The Shaft (21 page)

    Of voting, Jonathan's line had always been that he refused to vote for politicians. 'It only encourages them.' Amanda would sigh, tell him not to bitch because he had not taken a say, and peruse local ballot initiatives alone. He talked about drops of water in an ocean, of corruption so deeply rooted as to be immune to a universe of good intentions. Amanda voted anyway, telling him he had closed off too many avenues. Soon he would be perfectly impregnable, walled up inside his own head.

    She would tell him it was pretty goddamned hard to lose anything when you had nothing.

    Before Amanda, it had been much easier to evaporate problems by averting his attention. You really could ignore it and it would go away. It was not a very honorable way of life, but it was safe - a core survival lesson learned long ago by hyenas. Just another verse of that venerable old standard blues, Don't Get Yo Ass Involved.

    Just now, Jonathan was thinking that Amanda would find the rolling, uninterrupted blankness of the predawn snowfall charming. It was simple to let your gaze blur and imagine a clean slate world beyond hatred and bills and sickness. Permafrost kicked back rainbow points of night lights like thousands of blue-white diamonds. No car tracks yet. No dirty dustmop sunrise. A pristine moment… and right in the midst of it Jonathan caught himself thinking again of you-know-who.

    Inertia can be the most exhausting exercise of all. Running at redline without engaging a gear can burn up the most expensive of cars real good. Jonathan had jump-started his hesitant glutes, climbed into his parka with a prodding sense of mission, slogged it down to the post office, and done himself a deed. Now he felt a headlong sense of righteousness diat was unassailable. He had rejoined the world of human beings through his act. And golly gee… now he felt good about himself. Amazing; like trying to explain to a sofa spud how good exercise can feel.

    MR HAPPY.

    A flighty female voice had instructed him to wait until sunrise the following day. He would receive money sufficient to post Cruz's bail. He would be handsomely recompensed for this. The voice called it a favor. Then Jonathan was listening to a dial tone.

    It stank of clandestine rendezvous and film noir intrigue. The coals of his imagination were fanned, and he achieved a spurious feeling of revenge wreaked against the berserkers of the Oakwood police, who had unhesitatingly adjudged him no different from their arrestees. Conceivably he had skimmed within a microdot of spending the night playing pat-a-cake with Cruz in some dungeon.

    He stood in the snow, still free, feeling the tug of obligation and the abrupt yet pleasing solidarity of the commonly oppressed.

    Jamaica; that was what the cops had called the woman with Cruz. Her image defrosted Jonathan's brain and warmed his thoughts. He was thinking of her as he came through the

    Garrison Street door… so it was a jolt to see her in the flesh, there right in front of him. She was sitting on the stairs of the foyer where all the badness had come down. Waiting, apparently, for Jonathan, as light began to intimidate the sky far to the east.

    The night had not used her well. The picture in Jonathan's brain was sexier, less haggard; more the streetwise and capable urban siren and not so much the sleepless, lost woman ODed on too much of the Wrong Stuff. It shone in her eyes. Wiped free of their elaborate makeup, they had shied back into her head to hang like dim lamps in distant caves. She blinked too much in the undiflused light of the foyer's naked bulbs. She hugged her knees, huddled in her car coat. Jonathan thought of a child left to sit too long at a football game.

    She saw him and brightened. He stopped where he was and scrambled to recall her name again.

    He said hello. His tone said:
A surprise, but a good one; what are you doing here at this time of night and I hope it involves me?

    'God.' She cleared her throat. 'I was hoping you'd toddle back here. I knocked but you weren't home and Cruz didn't have time to slip me his keys.' As she stood, Jonathan caught flashes of the hip-hugging leather skirt, the net lace of her stockings, the legs as long and fine as polished sculpture. She preceded him up the stairs to his own apartment. Cruz must have told her. 'Can we go up? It's really freezing down here.'

    He nodded, clumping up the steps behind her, grateful for the view. He had thirty seconds to collect his thoughts. He fished up keys from his parka while she toyed with one of the icebox door handles.

    Inside she pondered the riot of cardboard boxes and what they might contain. She immediately liked the skinny black cat, who snaked into her grasp as though magnetized. 'You got any coffee? Or some beer? No, wait - something hot. You got towels in any of these boxes?'

    'I'm unpacking.' It was lame. Try again. 'Uh - towels?'

