David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

Shel said to Abatangelo, “Time to get wet, big fella.”

Making a little bow, he let the towel drop. He still had his shape from prison lifting, which the Speedo showed off to grand effect, barely covering his basket.

Wiggling her fingers, Shel said, “Yummers.”

Polly climbed out of the pool, her head thrown back. “Your turn,” she said to Abatangelo, shaking her hands of water. “Make sure she kicks.”

“Show Polly-Wogs how pretty you are in the water,” Shel hollered, clapping her hands. The sound echoed through the vast domed space, and surrendering to the mood of celebration, Abatangelo made a racing dive, skimming the surface with barely a splash. He took one fast lap, switching from Australian crawl to backstroke to butterfly as the mood dictated, then came up behind Shel and slipped his arms underneath her breasts. Her nipples hardened at the touch, sprouting under the slick black fabric.

“Come on,” he said. “Kick.”

He pulled her behind him as she made knifing thrusts with one leg then the other, the right clearly abler, stronger than the left. He wondered how long it would take, getting her to walk again. Wondered if she’d even survive that long. Stroke, he thought. Aneurism. To lose her now, after all they’d survived, wouldn’t that be a nice little valentine from the gods. Once he felt confident they were out of Ed’s and Polly’s earshot, he said softly, “Tell me the truth, how are you?”

She stopped kicking and wiped a gluey strand of hair from her face. “I’m an old woman,” she whispered. “You’re still gonna love me, right?”

He dunked her under the water, held her for a second, then let her up. She gasped, wiped the water from her face and sputtered, “Asshole.”

“Tell me how you’re doing.”

She gauged the space between them and the bleachers. “I don’t sleep much,” she admitted.

“Scared?”

“God yes.”

He moved a little further into the center of the pool.

“Not just me,” Shel said. “Eddy freaks every time a Mexican walks into his shop. Boy’s jumpy as a bug. It’s nuts, he knows it, but it’s got him beat.”

“I think I know how he feels,” Abatangelo said.

Despite his attempts to keep a low profile, word of Abatangelo’s presence at San Bruno had circled quickly inside. It was the kind of notoriety that would make him a prize to some lowlife mutt or desgraciado eager to make his name, which was why he’d elected for solitary.

As for Shel, she’d been granted immunity through Cohn’s intercession in exchange for a series of interviews with the law. She still got calls at least once a week to come in, sit down with Detective So-and-So, he wanted to go over just one more aspect of this thing, tie up a little loose end. It was a good-news-bad-news sort of arrangement; she’d be safe but at the mercy of law enforcement for a good long while, and when she was no longer at their mercy she’d be cut free to fend for herself.

“It’s not just the scared part, though,” Shel went on. “These pills, there’s times I feel like I’m watching myself watch myself watch something. And the thing I keep seeing is him. Cesar, I mean. I tricked him, gave him the idea it was him and me, baby, on the run.”

“Shel- ”

“I had to, I know that, it was my only way out. If he didn’t exactly save my life, though, he did at least refuse to kill me. It’s the only reason I’m here. But then, like I said, I see him. Up against the wall, you holding him there, trying to get him to listen, to see, to stop, and that thing in his eyes when he figured it out and the hate and then the gun going off- ”

“I didn’t want,” Abatangelo began, stopping because he caught a whiff of self-pity in it. Changing tacks, he said, “Not much of a sleeper myself these past few weeks.”

He lay awake most nights till dawn, trying to negotiate a truce with his foreboding. Felix Randall was back in Boron. He’d been able to keep his empire alive before from inside prison, but his organization lay in shambles now. Dayball, Tully, his other lieutenants were dead or in lockup. And in that void, the Mexicans accomplished their principal goal, tightening their grip on the Delta meth trade. Rumor suggested the stranglehold would be short-lived. It’d be only a matter of time, they said, before the locals reclaimed the territory, taking it back inch-by-inch as the homegrown masterminds learned the ephedrine cooking process and their labs cropped up everywhere again.

Regardless, Rolando Moreira hadn’t stuck around to gloat, not with the press coverage Waxman had caused. He’d fled to Mexico, claiming family business interests beckoned and leaving behind a phalanx of lawyers and straw men to deny all. Victor Facio, never one to relish the public eye to begin with, vanished completely. Rumors placed him back in Mexico, now fully in the service of Marco Carasco, the Sinaloan trafficker behind Moreira’s operation. The El Parador Hotel, out in Montezuma Hills, sat empty, still cluttered with the debris from Larissa Moreira’s quince.

“Sometimes,” Shel said, breaking the silence, “I wake up in the middle of the night with the taste of Cesar’s blood in my mouth. The way it tasted when I bit him.”

He tightened his arms around her. “I get the same thing,” he admitted. “Except with me it’s the smell that hung in the air right after Frank triggered his bomb.”

She rested her cheek against his arm. “Poor, sad, fucked-up Frank.”

He flinched a little at her tone, and caught himself again wanting to say, I didn’t want…, or some such, but she beat him to it. “If I had a nickel for every good intention gone bad,” she said, “we’d be set for life. Good intentions gone bad and people I never meant to hurt.”

He trolled her backward around the pool, glancing up at Ed and Polly on the bleachers. They sat close, sharing the Sunday funnies, him in his street clothes, her wrapped in a towel. Suddenly they laughed out loud, knocking against each other, rattling the comics between them. Shel glanced up then, too.

“Polly’s been the queen’s kid sister,” she said. “Even helps me dress sometimes, when I’m just… such a klutz. I feel stupid. And Eddy, God. Eddy’s been stellar.”

“It’s his nature,” Abatangelo said.

“If anything happens to them,” she said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”

Abatangelo kissed her hair. It smelled of chlorine and shampoo. “They’re not here,” he said, “because it’s easy. It’d be nice if we could wish the risks away, but we can’t.”

“We could disappear.” The words came out rushed, hopeless. “Leave them out of it.”

“You tried that once, remember? Where’d it get you?”

“It’s not fair,” Shel said. “Not for them. I’m serious, Danny.”

“Everybody’s serious,” he responded, “and everybody’s scared. Too bad that’s no excuse. If people care about you, return the favor. Love them back. Have the guts to be grateful, make it worth their while. Running’s chickenshit and there’s no guarantee it’ll protect anybody, anyway. I realize, like a lot of sound advice, that’s easy to say and hard to live by and doesn’t seem to solve much, but…”

He tightened his grip around her and kept moving, kissing her hair again. Swirling the water with her feet, she watched the froth dissolve behind her and settled back against his arms, lulled by the rhythm of his breathing. In time, he lay his cheek against her hair and hummed a tune she couldn’t quite place at first. Gradually, it came to her- it was one of the songs he’d sung that night at his flat, when he dropped her into the tub of scalding water and nursed her. A comical song, except now she detected sadness in it. Not tragic or crazy-making or wrong. Gentle. True. Maybe it’s the way he’s humming it, she thought, or just your imagination, or these pills. Then again, maybe it was there all along, that sadness.