Chapter Eighteen
Reaper
It’s hard to leave the front yard of ‘Never Again.’ Hard to disentangle Christina and Abigail from around my legs.
Hard to take Kim’s hand off my shoulder — she’s clinging to it harder than usual, and I know that shaky tenacity in her grip, because I’ve felt it many times before, when my willpower was crumbling to dust against the urges, when it felt like one piece of bad news is all it would take to send me back over the edge.
If we had more time, I’d pull her aside, and let her talk until every ounce of frustration, every gram of pain, every wisp of urge has released itself from her body and she can smile with that crooked, half-toothed smile that bears every evidence of her pure soul and her devilishly hard life; of her ex-husbands fists; of bad boyfriends and dealers who used her just like I used Vanessa; of months on the street before she found Susan; of the toll that life takes on you when you don’t know any better.
But there isn’t time to help her. I send a thought up to Vanessa — later, I promise, I’ll help her just like you would — and look at Susan and smile.
I know my smile works on her, and Adriana and I will need every bit of help we can get to make Susan take us in.
She’s no fool; she knows that if I came here seeking help, it has to be bad.
If she knew what I knew, she’d send me away screaming.
But she doesn’t know just how bad I was in those dark days where I tried to drink and gamble and bargain my life away. She’s got a kind heart, and a trusting one, too — even if she’s wary.
“What do you say, Susan? Can you help?” I say.
Still, Susan hesitates because she’s smart.
But then Abigail says, “Susan? Please?”
And so does Christina, and Kim, and Melanie, and Rachel, and Roxanna, until it’s sixteen sets of eyes staring at her, asking, pleading, for a little bit of sanctuary.
I feel like a user doing it. If Adriana’s life weren’t on the line, I wouldn’t be here. But it is, and I am.
“Fine. I have a place for you. Come on, I’ll take you to the guest suite.
” She totters toward the street, to an unmarked van that ‘Never Again’ uses for some of its more discrete errands.
She unlocks the door, slips in, then pokes her head out the window to yell at us.
“Follow me. It’s not far. Maybe five minutes. ”
While she does so, Abigail, Christina, and all the others take advantage of her distraction to open the doors to the van and hop inside. I feel a pang of guilt at that — if Susan knew what we were really up against, she’s send them away.
“Come on, Reaper. I’ll drive.” Adrian has her keys out and is already halfway back to our stolen Sebring before I start moving. It isn’t easy to walk with guilt weighing my feet down.
It’s nearly ten minutes before we get to the guest suite.
We park in front of a drab gray apartment building that looks like it was cut out of crumbling concrete by a 1980s Soviet cookie cutter.
There’s a drab, yellow-green yard out front, shaded by a short solitary tree that’s half-dead, and a few children’s toys — a car, a school bus, and a pair of dump trucks — litter the grass.
Susan exits her van, scans the neighborhood twice, then nods in our direction.
“She’s cautious,” Adriana says. “Like she suspects something.”
“She always suspects something. You know how many drunk ex-boyfriends have shown up at ‘Never Again’ trying to beat their scared ex-girlfriends back into submission?” I stop, swallow my anger, then continue.
“It’s fucking sick, what they do to the people they love.
I know for a fact that Susan keeps a pistol on her, though I’ve never seen her use it.
But I’ve seen a marksmanship award on her desk. ”
“She’s a hard woman,” she says, looking at Susan again, with even more respect. “But she also isn’t. That isn’t easy to do. I know I’ve never…”
Her voice trails off, but I know what she means.
I don’t know how Susan does it — how she seems so loving and open and vulnerable, while holding her arms open so wide to invite in all the people who need her help, and all the torrential and terrible problems they bring with them.
How can she smile so warmly, be so kind, when every day involves facing such brutality?
“She is. And she’s trusting us. I’ve never seen this guest suite, but I’ve heard about it.
The shelter rents it under a shell company; they only use it for their really desperate cases.
Women and girls running from real dangerous men.
” I look up and down the street. It’s empty, but I’m now very aware of how exposed we are. “Let’s go. We should get up there.”
