‘What else happened that day?’
‘Sparrow shook the kid till she woke up. Reminded her she had something to do – and fast. I never found out what that was about.
So the kid climbs down from the bed. So tired. Poor baby. She was weavin’ on her way out the door. And that was the last time I ever saw that child alive.’
Mallory leaned forward, straining to catch the details of her hospital visit. That was the day Sparrow had sent her back to the deserted crackhouse – the day of the fire. This was a memory she did not want to relive, but images broke into her conscious mind against her will – the rats were eating the dead man, and she could hear the sucking sound that Sparrow’s knife made when it was pulled from the body.
‘No, babe,’ said Crystal. ‘Sparrow ain’t worked the tunnel in a while. Last time I saw that whore, she was planning to get her nose fixed. Later, I heard she was working uptown hotels. I’m telling you, that must’ve been one hell of a nose job. I wouldn’t last six seconds in one of those hotels before they threw my ass out the door. So what’s the rest of the story?’
‘First, tell me something,’ said Charles. ‘Why do you care about these books?’
Crystal gave this some careful thought, then smiled with her broken mouth. ‘It’s like you’re always waiting for the other shoe to fall. You know that saying? You do? Good. Well, babe, I’ve been waiting for fifteen years. Now give me the rest of my damn story.’
‘All right. Remember the first cowboy Wichita ever killed?’
Exasperated, she said, ‘Of course I do. All the girls know that story. That was the only one we got paid for.’
‘Pardon?’
‘That first story – the kid paid for it. Well, she paid for the first hour. She’d give a whore something she stole, something real fine. I gotta say, the girl had good taste. Then, after that first time, all her stories were free. All she had to do was say, „Read me a story,“ and some whore would take her home.’
‘And you all read to her – because you had to know how the books ended?’
‘Now you got it. But it was never the same book twice in a row. You’d wind up an hour into a completely different story – and no end. Or maybe you’d get the end, but you wouldn’t know how it started.’
‘Well, in Homecoming, you discover that the first dead cowboy was a murderer. He was part of a gang that killed Wichita’s father and stole his cattle.’
‘So that’s how the kid’s mother wound up as a dancehall girl. I always wondered about that. She was the only church-going slut in Franktown.’
‘Right,’ said Charles. ‘It was either work in a saloon or starve, and she had a child to support. Well, in this book, Wichita’s almost done. He’s tracked down the last gang member, a man hiding out in Franktown. And he kills him in a gunfight.’
‘Does the sheriff arrest the Kid?’
‘No.’
‘So the Kid just left town, right? He got away again?’
‘Well, not in this one.’ Now Charles realized that this woman was unaware that Homecoming was the end of the series.
‘You don’t mean Wichita gave himself up?’ She read a worse fate in Charles’s giveaway face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me he died? Don’t you dare tell me that!’ She shouted, ‘How can the Kid be dead?’’
All around the room, conversations stopped abruptly as ten hookers went into mourning for the Wichita Kid.
Mallory sat in darkness, eyes closed, slowly moving her head from side to side. She could not remember a book called Homecoming.
Riker waited out the silence. Finally, the whores rallied, for they had other unresolved issues.
‘So tell me what happened to the horse,’ said Minnie. ‘OF Blaze rolled off a cliff at the end of one book. At least tell me the horse didn’t die.’
‘Well,’ said Riker, ‘I know it looked like old Blaze was goin’ sour, but the horse came back in the next book. Now this Indian girl – ’
‘Gray Bird? The one who loved the Wichita Kid? He talks about her in most of the stories.’
‘That’s the one, yeah. She nursed the horse back to health with magic and herbs. The girl died, but the horse was good as new.’
‘Ain’t that romantic?’
‘Yeah.’
Mallory left the building and walked past her car, heading for the next block and her office at Butler and Company. It was trash collection night, and the street was rimmed with garbage and a rancid stink. As she passed each metal can, something slithered away in the dark. Eyes shut tight, she pressed her hands over her ears, trying to kill the sound of rats’ feet scrabbling across a rotted wood floor, racing one another to the fallen, bleeding Sparrow. She could not lose the smell of kerosene, smoke and burning skin.
Stopping by a payphone, she fed coins into the slot. Mallory dialed three random numbers and then the four she knew by heart, though she had not performed this ritual since childhood. The phone was ringing, and she felt the same excited anticipation. But why? Was it comfort she expected at the other end of the line?
A woman answered, ‘Hello?’ One more stranger out of a thousand calls from the street said, ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’
Mallory had not forgotten the ritual. She knew what came next, the words, It’s Kathy, I’m lost, but she could not say them anymore.
‘Hello?’ The stranger’s voice was climbing into the high notes of alarm.
Oh, lady, can you hear the rats on the telephone line?
Charles abandoned his previous theories. The child had neither believed in heroes, nor had she relied on fictional people for friends. Far from it. She had once ruled a stable of prostitutes bound to her by stories. It was an ancient lure dating back to the cave, the need to know what happens next.
Brilliant child.
He pulled another chair into his cubicle for Gloria and Maxine. The women were not related, but resembled one another and even dressed in twin red halter tops and shorts. They were younger than the rest. Their makeup was low key, and they were not battered where it showed. The two prostitutes had insisted on being interviewed together.
‘We do everything together.’ Gloria’s smile was very friendly. ‘Everything, hon.’
On request, Charles was about to finish a story begun in The Cabin at the Edge of the World.
‘And don’t tell us that preacher made it rain,’ said Gloria.
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. When Wichita comes out of the fever, the cabin is still in flames. Now if you recall the clifflianger in the previous book – ’
‘Like we’d forget that,’ said Gloria. ‘The farmers think the old woman’s a witch and she caused the drought. They move burning bushes in front of all the windows and the doors. Every wall is on fire, and Wichita’s dying. That’s what the old woman thinks. So she gets down on her knees and screams to God for mercy.’
‘Right,’ said Charles, recalling the final sentence, ‘ „A scream that shivered the stars in the firmament.“ Well, in the next book, Wichita wakes up and soaks the old woman with a bucket of water.
He slings her over one shoulder, then leaves by the front door. Walks right through a wall of fire.’ And now he thrilled the prostitutes with another quotation from the page, ‘„… stripped to the waist, his long golden hair flying in the wind and burning with sparks, his skin steaming with the burnt sweat of his fever.“ It’s an imposing sight on the heels of a very loud prayer from the old woman. Now the fake preacher gets religion. He falls down on bended knee and declares the outlaw is an angel. Well, as you can imagine, that gives a few of the farmers pause. Then the Wichita Kid draws his six-gun, and the rest of them have second thoughts about this business of witch burning.’