Hell's Half Acre (2 page)

That freaked me out, said Rabbit. She caught me looking at those high beams and she stared through me so hard I caught a chill.

No shit, said Steve. It was her eyes freaked me out.

How so? I asked.

She didn’t seem to blink, for one thing. For another, she has this long white scar that starts just above the left eye and disappears into her hair, like somebody tried to damn near cut off the top of her head. And around the other eye, she’s got three small black tattoos, three stars, like her own little constellation.

This was Jude, without question. The physical description was dead on, and I had known her to use the name Jesse Redd when we were on the run in Mexico. Jude had fake passports in a dozen different names. Wendy Sweet. Emma Frye. She liked names that sounded like superhero secret identities. As for the scar above her left eye, she’d acquired that in New Orleans, the same night I came by the massive blow to the head that caused a goodly knot of scar tissue to form in my brain, which may or may not account for the seizures and false visions that developed slow but sure over the past years. And while I’d known Jude to have several tattoos, an eye between her shoulder blades, a Greek symbol on her forearm, and a small dragon on her hip, the stars around her eyes were new. Apparently she’s acquired more ink since I lost her.

The long and short of Rabbit and Steve’s story was about what I expected. Jude was looking for info on the possible whereabouts of their childhood buddies, Shane and Sugar Finch. She was asking nicely, at first. Everybody was getting along. And then Rabbit got a little too fresh with her, and maybe Steve gave her some static about hassling
their friends. At which point she handed their asses to them, in exchange for the information that Sugar, which they swore upside down and sideways was his real name as shown on his birth certificate, used to have a girlfriend named Maggie who slung cocktails at a tittie bar called the Painted Lady, in Bakersfield.

I
HEADED FOR
B
AKERSFIELD THAT SAME NIGHT
, where I learned that the Painted Lady had burned to the ground almost a year ago. Nobody knew anything about a waitress named Maggie, so I checked into a motel with a bottle of rum and a notion to get drunk and take a three-day nap before I contemplated my next move. I stretched out on the bed with a plastic cup of rum on my belly and stared at my boots. The heels were worn down to nothing.

I flipped on the TV, realizing I couldn’t remember when I last watched a baseball game, the news, or a stupid movie with explosions and chase scenes. I was barely aware who was even president these days, or who we were currently at war with. I surfed around until I came to CNN, which was airing footage of some political block party in Berkeley, where some guy in a suit was giving a speech. His name was MacDonald Cody, and after a while I gathered that he was a senator, recently elected, the prodigal son of a former California governor, Anderson Cody. This younger Cody was talking about jobs, healthcare, the environment, family values; he was covering all the bases. He had a smoke-and-gravel voice and rugged movie-star looks,
with a glint of the rogue sparkle in his eye, silver blond hair, nice tan, healthy American teeth, and he looked vaguely familiar to me in that way that a lot of people on the box do. But then he raised his left arm to emphasize a point and I saw that he wore a prosthetic hand, and I popped upright like a half-drunk jack-in-the-box, my stomach in my mouth.

It’s a small world and getting smaller, but the source of my shock was as follows. Not quite six years ago in a brightly lit motel room in Mexico City, I held a sponge and bucket while Jude surgically removed MacDonald Cody’s left hand with an electric saw for twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in advance. We had no idea who he was, at the time. First names were discouraged in such transactions, and for all we knew he was just another sick, rich fuck from the States who’d come south of the border to satisfy his amputation fetish anonymously. Jude had performed a half dozen similar procedures in the space of four months, and this one was nothing special. She wore a clear plastic raincoat while she worked. She cranked up
London Calling
on a boombox to drown out the noise as she took his hand.

Then, a year or so later. Jude and I had made our way back to the States and landed in New Orleans, and were uneasily adjusting to our re-entry into the atmosphere. One day Jude came home with a funny look on her face. I asked her what was up and she said she had run smack into one of our former customers from Mexico, one of our flipper boys.

Which one? I said.

She shrugged. The handsome one.

That narrows it down.

She poured a glass of wine. As I recall, there were only two I
would have called handsome. This one looked like an ex-quarterback.

