She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”
“We have to get you back now.”
She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.
Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”
“Give me the gun, Emily.”
She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure.”
A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.
“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.
“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”
“If you say so.”
My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”
“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”
Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.
Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.
The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.
I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.
I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.
The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.
She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.
“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.
“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”
I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.
“You want me,” she said.
She was a kid, but she was a beautiful and alluring one, and she had the added draw of being her mother’s daughter. I heard a strange, moaning lament and realized it was coming from my throat. She laughed at me again. She kissed my throat and placed the gun under my ear. It made me groan louder. I had been helpless in the hands of her mother, and now it was happening all over again. Except this time instead of a crazed, adult carnal bitch I was being manipulated by a lonely, insecure girl. A part of me cared about the difference, and a part of me didn’t. I wasn’t a good man. I’d done a lot of things that I’d one day have to pay for, but I’d never done anything like this. I waited on the edge of the razor to see which half of myself would win.
She made the choice for me. She climbed into bed and laid across the sheets, trying to bewitch me, the laughter in her throat as ugly as her mother’s. I’d made love to Katy in this room, in her and Ronnie’s bed, wasted on coke and wine, with M-16s stacked in the closet. Katy had never brought a gun to bed with her, but she did like knives. She used to dig grooves and half-moon gashes along my ribs. Afterward the sheets would look like someone had been butchered.
Even as my erection grew my stomach tumbled. I laid beside her and pulled her to me. The pistol wavered between us. She kissed my chin and attempted some dirty talk, but I shushed her and held her, and kept holding her, until a wild sob welled inside her and finally broke free. She cried for twenty minutes straight while I rubbed her back. I took the gun away from her and put it in my nightstand drawer.
“Ghosts walk these rooms,” she said.
“That’s true of every house,” I said. “Not just this one.”
“But mine are here. They have been for years. They’re with us now. I can hear my mom.”
“Emily, you—”
“Can you hear her? She’s saying thank you. For helping me. She’s under your bed right now. She says you were always the nicest one of the guys she used to fuck.”
I gripped her by her shoulders and gave her one vicious shake. “Enough of that shit, all right?”
“I need to find who killed my parents,” she said.
It was generally believed that Dell Bishop, the number-two guy of the Brothers of Bedlam, had murdered Emily’s parents in order to take over the club. No one held it against him. Ron and Katy had been branching farther and farther out, making deals with the mob, the pushers, other clubs considered to be enemies of the brotherhood. The feds caught wind of the gunrunning. They were all over town for months, questioning the civilians, but they never found any hard evidence. The chop shops were raided and marijuana crops burned. There was no connection back to the brothers, but it stirred a lot of misery. The townsfolk, who’d once considered the club to be vigilantes protecting their borders, worried that even more problems were bound to come down on them.