The Sexiest Man Alive (26 page)

“We’re not going to catch TB germs, are we?”

“Least of our worries.”

“Cripes, Mazie, I’ve really gotta pee. What am I supposed to do?”

The moment Shayla mentioned it, Mazie realized that her own bladder was at the bursting point. There had to be something they could use. They searched through the rubble strewn about the room, until Shayla gave a little cry of triumph. “Here we go—one portable pee pot!” She held up a one-gallon paint container, its paint so ancient, it had petrified to a stonelike substance. “There’s a can for you, and even a weenie one for Muffin.”

Muffin didn’t need a paint can. He’d already baptized both the radiators. Still modest
despite their dire circumstances, Mazie found a spot on the opposite side of the room from Shayla, lifted her skirt, pulled down her panty hose and underpants, and squatted over the paint can. Sweet relief! Hunkering there, she mulled over the problem of what to do with Muffin. If she could find a way to get him outside, he might escape the notice of the gang members. He was small enough to be able to scoot between the fence bars and get away. Sadly, he wasn’t a Lassie-type dog who would try to lead rescuers back to his mistress, but he might at least fall into the hands of someone who’d take care of him. Maybe she could cram him into one of the empty paint cans, attach some kind of line to it, and lower him out through a window.

Choosing a window at random, Mazie tried to open it but discovered it was painted shut. A quick inspection revealed that all the other windows were, too.

“Why don’t we just break a window?” Shayla asked.

“Too risky.” Mazie pointed at the parking lot below, where a man in Skull insignia was pacing back and forth, armed with an automatic weapon and apparently on sentry duty. “He’d notice breaking glass. We don’t want to remind those guys that we’re up here.”

“You got that right.” Shayla gave a bitter laugh. “Papa Yatt gave ’em orders to leave me alone, but some of ’em—like that stinking Brimstone—consider
you
fair game.”

Mazie handed her the punch can opener they’d found in the truck. “Scrape around the frame, okay?” Mazie fished out the pear can lid she’d stuck in her underpants—it was chafing her stomach—and began using its sharp edge to scratch away at the paint on the opposite side of the window. It was surprisingly hard work. By mid-morning the sun was blazing in through the glass and they were both hot and sweaty.

“What’s that on your cheek?” Shayla asked, pointing to a patch of puckered pink skin on Mazie’s left cheekbone.

“Nothing much. A burn.” It was a souvenir from her fugitive days, when a couple of hired thugs had tried to torture information out of her, but Mazie didn’t think mentioning that was a good idea at the moment; Shayla was scared enough already.

Shayla scraped some more, then asked, “Did your boyfriend do that to you?”

“What? No, of course not.” Mazie stopped scraping and stared at her. “Why would you think that?”

“I dunno.” Shayla twiddled with her hair. “Sometimes they get mad at you, do stuff they don’t mean.”

Mazie pointed to the Skittle-size scab beneath Shayla’s chin. “Did Ricky Lee do that to
you
?”

“He didn’t mean to,” Shayla said quickly. “Only I made him mad and he shoved me hard and there was this nail sticking out of the wall and I hit it with my chin. It healed up good, but it left that little mark. Usually I just cover it up with makeup.”

“What other ‘stuff’ did he do to you?”

“He didn’t do nothin’!” Shayla lapsed into sullen silence, chipping at her side of the window. “He just used to get mad sometimes,” she said finally. “When two people love each other, they—they once in a while lose their tempers. Ricky had a temper. But he was always sorry after he hurt me.” Her left hand flew to her right elbow, which Mazie noticed had a red mark that looked like an old cigarette burn.

“I was only sixteen when we first hooked up,” Shayla mumbled. “Ricky was twenty-six. I was just this dumb kid. I couldn’t believe that a cool guy like Ricky would—”

“You were sixteen? That makes him a pedophile.”

“He was not!” Shayla flung herself away from the window, stomped over to the far side of the room, and threw herself to the floor, obviously fuming.

Ricky Lee Tatum had been a bullying child predator, but trying to convince Shayla of that wouldn’t serve any purpose, Mazie realized. She had to concentrate on keeping the girl’s spirits up. “I’m sorry,” Mazie said. “I just—”

“Ricky Lee said our ages weren’t important because we loved each other.” Shayla’s tone was sullen and defensive. “So it didn’t matter whether we were legal or not.”

“Okay,” Mazie said in a neutral tone, not wanting to further alienate Shayla because, if they were going to escape, they needed to work together.

