Dark End of the Street

Abby pulled away and looked down at her hand as if it had been infected. Her fingernails were cut close and her hands dry and chapped. Moisturizer.

“Well,” Abby began, staring at the purse that Perfect had by her side, a Navajo-print bag slightly open. At the top edge, a handgun’s muzzle poked out. Son of a bitch.

Perfect covered up the edge of the gun, politely smiled, and said, “Woman has to watch out for herself.”

Perfect then rolled her eyes like it was the silliest thing she’d ever done in her life and again cupped Abby’s hand in hers. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Abby excused herself and walked back to the bathroom where she brushed her teeth with a portable toothbrush and twice had to push away the urge to vomit. Just the thought of having to face the fucking town again made her sick.

Since she left the house that morning, she couldn’t even bring herself to look through her father’s files. The thought of seeing his signature or any bit of his work made her feel the decay of his body. Some kind of direct connection to the physical presence she knew was rotting away.

She felt the bile rise in her throat and threw up a thick wad of the cheeseburger into a brown-stained sink.

When nothing else would come but dry heaves, she brushed her teeth again, stepped into a stall, and changed into a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and clean underwear. At the sink counter, she carefully folded her dirty clothes on top of the duffel bag and stared at her reddened eyes.

For a few moments she cried until a hillbilly-looking woman, who didn’t have a neck and kept a slight moustache, came in and sat down on a toilet. The door was wide open.

If it got too bad, she could always get Maggie to take her back here. Abby grabbed her bag and decided she’d leave with Ellie.

On the way out, she paused and looked down the long hallway. Some video games plinked nearby in a desolate video arcade. A long row of lockers with orange turnkeys lined a far wall.

Abby emptied the duffel bag into a small blue locker and filled it with her old T-shirt and panties. She dropped in her remaining four quarters and turned the key.

Chapter 8

THE GOLDEN LOTUS OOZED with sex and tired Chinese food. Just sitting in the parking lot with the sound of my Bronco’s motor ticking in my ears, I could tell that the vegetables would be overcooked, the snow crab frostbit, and the egg rolls soggy. Of course, the patrons probably didn’t give a shit. The little cinder block building topped with a pagodalike tile roof near the airport also offered table dances with your egg foo young and a shower show with your moo goo gai pan.

I shut off my engine and walked to an ornate red door guarded by a teenage girl in a bikini top and hip-hugger jeans. She wore stiletto heels with rabbit fur straps, and an angoralike sweater hung loose off her bony shoulders. She smiled briefly at me, remained perched on her barstool, and took a five buck cover.

Her fingers slowly traced a vertical scar that ran from her navel to the clasp of her bikini top as her gaze drifted to a long black row of clouds rolling across the flat land of the airport where a 727 rumbled overhead.

Inside, the floor was concrete and the room smelled of clove cigarettes and cherry air freshener. There were three amoeba-shaped elevated stages throughout the shadowed bar pumping with a slow Ann Peebles song. Couldn’t stand it, baby, if you said we were through. That’s what you keep on doin’ to me. Heartache. Heartache. Heartache.

A brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty wearing only pearls looped in a knot like a man’s tie stooped to the floor of the center stage and pulled off a balding patron’s glasses. She crushed the frames between her breasts and placed them back on his head upside down. Throughout the bar, there were only six guys – most eroded businessmen with wrinkled shirts, slightly untucked – watching the matinee show. Pink and green neon glowed in the dark cave while a soft gray rain began to patter the sun-bleached parking lot framed by the open door.

I lit a cigarette and took a seat at the long bar and ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress was about my age, somewhere between thirty and forty. She had short brown hair, not boy short, but cut just below the ears and tosseled in her eyes.

“Mr. Cook around?” I asked.

She shrugged. She had a sharp nose and full lips. I could tell she worked out by the shape of her biceps as she poured the coffee and firmly shoved a cracked mug before me.

“Could you check?”

“Why?” she asked.

Her man’s ribbed tank top didn’t quite touch the edge of her dark blue jeans held together with a Western belt.

“Health inspector,” I said. “Somebody found a G-string in his wonton soup.”

“That’s funny,” she said. She chewed gum, keeping her eyes trained to a soap opera. The television was muted and suspended by chains from the ceiling. “I never heard shit like that before.”

“It’s true, and the other day someone reported the indecent use of a fortune cookie.”