The Devil's Redhead (29 page)

Abatangelo withdrew his photographs of Shel and set them on the table. Waxman eyed the packet of photographs warily.

“Take a look, Wax. Let me tell you a story.”

Waxman reluctantly reached out, collected the plasticine envelope and bent back the fold. He fished the pictures out and sighed, turning them right side up. He made it seem a monstrous chore.

“This is your sort of story, Wax. I've been following your work since I got out, and when this thing came my way, your name was the first that came to mind.” He checked Waxman's eyes for suspicion. “Christians scare me too, Wax. And yet, when all's said and done, they aren't half as scary as some of their friends.”

Waxman punctuated his review of the photographs with a laborious sigh. Abatangelo leaned closer.

“I was in the tank ten years. When I first got in, the Aryans were cartoons. A sideshow in the yard. But over time, you know? They held their little conclaves. They went to school, they studied the IRA and the Whitecaps, they read
The Turner Diaries
and
Mein Kampf.
They sent their converts out into the world. There's your shock troops, Wax. How many militia contingents are there in this state, couple dozen? In every goddamn one, I promise, there's at least one guy who got indoctrinated doing hard time. And he'll be the one everybody listens to when it comes time to talk methods.”

The waitress returned with their drinks. Abatangelo waited till she was gone before resuming. “People in this country think drugs, Wax, they think bangers. Spades, pachucos. It's bullshit. The white underground, the militias, without crank they're nothing but a rumor. Crystal's how they bankroll their ordnance. Which brings us to the pictures you've been looking at. You remember the face, right?”

Waxman glanced down at the photographs of Shel he was holding. He nodded.

“She only did three and change, wandered around for four years, then bumped into your average cranker. Some garden variety mutt, low chump on the totem pole, didn't-know-what-I-was-getting-into sort of guy. The gang he ran with, based out in east CoCo County, they were heavy folks. Biker equivalent of
Blut und Ehre.
Pushing meth in the Delta, had the market to themselves. Then the Mexicans showed up. Boom, it's war. And this little mutt, his mother was Chicano I guess, he had sympathies, he got greedy, whatever the reason, he tried to play it both ways. Now he's in a spot. A spot where he's had to kill to get back into good graces.”

He paused to judge the effect he was making. Waxman refused to look at him.

“You heard about the Briscoe family, bigwigs up in Lodi. Lost a pair of twins. Whacked. Guess who: same guy we're talking about here. Same guy who did what you're looking at.” He picked up one of the photographs and flicked it with his finger. “You're going to hear word in the next day or two of some shoot-'em-up over in the Delta, too. Some kind of gunfight gone wrong. Again, guess who. Think like a prosecutor, Wax. Start with the little guy, the mutt who did this. Snap that link, then move up the chain. You'll have the story of your career.” Abatangelo put the picture back down. “I've got some other pictures, too. One of a sixteen-wheeler rolling out of a compound at midnight from the property where these guys operate. What do you think the driver was carrying, Wax? Maybe we should trace the license, go ask him.”

Waxman reached up beneath his glasses and pinched his eyes, letting go with a long, burdened groan. “You talk the most incredible trash.”

“Make a few calls on your own,” Abatangelo urged. “Check it out.”

Waxman flinched, uttered a scoffing laugh, then seemed to suffer the inner onslaught of a dozen competing voices. Abatangelo inferred from this he was thinking it over. After a moment, returning his attention to the pictures, Waxman said, “This woman,” raising his hand to his glasses again, this time to lift them onto his brow, the better to study a close-up, “she has haunted eyes.” He ran his fingertip around her face. “I remember her better now.” Rubbing his hand across his mouth, he closed his eyes and said with forced irony, “It's tawdry. It's timely.”

“Don't talk like that, Wax.”

“You'll never see it out front.” Waxman shook his head, waved his hand. “Buried in back. Below the fold. Maybe just a column inch in the briefs.”

“I can live with that. For now. Come on, Wax. I know what you can do. This isn't some chickenshit sidebar passed down through six other guys who don't want it. It has your name all over it. And I'll be right there with you. I'm no stranger to a camera. Look at these. I can do your art.”

Waxman frowned uneasily. And yet a certain willingness animated his eyes. Abatangelo felt something turn. He glanced at his watch. Shel had been alone for hours, but he couldn't leave Waxman sitting there without a draft down on paper. Devoid of record, the impulse would die.

“Let's hash something out right now, Wax.” There were paper place mats stacked atop a nearby piano. He pulled one down and took out a pen. “What's our tag? Wax, hey.”

Waxman hugged his drink. He looked down at Shel's pictures.

“If we are going to use this woman as bait for the reader's sympathy,” he said, “we will have to make her a little less the moll.”

Abatangelo, poised to write, said, “Bait?”

“It's the yuppie factor,” Waxman explained. “The new wealth, the young folks earning it, they're sneakily conservative. Fallen women do not appeal to sentiment quite the way they used to. And these days one must, above all else, appeal to sentiment. Trust me.”

“Wax, you're driving at what, exactly?”

Waxman shrugged. “I mean, well, not to be morbid. It's just ironic. She needs to be human to be sympathetic. And she would be human instantly if she were dead.”

CHAPTER

15

Asleep in Abatangelo's bed, Shel dreamed she stood alone in an abandoned foundry, her reflection gazing back at her from a rust—spotted washroom mirror. The cement floor, sooty and broken, grated against the soles of her bare feet. The sink was dry and flecked with cold ash. She felt a terrifying premonition that It was about to happen. And yet, in her paralysis, she felt ready. Sunlight broke through a grainy skylight. A sharp, rattled banging rushed toward her through the silence.

