Part 14 - Goldi: Pistol Whipped

Threading through my body, snaking up my spine and bursting, trumpeting into slivers of hot light behind my eyes, my thighs burning as I turn in bed, throwing one arm across my face, the other hand slipping instinctively across the sheets for her face, for Red, but she’s gone, and again the truth, my sin, my pain blooms within me, a mushroom cloud, a hot blast before I sink into black, release into sleep.

I smelled him before I opened my eyes. I curled up, small and whirled as a girl, as a seashell. I am hollow. I am scraped clean. Pricked sting of bitter coffee; he made the worst coffee, strong and thick, Egyptian, bracing, caffeine racing until he’s up, he’s off, he’s starting his day.

“I think you should get up,” he said.

I could have echoed the ocean, I was so hollow. Carved pumpkin, discarded seed. I opened one eye and he sat in the purple velvet chair, a street market find.

Red had been so thrilled she actually clapped, bouncing on her toes, as I peeled off bills to pay the tiny Gypsy woman with one eye. In that chair every morning and reading a battered paperback, something pulpy from the ’70s. She read the same book over and over, and when she finished she’d sigh, stroke the cover, and flip back to the beginning. The book, I saw now, that Papa Bear was flipping back and forth between his massive paws, his nails clean, gleaming in the mid-morning sunlight.

“I think you should get up,” he said again, his Russian accent a growl at the end.

“Heard you the first time,” I said into the pillowcase, wincing as lightning streaked through my temples.

“I have coffee.”

“Thank you.”

I reached a hand out from beneath the white sheets, dingy and streaked since I wouldn’t wash them, couldn’t wash them or I’d lose her scent, her trail.

“Shower first,” he said. Not a suggestion.

I sat up, hugging the sheet to my chest, tucking it around my hips like a petulant child. “Aw, come on, Steve.” No sense in calling him Papa anymore, considering. “Please? I really need it.”

“Shower first,” he said and stood, tossed the paperback on the scarred top of the dresser beside the chair. “Wash yourself off, you stink like brothel.” He moved to the door before turning, one beady eye assessing my knotted hair, my pulsing fat lower lip. “Then after shower and coffee, you’ll tell me what the fuck did you last night.”

“What you did,” I corrected, the back of my hand on my mouth.

His sneer was amused, and familiar, and terrifying. “No, what did you, I mean to say.”

I sat at our tiny kitchen table, my hair swaddled in a towel, and held out my hand. “Coffee.”

Steve lowered his newspaper and pushed a second, cooling mug toward me. “Better.”

I sipped, the aroma and spreading warmth making my eyes automatically flutter closed.

“Good.” He snapped the paper, rustled the edges. “Says here stripper was killed in back alley of Smiley’s. This your girl, your Red?”

At the sound of her name, guttural and trilled on his tongue, my stomach turned and I touched my lips with a paper napkin, greasy and befouled with duck sauce from Ginger Ho’s Best Time Chinese Take-Out. “Yes,” I answered, uneasily. “That was my Red. But you already knew that.”

“Now everyone knows it,” he said, rustling the newspaper again. He made low, unsatisfied growling sound, and I started to stand, silently, before he snapped, “You sit. Tell me why you come slinking in here smelling like whore.”

“Jesus,” I said, smacking a hand on the table and jarring the sugar bowl. “You’re not my goddamned father. I don’t have to answer to you.”

He snapped the paper closed and slapped it on the table. “You should be so lucky as to have father that cares about you, little girl,” he snarled. “Maybe then you wouldn’t get yourself in situations is difficult to extract from.”

“Oh, you know all about that, don’t you,” I shot back.

Steve laced his fingers, thick and furry with coarse swirls of black hair, and stared at me. “Am trying to help you here, Goldi girl. I cannot do that if you fight me tooth and tail.”

“It’s tooth and nail,” I began, but he stood abruptly, nearly knocking the table over. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, standing too and taking a step toward him. “I really am. I…I’m not exactly sure what happened last night. There was a lot of champagne to start with, and a lot of drugs, not even really sure what, but I’m pretty certain Molly made an appearance, and I think…I think I fucked Wolfe.”

“The cop?”

I nodded, running the edge of my thumb along my lower lip. Sudden flash of a gun, a pistol, and the greasy sour tang of metal on my tongue. I feigned sipping my coffee, feeling the heat of the moment wash over my face.

“Wait, who is this Molly?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I swallowed hard, forcing down hot bile, and had another flash of memory: a rumpled paper bag bulging uncertainly on his dusty, disgusting dining room table. “I just remembered something.”

“I have feeling there will be many things you remember this morning.”

