Читать книгу Every Wickedness - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 13

Her life is in a bag

All she has

It’s very sad

“Bag Lady”

Dee Dee Robinson, #471

StreetWise

Thursday, May 18, 8:00 a.m.

A chill wind razored down the street directly off the lake four blocks away. I shivered in my thin jacket as I stepped out the front door. May in Chicago. I briefly contemplated going back in for something warmer, but it was too much effort. Besides, it wasn’t the freezing gusts that were chilling me. It was fatigue. Memories from the previous evening had kept me awake most of the night. That image of the mouth and nose clogged with concrete rising slowly in front of my eyes had been with me ever since, waking and sleeping.

At first, of course, I’d been charged up by the adrenaline rush that comes with a rescue. Jumping into the elevator shaft, acting heroic. But somehow the horror of that gray clotting matter holding on to its prey had gotten right down into my bones, turning them to jelly. ‘Preserve me from this’ had been a prayer I’d silently breathed through stiff and frightened lips more than once last night.

I doubted Courtney’s death had been an accident and in my mind’s eye the memory of that dark gaping mouth of the elevator shaft had included monster shapes, feeding the mouth, feeding her to the dark maw. Those monster shapes were the shadowy outline of a murderer.

These charming thoughts accompanied me as I walked slowly on my sore feet toward the corner. When I turned, I brightened, seeing Alice Matthews coming down the sidewalk. She must have taken the train. I could see a brief flash as she lit a cigarette and inhaled slowly. I waited.

Alice was hatless and she only had on a light jacket that wasn’t even zipped despite the cold. Both the jacket and her hair whipped in the wind. She seemed lost in thought and she was almost next to me before she glanced up.

“Who died?” she quipped. My mood was none too subtly reflected in my choice of clothes this morning. I was in black from head to toe and I’d tied my hair back, too tired to do anything else.

“A young woman about twenty years of age, I’d say,” was my curt reply.

Alice’s deep brown eyes flashed up at me, and I was brought up short, ashamed of my self-dramatizing. I flushed.

“Sorry, Alice,” I said. “Really bad night.”

I proceeded to give her a quick run through of what had happened while we walked down the street toward the university. We passed Dwayne, the StreetWise vendor, to whom I’d spoken last night. He seemed to be concentrating on his shoes again.

While I gave her a blow-by-blow description of the demonstration, the reception, the so-called rescue and then the time in the hospital, Alice kept running her free hand through her blowing curls, pushing them back from her face. The wind at our backs kept pushing them forward. With the other hand, she took short, quick drags on her cigarette. She finally threw it down on the sidewalk and ground it out with her heel. She was probably afraid of her hair catching on fire. But her attention was clearly on what I was saying and when I finished, she groaned.

“Jane Quixote rides again. God, Kristin, don’t you ever quit jumping in where you don’t belong? This time into an elevator shaft for Christ’s sake? And you say Stammos was there and saw you pull this stunt?”

I nodded.

“Yep. He helped pull me out of the elevator shaft.” I remembered the power in his arms and shoulders.

Alice sighed.

“Sounds like you’re making friends in high places as usual. I’ll see what they say at morning briefing. You teaching today?”

“Yes. I have a morning class, heaven help me. Want to meet for coffee later?”

Alice nodded.

“Sure. Later is right. I’m on for ten stinking hours today. Last night was the first night I didn’t work in four straight days.”

She reached into an outside pocket of her shoulder bag, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out and had it lit before I could blink. She had lots of practice. She watched me watching her.

“Don’t say it. Don’t even think of saying it. If I didn’t smoke I’d be one of those crazy cops who go home and shoot the family and then themselves.” Her plump shoulders sagged.

“Jim still having no luck?”

Jim, her husband, was an out of work firefighter, the victim of budget cuts in their small, south suburban town this past fall. That made six months he’d been out of work. The strain on their family had been enormous. Alice worked over-time, Jim stayed home and got depressed, and their daughter Shawna, who’d seemed to me to be a happy, energetic child when I’d met her with Alice on campus one day, was now wetting the bed. A typical and tragic story in the ‘not so great’ American local economy today.

Alice stopped. We’d reached the middle of the campus. My faculty office was straight ahead, the campus police station to the right and a few blocks further. Her eyes didn’t meet mine.

“Nothing. Just nothing. He hardly even looks now. He . . . ” She broke off. “Let’s just leave it, okay?”

“Okay. But if I can help in any way, let me know.”

Alice glared at me.

“What, you got a fire that needs putting out?” She threw down her second cigarette and ground it into dust. The slicing wind took the tobacco flakes and the paper and spread them across the grass in an instant.

I looked down at her. No, I didn’t have a fire that needed to be put out. What I did have was a huge trust fund. When I’d married my husband Marco, we hadn’t wanted to touch the Hilger wealth. I was rebelling against my family and he was too proud. After he had been killed, I’d had no energy either for rebellion or pride. I’d used the money to help support myself and the boys. No, I didn’t have a fire. I had Hilger shipping stock. But Alice would never take my help and so I would never offer it.

Time to change the subject.

“Well, no, but I might burst into flame when the Dean of the Faculty gets wind of what I did last night,” I said dryly.

Alice and I both knew the Dean would just love to see me kicked off the faculty because of my meddling ways, and because I’d effectively blackmailed him into giving me my current release time from teaching one class and doing “consulting” for the campus police that seemed, so far, to mean sitting on a committee and also having coffee with Alice. Could be worse.

Alice shot me a forced smile, erasing the pain from her face by sheer will power.

“Man, that’s the truth. If I was you, I’d sneak in to work, wear a disguise, do what you can to be invisible.” As she said this, she looked me up and down, clearly noting my six-foot frame encased in black. She shook her head.

“But there ain’t no way.”

“There’s no way I’m going to be on time for my class either,” I said, glancing at my watch. “What do you say I call your cell around 1?”

Alice nodded and started to turn toward the campus police station. Then she stopped and turned back.

“What’re you teaching them today?” Alice was endlessly curious about my switch from being a cop to being a professor. Or maybe incredulous was more accurate.

“The course is called ‘Good and Evil,’” I said, trying to keep a straight face.

Alice snorted.

“You kill me, girl. You purely do.” Her shoulders were shaking with laughter as she hurried away.

I trudged on toward the building where the department of Philosophy and Religion was housed.

It was killing me too.