David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

Every hour through the morning, he shook her awake, told her this was a precaution against concussion and checked her eyes, her pulse, her breathing. At first, Shel accepted this attention compliantly. He was a man who knew his beatings. After the fourth roust she grew irritable. By noon she was fending him off.

In the kitchen Abatangelo fixed himself coffee, his third pot of the day. Cup in hand, he dialed Lenny Mannion and begged off coming in that afternoon, resorting to the same excuse he’d concocted that morning: He said his eye was swollen shut from a spider bite. Mannion, from his tone, found this too weird to disbelieve. Abatangelo hung up, went into the front room and sank into the sofa, thinking things through.

His hourly calls on Shel had not been inspired solely by a desire to monitor the healing process. Every time he nudged her awake, Abatangelo grilled her a little further about what her life had been like the past few years. He kept it simple and innocent, blamed it on lost time, they had a lot of catching up to do. Little by little he gained a much clearer view into who this Frank character was. He learned in particular that though the dead boy had not been Shel’s, she’d felt a special devotion for him. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought. No joke.

He’d also learned a lot more about Frank’s friends, who they were and what they were up to, how Frank fit into all of it. Now that Shel seemed well enough to leave alone for a few hours, he intended to step out, make some calls. He had the beginnings of a plan.

There was something to this story about dead twins, he decided. Shel had been noncommittal when he brought it up. That was as good as a yes. Regardless, an inquiry or two seemed in order. Train a little light on the action, put Frank in the oldest bind of all: the law on one side, revenge from his pals on the other. Turn up the discomfort level. Help Frank find out what scared really feels like.

The alternative to this plan, of course, was to sit still. Wait and see. Do as Shel asked: nothing. Abatangelo considered this alternative, such as it was, unacceptable. He’d found himself pacing, and soon a feeling of being trapped arose. He’d thought it through all morning, weighing the various strategies, unable to choose the best, fussing over pointless distinctions, until it dawned on him he was doing exactly what he’d been warned against his first day out. How had the cab driver put it: Just because you can think deep thoughts, that don’t mean they ain’t got you right where they want you. Shel lay asleep in the next room, lucky to be alive, and he traveled the confines of a small room, pacing. Thinking. It’s a trap, he realized- the mind, it’s the perfect trap, a brilliant, beguiling, captivating trap. It was prison.

Get out, a voice said. Do something. Remind yourself what freedom feels like. Because if freedom doesn’t feel like the power to protect the person you love, what good is it? She wouldn’t have come to me for shelter if she didn’t, on some level, want me to make sure shelter meant something real. Frank wasn’t just some hapless loser- maybe once upon a time, but not now. Something had snapped. He was a killer.

He went back to the bedroom and knocked lightly, pushing open the door. Hearing him enter, Shel drew her covers tight around her head, peering out whale-eyed as he approached the bed.

“Don’t touch me, Danny.”

Abatangelo sat on the edge of the bed and settled his hand on her haunch. She squirmed away. “You poke at me one more time, I swear to God.” A frantic plaint pitched her voice, half mocking, half not. “I don’t want to be pissed at you, Danny. I love you, you’re driving me crazy, leave me alone.”

“Just let me see your eyes,” he said.

“No way. I mean it, I’m goddamn fine. Just let me sleep.”

He felt the sheets; they were warm but not too warm. “You don’t have a fever,” he told her. “And you’re pissy. I suppose that’s a good sign.”

“Damn right.”

“What if I’m wrong?” he said. “What if I end up having to cart you down to ER?”

“No hospitals,” she moaned, digging a vent through the blankets.

“Oh for God’s sake…”

“People die in hospitals. My aunt went in for an ulcer, got peritonitis. She never came out again.”

“Every family in the world has a story like that,” he said. “Come on, sit up. It’ll be over in a minute.”

She shot up. “Danny, so help me God. Please. If you really care, be a doll, run some errands, go to work. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.” She reached for an alarm clock beside the bed, set it for an hour ahead, said, “There, I’ll do it myself,” then dove back under the covers.

After another minute of silent watching, Abatangelo withdrew from the room. He made two rounds of the flat, secured the transom from within, dead-bolted the rear door, saw that the windows were locked. In the kitchen he checked his answering machine to see if there’d been any curious calls. Nothing. He went up front to check the street.

Noon light hazed among gray clouds, with hints of sun and burn-off coming. It had already rained. Chinese groceries, Italian cafés and local bars defiled along the arching pavement, bustling, loud. The bohemian ghetto. He stood there awhile, watching for a lone man waiting in a car, a suspicious loiterer, a window across the way with a man at the curtains.

When he came back to the bedroom Shel was asleep, facedown in her nest of pillows and snoring in a faint, adenoidal drone. He leaned down, studying her welts and bruises one last time. Gently, he kissed her shoulder, then the hand nearest to him. Her fingers smelled the same as her hair. He still suffered a nagging sense of unreality at her being there, no longer a mere fixation, no longer locked away in dreams. At the same time, an excruciating longing for her seethed through him, nesting in his hands, his groin, but the longing only reminded him that after ten years in prison, his capacity as a lover, as a knower of anyone’s body other than his own, was hideously malformed. And so the longing turned to shame. He couldn’t claim to be her lover, not yet. For now he was just the grim relentless figure who’d emerged from the desert. With business to attend.

So go take care of it, he told himself, turning away from the bed. Make sure there never comes another day you see her standing there in your doorway, battered, an inch away from dead.

Frank pulled into the parking garage of the Mayview Hotel. In the ticket stall, the attendant, wearing a hair net and blue coveralls, sang to the radio and beat his logbook with drumstick pencils. Frank collected his ticket, passed through the raised gate, found a parking stall and killed the motor. Waiting a moment, he checked for sounds. Someone started a car on a lower tier. The echoes spread through the vast dark underground, tires squealed on the smooth floor and then headlights appeared. Frank held his breath, watching the car pass and then waiting for the next silence. Finally, feeling safe, he headed from the truck toward the elevator.

He passed a rust-eaten Datsun laden with bumper stickers: GET A FAITH LIFT. THE CROSS IS BOSS. JESUS LOVES MY YORKIE. The elevator had metal walls, smelled of gasoline, and after a shuddering two-floor journey opened onto a clean, faded lobby.

The desk clerk, white, early twenties, exuded a bristling tidiness. His skin shone, his hair, his fingernails, his pink ears, everything about him emanated Fear of Imperfection. A text called Food Management lay open before him and he offered Frank the rigid smile of a student driver.

“Single room, two nights,” Frank told him.

His only luggage was a paper bag, filled with underwear and socks bought at the Pac’n’Save. He gave the name Justin Case to the clerk who accepted it with merry oblivion, tapping the keys of his computer as though to an inner song.