Bear, Elizabeth One Eyed Jack i

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.The scent of bougainvillea and jacaranda filled the spaces of the night.I watched them skipping from streetlight to streetlight, shadows stretched out behind them, catching up, and then reaching before.The brown-haired one walked a few steps ahead of the bleach-blonde, humming to herself.I couldn’t help it.It wasn’t one of my standards, but every blues singer born knows the words to that one.Hell, I used to have a horse by that name.I picked up the tune.I had to.“.they call the Rising Sun.It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy.And me, O God, I’m one!”Their heads snapped up.Twenty, maybe.I was dead before they were born.Gratifying that they recognized my voice.“Fellas, don’t believe what a bad woman tells you—though her eyes be blue, or brown.” I strolled out of the shadows, ducking my head and smiling, letting the words trail away.The dark-haired girl did a doubletake.She had a lovely nose, pert and turned up.The blonde blinked a couple of times, but I don’t think she made the connection.I’d changed my appearance some, stopped dying my hair black, and I’d lost a lot of weight.The stench of garlic on their breath would have thickened my blood in my veins—if I had any left.I swallowed hard, remembering all those songs about wandering ghosts and unquiet graves.Ghosts that all seem to want the same thing: revenge, and to lie down and rest.I smiled wider.What the lady wants, the lady gets.“Oh, wow,” the darker girl said.“Do you have any idea how much you look like.”The street was empty, dark and deserted.I came up under the streetlight, close enough to reach out and touch the tip of that nose if I wanted.I dropped them a look that used to melt hearts, sidelong glance under lowered lashes.“People say,” I answered.And, sick to my stomach, I broke their necks before I fed.It was the least I could do.Poison roiled in my belly when I laid them out gently in the light of that streetlamp, in the rich dark covering the waterfront, close enough to smell the sea.I straightened their spines so they wouldn’t look so terrible for whoever found them, but at least they wouldn’t be coming back.It was happening: my limbs jerked and shook.My flesh crawled with ripples like fire, my tongue numb as a drunk’s.I’m going back to New Orleans, to wear that ball and chain.Not this time.Struggling to smooth each step, to hide the venom flooding my veins, I hurried back to my poor, hungry mistress.I stole the brunette’s wallet.I stopped and bought breath mints at the all-night grocery.I beat Sycorax home.One-Eyed Jack and the Fallen Angel.Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.The trooper shone his light around the cab and the bed of the truck, but didn’t make us get out despite 3:00 a.m.and no excuse to be out but stargazing at Willow Beach.Right after the terrorist attacks, it was soldiers armed with automatic weapons.I’m not sure if the Nevada Highway Patrol are an improvement, but this is the world we have to live in, even if it is under siege.Stewart, driving, smiled and showed ID, and then we passed through winding gullies and out onto the Dam.It was uncrowded in the breathless summer night.The massive lights painting its facade washed the stars out of the desert sky.Despite the mountains between here and there, Las Vegas glowed in the passenger-side mirror as Stewart parked the truck on the Arizona side.On an overcast night, the glow is greenish—the reflected lights of the MGM Grand.That night we had clear skies, and it was the familiar city-glow pink, only brighter and split asymmetrically by the ascending Luxor light like a beacon calling someone home.I’d been chewing my thumb all evening.Stewart rattled my shoulder to get me to look up.“We’re here.Bring your chisel?”“Better,” I said, and reached behind the seat to bring out the tire iron and a little eight-pound sledge.The sledge dropped neatly into the tool loop of my cargo pants.I tugged a black denim jacket on over the torn shirt and slid the iron into the left-hand sleeve.“Now I’m ready.”He disarmed the doors and struggled out of the leather jacket I’d told him was too hot to wear.“Why you always gotta break things you don’t understand?”I didn’t ask for this job.I didn’t go looking for this job, and I sure as hell didn’t get to pick my father, or the way his blood linked me to Nevada, or the way he paid my mother off and sent her south out of Carson City when her belly proved an embarrassment.Or the magic that rose up and bound me to a newborn city.No.I got to pick the manner of my death, however.And apparently that’s enough for the fates.They have a sense of humor.“Because they scare me.” I didn’t think he’d get it, but he was still sitting behind the wheel thinking when I walked around and opened his door.The alarm had rearmed; it wailed momentarily but he keyed it off in irritation and hopped down, tossing the jacket inside.“It’s got to relate to how bad things have gotten.It’s a shadow war, man.This Dam is for something.”“Of course it’s for something.” Walking beside me, he shot me that blue-eyed look that made me want to smack him and kiss him all at once.“You know what they used to say about the Colorado before they built it—too thick to drink, and too thin to plow.The Dam is there to screw up the breeding cycles of fish, make it possible for men to live where men shouldn’t be living.Make a reservoir.Hydroelectric power.Let the mud settle out.It’s there to hold the river back.”It’s there to hold the river back.“I was thinking just that earlier,” I said as we walked across the floodlit Dam.The same young girl from that afternoon leaned out over the railing, looking down into the yawning, floodlit chasm.I wondered if she was homeless and how she’d gotten all the way out here—and how she planned to get back.She looked up as we walked past arm in arm, something reflected like city glow in her eyes.The lure of innocence to decadence cuts both ways: cities and angels, vampires and victims.Sweet-eyed street kid with a heart like a knife.I didn’t even need to flip up my eyepatch to know for sure.“What’s your name?” I let the tire iron slip down in my sleeve where I could grab it.“Goddess leave you behind?”“Goddess works for me,” she said, and raised her right fist.A shiny little automatic glittered in it, all blued steel with a viper nose.It made a 40’s movie tableau, even to the silhouetting spill of floodlights and the way the wind pinned the dress to her body.She smiled.Sweet, venomous.“And you can call me Angel.Drop the crowbar, kid.”“It’s a tire iron,” I answered, but I let it fall to the cement.It rang like the bell going off in my head, telling me everything made perfect sense.“What the hell do you want with Las Vegas, Angel?” I thought I knew all the West-coast animae.She must be new.She giggled prettily.“Look at you, cutie.Just as proud of your little shadow city as if it really existed.”I wished I still had the tire iron in my hand.I would have broken it across her face.“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Stewart.Bless him.He jerked his thumb up at the spill of light smirching the sky.“What do you call that?”She shrugged.“A mirage shines too, but you can’t touch it.All you need to know is quit trying to break my Dam.You must be Jack, right? And this charming fellow here—” she took a step back so the pistol still covered both of us, even as Stewart dropped my hand and edged away.Stewart.“—This must be the Suicide King.I’d like you both to work for me too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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