Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.
Shelley. Oh shit.
He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.
"I got jumped," she said. "I-somebody must have pointed me out to them."
"How do you know that?"
"Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I'd just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars." JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.
"I went to court," she said, "and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what's the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can't carry trays with these hands." She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.
"Why did you go away?" she wailed.
"That was a bad scene you were in. I told you it was time to leave."
She stirred her shake with her useless straw. "Everyone started getting killed."
"I told you."
"You didn't tell me they'd start dying."
"I told you it would get as bad as it gets." "Why didn't you take me with you?"
He just looked at her while guilt planted barbed hooks in his insides. He'd done what he'd done and just walked away, as if Shelley had been no more to him than one of the freaks he left hanging from lampposts or as if she were as invulnerable as she seemed to think she was.
He hadn't thought he could save her, a little rich white girl stuck in a scene so evil, so decadent, so glamorous that it probably would have crumbled into violence and madness even without his prodding. But she hadn't seen it comingshe led a charmed life, like everyone in her set, protected by her beauty, her trust fund, her sense of life as something to be devoured, inhaled, like the drugs she and her friends bought from the smiling, menacing street hustlers who saw them only as victims, as people to be led, step by step, into a place where a temporary and frantic safety could be acquired only by giving away their money, their bodies, eventually their lives. He didn't think he could have saved her. In his best professional judgement at the time, it was impossible. But then he'd never know. He hadn't tried.
She took another napkin from the dispenser and began to tear it into shreds. "Bobbie's dead. Somebody beat her to death with one of her sculptures. And Sebastian's dead. And Niko."
"I'm not surprised." He'd killed Niko with his own two hands, snapping the man's neck with a quick, practiced twist. He'd never met anyone who deserved it more. Left him on his bed with his head facing the wrong way, gazing into the nodded-off face of his junkie chicken, Rudy-Rudy, who used to appear in Sebastian's little art films, telling stories about his life and shooting up between his toes and talking about how much he wanted to fuck the cameraman.
"Violet threw herself off a roof. Or maybe the police pushed her. That's what Sebastian said, anyway. And Rudy's on the streets. Maybe it was Rudy who pointed me out to them. The jumpers. But he wasn't the guy who contacted me."
Shad looked down into his coffee. It was cold, and he hadn't used any of the heat. His reflexes were singing a warning, telling him not to ask the next question, that whatever the answer, it was going to lead him into another pit of tragedy. "Who contacted you?" he said. "Why?"
"A lousy twenty grand," she said, "and I get out of this body." She looked up at him, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. "You wouldn't happen to have twenty thousand dollars, would you?"
He looked at her, the sense of horror deepening, widening, ready to swallow him in. "Twenty grand?" he said. "Maybe I could get it."
He bought her a room in a Jokertown hotel and said he'd come the next day with more money. Then he slipped away, walking north, toward his building off Gramercy Park.
He'd met her at a dope deal. He'd been following this guy with the stunningly original name of Uptown Brown, brown being the color of the bad heroin he sold in Harlem in order to support a more fashionable existence on Fifth Avenue east of Central Park, brown also being the color of his victims, who shot the stuff and then went into respiratory arrest from whatever it was-Drano, battery acid, whateverhe cut it with.
Shad had arrived at the address he'd been given and walked up the outside of the building to peer in the windows. He'd been expecting the usual meeting, guys in overcoats and shades carrying suitcases and shotguns, but what he saw was a party. Young white people drinking spritzers or imported beer while someone banged out a lot of furious, clashing chords on a cream-colored baby grand. And among them was Uptown and a couple other guys who didn't fit into the scene at all.
He just walked in the door and said he was Simon. That was how he met Sebastian, the poet-slash-filmmaker; Bobbie, the sculptor; Shelley, the actress; Violet, the composer; and Niko, the director, a man who liked to direct other little dramas besides those on stage and intended to direct everyone in the room straight into hell so he could watch them flare and burn.
Shad found out his informant wasn't wrong. It was a dope deal he was part ou Everyone in the room was hustling someone or something, drugs and art, drugs and money, or drugs and real life, this last being something this little set craved and had never, to hear them tell it, experienced.
If it hadn't been for Shelley, he would never have come back. These people weren't his problem. People dying back in his old neighborhood were his problem, dying from Uptown's bullets and bad drugs. Now he knew why Uptown was peddling bad junk. He'd found another class of people he could move among, and he didn't care what happened to his old customers.
But for some reason Shad found himself returning… He saw something duck into an alleyway ahead of him, and his nerves went on the alert. He cautiously called the darkness down and moved toward the entrance.
Looking down the length of the alley, he could see at the other end a small figure running in heavy boots and baseball cap. Chalktalk, he knew, the street artist.
"Hey," he called, but Chalktalk kept running.
He looked down at his feet. Drawn with careful attention to detail was a picture of him, of Shad, dressed in his windbreaker and watch cap, leaning in the doorway and reading the New York Post by the light of a streetlamp.
Shad ran after her, but Chalktalk was gone.
"Simon. It's almost noon. I was afraid you weren't coming."
"I thought I'd buy you breakfast. Then some clothes. Okay?"
Shelley looked at him carefully. "I've been thinking, Simon, you know?"
Shad looked at the shabby hotel room-the thinning carpet and broken venetian blinds. "Let's get out of this rattrap." Pimps in the hallways, junkies shooting up in the back rooms. Jokertown. "I'll get you a nicer place tonight."
"I could stay with you."
He frowned. "I'm sort of between lodgings at present." He bought her breakfast at the same coffee shop they'd been in the night before. "Here's what I think," he said. "You contact the jumpers. I'll give you the twenty grand. Then we see what they want you to do."
She pulled some of the wrinkled flesh off her eyes and looked up at him. "Who are you, Simon? You're not just some student, like you told me."
"I'm just somebody who wants to do you some good, okay?"
"Are you the longbow killer? Is that who you are?"
He raised his arms. "Do I look like Robin Hood to you? Where's a homeboy going to learn to shoot a bow, for God's sake?"