still swollen.
He slams the car door shut, then turns and walks down a peb bled pathway and through a pergola archway that’s covered in stiff wisteria branches and thick blooms, which, on a closer look, Jay realizes are made of plastic.
Each unit in the Sugar Oaks Condominiums has its own porch with a white ceiling fan and matching wicker furniture. The pool is kidney shaped and completely empty. Sugar Oaks is not yet operating at full capacity. Jay walks through the desolate courtyard, looking for unit 9B. The condo is tucked in a far cor ner, on the opposite end of the courtyard from where he entered. The blinds are drawn, but there’s light poking through, casting thin streaks of yellow across the painted black slats of the front porch.
He raises his fist and knocks.
There are no footsteps. He hears no padding to the door.
It simply opens without warning.
There, on the other side, is the face he’s been chasing.
She takes one look at Jay, takes him all in, head to toe. Then slowly, her mouth curls into a thin half smile. She looks almost reproachful, as if Jay were a tardy dinner guest who’s kept her waiting into the night. She does not seem in the least bit sur prised to see him at her doorstep after dark. She seems, if any thing, to have been expecting him. If not on this night, then some other.
“If it’s the same to you,” she says, “I’d rather do this inside than out.”
He remembers the voice, rusty and sweet around the edges.
“Why don’t you come inside?”
He follows her inside the apartment, wincing ever so slightly when she closes the front door, locking them both inside. He doesn’t know this woman, only what she’s capable of, and he has no reason, as of this moment, to trust her.
The condo smells of fresh paint. It’s completely empty except for a pair of tangled sheets and a Louis Vuitton duffel bag in one corner, a bottle of Cutty Sark in another. There’s a rotary phone on the floor, near the kitchen.
Elise offers him a drink, making a show of fishing through empty cabinets in the kitchen before simply holding out the bot tle of scotch. Jay shakes his head, wanting to stay sharp. Elise raises the bottle to her lips and drinks alone.
Unlike the prim, buttoned-up clothes she wore earlier today at the courthouse, right now she’s wearing jeans and what appears to be a man’s undershirt. Her nipples and the bones of her rib cage poke through the thin white cotton. She’s smaller and a lot younger looking this close up, under the bright white overhead lights in the unfurnished condo. Here, she’s open, completely exposed. Beneath the soft putty of her chin, Jay can see thin, ragged rings around her neck, fading bruises that are still visible almost a week after their first meeting on the boat. The col ored scars against her white skin startle him. And all at once, he hears her screams again. That night on the boat. The words,
She stares at Jay, the bottle dangling between her thin fin gers.
“Whatever you’re thinking about me,” she says, “you got it all wrong.”
Jay can hear the Galena Park coming out, rounding out her vowels, roughing up the ends of her words. Elise takes another lusty swallow from the liquor bottle, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Jay can imagine her as a girl, growing up in that rough-and-tumble neighborhood. He can see her dusty bare feet, toes dug in the dirt, can picture her begging a quarter from some boy to run up the street for a snow cone or a cherry pop. She has the bony disposition of an alley cat, a wayward thing, hunting for scraps she can use. And like a feral cat, there is the hint of a hulking strength beneath her tiny frame. It’s in the way she cuts her eyes at you. If cornered, she will come out fighting.
“He do that to you?” Jay asks, nodding at the marks on her neck. “Dwight Sweeney?”
“I don’t know who the hell that is,” she says.
Jay stares at her, confused. He thinks she’s playing games with him.
“He told me his name was Blake Ellis,” she explains.
“He put his hands on you like that?” Jay asks.
“I’m not supposed to be talking about this.”
“Your lawyer know he attacked you?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t talk about it.”
“I don’t understand,” Jay says, softening toward her in a way he doesn’t like or even completely understand. “We dropped you at a police station,” he says. “Why didn’t you just go in and tell them what he did to you?” He can’t help thinking this whole thing might have gone so much differently for all of them. “If this man attacked you, tried to kill you—”
“You never panicked?” Elise asks, her voice rising sharply. “You heard that lawyer in court. I got a record.”
The irony is not lost on Jay. He would laugh out loud at the peculiar similarities between their two states of mind if it weren’t for the feelings of confusion they engender. He feels a sudden headache coming on, a white-hot point of pressure behind his eyes. He had not been prepared to feel anything but rage toward her. “Who was he?” he asks. “The guy?”
“How the hell should I know?” she says. “We met in a bar. He asked me on a date, took me to some Mexican joint out north. After, he wanted to park a little, which I was all right with.” Her words slow to a crawl. “Then he got kind of rough with me and . . .” She looks up at Jay suddenly, the brown color of her eyes going as flat as a puddle of mud. “And that’s all I’m gon’ say about it.”