Did he recognize you?

I think so, yeah. But what difference could it make?

And I had to agree. It was a funny coincidence but one that seemed not to matter. We weren’t going to bother the guy, and it seemed unlikely that he would bother us.

Two days later, four men wearing masks entered our rented French Quarter flat. Jude had gone down to the market to buy limes and salt. She wanted to make margaritas. I was taking a bubble bath, of all things. I was thumbing through a
Rolling Stone
magazine and smoking a cigarette. I remember the ashes fell into the bubbles like little black snowflakes. I heard the front door open. I heard footsteps that weren’t Jude’s. Voices, low and dangerous. We didn’t have any guns in the apartment, having ditched our gear before flying into Miami, and we hadn’t gotten around to picking up new shit. I got out of the bath, wrapped a towel around my waist. There wasn’t much in the bathroom that could pass for a weapon but the lid of the toilet tank. I picked it up and eased the bathroom door open. I could see two of them, lean fuckers in black masks, with their backs to me. One of them had pushed his mask up over his forehead and was sniffing a pink thong of Jude’s that had been laying on the coffee table since the night before. I swung the heavy tank lid like a baseball bat and hammered the panty sniffer in the small of the spine hard enough to break it. He went down and I thought okay, he’s done. I caught a sideways flash of dark hair and bright eyes, but I was in a hurry and didn’t really study his face. I dropped the tank lid as his partner spun around roaring at me, and I swung what I thought was a pretty nasty punch at his throat, a shot that never hit its target. Instead I felt what I took to be the heavy talons of a massive bird sink into my back,
above the shoulder blade, and I went down like a sack of bones. At which point they commenced to kicking me in the head with their boots, and were still kicking me when Jude came home.

I was barely conscious by then, with a fast-seeping hematoma on the brain so profound the doctors later told me it ought to have killed me. I was also bleeding pretty good from the wound in my back, which as it turned out came not from a giant bird, but from the claw end of a hammer. The guy had sunk it in me about as deep as it would go. Anyway, I was dead to the world when Jude returned. I didn’t see anything for a while. And when I started to come out of it, my vision and awareness coming back in splintered flashes, I was strapped into a chair. I reckon they figured they would have plenty of time to kill me later.

Jude was tied to the bed, her clothes bloody and torn to ribbons. I still don’t know how they got the drop on her. And yes, there were three of them, as my guy was down for the count with what I hoped was a shattered tailbone, but I had seen Jude take on three guys at once on more than one occasion. The average hired muscle stood no chance against her, weapons notwithstanding. Jude had been in the Army, special forces. She had spent two years training with an Israeli death squad and she could throttle a mountain lion in a fair fight. But somehow these humps took her down.

She would barely talk about it, later.

They were pros, she said. They were very fast, and very good.

I pieced it together from what she didn’t say, and what little I could remember. The way I figured it, the guy I nailed with the tank lid was the crew leader, and since he was down, the others decided to have some fun with Jude before they killed her. They took off their masks and arrogantly allowed her to see their faces. Two of them were
feral white guys with dirty blond hair, thin hard guys built like welterweights who could have been brothers. The other was a silent, muscular black man with shaved head. They tied her facedown on the bed and tortured her, and they took their sweet time about it. They sniffed out that she had a thing for knives, so they cut her. They cut up her feet. They opened up her left arm. They made shallow cuts on her back that I think were meant to look like wings, and they gave her that long curved wound that Rabbit and Steve described, that begins above her eye and wraps halfway around her head.

Then one of the white guys backed off, lit a cigarette. He waved his hand like he was bored with this shit. And his buddy then did the worst thing I could imagine, he did something worse to Jude than just rape her. He knelt on the floor like he was receiving the sacrament and went down on her. He took his sweet time about it, then took off his pants and fucked her proper, grunting as he did so. Jude was silent throughout. She just lay there on her belly, eyes streaming with blood and tears, glittering like two pieces of glass on the beach. When he was finished, his buddy stepped in to have a go. I struggled in my chair, hopeless, slipping in and out of consciousness. These men had come there to kill us, no mistake. You don’t rape and torture somebody like that unless you mean to kill them. And even with a concussion it wasn’t hard to glimmer that they were hired to erase us and thereby protect the identity of the man Jude saw downtown, the one she said looked like an aging quarterback.