I waved a hand at him. “No, no, shhh.” I couldn’t think, images crowding in and flashing. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I didn’t want to remember the gun or where it had gone, the dizzying uncertainty of what he’d have done, what I’d wanted him to do. His nails — more like claws piercing crescent moons into the buttery hollow of my throat. My hands flew up then, fingers flickering across my collarbone, pressing fleshy tender bruises — too late to hide them from Papa Bear. But he wouldn’t see the other bruises, see how much the thought of it…fuck me. That pistol.

I blinked, tried to blink those thoughts away before they betrayed me. I wanted to focus on something else, something, the thing, what was it that had flitted on the edge of my mind like a moth just then?

What I wanted to recall was that bag, because I had a pulsing thought that it was filled with cash.

“Money,” I whispered, looking up at Steve, whose head cocked quizzically to the side. “There was a bag — a paper bag, wrinkled and dirty, like it’d been on the streets — on his table, and I think it was filled with money.”

“That’s one dirty cop,” Bear mused.

“He’s a detective, actually. And yeah,” I nodded, moving to the kitchen window and looking out over the endless range of rooftops, water tanks, cell towers, the lanky limbs of the city reaching up, always reaching, wanting, scraping by. “He’s definitely dirty. And so is his gun.”

I explained to Steve how Smiley had forced me to sing (Was that my cash in that paper bag? What had I done with my tips? Did that nasty gun fuck steal my money?) and Wolfe had waited in the back for me, how we’d moved to the private room and things got real nasty real quick. (A backhand across my smart mouth, overturned table, bouncers I didn’t recognize tossing us out. But I’d held onto the bottle, unopened and waiting for its moment.)

I struggled with details moving deeper into the night, the cab ride, him popping the bottle while I sucked his cock, sucked the bottle like it was him, downing most it, passing it off to him until I’d thrown it up on the sidewalk somewhere in Nolita. Up too many flights of stairs, his tongue down my throat, dress half-open, fucking me against the door while he fumbled for his keys. His cock full of jet fuel. The bottle when his cock had its fill. And the pistol. Fuck, the pistol.

I shuddered, turned away, nearly dropping my coffee cup into the sink.

“It happens,” Steve dismissed this with a wave of his paw, and I walked away, tucked my legs beneath me on the couch, the images, the sensations, the blind thirst for him. “But get back to this money, this bag. You think this is your money, no? You think he took money from you on purpose, or you just forget to grab it when you slink out like common whore?”

“Nice, thank you.”

“Am serious, Goldi. You had to have a reason for going there, for doing what you did, and for not taking that money. Where is your money from last night?”

I shook my head, which was feeling less like a splintered mirror now thanks to aspirin, coffee and the shower, and spread my hands. “I honestly don’t know.” I fingered my lower lip again, licked a bit of blood away. I could still taste the Baretta. “I think he has it. I think. I dunno if it was mine, if it was from somewhere else. It was a lot of money though.”

Steve stood, threw back the dregs of his coffee and slipped on a light tan jacket I hadn’t noticed before. “Let’s go, then.”

I blinked at him. “Go?”

Nodding, he lumbered toward the back of the apartment, to my bedroom, where I heard him rummaging around, hangers clacking in the closet. When he returned he tossed a silky black jersey dress and a matching black bra and panty set at me, twirled an index finger. “Getting dressed now.”

I stared at him. “You want for us to go to Wolfe’s, break in and steal that money.”

He turned with what I can only describe as the most genuine, pleased and, might I add, first wide grin I’d ever seen on his face. “Listen you talk like me.”

I stood, rubbing the fabric of the jersey dress between my fingers. It had been Red’s. It took everything I had not to press it to my nose and inhale. “You lay it on thick, and I like it. Besides,” I hopped up to kiss his nose as I passed, pinching his cheek maybe a little too roughly, “I forgot my panties at Wolfe’s place. And those are my favorite pair.”

I’ve always loved riding the subway: there’s not a lot I like about the city — I prefer fresh air, blank slates of sky, the dense crowds of trees to those of people and skyscrapers, but I do enjoy the descent beneath the streets, the curved walls, the close proximity of breath.

“‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd,’” Steve said suddenly as our train whooshed to a hissy stop feet from us. “‘Petals on a wet, black bough.’”

I turned and looked up into his face.

“Is poetry,” he said, his flat brown face wrinkling. His hand slid around my waist as we waited for passengers to exit, a low press as he ushered me inside. “Ezra Pound,” he said into my ear.

I couldn’t take my eyes of him. “I know,” I whispered, and the doors whisked closed.

