Part 30 (1/2)
”Yeah?”
”Tonight when you're on the job?”
”Yeah?”
Mullins chuckled. ”Try not to kill more than ten people, huh? Would ya do that?”
Phil drove home numb. Morning sunlight glared like a great blade-an annoying scimitar-across the winds.h.i.+eld. Only now were the realities sinking in. He'd killed men last night, a lot of men. Eagle had been killed.
And he'd nearly been killed himself.
All that adrenalin left him hungover now. He felt jittery, dry-mouthed. Two pinpoint headaches buzzed behind his eyes as he drove the Malibu down the Route, and he could swear his heart was still skipping beats in the aftermath of split-second terror.
When he parked at the boardinghouse and got out, he instinctively glanced up at Susan's window. Her curtains were drawn. She's asleep by now, he realized, and this depressed him. He wanted to sleep with her, not to make love, just to...sleep. After the frenzy of last night, he didn't want to be by himself.
I want to be with her, he thought sappily.
Should he go up to her room right now and knock on her door? Should he wake her? Would she mind?
It didn't matter; Phil never got the chance.
Just as he was about to go up the stairs to her room, the faintest sound wisped from down the darkened hall.
A moan.
Phil turned.
Something sat huddled right beside his door.
Susan?he stupidly thought. No, it wasn't Susan.
The huddled figure moaned again. When Phil realized it was Vicki-and that something was very wrong-he ran down the hall to help her.
He knelt down; her hand reached out.
”Good G.o.d, Vicki. What happened?”
She was only partly conscious when he helped her up. Her hair was disarrayed, her clothes were torn, and when Phil looked at her face- Oh, Christ, no...
-he could tell at once that she'd been beaten.
”Calm down,” Phil said, gingerly daubing at the cut on her forehead. ”It's not as bad as it looks.”
Vicki flinched for probably the hundredth time. ”That hurts, Phil!”
”Hey, I ain't Dr. Kildare, the alcohol is going to sting a little-”
”A little? Jesus!”
”-but you don't want it to get infected. So pipe down and let me do this,” Phil finished. There hadn't been much blood, and the bruises weren't too severe. It was easy, though, to see what had happened. Yeah, somebody gave her a pretty good knocking around, he observed. But why?
”How did you get here?” Phil asked, next applying a Band-Aid over the small cut.
”I walked,” she said.
”All the way from Sallee's?”
She nodded groggily.
”That's some haul.” Phil sat down on the edge of the bed while Vicki lay back on the couch holding a cold wet rag over her eyes. ”How do you feel? Are you dizzy? Confused? Are you seeing double or anything like that?”
”Just tired mostly,” she murmured and sighed. ”It was a long night.”
I guess it was. For you and me both. ”Yeah, well, come on. I better take you to the hospital.”
”No, no-”
”Vicki, it's a good idea. You could have a concussion or something.”
”I don't have a concussion,” she complained rather testily. ”I just got slapped around a little, no big deal. Just-” She sighed again. ”Just let me lie here for a little while. Is that okay?”
”Sure,” Phil said. Actually, it wasn't okay-what if Susan found out she was here? What would he say? How could he possibly explain it? But he couldn't very well throw her out. Something serious had happened, and Phil wanted to know what. I'll just let her calm down a little, he decided. Susan had cla.s.ses this afternoon before work.She can sleep on the couch till Susan goes to school. Then I'll figure out how to get her out of here.
”So,” he got on to the next question. ”What happened?”
”It's a long story, Phil. You don't want to hear it.”
”You're right, I probably don't, but tell me anyway. Did your husband do this to you?”
She relaxed back on the couch with her feet up. Her jeans looked scuffed. Her blouse had been ripped open; she feebly clasped it together with her hand but not very effectively. Phil could see almost all of one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
”Since I married Cody, he's kind of held me in reserve,” she said. ”He stopped making me turn regular tricks.”
”He made you his top-drawer, in other words,” Phil suggested, remembering how things worked on the street when he was with Metro. Pimps got prestige by ”marrying” their most marketable women and charging more for them.
”Yeah,” she affirmed. ”He'd save me for the bigger money tricks. Anyway, last night after my set at Sallee's, he wanted me to do a six-way with three guys and two of the Creeker dancers. I had no choice. If I didn't do it, Cody would've beat the s.h.i.+t out of me.”
”So who did beat the s.h.i.+t out of you?”
She paused as if to quell something. ”Christ, you should've seen these guys, they were three bikers who ran dust north of Waynesville. Some friends of Cody's. They just came off a big drop and were loaded with cash. Things got out of hand pretty fast; they were all smoking flake and doing c.o.ke at the same time.”
”Bad combination,” Phil said.