Shudder and sigh, five years later.

I was crouched on a rented bed in a shitty motel with a bottle of rum between my knees, and that quarterback was on television, giving a speech. I wondered how his people had spun the story of that prosthetic hand. A wild tale of Mexican banditos, perhaps, a story so
wild it had to be true. He had rescued a servant girl from certain death and lost his hand in the process. The brave, sympathetic hero. The shy, handsome California boy who would be king. A story that would start to stink fast if there were even murmurs about amputation as a sexual kick. The Codys had been a proud California family since the gold rush days, boasting a long line of congressmen, state reps, and two governors. And according to the CNN commentator, this MacDonald Cody was now on the short list to be running mate to the Democratic frontrunner for president. Good god, I thought. No wonder they had come for us in New Orleans. And as the camera panned the crowd for reaction shots, I saw her for just a second.

Jude.

She wore rose-colored wraparound sunglasses and a stylish white designer suit. The jacket was cropped short and the pants rode just a little low on her hips. She looked like a very expensive prostitute or runway model who had borrowed or stolen a trendy lawyer’s clothes for the day. She was watching the handsome senator with the cool detachment of a spider, and just as the camera paused to linger on her she seemed to feel it like the sun on her skin and she turned away.

The next morning, I headed for the nearby Denny’s to get a bite and some coffee while I waited for the next Greyhound north. I took a stab and asked my waitress if she had ever known a girl named Maggie, who used to work at the Painted Lady.

Sure, she said. I know Maggie. She went up to San Francisco after the Lady burned down, got a job at some little bar. She sent me a couple postcards.

That’s nice. Do you remember the name of the bar?

The waitress grinned. It was called Mao’s, like the Chinese dictator. I remember because I used to love those Andy Warhol paintings.

I’
M STARING AT THE BACK OF A CAB DRIVER’S NECK
. The thing is, I’m not used to being around people. I have been living on the edge of nowhere too long. I’ve been asleep for years, it feels like. My sunburned hands twitch like birds. I crush them together, force them to be still.

This is heavy traffic and nothing more.

Downtown San Francisco, or thereabout. I don’t know the city well, but it looks to be composed of wrong angles. It’s one of those cities where two streets may run parallel for a few blocks, then cross each other. The streets are not to be trusted. I need to relax. I’m an ordinary passenger in an ordinary yellow cab, waiting in traffic. I’m on my way to a hotel called the King James. Upon arriving in San Francisco, I experienced a rare moment of trouble-shooting cool and called a dozen hotels asking for a guest named Jesse Redd until I got a hit. The receptionist who answered the phone was a young girl named Holly, apparently new on the job, and I had managed to flirt with her just enough to wrangle Jesse Redd’s room number out of her.

The mind wanders, forward and back. Jude was never my girlfriend in any conventional sense of the word. I met her in a hotel bar in Denver almost seven years ago, less than a week before Christmas. I had just been released from a state hospital with my head shaved and my emotional infrastructure rewired. I was an ex-cop but my judgment was poor. I mistook Jude for a prostitute and invited her up to my room. She relieved me of all my cash and didn’t give me so much as a handjob in return. I barely copped a feel before the horse tranq she’d slipped me robbed me of my senses. I woke up some twenty-four hours later in a bathtub full of ice, and one of my kidneys was gone. She’d targeted me before I ever walked out of Fort Logan, having helped herself to my med records and shaky psych profile.

It sounds complicated but it amounts to boy meets girl and girl steals his kidney. Boy wants his kidney back. Boy wants to kill girl. Boy catches up with girl and decides he likes her. He just might love her. And so he doesn’t kill her. He becomes her partner, and pretty soon boy and girl get along like two ducks flying high in a washed blue sky. I called her that sometimes, when I was feeling daffy.