I crossed my arms, on the lookout while Bear worked on the lock of Wolfe’s back door, and leaned in closer to stay out of the drizzle. A cold rain, so far from the heat of Wolfe’s bed. I can’t believe I slept with him. I spat on the patch of scraggly dead grass at the base of Wolfe’s back stairs, trying to eject the memories, the blur of colors and sound, the shudders that went through my body each time I thought of the Baretta.

It had been years since I’d touched a dick, since I’d declared for the other side. But fuck how I wanted…no. Just no. But fuck. Even now I wanted him to throw open the door, standing there with his cock out and ready. Is that what he fucked her with? Is that why she stayed with him so long? Is that why she was leaving me? Did he make her cum like that, too? Fuck me. Fuck.

The door buckled and gave, suddenly swinging open into darkness, and Steve took a tentative step inside.

Damp rank of unwashed dishes and clothes. And recent sex. It permeated the room. Thick curtains throwing the studio apartment into shadow. Flies buzzing around the kitchen sink, sticky mess of spilt booze and tonic. Stale cigarette smoke and the earthy, musty smell of old books. I hadn’t noticed the mess then. All I could see was him.

“This fatalistic,” he said behind his hand. “A sty.” He nudged me with a crooked elbow. “You fuck this?”

I went straight for the dining room table, ignoring him.

The paper bag was gone. I called out to Steve, who pushed in behind me, ran a thick finger through the layers of dust. “Maybe he hid it? We look. Seek everywhere.”

“I need to find my panties, too.” And the Baretta. If he didn’t take it, I would. At least I wanted to see it again. To touch it. Fuck. I took a deep breath, scanned the room. It was here. The bag. The gun. The memories.

Steve grumbled, pushing over a haphazard pile of books on a sideboard crowded with coffee mugs of cigarette butts and sticky liquor. “Money is all that matters.”

He ticked over a ceiling to floor bookcase that hit the floor like rolling thunder as I padded across the studio to Wolfe’s bed. Bedsheets on the floor, where we ended up. Nothing there, just the smell of him, of us. I ran my hands across the cheap cotton, felt the lingering warmth. Or did I just imagine it?

The top drawer of Wolfe’s bureau was open. Nothing there but find boxers and undershirts and no less than three long strips of plastic-wrapped condoms. I slammed the drawer shut, opened the second one. Folded cotton shirts, running shorts (running shorts? this wasted fuck ran if he wasn’t being chased?), and a pistol taped to the back of the drawer. Before I could even think to touch it, I saw something that made my heart skip a beat.

A tight little white box hidden deep beneath a knot of rolled-up gym socks and a sealed envelope with one word scrawled on the outside: Red.

“What the –!” I’d flattened the envelope out on the top of the bureau (pushing aside a litter of Lotto tickets) and was about to slip a fingernail beneath the seal when I heard a loud bump and clatter, and then a muffled scream.

A woman’s scream.

I froze, my heart thudding to a halt. My head roared with white silence for a full five seconds before the world crashed back through my ears: a siren, a child’s laugh, two dogs barking in argument. I turned, at the same time opening the second drawer and shoving the box and envelope back beneath the socks, bumping the drawer closed with my hip. I touched my puffy lower lip, licked away blood.

Steve roared my name, and I leapt for the door.

He was standing in the doorway, the back door open, looking down at the body of a small woman, dark hair, face-down and very still, and he was holding a pink slip of silk in one huge paw.

“Found them,” he said, “and this.” He nodded at the woman crumpled on the steps.

“The fuck, Steve?” I cried, circling around the woman. “What did you do?”

He appeared genuinely puzzled, his beady eyes flicking between my panties and the woman on the floor. “I heard her at back door just as I found your panties,” he said reasonably. “I find them on floor underneath coffee table, there.” He pointed. “Am straightening up and look up to see her standing just there. She look angry and maybe a little strung out. And frightened, yes?”

“I bet,” I said, shaking my head.

“I come over before she can move and I hit her with this,” he nudged a shattered lamp with his toe, the base cracked into pieces near her face, which was completely covered by her long hair. “I don’t think I kill her, but would be best if we go now.”

I snatched the panties from him and shoved them into my bra, took his hand. “Too late to try and do anything about that door,” I said as we crossed the threshold and emerged, blinking, into the yellow air. “It’ll just look like she did it.”

“But what about lamp?” Steve asked as we hurried up the alley from the back of Wolfe’s place. “And the money?”

I shook my head again, glancing both ways as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, yellow taxis flashing past, honking horns and the soft smell of pizza and pretzels at the corner. “I don’t know, I -.” That’s when I saw it: a dark blue Chevy parked out front of Wolfe’s place. I reached instinctively for Steve’s hand again, clutching. “Come on,” I said, as low as possible but so he could still hear me. “Time to go.”