through her veins until she has to replace it with something she can tolerate and then the whole thing starts over again? Is that what I’m supposed to let you do?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know what you’re saying. I’ve heard it before,” I said. “And I’m sure it won’t make any more sense to me now than it did the last twenty times. Thanks for the blanket.”

I chucked it into his lap and exited the cruiser. Then I stood on the sidewalk, arms folded, until he eased the car away from the curb and followed the other cruiser down the street.

When they were all out of sight, I got on the Classic, but I couldn’t start it up yet.
Don’t ride when you want to smack somebody
, Chief always told me. And there was definitely nothing I wanted to do more just then than knock those cops’ heads through the window of the Magic Moment, or find Zelda’s supplier, or any supplier, and strip his veins with my teeth.

So I sat there astride my bike and let the anger circle the drain. When it didn’t find its way down, I wanted to claw my helmet off and collapse in the King Street gutter.