    'Yeah. If you don't mind I'd like to grab a bath. Soak and thaw out my bones. The smell of cop cars and police stations always makes you want a bath.' She pulled off her high heels;

    it was an effort. Jonathan noticed that her little toes were turned outward from too many years spent being stylish. The knucks were rubbed raw and shiny. Her feet were disastrous.

    'Uh…' He resolved to stop saying uh. 'Sure. I mean, absolutely. Let me dig out the accoutrements.'

    'The what?'

    'Towels. Soap. More towels. I think I've got a loofa in one of these mystery boxes.'

    'Jesus - that'd be fabulous. I feel like I've just run a marathon. I lost.' She let her coat fall to the cot and sat on it, dropping her saddlebag to the floor and peeling off her wrecked stockings. The gracilis muscles on her inner thighs seemed as big around as Jonathan's wrists. They jumped starkly out as she raised each leg. The second most chewable muscles on the body.

    He knew what she was doing, and knew that she knew. He smiled to himself. The trick in dealing with her would be not to respond like a doggie head in Pavlov's lab.

    'How come they let you go and not Cruz?' It was almost the question he wanted to ask her.

    She stood to yank her camisole free of its tuck. "They want to pin the coke to Cruz, because they don't need me to pin Cruz to Bauhaus, and they're positively ravenous to nail Bauhaus.'

    'I dialed that number. I didn't get to speak to him.'

    This appeared to amuse her. 'Yeah, Bauhaus loves his security, alright. Thinks he's some kinda secret agent.
The Man from B.L.O.W
.' She was down to the serious disrobing. She smiled in a charming fake of modesty, and made a move for the bathroom door.

    'Here, wait - let me do it.' He rushed in ahead of her, mostly to insure that none of the disgusting mystery mess had blobbed its way back to the tub. A faint morgue-slab taint hung in the chill air, but the square of cardboard he'd force-fit into the broken window remained unbowed. He spun the spigot and was thankful to see reasonable gouts of strong steam. She was behind him, leaning against the jamb to watch.

    'Sorry I don't have any bubble bath or stuff like that.'

    'That's okay.' She was barefoot, shorter now, less statuesque, more human. A pleasantly calm smile hinted at the corners of her mouth but was spoiled by the topic at hand: 'They'll shitcan Cruz for twenty-four hours before they release him on bail. That's SOP. They'll want to work him for a day.'

    Water rushed to fill the tub. 'How did you handle that?' he asked. 'I mean, bail and stuff? Why didn't they just keep both of you?' He felt a blush coming on as he decided to ask what he meant. 'That is… how did you get out so fast?'

    Jamaica sighed. It was a what's a nice girl like you? sound. She concentrated on the tub. 'Because some things never change, and the world goes round, and hell, it's not really me they want…'

    He saw her shoulders, lace ties hanging from the camisole like comrowed hair. It was just the answer he had feared. He felt so much younger than Jamaica. He felt like a naive asshole.

    She brought her smile back. 'Hey - don't turn so blue.' Her timbre was philosophical. 'Sex with cops ain't like making love. It ain't even like sex with real people. It's the reason the great god Scope invented mouthwash.' She let that sink in, then: 'So. Is that tub ready yet?'

    He tested the water and nearly scalded his hand. 'Let me calm it down a little bit.' He almost didn't want to look back, to see her one more deadly time. As if he had a choice.

    She turned to fetch towels, leaving her camisole hanging from the doorknob - once cut glass, now a paint-clotted protuberance that could hardly turn either way. He saw her bare back, the way the skirt switched when she walked.

    'Bubbles are bad for you anyway,' she called from the other room.

    'How's that?'

    She reappeared with one white towel knotted low on her waist, like a sarong, and was otherwise nude except for the cat, which she cradled, letting its purr warm her bosom. The cat looked dopily pleased to be held so strategically.

    
Get an eyefulla this action, bubba
.

    'Stupid cat,' Jonathan muttered. 'He's freeloading here, honest. What did you say about bubbles?'

    They tend to bubble into uncomfortable places. Sometimes they can speed along things like bladder infections.'

    'Really? God.' He drew the plastic shower curtain halfway, shading the tub in blue-tinted light. 'All yours, madame. I shall repair to the conservatory and ring Jeeves to bring up a tea tray for you.'

    She returned a courtly nod, keeping the cat poised where it was. As before, it was modesty feigned, and Jonathan found it overwhelmingly erotic.

