“Drugs?”
“Not drugs.”
He nodded. “What kinda work you do?”
“The kind that I don’t talk about and you don’t need to know about.”
Again he nodded.
He asked, “Need me to look out for you? I could watch your door or something.”
I motioned to the hardware I had just purchased, told him I’d be okay, would call if I needed him.
He was a big man, but a little bullet could reduce him to dead weight in an instant.
I wouldn’t want his death on my conscience.
Then he left, his big body making the walkway outside my door rumble with each one of his steps.
The hotel phone rang after the sun went down. I woke up with a loaded gun on my lap, another nearby. I’d made a pallet on the floor. I was on the floor so if my door was kicked open, the first thing they would see would be an empty bed, not me half-naked and in a daze. The illness and medicine tried to hold me down on the stained sheets and pillows I had on the dirty carpet, but I sat up. In the room next door, a sex therapist and her client were moaning for Jesus and trying to bang a hole in the wall.
I reached up over my head, picked up the phone.
She said, “Gideon.”
Hawks was on the line. She said my tag and I could smell lemons and tea tree and eucalyptus and rosemary all mixed with sandalwood and lavender and orange and sage. I saw her haunting eyes.
Hawks asked, “Feeling better?”
“Yeah. I’m healing. You know how people with mesomorphic body types are.”
“Somebody’s trying to get eighteen points playing Scrabble.”
“Looked it up on the Internet. Read about the three somatotypes.”
“Endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic. Nice Scrabble words too.”
“From what I read, I guess you have an ectomorphic body type.”
I took easy steps and went to the window and spied out, gun in my right hand, the receiver to the phone in my left hand and up to my left ear, the cord stretching with every step.
I said, “Surprised you called.”
“Was up. Konstantin called. I’m picking up a job or two.”
“What about your administrative assistant gig?”
“Got fired.”
“You serious?”
“I took off that day to come get you from exit 22. Sort of left and didn’t tell anybody I was leaving. Got reprimanded. Then I did it again when I drove to Atlanta to make sure you were okay.”
“Hawks.”
“Hush.”
“Okay.”
“Needed to tell you something.”
“After Dallas you were pregnant and had my baby.”
“You wish. I’d send it down the toilet if it was yours.”
“That’s cold.”
“No need to make a kid suffer for my bad judgment. Hell, if you couldn’t remember to call me, would hate for you to do the same to the kid. I went through that mess with my old man. Still waiting. Oh, wait. Guess I’m being
cheeky
since I didn’t get over that heartbreak and allowed you to let me down too.”
“I was joking.”
“I don’t know what would be worse, me getting stuck with a kid that turned out like you or turned out like me. If that’s not an argument for being pro-choice, I don’t know what is.”
I eased the curtains back and peeped outside. Men wearing baggy pants in cars with shiny rims were doing a drug transaction. Women were half-naked and freezing as they walked back and forth on the stroll. Other cars slowed down, inspected the young girls; some stopped, others sped away.
I was surrounded by the children of the night.
I went back to my pallet and sat down before I asked Hawks, “What do you need to tell me?”
She said, “I should apologize for trying to slap you to the devil.”
“You should.”
“But I won’t. I’m not a very apologetic person.”
“Character flaw.”
“I don’t see the point of apologizing for doing something I meant to do.”
“I got what I deserved.”
“Well, I think you deserved to get shot.”
“Over a phone call?”
“This is not about a phone call. This is about a promise.”
“That’s a bit over-the-top, don’t you think?”
“Well, I only hit you half as hard as I should’ve hit you. It was open-handed. Would’ve used my fist but I had just done my nails. All the way to pick you up, you have no idea. Just be glad there weren’t any bricks lying around where we were. Be real glad I slapped you and walked away like I did.”
“Sorry I didn’t call.”
“No need to be sorry. I set myself up for that letdown. Me and my impulsive decisions.”
I waited. My thoughts in too many places at one time.
Hawks said, “Gideon?”
“I’m here.”
“Got something to say. What I have to say might not mean much to you, but it’s important to me that I say it, because if I don’t say it, then I’ll kick myself for not saying it and I don’t like kicking myself.”
“Okay.”
“So you listen and don’t say anything back while I talk.”
“Okay.”
There was a pause.
“You made me feel so pretty when we were in Dallas. The way you dressed me up and took me out, you made me feel so special. I still remember your arms around me. I’ve missed that the most. Even while I was married I missed that. If you had called while I was married, I would’ve broken another commandment, would’ve left my home in the middle of the night to get to you. You never left my mind. Loved the way your arms were around me when we slept in that fancy hotel. The way you were kissing me, stealing my orgasms . . . the way you made me look at you when I was having an orgasm . . . and the next morning . . . the way you were looking at me when you were doing me sideways . . . the way you fed me breakfast in bed . . . the way you kissed me good-bye at the airport . . . hard for a girl to forget all of that.”
Silence.
“Okay, I am stopping now. Already said too much and I don’t want to get too worked up. I think about you and I get all hot and bothered. Then I get so angry, I mean breaking-and-throwing-things angry. And then I saw you, guess all that heat and anger had to go somewhere and I exploded. No other man has ever made me act stupid like that. Not even the man I married, that worthless piece of nothing.”
Silence.
“You didn’t even notice.”
I waited, tempted to say something, but I didn’t.
“The jeans I had on, you bought me those in Dallas. Hadn’t put them on in a long time. The day I finally put them on, you called me from Huntsville. Had them on that day and today. And you didn’t notice. Didn’t matter. Only reason you called was because you needed help. Then you tell me you had been living up in Stone Mountain. Not overseas, just a few hours away. Guess I figured you were living in some faraway land and that was why you didn’t call me. You were my neighbor. You promised to call and you never called, and you weren’t that far away from me. Yeah, I have said way too much.”