We exit the car, and Susan is waiting for us on the doorstep of the apartment building, keys in her hand and a barely visible, impatient look on her face.
It hurts to think we’re using her like this, testing her, and that feeling is only lessened by the times Susan’s eyes drift from us to the women and girls she cares for — every time her eyes touch them, her smile grows and warms.
“It isn’t the Ritz or anything, but I promise it’s nicer inside than it looks from the outside.
There’s a reason we picked this building — no one wants to look at it,” she says as she unlocks the door and leads our group down a long, poorly lit hallway, where the walls have the occasional crack and spots of peeling paint, and then past an elevator bearing an ‘Out of Service’ sign that looks older than Abigail, and up several flights of stairs.
At a door with a painted-on number that’s so faded that I can’t tell if it’s apartment ‘62’ or ‘82,’ she unlocks the door and pushes it open with a gentle grace. “Welcome to the guest suite.”
The door opens to a fine-enough living room, with a blue-gray couch that’s seen better days, but only in the way that makes it look just the right amount of warm and worn that I know laying on it will be like stretching out on a cloud.
There’s a coffee table made of deep brown wood, polished so that it shines, and there’s a big screen television with a few mussy, child-sized handprints on the screen. I smile at that.
Connected to the living room is a kitchen, with linoleum floors that have yellowed with age, an expensive-looking gas range that tempts me to find a spare hour or two to bake something, anything, for Adriana, and a stainless steel refrigerator that looks relatively new.
It doesn’t surprise me that Susan’s made sure the kitchen is well-equipped; there’s something about a good, home-cooked meal that makes all of life’s problems seem smaller.
This is a place meant to be a refuge. To give the most desperate cases a chance to breathe and to feel even a brief sensation of what a normal, peaceful life could be like.
“This is really nice,” Adriana says. “Definitely better than my apartment in Chicago.”
“Better than my place, too,” I say.
Adriana looks at me sideways, smiling. “Do you mean the rathole hotel room you were living in? Or do you actually have an apartment somewhere?”
“Well, since I never settled in to Ironwood Falls, I guess I only have my rathole hotel room to compare it to. So, yeah, this place is definitely better.”
“I’m glad you approve,” Susan says. Christina and Abigail both leave the entry hallway and run deeper into the apartment, first running into the kitchen and opening every cupboard and drawer, and then running to the living room, where they add handprints to the television as they chatter to each other about finding some cartoon to watch.
“Girls, behave yourselves. You are guests in Ricky and Adriana’s home.
” The girls quiet — still searching the television channels — and Susan sighs and gives Adriana and me an apologetic smile.
“Sorry. I hope you can forgive their enthusiasm. The TV’s been out at ‘Never Again’ for the last two days, ever since…
It doesn’t matter. Let me give you your keys and go over the ground rules, OK? ”
Adriana holds up a finger. There’s a look on her face that’s a mix of curiosity and anger. “Wait a second. It matters. What happened to the TV?”
I open my mouth — why is Adriana talking back to Susan, when Susan is already doing so much for us? — but before I can speak, Susan does.
“There was an incident.” Susan stops, then looks at the other women from ‘Never Again.’ Roxanna flinches, and bows her head a little. “I need to talk to Adriana and Ricky in private. Can you all take the girls on a little tour of the apartment? Maybe to the bedroom, and close the door?”
It’s hard as hell to keep my mouth shut and my fists relaxed. The tone in Susan’s voice, the concern she carries in the look she gives to the girls, the stress-line that appears across her forehead; I’m ready to kill.
When the girls are gone and we’re alone with Susan, Adriana moves closer to her and puts her hand on her shoulder.
It’s compassionate, yes, but it reminds me of a police officer putting a blanket around the shoulders of a victim; businesslike, with the same depth of someone who’s done that action a thousand times.
But Susan smiles and puts her hand over Adriana’s.
“Tell us what happened,” Adriana says.
“Ricky, sit down,” she says.
“I’m fine standing.”
“You don’t look it. I’ll tell you what happened after you sit down. I don’t want to worry the girls.”
Adriana looks into my eyes and nods. I sit.
“Fine. I’m sitting. What happened?”
