WIDOW (17 page)

“You made a big mistake, pal. You picked on the wrong women, you slack-mouthed bastard. Didn't you know there were two of us? If you'd come for me, it might not have ended this way. You might have scared me into submission, but not Charlene. She's damaged so bad, she didn't care what you did, all she wanted was to have it over and done forever.”

She shut off the boat motor and let the waves push them back and forth, flotsam in the Gulf waters.

“You don't weigh so much. You can't overpower any more defenseless women now, can you, you fuck?”

First, she lifted his feet, shoes intact, and dropped them from the knees over the side of the boat. Then she moved cautiously down his body to his head and shoulders. That area of his body was soaked. She made a mental note to clean out the boat when the sun came up.

“I get you out of here, I don't want you coming back.”

She heaved, the muscles tightening in her arms, and her neck tensing as she got his torso onto her outstretched legs. He felt like an unwieldy laundry bag. She realized how much strength she'd gained from all her exercise. But was it enough?

“I fall outta this motherfuckin' boat with you, I hope to God you come back to life and die all over again! Get out.”

She had one of his arms over the side. The boat shifted perilously. A cold sweat broke out on her face. She smelled his blood, a strong scent she couldn't disregard even when she turned aside her head. She wanted to gag, but fought down the urge with pure mental determination.

She pushed and he went over head first, the other arm dragging along behind at his side. His hips rose up and over the boat edge, his body not even producing a splash as he slipped under the water.

“Go, you piece of shit. Go to the bottom and feed the crabs.”

She hung over the water, swallowing hard. She washed off her hands, her arms. It was cold this far out. A fish flipped, surfacing near her, and Shadow flinched, for one moment imagining the dead man revived by the sudden shock of the water and coming up for air.

She saw it was a fish. She laughed. Even to her ears the laugh sounded too high, too out of control. Too crazy. She put a hand over her mouth, watching all around for his body. She saw him floating face down, his big coat billowing out like a dark parachute around him.

She felt the laugh die. She took his floppy hat and threw it out after him.

“There,” she said, with finality. “Now you have everything you deserve.”

When she returned to the pier, she was relieved to see Charlene had obeyed her and was in the house. She saw a light shining from one of the side front windows. The kitchen?

She secured the boat and climbed out. The pearl light in the sky had changed to a muted yellow the color of the dead lawns of October. No sun yet, but soon.

She saw the front of her knee-length white satin gown was blotched red with his blood. The satin stuck like glue to her breasts, her stomach.

She looked around quickly, but the mansion stood on its own piece of three-acre property. For anyone to see her, he'd have to have binoculars. At five o'clock in the morning. Not likely.

She hurried through the garage, took the wrought-iron spiral stairs to the back-section second floor, ran across the ringing catwalk calling out, “I'm back! I told you I'd always come back. Charlene? I'm here now.”

Charlene appeared at the other side of the catwalk still dressed in her bloody nightgown. She did not smile or speak or raise a hand in greeting. But she was also not weeping. Shadow considered that victory enough.

~*~

Shadow's thoughts were on the details of the work she had done putting in a new deadbolt lock on the door leading from the garage into the interior of the house. The door with the broken lock where the rapist had entered.

Mad asked, “You don't date men?”

The DJ had the music cranked about ten decibels too high. The dressing room walls vibrated to every bass beat. Shadow adjusted the red, white, and blue stage outfit and said offhandedly, “Not much.” She hoped Mad wasn't making a pass. In some way she needed to get across her sexual preference to the bi's, like Mad. Might as well state it, meet the old red-eyed monster head on.

“They call you the Ice Queen.” Mad leaned over and lifted her tits into the French-cut bra so they stuck out more on top. She rounded them, the way Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind rounded the mashed potatoes.

“Do they?”

“You don't go with customers. And we never seen a boyfriend.”

Shadow thought of the man in the floppy hat riding Charlene and suddenly the term “boyfriend” made her frown.

“Well?”

“What?” The blade sinking through tough skin and muscle . . .

“Hey, where are you? You on something?”

Shadow looked in the wall of mirrors at the reflection of Mad's inquisitive face. It was a young face, too young to be hardened and aged in this place. “I don't do drugs.” She hoped that didn't sound judgmental. She didn't care one way or the other what the rest of the girls were into. Prostitution, drugs, who cared?

“So, you straight or what?”

“Oh. Yeah, I'm straight. I was married.” Hell. She never wanted to talk about that. Her husband had killed. Now she had killed. Why didn't this similarity worry her?

“Divorced?”

Shadow blinked back memories. “Dead.”

“That's too bad. Sorry I asked.”

“No problem. It was a long time ago.” Only two years, you liar. Before that you were an ordinary housewife. A living cliché. Look at you now. White thigh-high stockings, blue garter belt and panties, red bra. A Looker. A teaser on the professional level.

“What song you doing in that outfit?” Mad asked, her curiosity taking the conversation in a new direction.

‘"American Woman."'

“Way cool.”

“You dance for the money?” Shadow used her little finger to take off a smudge of eyeliner from the corner of her dark eyes.

“Well, I tried waiting tables, but you get the same hassle from men so I figured why not, right? Now, though, I think I'm hooked on something else besides the money.”

“What's that?”

“The excitement. It's like a new adventure every night, isn't it?”

Shadow didn't answer. She thought maybe the girl wasn't looking deep enough. But then how deep did you perceive things when you were eighteen years old? Mad hadn't mentioned how addicting it was to have men adore your flesh. If that was adventure, so be it.

Mad wasn't the only young girl working the club. More than half of them were between eighteen and twenty. The remaining females were women like Shadow—older, although most of them weren't in the excellent physical condition that she was. Some of them had baggy breasts that looked like paper bags with an orange in them, or they were overweight, rolls of cloud white flesh hanging over their G-strings.