Then Hawks hung up.
I sat there, holding the phone, waiting for Hawks to call back.
Hoping she would call back.
Knowing she wouldn’t.
I needed sleep, but I didn’t want to take the chance of that sleep being my last.
I called Alvin White, asked him if he wanted a job that evening.
He said, “What you need done?”
“You said you could watch my room for me.”
“I can do security work if that’s what you need.”
“I need to take some meds and these meds have codeine in them, and that codeine will pull me into a deep sleep. I need you to hang around as long as you can and watch out for me.”
“Want me to sit outside your door until you wake up?”
“Too cold and wet out. Just park down below. Anybody stop by my door start flashing your lights and start blowing your horn. That should make them back away. Should get me up.”
“That go for women too?”
“That goes double for women.”
“I can do that.”
“How does five hundred sound?”
“I’ll do it for a hundred.”
“Job pays five. Cash money. About fifty an hour. But I don’t think I’ll need you that long.”
“Yessir. I take what the job pays.”
“And keep a gun in your lap. Just in case.”
With that I ended the call.
A hit man who needed a bodyguard. If I hadn’t died in London I would’ve laughed.
I checked my messages. Had one from my hookup at DNA Solutions.
She got my message. My package had been received. Was put at the front of the line.
A new fear moved through my blood, made bumps rise on my skin.
Thirty minutes later a horn blew and I looked out. Alvin White was there. I waved and he flashed his lights from high to low, then turned them off. Anxiety rose from my body.
I took some more meds, relaxed on the bed, continued down the road to healing.
Seven hours later I looked out my window and Alvin White was still there. I called his cellular, told him I was awake and ready to leave this dump on Ho Stroll. I told him I needed to clean up, then asked him if he could take me from Metropolitan Parkway and drop me off at the airport in a couple of hours. Told him I had his money, if he wanted it right now. He said he could wait until I was ready to leave, that he’d keep watching my room until then. He wanted to work the time he had promised. After that I asked him for another favor, asked if he could manage to get me some more of his girlfriend’s chicken soup.
He laughed and said he had a big bowl of it in the car with him, had brought it for me.
He was looking out for me in more ways than one.
That loquacious and gregarious giant was the closest thing I had to a friend.
I tried to remember who my friends had been when I was a child.
Then I struggled to remember a single friend.
No one came to mind. I knew people; they came and went; none were ever true friends.
None knew the darkness that lived inside me. None knew my truth.
Twenty-three
in cold blood
iPhone in hand,
I connected to the Internet. Pulled up the cameras at the house in Powder Springs. Something was wrong. Catherine was crying, her shoulders going up and down as she sobbed, shaking her head, rubbing her hands. My first thought was something had happened to the kid. But the kid stepped into the frame, sat next to the woman he knew as his mother, put his hand on hers, tried to calm her down. His efforts didn’t work. She was grief-stricken. There wasn’t any sound, just the video from the cameras, so I couldn’t listen in, had no idea what was being said.
I used the phone in the room, called Powder Springs. Catherine jumped when the phone rang, wiped her eyes, and straightened her knee-length dress before she rushed into the kitchen and answered the cordless phone. I had the hotel phone up to my right ear, my iPhone in my left hand.
I said, “The sound of your voice, what’s wrong?”
“Just received bad news.”
“What happened?”
“Two of my friends are . . . they were murdered . . . just got word they were both found dead.”
“What friends?”
“Friends from my old life. Friends in London.”
“You keep in touch with them?”
“They are my friends. They worked . . . the last place I was when I was there.”
Blood had been shed on Berwick Street.
An eighteen-year-old model had been found dead, her body badly beaten, her throat cut, her mutilated and battered body left on the floor of the flat where she conducted her business.
I asked, “When were they murdered?”
Catherine told me the day the bodies were found. They were discovered the same day I had been in Central London, discovered later that night. The same day the strawberry blonde and her red-haired male companion had tracked me from the West End and attempted to ambush me on Shaftesbury Avenue.
I asked, “Were they raped?”
“It was not a rape. It was a brutal, senseless murder.”
“Who was the other woman?”
Catherine sobbed harder, no longer trying to hide her tears.
Another of the models had been subjected to a fate more tragic than the first one’s. The second body they found had been beaten, eyes swollen, teeth knocked out, cut dozens of times in ways that didn’t kill her right away, just ensured a slow death.
As if she had been tortured.
The first model, the one who was tortured and killed first, she was Yugoslavian.
The second model was from Africa. Her name was Nusaybah.
Catherine’s best friend had been butchered.
She said, “You were in London.”
“I went to Berwick Street.”
“Why?”
“To ask questions.”
“Questions.”
“About the kid. About you.”
“You went all the way there asking questions regarding my son and me?”
“I did . . . it was before I gave you the DNA test.”
She sobbed. “Did you go to London . . . there to hurt my friends?”
“No. When I left they were fine. I only talked to the Yugoslavian.”
“I did not know Ivanka that well.”
“That is what she told me.”
“She came to London . . . started working there right before you came to . . . when you beat me.”
I rubbed my eyes, guilt swelling. “I didn’t talk to or see Nusaybah.”
“My old world is following me. All of my sins will never wash away.”
“I saw Nusaybah’s son. He could tell you I left, that I was only there a few minutes, no more than five, and the Yugoslavian was not harmed when I left Berwick Street. No one was harmed.”
“Steven’s friend saw you.”
“Where is Nusaybah’s son?”
“No one knows.”
“Was he hurt?”
“No one knows. All they know is that Nusaybah is dead and her son is missing.”