“Ricky Lee never hurt me unless I had it coming.” Shayla sounded as though she were trying to convince herself. “He had to explain stuff to me because I didn’t know anything. He had to teach me not to talk back to him because if you wanted to be one of the Skulls’ women, you had to learn to keep your mouth shut.”

“And that was okay with you?”

Shayla bit a ragged nail. “No, not really. But Ricky Lee never hurt me bad. Like some of the Skulls, they knocked out their old ladies’ teeth. Ricky just dislocated my finger one time.”

Mazie kept on scraping paint, her back to Shayla. Poor girl—still enough of a child to
believe that a boyfriend who hit her was sexy and manly.

“Maybe I didn’t deserve getting hit all the time,” Shayla said slowly. “I thought it was Ricky’s way of showing he cared for me, but … I suppose
your
boyfriend never hits you.”

“No, never.”

“But what does he do when he gets mad at you?”

“Yells. Then I yell back and I’m better at yelling than he is, so I win.”

“I heard you two fighting while I was hiding outside your apartment. Then I saw your boyfriend stomp out. He’s pretty cute.”

“A lot of women think so,” Mazie said drily.

“You mean he was, like, running around on you?”

“Not exactly. But he was getting a lot of attention from women.” Okay, one good confession deserved another. “It made me insecure. And I went a little crazy.”

Shayla went over to the window and resumed scraping, running the pointed end of the punch against the window frame where it intersected the molding. “You don’t mind me asking you this stuff?”

“No, I like talking about it.” Because it was making things clear in her own mind.

“Are you in love with him?” Shayla asked.

“Yes,” Mazie said, sighing. “I’ve tried not to be, but God help me, I am.”

“When did you first know you loved him?”

“His name is Ben, okay? First I admired him because he was brave and resourceful. Then I started liking him because he was the kind of person you can talk to—”

“So you started off as, like, friends.”

“We were more enemies at first. Long story. But then we discovered that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

Shayla laughed. “You made it with him? That’s so hot. Did he tell you he loved you?”

“Once. I guess that was my lifetime ration because I haven’t heard it since.

“But you knew you loved him?” Shayla prodded.

“No question in my mind.”

“A girl can’t say the L-word until the guy says it,” Shayla said confidently. “It’s like an unwritten rule.”

“That’s one of the rules?” Mazie was really tired of the rules that pretty much allowed
men to behave any way they wanted while forcing women to do the hard work in a relationship.

“Yeah,” Shayla said sincerely, “because if the girl says it first, the guy feels trapped, like she’s no challenge anymore.”

Mazie blew her bangs out of her eyes. “That is so incredibly stupid. If a guy gets scared off by hearing a woman say she loves him, he’s not worth it.”

“Getting back to my question, though, how did you know you loved Ben?”

Mazie dug in with her scraper and an enormous chunk of paint flaked off the window. She slid out of her shoes—they were still the make-your-legs-longer platforms she’d had on for her date with Sphincter Man. Grasping the shoe by the sole, she used the heel to hammer around the edges of the window. Chunks of paint rained down. Seizing the window handle, she pulled with all her strength. The window resisted, but she felt a tremor beneath her hands. It was nearly there.

“My brother’s wife had a baby,” Mazie said. “Ben came to her hospital room—this was right after we’d had a blowup and we’d each gone off steaming mad. Emily—my sister-in-law—handed Ben the baby and he walked around the room with this tiny newborn, talking to her under his breath. Annie Laurie—that’s the baby—kicked off her socks and Ben kissed her toes and cooed, ‘Does this widdle giwl have teeny, weeny piggies?’ ”

Shayla snorted with laughter. “I don’t know this guy,” she burst out, “but I really like him.”

“Then she yawned this hu-u-ge yawn and Ben said she had tonsils just as pretty as Aunt Mazie’s and that I usually yawned when he was talking to me, too.”

“He teases you a lot?”

“Yeah. And I just—that was the moment.” Mazie discovered that she was crying and wiped her nose. “It was like something had melted inside my chest. Like there was this candle inside me and Ben had lit it and it was starting to glow and I was all golden inside. I know that’s crazy and mixed metaphors and stuff, but I don’t know how else to describe it. I just knew he was the one man for me, that whatever happened in my life, whoever I met, no matter how mad I got at him, Ben Labeck would always be—”
Come on, Maguire, have the guts to admit it
. Mazie wiped fresh tears out of her eyes, swallowed hard. “—my only true love.”