Clubs thrived on variety. There were men who came in especially to see a fat woman, a woman other than white, or a less then model-perfect desirable woman. Men had fetishes and obsessions. None of the clubs featured all-young live flesh, not if they were the lower-class clubs and they knew the business.

“The girls have noticed our cop's got a thing for you.”

Shadow, lost in her thoughts again, was startled to see Mad still in the dressing room with her. The girl was adjusting her stockings and looking over her shoulder in the mirror at her naked ass. Now that ass, Shadow thought uncharitably, is decidedly undesirable. Her pores are clogged. She needs a dermatologist to look at those pimples.

“I'll just ignore him,” she said, unconcerned.

“What's so funny,” Mad said, “is he never took that kind of interest before. He useta come in here to see one girl, but he never went after her when she got off work. That was Jezebel, but she quit before you started here.”

“How do you know about him trying to see me after work?”

“You forget I was on stage when you left your shift. I saw him leave. He looked like he had a real mission. I knew he was going for the alley and the back where we park.”

Shadow shrugged. She was tired of this conversation. What there was of it. She stowed her gear in the locker and turned the tumbler on the lock.

“He catch up with you?”

“Mad, just leave it alone, okay? I don't care about dating customers and I sure won't be in the market for a cop.”

“Well, excuse me. I should ask before I take a fucking breath.” She lifted her chin and made for the door.

Shadow almost apologized, but decided fuck it, maybe Mad would stop trying to get to know her. She didn't want to know the girls or them to know her. In any way. They didn't know where she lived. They didn't know about Charlene or the state mental hospital. They didn't know . . .

. . . about the man in the hat . . .

about her past or future, and that's just how she wanted to keep it.

She left the empty dressing room carrying a can of lukewarm Pepsi. She sipped at it while waiting behind the curtain for her turn on stage. She occasionally peeked out at Mad, admiring how she danced. The girl was damn skinny, her breasts no larger than a boy's, and she had that unappetizing ass, but she was young enough that the music surged through her and turned her bones to jelly. She danced energetically, employing all the new dance moves. Men paid her well, as they should have.

Dragging her gaze from Mad, Shadow scoped the room. The cop wasn't there. She sighed in relief. He kept coming around, she'd go to another club. She couldn't afford getting close to a homicide officer.

Because you killed.

He had looked all right. Nice enough face. Good body with strong shoulders, a blocky sort of guy, though not short. But . . .

What if he follows you to another club?

She would tell him, then, the way she told Mad. You get out of my face, she'd tell him. You're harassing me. The department know you got the hots for exotic dancers? They know your thing for voyeurism? Don't they have a shrink on the payroll might be interested in having a little talk with a guy like you?

Still, it was interesting, a cop hanging out in titty bars not to bust girls, but to enjoy them.

He might find out you killed the man in the hat. That was ridiculous. No one would ever know. The rapist was halfway to Cuba by now. Or taken down by sharks. There had been a shark attack the summer before on Galveston's West Beach. Took a teenager's leg in its mouth and shook it like a good supper bone. Boy almost lost his leg. Stitches and miracle drugs saved it. How much better an entire human for lunch?

Mad flounced off stage. She made a wide berth for Shadow, who moved up for her cue.

“Fuckin' Ice Maiden,” Mad said below her breath.

“Get a life, Mad.” Shadow was too sorry for the girls and women she worked with to get really angry with them. They were all sisters under the skin. Bumping and humping their way to glory. Or the bank. Whatever.

The lights rose from punk violet to frosty blue as the first strains of “American Woman” belted from the speaker system.

She was on. She set the Pepsi on the floor. Air caught in her chest, was held there two beats, let out. She drew back the curtain and went into the routine she'd practiced over and over in the mansion ballroom. This was her first time coordinating a song with an outfit.

And the club went wild.

Scaring her for a split second, then rolling over her like . . .

. . . one of those gentle waves in the bay . . .

She fell into the song the way . . .

. . . the body fell into the water . . .

Easy, smooth, she worked out the moves, bending her body around the lyrics, the beats driving fast and solid as . . .

. . . her hand brought the knife down into his back . . .

She never knew how she got through her spots, but even less so this night. Her mind kept slipping off from what she wanted to think, into alien thoughts coming from somewhere else.

She took off the red-sequined jacket for the audience, the panties, revealing a white G-string beneath, and finally the bra just at the end of the song.

The lights went down softer so that a man would have to have x-ray vision to see her well, and she moved onto one of the stage arms leading into the audience. There, in G-string, garter belt, and stockings, her body rocked the men into a lullaby with a slow Billie Holiday blues song backing her up. They stuffed her garter belt with bills. Big bills.

She smiled.

She danced.

She thought of the new lock on the door leading from the garage and of murder most foul.

 

Fifteen

 

Son's mother rolled onto her side, swinging her feet to the floor. Son was busy. She could go to the bathroom by herself.

She believed this up to the moment the pains made her grimace and stopped her dead in her tracks, not two feet from the bedside.

The door seemed too far away. Another five or six steps. She couldn't just stand here, her bladder hurting this way.

It was her back, along the spine, and her hips, in the sockets. It was her elbows and her knees. Her ankles. It was everything. Her body had turned on her over the years. If she had any gumption at all, she'd do away with herself, save Son from being burdened with an old invalid mother.

The thought of suicide, even when couched in words like “do away with herself,” left a bitter taste in her mouth. She didn't believe in such things. It was a coward's way. Are you a man or a mouse? Where did that saying come from anyway? It was women who were stronger. Let some man have a baby, see the whole human race die out! She remembered when Son was born . . .

She turned slowly, like a gear in a machine needing oil, and made it to the bed again. She slumped onto it, leaning over on one arm to support herself.