She convulsed, bolting upright. Instantly her head rang in pain, worse than before. Taking in gulps of air, she blinked her eyes open, staring through tears. The walls drifted around as sleep gave way to a grating half-sleep. The sense she was returning from a distance lingered, and for a moment the room seemed more remembered than seen.

Light from a streetlamp filtered in through wafting blinds. A smell of winter rain seeped into the room through a window crack.

She was supposed to be up in an hour, an hour when? She found the alarm clock beside the bed and it told her the time was well past five. No, she thought, putting the clock back down. Can't be. Not possible. Then she remembered, she'd turned off the alarm as soon as Danny'd left. Dumb, she thought. Pissy and dumb.

She rose up on one elbow, rubbing the grit from her eyes. She tried to sit up but her body felt thick, the pain confused her. That was when the pretense fled and the panic set in.

If every fear she had ever known had suddenly assumed bodily form and crashed through the door that minute, she would not have run. She would have said: What took you?

This pain has got to go, she thought, it's giving you the willies. Wind scraped the roof and windows. The rain had returned, pattering against the building.

She lowered her feet to the floor and tested her weight. Movement had a watery feel; she quivered, standing. Stumbling room to room, she checked the bathroom for painkillers, the kitchen for a bit more liquor, the front room for Danny, flicking the overhead lights on then off.

Feeling chilled, she stumbled to the window and closed it. The room pivoted and folded into shapes, she had to close her eyes finally to keep from falling. Braced by the window frame, she looked down toward the street and spotted in a shallow doorway a homeless man with stone-colored skin, propped on a cane and draped in a blanket, smoking a cigarette. The ash glowed bright red in the haze. A bed of damp newspaper and oily cardboard lay around his feet. As though sensing her watching him, the man's face rose and he stared up at her window. The blanket fell away from around his head as their eyes locked. He had thin, haggard features, close—cut gray hair, deep—set piercing eyes of a pale blue color.

Good God, Shel thought. It's Felix.

She gagged and her legs gave way beneath her. Catching herself against the wall, she clutched the window frame, checking the man's features again, thinking, No. She stared long and hard, the man staring right back, his face brightened by the ash of his cigarette as he took a long drag, then obscured in a smoky plume as he exhaled. Shel waited him out, studying everything about him, the cock of his head, the size of his hands, the angle of his body as he leaned on his cane. She convinced herself she'd been wrong. It wasn't Felix at all. Strangely, however, as the illusion drained away, the dread intensified. She pulled the blind and went front to check the door lock.

Where's Danny? she thought. We have to talk about Felix.

She returned to his room and sat back down on the bed, tallying up the things she felt reasonably certain were true. First, the fact Frank had come back alone last night meant something had gone wrong. Very wrong. Second, the fact none of the Akers brothers in particular had come back with Frank suggested one or more of them was dead. Third, all that meant there would be hell to pay. And Felix wouldn't take two minutes to decide who was going to pay it.

Sure, they'd track down Frank, and there was no two ways about it, he was running now. After three years of trying to get him to the next safe place, she thought, all you accomplished was helping him sign his own death warrant. What a pitiless waste. Maybe they'll write that on your gravestone, dear. Because Frank won't be the one they really want now. Not those boys. Once they've put their faith in a woman who's fucked up, they can't get back at her fast enough.

Felix had made it clear, he would find her. And not just her. That one little offhand remark he'd made: I'm not gonna worry about my manners. People'll get hurt. She had to believe Felix knew about Danny. They'd tracked down her case file or her probation report or some damn thing, bribed some bent cop for it. If they hadn't already, they would quick. And when they did they'd have her life story in their hands and if they couldn't find her right off one way, they'd flush her out another. Come for Danny. Her mother in Texas. Eddy Igo, any number of people.

As though picking at a scab, she went to the window again, peeked out behind the blind and saw the crippled homeless man leaning in the doorway exactly where he had before. Go, she thought. Run.

But running was ludicrous. They'd last a couple weeks at best. She had two hundred dollars to her name and that was back at the house. Might as well be on Mars. Danny, from the look of his apartment, was worse off than her, and he was on probation regardless. Not only would Felix be hunting for them, the law would, too, and regardless of which one got there first, Felix would mete out revenge. She could be killed in custody easy as anywhere else. Hell, easier. Double that for Danny.

It's not his price to pay, she thought. You can't do this to him. Go back.

She turned from the window, ran to the toilet and vomited. Her head rang, the bile was clear and sour. She couldn't tell if it was her fear or something wrong with her head that brought this on. As though it matters, she thought. She collapsed onto her haunch on the cold tile floor.

The situation had a certain storybook quality, she decided. The maiden who descends into Hell to beg back her soul from the Devil. If memory served, the story did not end well. The maiden gets screwed. And that, she supposed—to use Frank's expression—is fitting and fair.

If they didn't already have Frank in hand, they'd use her for bait. Picturing what was likely to follow, she felt sick with terror again and hoisted herself up, preparing to retch, but nothing came. The perfect posture, she thought, for realizing you have no choice. She felt in need of a prayer. In need of a saint who would listen to it. St. Dismal.

She rose, rinsed her face and mouth with cold water then staggered back down the hallway to the bedroom. She looked around one final time. Calling to mind the words on Abatangelo's scapular, she told herself: Remember me. Remember me, Danny, because I love you. And that's why I can't stay. I can't bring my nightmare here. I'll take it back where it belongs.

She drove with one hand on the wheel, the other clutching her head, focusing on the road's white lines. A dull throbbing tinged with nausea was interrupted by a flare of pain from behind one eye. She winced and struggled to keep a grip on the wheel. She wasn't entirely sure what was happening, but the headache was getting worse, and every time one of these flare-ups occurred, she felt dizzy and everything blurred.