David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

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.”

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.