“Roxanna has an ex who is far from a decent person. That isn’t a surprise.
You don’t wind up at our shelter unless you’re escaping dire circumstances and unwholesome people.
Roxanna has been with us for a while, and things had been calm until that point, even though what she left was not calm at all.
But apparently, her ex, Mario, has taken to drinking, and he’s decided, in his infinite, drunken wisdom, to take ‘his property bake’ to use his exact phrasing.
And that the best way to do so would be to round up some of his friends, seek out our shelter, break into it, and try to abduct Roxanna from her room.
He dragged her by her hair out of her room, kicking and screaming, and we didn’t manage to separate the two of them until they’d already gotten to the communal lobby.
The television was damaged in the scuffle. ”
“The fucking small-cocked piece of shit,” Adriana says.
“He is,” Susan says. “The police only gave Mario a warning when they arrived. The two officers seemed more than a little sympathetic to a man trying to ‘win his woman back’ and it took everything I had not to draw on them and shoot them somewhere that might teach them a little empathy. But that’s not the worst of it.
We’ve seen Mario and his friends lurking around the shelter since then.
Driving by, hanging out on the sidewalks in front, doing just enough to make their presence known.
I worry. I’ve seen this situation play out too many times, and men like him rarely come to their senses once they’ve made up their minds. ”
I realize I’m not sitting anymore. I haven’t been for a while, I’d guess. My fists are clenched, too. There’s a vein pulsing — throbbing — in my neck. “Do you want me to take care of him?”
“I couldn’t — “
“No, I’ll do it. I want to do it,” Adriana says, cutting Susan off.
Then, to me, she says, “You’re injured, Ricky, you’ve been through a lot of shit, and you stand out.
Mario would spot you from a mile away and know you’re up to something.
But men like him? They won’t spare a second look at me.
Or if they do, they’ll be too busy staring at my tits to realize I’m about to hand their ass to them.
I’ve dealt with worse men than Mario when I was in high school.
And since I took on the badge, fuck, the men I dealt with would beat that small-cocked malfeasant shithead into the dirt without breaking a sweat. ”
Susan blinks, then looks from Adriana to me. “Where did you find her, Ricky?”
“She tried to kill me at the casino the other night,” I say.
“I believe it,” Susan says. “I like her, Ricky. But, Adriana, are you sure you want to do this? This is a lot to ask.”
“Legally, you’re not asking. I’m just telling you I’m insisting on having a personal conversation with Mario and I’d like to know what he looks like, where he hangs out, what car he drives, and if you have any other relevant information for him — an address, place of employment, a favorite bar he likes to drink at — tell me, so I can have a very peaceful, very non-violent, very serious conversation with him that’ll leave him in tears because he’ll regret every shitty thing he’s done.
It also may fill him with such regret that you, and everyone else he knows, never hears from him again. ”
“We have a file I can send you. We log every incident at ‘Never Again’ in case things ever take a legal turn. Let me see your phone.” Adriana passes Susan her phone, and a few swipes later, she hands it back. “That should be everything.”
Adriana frowns as she scrolls on her phone. “It’s a start. And that’s enough. I’ll figure out the rest.”
Susan hands her the keys. “The apartment is yours for the next couple of days. I wish I could give it to you longer, but we’re going to have need of it soon. There’s a special case we’re working on that could get difficult. Adriana, will you let me know when Mario’s been taken care of?”
“With pleasure.” She gives me a look, then with a crook of her head, beckons for me to follow as she starts for the door. “You coming? Or are you just going to hang out here and, fuck, I don’t know, watch TV while I take care of business?”
“You’re not doing this alone,” I say.
“No, I’m not. And that’s whether or not you come with me.” I follow her into the hallway, and she already has her phone to her ear.
I crook an eyebrow at her, but she doesn’t respond.
A muffled voice answers her call.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she says. “I know. It’s been a while, and I left a fucking mess.
But I need to call in one of those favors you owe me.
I’ve got a real shithead to take care of — some creep who’s been terrorizing his ex and assaulted her at a domestic violence shelter — and I need you to keep this one between us, OK?
And cover your tracks, because this one is going to get messy. ”