Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“I read a lot.”

“Can I have a cookie?”

He handed her the bag. “Knock yourself out.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Then she said, “I don’t suppose there’s like a radio in this hole.”

“There’s like not.”

“Sure, make fun.”

She got out of the chair. Slowly. It looked as if it hurt. She walked over to the front window and looked out. “Pretty.”

“Yeah.” More brilliant repartee, Neal thought.

“I stink.”

“Don’t get so down on yourself.”

“No, I mean I smell. Like bad.”

So much for Dr. Carey and positive reinforcement. “Do you want to take a bath?”

“Like yes.” She smiled back at him. If you can make fun of me, she was telling him, so can I.

“Like okay.”

“Where’s the bathroom? I don’t remember…”

“Outside.”

“Get real.”

“That’s as real as it gets.”

She lookod at him real hard. “Next time, I pick the hotel.”

Next time?

“C’mon. I’ll show you where it is.” It took them a good five minutes to walk the hundred feet to the tub. She was like an old lady. They stopped twice while she bent over to ease the soreness in her lower back. He hadn’t planned to heat water for her, but then he figured it would make her feel better.

“I’ll get a chair, you can sit outside for a while. Air’ll do you good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Heat the goddamn water.”

“How come you’re being so nice?”

“I’m a jerk.”

“Then can I have more tea?”

He took the cup from her and strode back into the cottage. Student, private eye, butler. May I help you?

It took forever to heat enough water for even a shallow bath. He’d check on her every few minutes, look out to see that she was still in her chair and not gimping in the direction of the village to get the next bus back to London and the needle. Never trust a junkie, he thought. But she stayed in her chair, dozing off from time to time, or watching the sheepdog work his flock.

The awkward moment came when the water was ready. Neal poured it into the tub, saving a bucket to rinse off with, handed her a towel, and started to walk away to give her privacy. She got up, stared at the tub, stared at Neal, stared at the tub, and then back at Neal again.

“What?”

“I don’t think I can get in.” She tried lifting her left leg to demonstrate. She could barely lift her foot to knee level.

“You want me to help you?” he asked, without the trace of a leer.

“I’d have to get undressed,” she objected. “In front of you.” A shy hooker? he thought. The proverbial new wrinkle.

“Alice, don’t you get undressed in front of men all the time?”

“That’s different. They’re strangers.” He appreciated the inverted logic that made what she said make sense.

“Okay. I’ll turn my back. You get undressed. I’ll help you into the tub as quickly as I can, then I’ll go away. You call me, and we’ll reverse the process.”

“I don’t know.”

“The water’s getting cold. If you’re not getting in, I will.” She thought about it for a second. Neal checked her out to see whether this was just a hooker game, a little hide-and-seek seduce-the-cop game. But she looked shy just then. She really did.

“Okay. But don’t look where you don’t have to.”

“Think of me as your doctor.”

“I could tell you stories…”

He turned around and heard her fumbling with her clothes. Her hands being none too steady, it took a couple of minutes. Then he heard a long sigh before she said, “Ready.”

He tried to focus on her eyes, but you know what it’s like when you try not to look at something. Her body was beautiful, and Neal quickly dismissed the sinking feeling in his gut.

“Come on, before the water gets cold,” she said. She was blushing, and the gooseflesh must have come from the crisp morning air. She crossed her arms over her breasts and looked away from him. It might have been the sexiest gesture he had ever seen.

“Turn around,” he said.

“What?”

“So I can lift you into the tub, idiot.”

“You don’t have to get mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“You sound mad.”

She turned around and Neal made a determined effort not to look at her as he held her around her waist and struggled her into the tub.

She let out an unholy shriek as she hit the water. “Getting cold? This is boiling!”

“It’ll feel great in a minute.”

“I thought you were going to go inside.”

“On my way.” He talked as he walked. “Now don’t try to get out on your own! You could fall and hit your head!” He realized he sounded like somebody’s mother.

I have to get out of this business, he thought. He went inside and drank two cups of tea and ate six oatmeal cookies.

“Neal!”

“What?”

“I wanna get out!”

“Okay!”

She had spent a good half hour lying in the bath. He had looked out every few minutes (well, she was in a tub, you couldn’t see anything) to make sure she hadn’t drowned or run away. When he came out of the cottage, she was sitting up, her hair full of suds.

“Rinse me?” she asked. “I can’t bend over to get my head in the water.”

He poured the bucketful over her head, and she shook her hair out like a wet dog.

She held her hand out and he turned her and lifted her out of the tub. Their bodies touched as he set her on her feet on the ground. He let go of her quickly and wrapped a towel around her.

“We’d better get inside,” he said, and started walking her to the cottage. She did much better this time, and only needed a little support climbing the stairs. She got dressed in some old clothes he had found. They were too big for her, but the pants stayed up with a belt and the jersey was comfortably baggy. Neal was stoking the fire when she came downstairs, all on her own. She stepped gingerly into the sitting room.

“Neal?”

“Yeah?”

“I need some smack.”

She came into his arms and cried for a long time.

Colin hated living this way.

He had scrunched himself down in his grandda’s flat, a dingy cellar in the Old East End. He had a mattress in the corner of the sitting room and he could see the street through the one tiny window. He tried hard not to watch every pair of feet that came by, but the thought that Dickie Huan was tracking him down made it tough.

The room was a pit, a real trash heap, and the old man smelled bad, what with the steady diet of cheap sausage and cheaper beer. Plus the filthy old codger watched telly every second that he wasn’t down to the pub, and he liked those quiz shows where fat old bags in pink frocks won holidays to Brighton for knowing the Christian names of every Prime Minister since Christ was a road guard, or the titles of every ultraboring song they used to sing before they took a quick poke up the old canal and started breeding. If Colin had to sit through one more episode of Poldark, he thought he would just let Dickie Huan slice and dice him into pigeon feed. It might be less painful.

And the old one couldn’t shut up, either, not for a moment. He engaged in a never-ending monologue about the war, and then it was Gerry this and Gerry that until Colin would scream out that he wished Gerry had won the bleeding war, anyway, so that at the least the beer would be worth drinking.

Or the old boy would maintain a running dialogue with the quiz-show contestants, shouting out the answers, all of them wrong, and then heaping abuse on the stupid cows when they rejected his well-intentioned advice.

His other hobby was getting on Colin. He enjoyed the spectacle of his big-shot grandson creeping hack to the old neighborhood to hide out, and he never let Colin forget that he owed his existence to the old man’s sufferance. The dirty drunken bastard would deliver lengthy soliloquies about the evils of drugs and fancy ladies, about ponces and ’hores, and dope peddlers, and above all poofters and buggerboys. He was convinced, or pretended to be, that Colin fell into the last category, so he made sure to spice his anecdotes with references to “sodomites” and “bumjockeys” he had known in the Navy, replete with tales of dark and murky deeds done in hammocks.