    He pulled the door partway shut, not needing to tell her that if she needed anything at all…

    The sounds she made as she disturbed the hot, placid surface of the water were not entirely sounds of pleasure. He imagined the water dogging down bruises and scrapes and perhaps worse. Cleansing pain, like the cauterization of a wound. Her muted protests and yelps, echoing off the bathroom's haphazard tiling, finally settled into a drawn-out
mmmm
.

    Leaving the warmth of the bathroom made the living room seem that much colder. Jonathan appreciated the glow from the hot plate and the rejuvenating smell of coffee. Bash had stashed small, bargain-sized bottles of Kahlua and Bailey's amid the scavengings in the kitchen box. Bash always seemed to be in host mode; his cabinets contained crap he would never touch himself. Jonathan remembered a time when he even kept cigarettes for guests, until he discovered how fast they staled. Now he ran a nonsmoking household. Jonathan counted himself lucky if he knew to buy coffee before he ran out. Amanda had learned that letting Jonathan stock the refrigerator by himself was a losing bet. Under his administration it would go unreplenished until it contained only a lemon plus several tubs of moldy stuff, unidentifiable food that looked more like failed biowar cultures.

    Tonight, he had Bash's bounty with which to tweak the coffee and, he hoped, impress his first guest. He even had two spoons, by god.

    'How we doing in there?' He curled fingers around the door crack. That was as much of him as dared to enter.

    She emitted a long, low sound that announced she was not coming out into the world of cold air and snow anytime soon… 'Jonathan? Can you bring the coffee in here? It is Jonathan, right, not John? I really want the coffee, but I really want to stay in the tub, too.'

    'What do you take?'

    'Uh. Whatever. Cream and sugar, one each?'

    His dino-mug was still at Rapid O'Graphics. For Jamaica 's use he reserved a borrower from Bash's, featuring a cratered half-Moon and science stats about it enameled in white on grey porcelain. For himself he scrounged a plastic hot mug he knew to be in one of the boxes. He blessed her cup with a generous dollop of Bailey's and hoped the crack in the handle would not offend her. Or make her think him cheap.

    He tapped. 'Room service. You might want to pull the curtain.'

    Her voice came back through the half-closed door. 'Give me a break, Jonathan. Just get your ass in here and talk to me.'

    Steam escaped. The sink mirror was cloudy and the tiles were fogged; the airshaft window was like a dirty blackboard. The cat was calmly licking the floor where the shit-brown gunk had slopped earlier. Christ, had all this stuff happened in a single night? This morning he had endured Camela at Capra's, fighting not to respond to her smugness and dreading the release of the shaky foothold he had established at Bash's - by extension, the precarious hang he had on the alien turf of the Chicago 'burbs. Then had come a brackishly spicy Italian meal with Bash and his beloved, eaten mostly in stiff silence while Camela wallowed in what she thought was a territorial victory. Then had come the back-and-forth with Bash's truck; the box parade. Three trips - but not three truckloads. Jonathan knew he had stretched it out unduly. What else did he have on tap for the evening? Bash and Camela would be huffing and puffing the rest of the night.

    All that had come before he had gotten adopted by the black cat. Before his tub had gotten slimed. Before the raid and the madness of dead babies, before the Nazi police, before meeting Cruz. Before Jamaica.

    Bash would shit.

    She was submerged to her upper lip; only her nipples broke the surface. Eyes closed, she recharged, her physique preserved in blue water for Jonathan's scrutiny. In the midst of such a fierce winter her mocha skin tone seemed unnatural, and was unblemished by bikini lines. Her eyelids, wiped clean of shadow and liner, were the same basic color as her toes. Jonathan guessed at a tanning salon. Midway her dark triangle of ecu captured his attention, an inviting equilateral on the sea of skin. Then he noticed, against his will, the catalogue of bruises on her shins, the marks where her forearms had been gripped hard and lovelessly, the purpled tracks bestown on the calm swell of her breasts, perhaps by Cruz, or, more horribly, by others. Jonathan traced rise and contour and the perfect denotation of aureolae as big as the circle he could make with thumb and forefinger, the nipples centered there so much like thumbtips themselves. The hot water had steamed her to the color of polished rubasse, and her eyes were weighted and dopey, as those of the cat had been in her arms. She extended a dripping hand for the coffee mug. Jonathan watched water sluice down her forearm as though it was a magic trick he could not quite figure out.