Andrew Vachss - The Weight

She blew smoke at the windshield. “See, that’s one of the differences between us.”

“You and me?”

“Men and women. Call a man a boy, he’s all insulted. Call a woman a girl, she’s all happy and sweet.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Men don’t,” she said, like she was done answering a lot of questions I never asked.

I didn’t look at her real close, either-you don’t do that. The windows of the big car were tinted, so you could look outside without sunglasses or anything. There wasn’t all that much to see.

The car was like a room with the curtains pulled. Every time the woman finished with a cigarette, she pushed a button and her window went down so she could snap the butt out into the street. Like opening the curtains for a second.

All I could really tell about her was she had long hair. Some dark color, but not black. I couldn’t see much of her upper body-she was wearing a light jacket and a dark blouse-but her right leg had a lot of definition around the calf. Dark nail polish, big flashy stone in a ring on her left hand-I saw it every time she made a right turn.

I didn’t see how she could drive with such high heels. White ones, with red soles. I remembered what this one girl I stayed with for a while was always telling me about the tricks women used to look thinner. White made you look bigger, she always said. So either this girl had small feet or she didn’t give a damn.

No way this one doesn’t give a damn , I thought.

“You’re Albie’s niece, right?” I said, just to make certain-sure I was in the right car.

“His what ?”

“Solly said-”

“Uh-huh,” she half-laughed. Sounded like sandpaper on soft wood.

I just shut up.

The longer we drove, the less the place looked like a city… and it hadn’t looked much like one when we started. It took about forty-five minutes before we came up on a pair of big stone piles, with a space between them just wide enough to let a car through. As we turned in, the girl reached into her purse. Her hand stayed there for a couple of seconds, came out empty.

We went down a long road. It was paved, but no wider than a driveway. Ran pretty straight, but sometimes it curved around a giant tree or some swampy-looking water.

She reached in her purse again just before we took a sharp right and then an even sharper left, like a zigzag. That’s when I saw the house.

It was more like a warehouse than a place people lived. Not that it was a dump-you could see it cost a lot of money. But it was only one story, and everything around it was cement, like a parking lot.

A garage door lifted. She pulled the car inside. I got out and waited for her to pop the trunk. That’s when I saw the car was one of those Lincoln Town Cars the limo companies buy.

“That one’s mine,” she said. I looked in the next bay. A little turquoise convertible, two-seater. “I thought you might have too much stuff to fit in it.”

Yeah, that’s why, all right , I thought to myself. The Lincoln was something you wouldn’t look at twice-but a long-haired girl in a little convertible…

“Follow me,” she said.

We went down a corridor. The carpet was so thick we didn’t make a sound.

“Yours is there,” she told me. I figured she meant where I was supposed to stay, so I dropped my bags.

It looked like a hotel suite. Not just a bedroom, but a living room, too. Lots of closets. A big chest of drawers, with the bottom drawer opened. No kitchen.

I wondered if that had been Albie’s idea of a joke: every decent burglar knows you start with the bottom drawer, saves you a few seconds on each one, because you don’t have to close it before you move up to the next.

“You can take off those glasses now.” I did it. One glance at my eyes was all she needed.

“You need to unpack?”

“I guess so.”

“So…?”

She stood right there, watching me put the stuff from the suitcases in the closet and the drawers. I didn’t open the duffel.

“Come on,” she told me, turning around and moving off.

I followed her again. It wasn’t just the heels that gave her the height-I put her at around five nine. I could see muscle flex all the way up to her lower thighs. From the way that little jacket bounced, I guessed the muscles didn’t stop at her legs.

We ended up in a white room. Not just the paint; it had all white furniture, too. The floor was white glass tile-her heels started clicking as soon as she stepped on it-and even the walls looked like they were made of some kind of white stone.

She knew exactly where she wanted to sit. A white leather chair with padded arms. She crossed her legs, opened both hands, and made a “pick your own” gesture.

I did that. One whole wall looked like a monster fireplace. Who would build a fire in weather like this? But it looked like it had been used plenty.

A flat-panel TV was on the opposite wall-it kept showing different pictures of flowers, one after another. Pyramid speakers al most as tall as me in two far corners. I couldn’t hear any hum, but I could feel the A/C.

No windows. None at all. But two doors. Besides the door we came through, there was one behind where she was sitting.

“You want anything?”

“Water would be great.”

“Go through the door behind me. The kitchen’s to the right.”

Making sure I got the message: she wasn’t the maid; she was the owner.

The kitchen was all stainless steel. I could see a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, an oven, even a chrome microwave, but no stove. There was a long strip of something laid into the top of what had to be a fifteen-foot slab of ash-gray granite-maybe that’s where they cooked.

The refrigerator had all kinds of drinks. I didn’t want to go poking through all those stainless-steel cabinets looking for a glass, so I just took the biggest bottle of water I could find and went back inside.

“That’s Containe,” she told me, pointing at the bottle I was holding.

“Not water?”

“It’s fortified water.”

I uncapped the bottle and took a big swig. Tasted like water to me.

“You can’t taste the difference,” she said, like she was cutting me off before I could say it myself.

“It’s fine the way it is.”

“What it is, is enhanced ,” she said, shaking her head a little when she said that last word-her hair kind of breezed before it settled down. A dark shade of red, easy to see against all that white.

Her blouse was almost the same color as her hair. A couple of buttons were opened. I could see that what she meant by “enhanced” covered more than a dye job on her hair.

“I’m Rena.”

“Stanley,” I said. “Stanley Wilson.”

“I like ‘Wilson’ better. You look like a guy who should have that one.”

“I don’t-”

“For your first name. So I’ll do that. Call you ‘Wilson,’ if you don’t mind.”

“Me? No.”

“It’s not like it’s your real name anyway,” she said. Not asking a question; just saying it.

“Is ‘Rena’ yours?”

“It’s what Albie liked.”

“You’re his… widow?”

“That’s a sweet way to put it.”

“Solly said-”

“Now, Solly, I am his niece.”

“For real?”

“What’s real? To me, he’s Uncle Solly. To him, I’m Rena. That’s the way I was introduced to him, understand?”

“Not really.”

She took a deep breath. She was either getting annoyed or showing off.

“Albie and Solly were brothers. And do not ask ‘For real?’ again, okay? Solly comes down here, oh, maybe seven, eight years ago. Albie meets him at the airport. They walk in, and here I am. Albie says, ‘Rena, this is your uncle Solly.’ And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”