Eva looks away from the sight and climbs down off the toilet. She doesn’t want to witness the arrival of that point. She stands rigid for a moment in the small confines of the stall, puts her hands against the cool green metal wall to steady herself, and closes her eyes.
But she can still hear the sound, the awful, scratchy, buzzing sound, as if a high-speed motor had materialized in all their larynxes. As if a minute hive of unclassified insects had formed in the throats of all her carriers.
Chapter Fourteen
The Barracuda flies through the five-way intersection at Hoffman’s Rotary, a new lesson in speed, congestion, and odds. Lenore maneuvers the car like she was the last fighter pilot left to hold the line against a barbarian aggressor. She comes inches from impacting half a dozen cars. Horns blowing the full range of the scales fill the air.
Woo is almost on the floor. He screams, “Shouldn’t you have one of those flashing red lights mounted on the top?”
“Probably,” Lenore yells, yanking the wheel to her right and missing the bumper of a Lincoln by a breath.
They cross into the Canal Zone in minutes. There’s already a crowd down past the main boulevard that the locals insist on calling Rimbaud Way. The woodcutters and calligraphers have even made their own street sign. A block down Rimbaud, two patrol cars have blocked off the small alley that leads to the burned-out remains of the old Seward typewriter factory. Behind them are three other black-and-whites and a growing pocket of black-clad, one-hundred-pound zombie artists that the uniforms are trying to disperse or at least keep at a safe distance. Red and blue lights are flashing everywhere. There’s a plainclothes guy, Lenore thinks his name is Dennison, squatting behind one of the blocking cars with a bullhorn in his hand.
Lenore pulls off the street onto the sidewalk and kills the engine. She yells for Woo to stay put, but he immediately follows her out of the car. She hauls her badge out of her back pocket and flashes it ahead of her body as she runs past the patrolman hoarding the bohemians into order.
She squats next to the guy with the bullhorn, her back against the patrol car, and says, “You’re Dennison, right?”
He just squints, waiting for an explanation of her presence.
“Lenore Thomas, narcotics. My lieutenant just radioed me down here. Said you’ve got a situation I need to know about.”
Dennison stares at her like he’s trying to decide if he should challenge her authority, then he looks around and starts talking. “The initial patrolman, Carson, he responded to reports of gunfire from down the old Seward shop. Figured it might be some more of those gallery freaks, those kids that load the old breech shotguns with paint pellets and blast away at reinforced plywood …”
“The Black Hole Group.”
“Yeah, them. So Carson comes down the boulevard and turns down the alley, and bang, his windshield is blown to shit by a forty-four slug. He manages to pull out and call in backup. It’s a girl, for Christ sake. Young kid. She’s up the goddamn telephone pole, climbed up the spikes right to the top. She’s got a bird’s-eye view and she’s cranked on some badass speed. Over the edge. She’s babbling away up there a mile a minute and you can’t understand a word of it. Every now and then she lets a bullet fly. We don’t know if she’s aiming for us or not. We don’t know if she’s even aware she’s here.”
“Anyone in the crowd identify her?”
“Not yet, but she doesn’t look like she’s from down here. She looks more like Bangkok material. Street thing. Burned up. Seven-teen years tops. Big head of red hair.”
“That’s my girl,” Lenore says, “and I need her in one piece.”
Dennison looks away and gives a sarcastic bob with his chin. “Wish I could promise delivery, Detective, but as you can see, it’s kind of a volatile situation. We don’t know how much ammo she’s got up there.”
“Whatever was in the chamber. Nothing more. Guaranteed.”
“Oh, thanks, I’ll just charge right in.”
There’s a pair of department binoculars on the ground near Dennison’s feet. Lenore gestures to them and asks, “Can I take a look?”
Dennison nods. Lenore picks up the binoculars and crawls back toward the trunk end of the patrol car. She comes up over the edge of the car and peers down the alley. It’s an unsettling feeling, the eyes suddenly on top of the weird, decayed remains of the Seward factory, charred ruins from one of the hottest fires in the city’s history. It was an arson case, never solved. The property was sold to a company that went bankrupt. The city condemned it, but each year failed to come up with the funds to tear what was left of it down. Now the Canal Zone’s various art groups and fringe sets use the place for everything from Black Masses to audienceparticipating theaters.
At the very end of the alley, about thirty yards from the entrance to the boulevard, sits the telephone pole. Lenore starts at the street and follows it up to the big, grey metal box mounted near the top and the thick black cables that run off into the air.
Then she centers her vision on Vicky, Cortez’s runaway hooker. Vicky’s bare feet are planted on the top climbing spikes and she’s got one arm hugging the splintery wooden pole. She looks like a graphic symbol of hell, a child possessed and tormented beyond descriptive words. She’s dressed in a floor-length, satiny, black nightgown. She has the remains of the bottom half, torn and shredded most likely on her climb upward, haphazardly pulled together, sort of gathered up slightly and held against the pole. Above the waist, the gown is form-hugging and sparse, held on her body by a single thin strap around her neck. Her left breast has fallen out of the gown and is exposed to the air and the public. But it’s Vicky’s face that captures and assaults Lenore’s eyes. Lenore knows, from the moment she sees it, that it will perpetually define, give image to, maybe even devour, the word torment, for the balance of her life.
The face is a masterpiece of the pure lines and curves of horror, of a primal fear. The eyes are bulging and yet sunk back a full inch into the skull. The skin is unblemished but sallow and taut to the point of ripping off the bone. The cheeks protrude at the sides of the nose, as if casting a furious vote for skeleton over cartilage. But it is the mouth that is the center of everything, opened into an endless-seeming hole, a bottomless O. It appears never to draw breath but moves ceaselessly, so fast that its motions begin to blur within the lenses of the binoculars. Vicky is forming words faster than her tongue, lips, full mouth can handle. It’s as if they’re all instruments pushed suddenly far beyond the limits they were designed for, as if they were inadequate substances, forced to the point of shattering under immense and unnatural forces of speed and gravity.
“I have to talk to her,” Lenore says.
“You know her number,” Dennison jokes, pleased with himself, searching through his sport coat for a cigarette.
“I need to speak with her,” Lenore says slowly, enunciating each syllable as if Dennison were an inattentive child.
“Hang in,” he says, mimicking her voice. “This could take a while.” Then he goes back to his own voice and says, “My guess is she’ll go over the top in a while and drop like a stone. Whatever crap she’s on is going to burn her down sooner or later. We’ll just wait for the fall.”
“I’m going down there,” Lenore says.
“Like hell you are.”
“I need to ask her some questions.”
“Then you better hope she can still talk after she hits the ground.”