“This way,” she said, bumping her hip against me to move us to the right.
At the corner, she waited for the light to change even though traffic was so light we could have slipped across easily. We were heading east, the Bowery somewhere just behind us. The streets narrowed. We passed an open strip of vacant lot, its ground cover of broken glass sparkling in the lousy sunlight that followed the dirty sleet. Splattered across the dead-eyed wall of a semi-abandoned building in huge jagged letters was a troubadour’s message:
As if anyone needed a reminder that the privileged princes and princesses of Generation X had rebelled against their elders by rejecting cocaine. And embracing heroin, snorting it in the deep delusion that only the needle could bring death.
Poor little rich kids. Never learned how to act. The FDA doesn’t regulate street drugs. The same fifty bucks that bought you a mild buzz on Friday night will buy you a quiet ride down to the Zero the next weekend.
Crystal Beth reached over and took my hand, held it like a trusting child. A trusting bossy child. She never looked at me, just tugged slightly when she wanted me to cross another street. We were walking down a long block, all by ourselves. Crystal Beth pulled her hand free, put it in her mouth and pulled the mitten off with her teeth. Then she wrapped her small hand around one of my fingers and gently tugged at the glove until it came off. She handed it to me without a word. I put it in my pocket. She took my hand again, swinging it slightly between us.
Three men came out of a bar down the street. They turned in our direction and started moving toward us in a tight triangle. I tried to pull my left hand away from Crystal Beth. She held it tighter.
“Drop it,” I told her, cold, eyes on the men.
She did. I put the glove back on, unzipped my jacket so I could reach inside, stepped forward quickly, putting her a half-pace behind me. I followed the rules for dealing with a pack—take the alpha first. The lead man in the triangle was a Latino, shorter than me but thicker in the body. Our eyes touched, dropped at the same time. The triangle moved past us. I reached over for Crystal Beth’s hand, but she yanked it away, making a snorting sound through her broad little nose.
We turned left at the end of the block. “What was that all about?” she asked me.
“I needed my hands free,” I told her.
“For what?”
“For whatever. If those guys got stupid, I’m holding your hand, I might as well have been wearing handcuffs.”
“They didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not a fucking fortune-teller,” I said.
“Are you always this suspicious?”
“Yeah. Are you always this not?”
“I wasn’t raised to be paranoid,” she said, looking at me for the first time.
“Where I was raised, it was the best way to be.”
“Where . . . ?”
“Inside,” I said. “Surrounded. You understand?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“You want to give me your hand again?”
“Why? Did you like it?”
“Yeah. I did.”
She was quiet a minute, walking next to me now, stride for stride. “Me too,” she finally said. And put her hand back in mine.
She led me into an alley just barely wide enough for a garbage truck. Didn’t look like one had tried that for quite a while. She turned right, stopping before a chain-link fence secured by a rubber-covered padlock that spanned a narrow opening in the alley wall. A metal sign wired to the gate said: BEWARE OF THE . . . The rest of the sign was a jagged edge from where it had been ripped apart.
Inside the chain-link, a back door was positioned between a pair of windows covered with thick wire mesh. The door itself was encased behind a security gate, a heavy lock anchoring it to a steel frame. She took her hand from mine, pulled a Medeco key from her coat pocket and turned the lock. The security door pulled out. Behind it was another, this one painted a light blue. Crystal Beth used the same key on another lock, and we were inside.
“Come on,” she said, starting up a flight of metal stairs.
The staircase was almost pitch-dark, the dim light flowing from somewhere above us too faint to do anything but cast murky shadows. Crystal Beth climbed as confidently as a Sherpa. I followed a couple of steps behind her, not questioning. Only myself for going along with this.
At the landing, she turned and walked toward what had to be the front of the building. We passed a few doors—all closed. At the end of the corridor was a pair of blacked-out windows. The floor looked deserted. Crystal Beth walked past the windows without a glance and started up the next flight, still not saying a word. I went along, following.
On the next floor a pair of long fluorescent tubes cast a yellowish light down from the ceiling. One door stood halfway open. Crystal Beth stepped through it. Over her shoulder I saw a whole wall of exposed brick and a tall woman with a clipboard in one hand. The woman looked past Crystal Beth to where I was standing, said, “Who the fuck is this?” in a voice as warm as a microchip.
“He’s helping me with something,” Crystal Beth told her, not moving.
“No outsiders,” the woman said, holding the clipboard like it was a cross and I was a vampire. A chocolate- colored cat stuck its narrow head around the corner of her room, regarding me with that “What’s-in-it-for-me?” stare they all have.
“Stop making rules, Lorraine,” Crystal Beth told her. “We’re going to my place. I just wanted you to know we were in the building.”
“I—”
“Come on,” Crystal Beth told me again, turning on her heel and walking away. I followed her again, not looking back, feeling the tall woman’s glare on my back like a laser-dot from a sniper’s rifle.
We walked quickly past the next floor. All closed doors, but I could hear music playing behind one of them.
“This is mine,” Crystal Beth said when we finally reached what I guessed was the top floor. She opened a door and walked in.
As soon as I saw the skylight overhead, I knew I’d been right about it being the top floor. The room was spartan—a mattress on the floor with neatly tucked blankets on top, an ancient leather easy chair patched with multi-colored scraps sitting under an old-fashioned floor lamp with a parchment shade; next to it, an empty orange crate held a large handmade clay ashtray and a box of kitchen matches. A wood desk was against the far wall, bracketed by some army-surplus filing cabinets. The only modern furnishings were a laptop computer with a row of wire-connected peripherals and a radio–CD–cassette–tape combo with bookend speakers sitting proudly on bookshelves made from long planks set on cinderblocks. I glimpsed what might be a kitchen to my left. Closed door to my right was probably a bathroom. The other door was a closet, maybe? Thick-cored gray radiators sat between the windows and against a side wall. The windows were heavy-coated with the same blackout paint they had downstairs.On the sill next to one of them was a green Micata cordless electric drill, a long narrow bit already fitted.
“You into carpentry?” I asked her.
“I’m into self-defense,” she said firmly, picking up the drill and pulling the trigger. The bit whirred. Up close, it would make a knife look friendly.
Crystal Beth replaced the drill—crossed over to the easy chair, flicked on the floor lamp. It glowed faintly yellow through the parchment shade. “Give me your jacket,” she said. Hers was already off, folded over her
