Seven
When Jennifer left the apartment and closed the door
behind her, Wanda flopped down in front of the television and floated in a
warm and serene universe, wishing that she, too, was young and beautiful
again. It seemed like only yesterday that she had been seventeen or
whatever uncertain age Jennifer was with all the world lying at her
doorstep. Year by year, the world had revealed itself to her as a
landfill of corrupt human flesh, not fit for anyone’s doorstep. Her place
within that tainted world had shrunk so much that it barely encompassed
the need to find a healthy vein for the needle she had been using for the
past week.
She sensed that something terrible had happened to
bring Jennifer crashing into her apartment in the middle of the night.
She told herself that she would have only burdened the younger girl in her
flight to safety, but she had feared separating herself from the only
dependable source of the drugs she needed to survive.
She’d be safe enough left behind. Who’d bother with
her? At thirty-five years of age, men weren’t paying her the attention
they had in earlier years. Not that she minded. The hassle of Miss
Peugeot’s high-class lifestyle had taken its toll. It was so much easier
to dish it out to slower traffic at fifty bucks a pop from her own
apartment. Even the candy man made houscalls in the hood.
If she was in any danger herself, it hardly
mattered. Pain was tolerable. Pain had been an intimate part of her life
for as far back as she could remember, the cold of an unheated flat in the
winter, or the impact of a fist against the side of her face, delivered by
her father, a drunk john, or a pissed cop. She had tolerance for pain, but none for
fear, and fear had crept into every corner of her world, the creeping-type
horror like in the movies where a fly with a human head shrieks for help,
caught in the web of a large black spider. That would be her fate in life
the day she became too old and ugly for anyone at all to bother with at
all, johns and cops alike, unloved and unworthy of love, or even of pain.
She would become that human fly, misshapen and easy prey for anyone out
for a cheap thrill. She had already decided to overdose before that
happened.
The tap at the door snapped her back from her foggy
ruminations. “Hold your horses!” she called out, climbed back to her feet
with a groan, and shuffled her way to the front entrance. Important
people knocked at her door from time to time. men with cash and drugs. Miss Piggy would never
approve.
This particular visitor had silver hair and dark
eyes. He had a nice smile, and with a faint European accent he said hello
to her.
“It’s late,” Wanda said, suspicious of visitors so
late at night. “What do you want?”
His smile was infectiously innocent, but he stepped
close and forced her to back away from the door. Only when he filled her
field of vision did she notice how pale he was, and the beads of sweat
running off his forehead. His eyes were bright with maniacal fury. “Who
was the kid?” he said, keeping his voice low. “Where’d she go?”
Wanda knew better than to volunteer information to a
stranger, regardless of how high she was. “What kid?” she muttered in
reply.
“Evelyn Haxx and I had a date tonight. The young one
must have followed her. I caught her snooping inside my house.”
“She’s just a kid at that,” Wanda said cautiously. She
understood now that he was speaking of Jennifer. “She’s not usually a
problem.”
“She was a problem tonight. Where did she go?”
“Talk to Francis about it,” Wanda said in a monotone,
dimly hoping he’d take no for an answer and leave.
The man chuckled. “I’d like to catch up with her
tonight, if at all possible. We have a misunderstanding to clear up.”
Wanda kept retreating from the advancing man until
she backed against the far wall. She wet her lips with the tip of her
tongue, trying to sort out the nature of the crisis through her warm
fuzzies. Evelyn wouldn’t have let a client deal with a problem himself,
and Wanda had never known Jennifer to cause trouble. Therefore, her
visitor spelled serious trouble all by his lonesome.
“If you had a date with Evelyn, call Evelyn,” Wanda
said, certain that Evelyn would never have dated the likes of this man.
The man’s voice hardened. “I haven’t got much time.
You know what I want. Where’s the girl?”
Some of her old discipline came to her rescue.
“Francis handles complaints. It ain’t my department.”
She heard the snick of the switchblade the same
instant his right hand caught her across the throat and slammed her head
against the wall. She felt the blade sting her skin just below her
navel. “Again,” he said through an unwavering smile. “Where’d she go?”
Wanda spat out the address through the pressure
choking her, through her mortal terror. Afterward, she thought that she
should have lied and fed him useless information, except that he’d come
back and hurt her out of spite.
“That was a good girl.”
“You bastard,” she managed to spit at him through the
pressure against her windpipe.
“The only thing I need from you now is for you to
keep your mouth shut, and I know just how to arrange that.”
He drew the point of the blade higher, pausing just
below her sternum. She didn’t think that he meant to hurt her, because
his expression smoothed over so peacefully.
“If only you understood the pleasure of it all,” he
whispered, and the knife plunged so deep that she felt the pressure of his
fist against her skin and nothing of the blade itself, at least not for an instant.
The universe exploded in a primal fireball of pain
and light. It was like the time she had dropped her hair dryer into the
bathtub, a moment of violent chaos and then blackness descending like a
protective cloak. That time, she had fallen out of the tub and saved
herself. This time, nothing stopped the darkness.
She felt momentary concern for poor little Jennifer.
Within fractions of a second, she had no surviving memory of Jennifer,
none even for her own existence. The cloak of darkness evaporated
into nothingness.
