All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(34)
Behind me, the guy with the chains cracked his knuckles and puffed up, his whole throat warbling like he was swallowing goldfish live. But Lawayne shook his head again.
“Tough is all about reputation, kid. All about your name. And if you want to squeeze, and I let you squeeze, well, my name doesn’t mean shit. So here’s the deal I’m willing to make you: you give me what I want, and I talk to a friend, who talks to a friend, who talks to a friend, and we find you a job. What are you doing now? Flipping burgers for minimum wage? Shit, Vie, that’s shit. Shit money, shit work, shit life. We get you something good. Something that pays. And when you’re eighteen, for a kid like you, the sky’s the limit, the fucking upper limit. Think about it: tomorrow, you could be out of that shitty apartment, away from that shit-brained tweaker God gave you for a father, living a life. A real life.”
“Why?” I said. “Why not break my arm? Or my leg? Why not put a bullet in my head and dump me fifty miles into nowhere? And don’t say you like me. Don’t give me that crap about I remind you of you, or whatever you think I want to hear. Why?”
Lawayne surged out of his chair. I scrambled up, but my head was still ringing, and Lawayne’s open-handed slap caught me across the jaw and ear and spilled me onto the floor. With both hands, Lawayne grabbed me by the shirt, yanked me to my feet, and propelled me across the room. I slammed into the wall, and my head bounced back with a bang.
With his face against mine, his mouth pressed against my ear, Lawayne whispered, “Eleven o’clock. Sage and Sarsaparilla, out back.” Then he slammed me against the wall again and, more loudly, said, “The fuck you think you are. The fuck you think you’re so big.” He let me slide to the ground and, turning to the guy with the chains, he said, “The kid wants a broken arm.”
“All right.”
Lawayne hesitated, then kicked me in the side. I grunted as the kick reopened the cut I had made earlier. “Take him out back. Nothing broken. Nothing that’ll leave a mark where you can see it.”
“All right.”
And the guy with the chains dragged me out of the room.
The beating happened exactly as Lawayne had instructed: nothing broken, nothing that could leave a bruise in plain sight. Unfortunately, it was almost winter, so that left a lot of places to hit me. The guy with the chains didn’t go fast, didn’t hit too hard. He wore a pair of gloves, and he worked slowly, steadily, methodically, like a man tearing down a house board by board. For sheer intensity, it didn’t match anything my dad had ever done, but by the end of it, I lay in a huddle, a bundle of pain from my shoulders to my knees, in the alley outside Jigger Boss.
When he’d finished, the man with the chains peeled off his gloves, examined his hands—thick, meaty hands, like they couldn’t handle anything more precise than a sledgehammer—and flexed his fingers once, as if he were testing his fists, as if he weren’t sure he was done yet. But then, whistling a tune I didn’t recognize, he plodded back down the alley and around the corner, and I was alone.
Propped against the corrugated metal wall, I thought about heading home, calling it quits. I’d done enough stupid stuff for one day, starting this morning when Becca showed up and running all the way down to now, this moment in the gutter, feeling like I’d been dragged feet-first up the Bighorn Mountains and then tossed back down again. The cut on the back of my neck throbbed. The cut on my hand throbbed. The cut on my side burned, because the guy with the chains had spent plenty of time working my torso. Blood darkened an oval section of the shirt, and I plucked at the blue button-up and sighed. Maybe the blood would come out in the wash. Maybe. If not—if not, I was down to one shirt.
Psychics in movies and TV didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. Granted, psychics in movies and TVs were often older women with lots of green eyeshadow, but sometimes they were young and attractive. They usually lived in nice homes or condos and they had supportive friends and family and if ordinary-people trouble came up, say, if they had to pay the water bill and they were low on cash, something always worked out in the end: a rich client hires them, or a wealthy friend or relative steps in, or their spouse or partner manages to make ends meet. The psychics I saw on TV didn’t have to deal with the raw pain of someone’s worst memory every time they went out in public. They didn’t, for that matter, get their asses beat by guys slicked up with baby oil. They didn’t, as far as I knew, end up in a shitty gutter in a shitty town in a shitty state.
But I wasn’t on TV. I was in Vehpese, WY, and I was in the gutter, and every breath hurt, but I was alive. And as I dragged myself to my feet and left the alley, my mind went back not to the guy with the chains but to Lawayne’s torture room, and the vision I’d had, and the knowledge, hot in my gut like I’d swallowed fire, that something terrible had happened in that room, something unspeakable. Something, I was fairly sure, that had to do with River.
As I reached Eighth Street, a voice called out behind me, “Vie, wait up.” Remy trotted across the parking lot, a box in her arms, and as she came she cast a long look back at the club. When she reached me, she puffed air up at her bangs, stirring the frizz, and said, “You are one stupid mother-fucker. Like, really stupid. What were you thinking?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell it doesn’t. Jesus, you can’t even stand up straight.”