Then she turned back to the window and yanked on it. It flew up with such force, it nearly took her with it. A breeze fluttered into the stifling room. She and Shayla stood side by
side, inhaling the fresh air, letting it stir their hair and cool their faces. The breeze brought with it the scent of sweet clover, of wild grapevine, and of hope.

“I wonder what would have happened with me and Ricky Lee,” Shayla mused, biting into a chocolate chip cookie. Having succeeded in opening three windows, she and Mazie were taking a break, sitting against a wall, eating their smuggled-in snacks. “I thought he’d ask me to marry him. First you fall in love, then you get married—that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Pretty corny, huh?”

“Yeah, it is—but all girls believe in that stuff,” Mazie said. “I had my whole wedding planned out when I was fourteen years old. My dress, my bridesmaids, the church, the flowers, the reception hall.” She laughed. “There was only one little thing missing.”

Shayla giggled. “The groom?”

“Yeah. He was always kind of hazy, but I knew you had to have one.”

“This one time I was looking through a bridal magazine,” Shayla said. “I pointed to a picture and asked Ricky Lee if he thought I’d look good in that dress. He laughed in a mean way and said no way did I deserve a white wedding and did I really think he was going to get dressed up in a monkey suit and stand up in front of a church with me? Because the other Skulls would have laughed their asses off. He snatched the magazine out of my hands and slapped me across the face with it.”

“God, Shayla—that’s awful.”

“Sometimes Ricky could be so sweet and I’d love him so much that I’d forget the nasty stuff—like how he was high most of the time or how he’d take it out on me when Sonny or one of the higher-ups disrespected him.”

Mazie patted her shoulder.

“But now, talking with you, I think maybe I just convinced myself I loved Ricky Lee because I didn’t have anyone to compare him with.” Shayla’s hair hid her face and she looked down at Muffin, avoiding Mazie’s eyes. “I never even went out on a date with a boy before I met Ricky. I didn’t know much about guys.”

“Never dated? A pretty girl like you?”

“I thought Ricky Lee was a man, but I—I think I started to grow up the last couple of
months before … before all the bad stuff. I started to see what a cheater Ricky was. Dishonest. He’d lie about every little thing, even when he didn’t have to lie. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but then he tried to cheat the Yatts. See, Ricky Lee was a runner—he delivered coke and pills and doobie to dealers and they’d pay him. Then he’d take the money back to the Yatts. But he started holding back, making up excuses for why he was coming up short. Ricky thought he could get away with it, but one of his buds ratted him out.”

“Reaper?”

“Probably. Or maybe Sonny. Or it could have been any of the others. You know that saying about honor among thieves, Mazie? Well, there isn’t any, not with these guys. Someone sees how it’ll work to his advantage, he’ll stab his best friend in the back.”

Shayla stood and began to pace around the room. “It seems like it was a long time ago, but it’s only been about three weeks, hasn’t it? The night it happened, Ricky Lee got a call from Papa Yatt to come to the old cannery. That was where they cut up the drugs. He told Ricky he was being bumped up in the operation, getting a bigger territory. I rode over there with Ricky on the back of his bike. When we got there I had to go pee—I’d got a urinary infection from Ricky—so I went out in the woods behind the building because the cannery’s toilets were all wrecked. When I came back, the whole tribe was gathered around in this big room. Ricky Lee and this other guy, Cody—I think he was a Yatt grandson—were kneeling on the floor in front of Papa. They were both crying, pleading, saying they were sorry they’d taken money and they’d never do anything bad again. I just stood there shocked, trying to figure out what was going on. I thought they were trying to throw a scare into Ricky and the other guy. Then Papa Yatt—he had this big hand gun—he walked around behind Ricky …”

Shayla’s voice trailed off. She walked over to the open window and stared out. Outside, it was clouding over and looked like rain. A few fat drops fell on the dusty windowsill.

“The old man shot them in the backs of their heads,” Shayla said finally. “They fell over and blood was pouring out. One of the Skulls looked up and saw me—they hadn’t even known I was there—and they came after me. I ran out and hid in the woods. I had my phone with me. I thought maybe Ricky wasn’t really dead, just hurt bad, and if he got to a hospital on time, they could save him—people recover from gunshot wounds all the time, don’t they? So I called 911, keeping my voice to a whisper, told them about Ricky’s being shot, and begged them to send an ambulance. The gang was stomping all over the place, trying to find me, but I got away.”