Patricia Cornwell - Southern Cross

'Who's bartending?' Smoke announced to the girl and three boys inside the boggy, musty-smelling suite. 'We got something to celebrate. Weed, meet your new family. That's Divinity, and the three assholes there are Dog, Sick and Beeper." 'That's their real names?' Weed couldn't help but ask.

'Their slave names,' Smoke replied.

The Pikes were sipping vodka out of Dixie cups and smoking cigarettes. They looked at Weed and seemed amused, their eyes laughing at him as they lounged on stained, sour-smelling mattresses.

Divinity was dark-skinned, but Weed didn't think she was black, maybe Hispanic or a little bit of everything. She wasn't wearing a bra, and her tight sheer black undershirt showed more than Weed had ever seen in person. Her slender legs in their worn-out jeans were spread wide. She was really pretty.

Dog was big and looked mean and stupid, and Sick had acne and a dark buzz cut and five loops in his right ear. Beeper seemed a little nicer, or maybe it was just that he was small like Weed. Each of them had a number tattooed on the right index finger and seemed oblivious to the nasty mattresses and the rotting wall-to-wall brown carpet beneath them.

Strewn about were plain oak chairs that Weed associated with school, and TV trays, and boxes of paper napkins and Dixie cups. Candles of all description sat in puddles of hardened wax on windowsills, and the motel furniture was so warped the Formica lamination was curling up. Piled in corners were boxes of chalk, erasers, a slide projector, library books, a corkboard, throw pillows, and at least a dozen empty wallets and ladies' purses and just as many pairs of leather tennis shoes of different sizes. Cases of liquor were stacked up to the water-stained ceiling. Smoke lit one of the candles while Divinity poured Smirnoff into a Dixie cup and handed it to him.

'Are you gonna change my name?' Weed asked.

'Give him some,' Smoke ordered Divinity.

She poured a cup of vodka for Weed and laughed when he hesitantly took it from her.

'Go on.' Smoke jerked his head at Weed.

Weed's daddy drank straight liquor all the time, but Weed never had. He knew it made his daddy mean and sent him out running around and not coming back, sometimes the entire weekend Weed was visiting. The vodka burned and almost gagged Weed. Instantly his face heated up and his brain got lighter.

'Naw,' Smoke said as he held out his cup for more and gestured for Divinity to refill Weed's as well. 'You got such a fucking stupid name, I'm just gonna leave it. We couldn't do much better than Weed if we tried, could we?' he said to his gang.

'No, baby.' Divinity sighed as she laid back on her mattress, hands beneath her head, breasts pointed up at the ceiling.

Smoke caught Weed staring.

'You never seen tits before, retard?' he asked.

Weed downed his second cup of vodka and thought he might be sick.

'Sure I seen 'em,' he stuttered.

'Bet you haven't either, retard.' Smoke laughed. 'Except maybe in pictures when you try to jerk off that little golden rod of yours.'

Everybody laughed with him, including Weed. Weed tried to get cocky and show no fear.

'Fuck,' Weed strutted. 'I seen tits bigger 'an hers.'

'Show him.' Smoke snapped his fingers at Divinity.

She pulled up her shirt and smiled at Weed. He stared, his mouth falling open, his face so hot he thought he had a bad fever. She had tattoos of targets and flower petals in places he could not believe.

'You can look, but you touch and I shoot your balls off,' Smoke said in a menacing tone. 'Everybody knows the rule, right?'

Beeper, Sick and Dog nodded blearily. They didn't seem the least bit interested in Divinity or her equipment. Smoke dropped down next to her on the mattress. He started feeling her and kissing her, his tongue about to get dislocated from his mouth. Weed had never seen anybody act like that in front of other people. It didn't make any sense to him, and he wanted to run as fast as he could and wake up in another city.

'All right, baby, you ready to cook?' Smoke asked, his tongue in her ear.

'Yeah, sugar.'

She languidly reached behind her and got hold of a box of syringes and a Bic ballpoint pen. Weed watched with growing terror as Smoke started heating a needle in the candle flame while Divinity smashed the pen with the butt of the vodka bottle. She pulled out the slender ink tube and dabbed a dot of black ink on her wrist, as if she were testing the warmth of baby's milk.

'We got it, sugar,' she said.

'Get your ass over here,' Smoke ordered Weed.

Weed was paralyzed.

'What'cha gonna do, Smoke?' His voice got small again.

'You gotta get your slave number, retard.'

'I don't need one. Really I don't.'

'Yeah you do. And you don't get your puny ass right here right now' - he patted the mattress where he and Divinity sat - 'then I'm gonna have to get the boys here to convince you.'

Weed walked over and sat on the mattress, a musty, yeasty smell assaulting his nostrils. He held his legs close together and wrapped his arms around his knees, his fists clenched to hide his fingers as best he could. Smoke slowly turned the needle in the flame.

'Hold out your right hand,' he commanded.

'I don't need no number.' Weed tried not to sound like he was begging, but knew he did.

'You don't hold it out now, I'm gonna chop it off.'

Divinity poured another cup of vodka and handed it to Weed.

'Here, honey, this will help. I know it don't feel good, but we all had it done, you know?" she said, holding out her delicate finger with its homemade 2 tattoo.

Weed drank the vodka and caught on fire. His mind went somewhere and when he put out his hand, he was surprised that he could tolerate the sticks and deep scratches of the red-hot needle. He didn't cry. He threw a switch that turned off pain. He didn't look as Divinity dripped ink into the wounds and rubbed it in good. Weed swayed and Smoke had to tell him twice to sit still.

'Your slave number's five, little shit,' Smoke was saying. 'Pretty good, huh. That makes you in the top ten - hell, it makes you in the top five, right? That makes you a first-string Pike. And a fucking lot is expected of a first-string Pike, right, everybody?'

'Sure as fuck is."

Tucking got it fucking straight.'

'Honey, don't you fret. You're gonna be just great,' Divinity reassured Weed.

'We're going to initiate you, retard,' Smoke said as again he stuck the needle in Weed's right index finger, above the first knuckle. 'You're gonna do a little paint job for us.'

Weed almost fell over and Divinity had to hold him up. She was laughing and rubbing his back.

'We're gonna show this city who we are once and for all,' Smoke went on, full of liquor and himself. 'You got paints, don't you, little art fag?'

Smoke's words whirled inside Weed's head like the Milky Way.

'He's gone, man,' Beeper said. 'Whatta we do with him?'

'Nothing right now,' Smoke said. 'I got an errand to run.'

It was almost eight P.M., and Virginia West was glad. Working long hours meant she didn't have the energy to get emotional about the dishes in the sink, the dirty clothes on the floor, the clean ones draped over chairs and falling off hangers.

She didn't have to wait for Brazil to ring her up and suggest a pizza or just a walk like he used to back in Charlotte. She knew from her InLog of calls that he never tried, but why should he? She made sure he knew she was never home. If it even crossed his mind to call, he wouldn't because it was pointless. She was busy, out, not thinking of him, not interested.

In fact, eight P.M. was earlier than usual. West preferred to roll in around ten or eleven, when it was too late to even call her family on the farm, where she rarely visited anymore because she now lived so far away. Time had become West's enemy. A pause in it echoed with an unbearable emptiness and loneliness that sent her fleeing from the nineteenth-century town house she rented on Park Avenue, once known as Scuffletown Road, in Richmond's Fan District.