Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

“Another time, baby. I’m busy.”

I ain’t your baby, baby. I ain’t nobody’s baby, baby baby baby. “What other time, baby? I’m out here all day.”

The man just keeps walking. Walking and sweating. Maybe she’ll see him on the way back from wherever he’s going, he’s so busy.

Her feet hurt.

Itching in the heat.

Jerry finds the Tahiti Inn.

Just in time too, because another two minutes he might have passed out. Last freaking job I take in the desert, he thinks, in the summer anyway. They want some guy taken off the roster in Phoenix in August, they can call somebody else.

The money is good, anyway. Do the job, hit the airport, fly back to Providence, and take Marcy on a little weekend to Block Island, like she’s been bugging him. Not much to ask, and she’s a good baby, Marcy, she don’t make too much trouble.

He walks past the big sign with the goofy tiki mask. The main office is shaped like a Tahitian hut, or what they think it looks like, anyway. Jerry doesn’t know — he’s never been to Tahiti or even Hawaii. Maybe he should spend a dollar and take Marcy to Hawaii, might not be a bad idea to get a little distance after this. Sit on the beach, watch the girls do the hula, maybe get Marcy fired up a little to lose those last five pounds.

Room 134.

They told him Rosavich is in 134.

Good. No stairs to go up or down.

He finds 134, pulls out the gun and holds it behind his back, then knocks on the door.

Abe dances with Estelle.

In his waking dream, the sun having lulled him into semisleep. In this dream that is not a dream, he’s in the old El Capri Ballroom, whirling her around, little dots of perspiration on her neck as she looks up at him and smiles. She wears a cornflower-blue dress and a string of pearls.

They had come down to Phoenix after the thing with Sol Hirsch went bad. Poor, stupid Sollie, hanging from the rafter in that loft while they took baseball bats to him. He finally told them what they wanted to know, but Abe had felt sick after that, and tired, so he’d said to Estelle, “Let’s take the new Buick down to Phoenix, stay on Van Buren. Do some dining, some dancing, get a tan.” She wouldn’t sit out in the sun, though, she said she liked her skin white and so did he. The few minutes she would sit out with him she’d wear that big floppy sun hat, even in the pool; she did the breast stroke and kept her head above the water. Then she’d go into the room, into the cool dark, and read paperback books and nap until he was ready to go to dinner.

That night at the El Capri she was so pretty.

He was young and handsome.

Van Buren was beautiful.

He sees Sollie Hirsch, his hand jerks, knocks the glass of grapefruit juice over, and he wakes up. Wonders where he is and then sees he’s on Van Buren under a white hot sun.

She don’t find nobody.

Cars go by but don’t even slow down to take a look. No one walks by — everybody has found a cool, dark place to be.

Everybody except me, she thinks.

Ain’t no cool, dark place for me in this bleached-out world.

The door opens and Jerry steps into a world of darkness.

So dark after the bright sun that he can’t see Benny Rosavich spring cat-quick with the knife.

Rosavich plunges the blade into Jerry’s leg and then slices sideways, severing the femoral artery. Jerry screams and backs out the door, which slams shut in front of him. The pistol falls from his hand and clatters on the baked concrete. He grabs his leg, trying to hold the blood in, but it pours around his fingers as he staggers out past the goofy sign and the Tahitian hut, onto Van Buren Street.

Abe looks down from his balcony and sees the man stumble up the sidewalk. A disgrace for a man to be drunk this early in the day. A disgrace and a shame. The man stops as if he’s lost and Abe wonders for a moment if he has sunstroke, then he sees the trail of blood and the man pirouette in an almost graceful dance before he staggers on.

Evie sees him come back.

Walking all goofy, like he’s messed up on glue or paint or something. She looks for the gold ring around his lips but doesn’t see any and then she realizes that he’s really messed up, his pant leg all bloody. He looks at her and this time he doesn’t call her “baby,” he just says, “Help me, please,” and topples at her red shoes.

Evie looks around, don’t see nobody but some old man trying to stand up on the motel balcony. She reaches down and slips the wallet from the man’s back jeans pocket where it was all snug and tight against the new fabric.

Then she walks up the alley into a thin slice of shadow.

Jerry rolls over.

Toward the sun.

Feels it in his face. It’s warm, and good now, because the rest of him is cold and he’s shivering.

He looks up at the sweet sun and smiles. Then the world goes white.

Christown

Luis wanted to go and get Catboy, but he knew he couldn’t. The cops might be watching the apartment, and even if they weren’t, they would certainly have forced their way in by now. They would either have taken Catboy to the pound or just ignored him, in which case he would be on the street. Luis fought a temptation to drive around and look for him.

He knew he’d better get out of town right away. At first he thought that the cops would think he’d left by now, so it might be safer to stay put and hide. But where would he hide? Too many people knew what he looked like and might call the cops as soon as they saw him. He knew there would be many vatos getting pulled in for questioning and fingerprinting on the off-chance that they might be him. Once he was far from Santa Fe he’d be safer, and safer still when he was out of the state. They’d be looking for him to head for Mexico, but that was okay with him because he wasn’t going to Mexico...

The place Vanjii moved into was in an apartment complex on Phoenix’s west side. There was a public phone out front with a sign that said, in Spanish, YOU CAN CALL MEXICO FROM HERE . Someone was always using it. Most of the people in the complex had jobs, some had phones and some didn’t, and none of them had any money.

Vanjii shared the apartment with two other people. Carlos, who’d been introduced to her by an old high school friend, had come to Phoenix from Santa Fe to learn to be an auto mechanic. He was hardly ever home. School and work kept him busy during the days and evenings, and he spent many of his nights at his girlfriend’s place.

The other roommate was Jaimie. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she’d suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part-time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a job, but she didn’t have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from the Spectrum Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

The walk to work was dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast, and loud to be real. The cars blasted by, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless, and they always came up to her, and they always said the same thing. Hey. Hey, I ain’t panhandling. It’s just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and... Vanjii had nothing she could give them.