Page 143 of If Looks Could Kill
Pearl closes her eyes. It’s the least bit of kindness she can give, to look away. The poor thing. The poor, poor thing. Young and inexperienced. How she’ll suffer.
Look at her.
Pearl pushes away the impulse. She will not add to the girl’s humiliation by looking.
Look at her.
Freddie pedals on. They’re nearly to the end of the block.
You know her. Look at the girl in the window.
With all that’s left of her strength, with her abdominal muscles crying out in protest, Pearl twists enough to turn and look.
Oh, God in heaven. No. It can’t be. It can’t.
But it is.
A newspaper boy got the fright of his life that night. The bleeding, dying damsel he’d squired along so heroically to the hospital let go of his waist, tilted to one side, and tumbled off his bike and onto the street. She’s dead, he thought. She died on his watch, almost at the hospital’s doorstep.
Just as he righted the bike, she rose from the pavement like God’s own vengeance. No longer weak and faint, but charged with fury. Boiling with new blood. Her hands uncurled before her as vicious claws extruded from her nail beds. Rage flashed red in her eyes. She shook her hair loose. It rose and swayed around her in a cloud, a halo, a crown of deadly golden snakes.
The poor lad stumbled back with a yelp.
She strode back down the block, toward a house with its second-story light on and a scantily clad girl standing limply in a window like a plucked turkey in a poulterer’s shop.
His mate, on the other bicycle, cried out, and the first lad looked over to see that other blond girl, the foreign one, untangle herself from the other toppled bicycle, then rise also, like a phoenix, parting the night before her as she ran with her sister into the thick of battle.
“Coo-ey,” said Oscar.
Tabitha—Soft as Velvet(Early Morning, Tuesday, December 4, 1888)
I huddle in the front window of Mother Rosie’s Greenwich Village brothel with almost all of me showing to Mack, to Zeke, to Rosie, and to anyone passing by. I want to die.
I also want to live. My body, such as it is, is today’s cut of meat. And my only home.
“Stand up straight,” Mother Rosie calls to me from her plush seat. “Chest out. Put a little wiggle into it.”
There’s a pounding at the street-level door.
“The police,” Rosie hisses. “Get away from that window.”
Do I dare hope for the police? If they came, would they even help me?
Rosie nods at the men, sprawled out on couches. “See to it.”
Mack lumbers to his feet and plods down the stairs. I hear a door open, then nothing, then footsteps coming up that aren’t his. Two sets of them.
Rosie’s eyes grow wide. “Zeke,” she says, “what’s going on?”
Captain Paddy.
Why, now, am I thinking of CaptainPaddy?
Zeke opens the door at the top of the stairs. He growls something atwhoever is coming up, then sways sideways and topples to the floor.
Rosie reaches for her pistol, tucked inside her purse, and now I know.
I stand behind Mother Rosie, as if I crave her protection. So she doesn’t see me wind up with a stiff velvet couch cushion until I smash it into the side of her face. In the split second of her cursing and confusion, I bring up an uppercut to her chin and then a left jab into her gut.
